Blog
“Who Is God?”
Categories: Sermons
Even foolish people can ask good questions, and one of the best Biblical examples of this appears in Exodus 5:2. I think that Pharaoh meant this question sarcastically, even though God spends the next 10 chapters of Exodus cluing him in. For us, though, it’s a question that we should ask non-sarcastically because the answer is important to all of us.
After all, we know that there is some kind of super-powerful being that we might as well call “God”. We see His handiwork revealed both in the physical creation and in the Bible. However, lots of people have all kinds of wrong ideas about this God because they don’t pay attention to what He has revealed about Himself. Instead, they make up their own version.
If we want to teach others, we have to know how to combat this kind of ignorance. This sermon, then, is going to be the second sermon in our study-outline series. It will help us to lead an outsider through a half-hour study that will answer the question, “Who is God?”
The first thing that we must understand about Him is that HE IS THE CREATOR. Look here at Revelation 4:10-11. In this text, there are two points that I want to focus on. The first is that if it exists, God made it. We are not here as the result of some mindless Big Bang. All of the creatures on earth are not here because some protoplasm evolved in a volcanic vent on the sea floor. Instead, we are here because God spoke and created us.
Some people find this hard to believe. You know what I find hard to believe? I find it hard to believe that the universe came about by chance. It would be like if Marky dumped out a bin of Legos on the floor and they all just happened to fall together to create a perfect model of the Millennium Falcon. Brethren, if I come into our family room, and I find a perfect model of the Millennium Falcon made out of Legos, I’m going to assume that somebody built that thing! Same with all this. Somebody made it. God did.
Second, the text tells us that because God is the Creator, He is worthy to receive glory and honor and power. As long as my parents were alive, I honored them because they were my parents. They brought me into this world, and the whole time I was under their roof, they provided for me. The same is true for God. Because He made us and provides for us, He is worthy of our worship.
It is also true of God that HE IS GOOD. Consider the exchange recorded in Mark 10:17-18. I think that when Jesus says that no one is good except God, He is including Himself in that as deity, but it’s still a true statement. Only God is good.
I think this is true first in the sense that no one is as good as God. He is the highest expression of every virtue, and He is constant in being virtuous. None of the rest of us can make that claim. I try to be a loving person, but I know very well that my love for others pales in comparison to the perfect love of God. I know too that there are times when I am not loving at all, when I am apathetic or downright hateful. God is not like that. His love is as constant as the sunshine on a cloudless day. God always loves, no matter what.
Second, God is the standard for goodness. Because He is perfect, we can’t look to ourselves to determine what is right and wrong. We have to look to Him. Lots of people in our society get this backwards. They think that they have the right to determine what is good and what is evil. In fact, many of them criticize the word of God because they don’t agree with it.
Brethren, that’s about like me criticizing a yardstick because I don’t like what it says about how long three feet is! I’m not the standard for three feet. A yardstick is. Neither are we the standard for good and evil. God is.
Third, GOD IS HOLY. We see this in the praise of the seraphim in Isaiah 6:1-3. Holiness is a tough thing to define, but I think that ultimately it consists of the idea of being separate. This is true of God in two main ways.
First, He is holy in His high position. This is hard for Americans to realize. We’re raised from infancy to believe that we’re just as good as anybody else. Well, when it comes to God, we aren’t. It would be weird if any of us had somebody following us around literally singing our praises all the time, but that’s not weird for God. It’s appropriate. That’s what He deserves.
Second, God is holy in His separation from sin. We’ve already seen that God is perfectly good, and because He is perfectly good, He is incapable of tolerating evil. People who think that they can do whatever they want and God doesn’t care could not be more mistaken.
Imagine the most disgusting thing you can think of, and the way your whole being revolts at it. That’s how God is with sin. He can’t stand to be around it. If we come before Him in our sins, we will leave Him no choice but to cast us out of His presence forever.
Finally, despite our evil, it is still true that HE DESIRES A RELATIONSHIP WITH US. We see one of the most beautiful expressions of this desire in 2 Corinthians 6:17-18. Let’s pause for a moment to reflect on how amazing this. We know that God is more important than we are. We know that God is better than we are. Nonetheless, the perfection of God’s love is so great that He continues to love each one of us. What He wants is to be a Father to each one of us, to have each one of us as His sons and as His daughters, not only now but forever. No matter what anybody else says or does, all of us matter to God.
However, this relationship can’t be on our terms. It has to be on God’s terms. If we want to be His children, we can’t be like all the people who don’t care about Him. We can’t walk in the footsteps of the wicked world. Instead, we have to come out of the world. We have to seek separation and holiness so that we can be like Him.
Once we have done that, we can’t love unclean things anymore. We can’t continue in sin, even in our favorite sin. We have to love God more than we love it. If we truly love God, we will not demand that He compromise His holiness for us. Instead, we will get all of the compromises out of our lives so that we will become like Him. If we refuse, if we cling to our sin and expect God to like it, we have forgotten who is the Creator and who is the creation.
