God
the Father
Absolute
Curriculum
Year 1,
Lesson 2
Introduction
(Trinity):
Last
time we considered the importance of Scripture in knowing God. This
time we are going to dive into the question of “Who is God?”,
which we said last week was the most fundamentally important question
we could ask as human beings. Before we get ahead of ourselves
though, we need to become familiar with a word you won't find
anywhere in your Bible; and that is the word “Trinity.” The
doctrine of the Trinity can be summed up most simply with the
following three statements:
- God is three persons.
- Each person is fully God.
- There is one God.1
This
of course is not an exhaustive teaching on the Trinity, but it does
give us the basic elements of the doctrine. Many hours, books, and
broken Sunday School lessons have been devoted to attempting to
explain the doctrine of the Trinity. While I will never suggest that
we shouldn't try to understand a biblical doctrine, I think it is
important to realize that the men who developed this doctrine in the
early days of the church didn't come at it as a mystery to be solved,
but rather developed it as a way of explaining the mystery of how God
in Scripture is presented as three Persons in one Being.2
To say it in a slightly different way, the doctrine of the Trinity
isn't a mystery that we try to figure out, the doctrine of the
Trinity is a framework that helps us understand what the Bible tells
us about God. It keeps us in balance by not letting us forget the
three-fold truth that God is three persons, each person is fully God,
and there is one God.
God the
Father: Creator
Who
are the three persons of the Trinity? We gain perhaps the clearest
statement of this in Matthew 28:19, “Go
therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the
name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”3
So, God is three persons, and the names of these persons are the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Each fully and equally God, yet
living together throughout all eternity in perfect unity as one
being. What I want to do today is look at God the Father. What is He
like? Over the next couple of sessions we will then look at the
person of the Son and the person of the Spirit, and we will conclude
our study on God by discussing some of the attributes of God.
Who
is God the Father? The Nicene Creed4
opens with this statement, “I believe in one God and Father
Almighty; Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and
invisible.”5
Doesn't
say a whole lot, does it? Essentially they define the Father as the
Maker, or Creator, of all that there is. They say virtually nothing
else about Him. Part of this is because of when the creeds of the
church were written. Very few people in the church back then had any
questions about who God the Father was, the questions that were
swirling around at that time centered around Jesus. We will discuss
some of those next time. But establishing that God is the Maker of
all is a good place to jump from today.
Is
this the clear teaching of the Bible? Yes, the church has believed
and confessed this for over 1600 years, but is this what the Bible
actually says? In a word; yes. The Bible is unequivocal on this
point. “In
the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”6
The first verse of the Bible says that God did what? He created the
heavens and the earth, which is a more poetic way of saying that He
made everything. How did He make everything? By His Word. Verses 3,
6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24, and 26 of Genesis one all open with the phrase,
“And God said.” When we think of God's word our thoughts
generally go (rightly) straight to the Bible. But we need to realize
that the term has more attached to it in the Bible than just the
Bible itself. As J.I. Packer puts it, “God's word in the Old
Testament is his creative utterance, his power in action fulfilling
his purpose.”7
This is absolutely true, in fact we see that at the beginning of
John's gospel he refers to Jesus as “the Word.”
“In
the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God. 2 He
was in the beginning with God. 3 All
things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made
that was made.”8
So God
creates by speaking; but His speech is not like our speech. His
speech is not the reverberating of atoms (for when God first spoke
there were no atoms!). His speech is His creative action and
revelation of Himself, especially through His only begotten Son,
Jesus Christ.
Sender of the Son
Which
leads us to the next thing we need to know about God. God the Father
sent His Son into the world. Jesus said, “the
very works that I am doing, bear witness about me that
the Father has sent me.
37 And
the
Father who sent me
has himself borne witness about me.”9
God the
Father sent the Son into the world, to fulfill two primary purposes.
The Revelation of the
Father
“No
one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side,
he has made him known.”10
God
sent the Son into the world to make the Father known. The Father has
never been seen, and so the only way for us to truly come to know Him
was for His Son to come and reveal Him. But even with such
revelation, we cannot come to know God, because we have sinned. We
sit under His just wrath. We need more than information, we need to
be saved from our sin if we are to know God. Which leads us to the
other main reason the Father sends Jesus.
To Save the World
“For
God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever
believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17 For
God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in
order that the world might be saved through him.”11
God did
not only send His Son, but gave Him,
that whoever places their faith in Christ might have eternal life.
God's goal in this was to save the world through Christ. To save you,
and to save me from our sinfulness and to remove the condemnation
that we deserved. Which leads us to the last thing I want to cover in
relation to God the Father.
Planner
of Salvation
“Blessed
be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in
Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, 4 even
as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we
should be holy and blameless before him. In love 5 he
predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according
to the purpose of his will, 6 to
the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the
Beloved.”12
Paul here ascribes praise to God the Father for all He has given us
in Jesus Christ. While we will probably look a little more closely at
these verses in the future, what I want s to notice today is this:
God the Father chose us, Paul speaking here of those who are saved,
before the foundation of the world. That is, before the sun came up
in the sky, before there was a sky for a sun to come up in , before
there was an earth for the sun to shine upon, God the Father was
planning the salvation of, and predestining for adoption, all those
who would believe. God the Father has planned salvation from eternity
past. This is a wonderful truth. God the Father has revealed Himself
in His Son, purchased Salvation in His Son, and this is according to
the plan He has set out long before the foundations of this world
were laid. Perhaps the most fitting way to end today's lesson is wth
Paul's prayer at the end of Romans chapter 11:
“Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge
of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his
ways!
34 “For
who has known the mind of the Lord,
or who has been his counselor?”
35 “Or
who has given a gift to him
that he might be repaid?”
36 For
from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory
forever. Amen.”13
1Wayne
Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand
Rapids: Zondervan, 1994) pg 231
2This
insight is from an interview with Fred Sanders on the Mere Fidelity
podcast
https://soundcloud.com/mere-fidelity/the-trinity-and-the-bible-with-fred-sanders
Accessed 08/20/2014
3
The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2001). (Matthew
28:19). Wheaton: Standard Bible Society. All Scripture quoted,
unless otherwise noted, will be from the ESV.
4The
creed formulated at the council of Nicea in A.D. 325 and revised at
Constantinople in A.D. 381. This creed is confessed to by Roman
Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant believers alike.
5Nicene
Creed, as reproduced in Grudem, Systematic Theology, pg
1169
6
Genesis 1:1
7J.I.
Packer, Knowing God (Downers
Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1973) pg 56
8
John 1:1-3
9
John 5:36b-37a. Emphasis added. Cf. John 4:34, 6:38
10
John 1:18
11
John 3:16-17
12
Ephesians 1:3-6
13
Romans 11:33-36
No comments:
Post a Comment