All right, well, we'll just be continuing on in what we've been working through here, the Westminster Confession of Faith. We're spending a lot of time in chapter two, paragraph one, as the Westminster Assembly is just listing out the attributes of God. second article they study. The first, of course, chapter we focused on was on the Holy Scriptures, because that's our foundation for knowledge, and so we have to set that out first. But then the most proper topic that the Scriptures lead us to study, the first and foremost thing, is, of course, who God himself is. So last week we looked at how God is almighty, most wise, and works all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will for his own glory. And then today, we're going to look at God as most free, most holy, and most absolute. Actually, most holy first, then most free, then most absolute. And I'm just going to read that paragraph again from the Confession to refresh us for where we are here. Chapter 2 of God and of the Holy Trinity. There is but one only living and true God who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions, immutable, immense, eternal. incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute, working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will, for his own glory, most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin, the rewarder of them that diligently seek him, and with all most just and terrible in his judgments, hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty." So that is chapter two, paragraph one. Very weighty things there. And like I said, we're going to focus on these three topics of most holy, most free, most absolute today. So first off, what does it mean for God to be most holy? Well, the Westminster Divines gave us two proof texts here that I'll draw our attention to. The first is Isaiah six, verse three, and one cried unto another and said, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory. So these are the angels beside God's throne that are proclaiming continually, ceaselessly that God is holy, holy, holy. And then Revelation 4.8, another heavenly vision here. And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him. And they were full of eyes within and they rest not day and night saying, holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was and is and is to come. Those are the two proof texts we have. We first have to ask ourselves, what does it mean to be holy? What does holy even mean? We know it's a word we describe to God, but what does it mean? Does anyone wanna try to answer that? Yeah, other and separate. That's a very key part of what holiness means is that God is separate from us. He is distinct from his creation. He's completely free from sin. He is higher than we are. He is totally separate. What else? Is there any other part of holiness that anyone wants to offer forward. That's right, perfectly good. Yeah, so his moral perfection, he's separate, but he's also totally good, totally righteous. So those two components are really the key things that we see in holiness. Holiness is a lot of times related to purity, because purity is separate in a sense, it's free from any contamination. a symbol of moral goodness. If something's pure, it's good. So yeah, I would say those two interlocking ways are the best way to understand holiness. God being holy, when we consider the separateness aspect of his holiness, sometimes theologians will call that his majestic holiness, majestic holiness. If you think about the royal family in the United Kingdom or the nobility in Great Britain, it's all, you know, really in one sense kind of just for show and pretend now. But if we had a real nobility with power and a real royalty, there are a lot of different titles and ranks. There are barons, and then there are earls, and then there are marquises, and there are dukes, and there are princes, and then of course there is the king or the queen. And you would address these people differently. To an earl, you would say, my lord, or maybe you would say, your lordship. To a duke, you would say, your grace. To a member of the royal family, like Prince William, you would say, your royal highness. And you, so a lot of people have these titles. A lot of people have your grace. A lot of people have your lordship. A lot of people have your royal highness. But then there's only one person, properly speaking, the sovereign, who has the title of your majesty. You don't say your majesty to the Prince of Wales, but you say your majesty to King Charles. And that's because majesty has that, weight about it of the highest possible dignity that could be obtained, to which there is nothing higher. Majesty is above your royal highness. Majesty goes above everything else. It is the greatest authority and the greatest dignity. It's above all others in splendor, above all others in grace. And because of that, it is separate. Majesty is in a class of its own. All the other people in the United Kingdom are subjects, but the sovereign is not a subject. You know, that's why King Charles doesn't pay any taxes. A lot of other people pay taxes in Britain. They're all supposed to pay taxes, but the sovereign doesn't pay taxes because he's not subject to anyone else. So we have that idea of God as majestic. He's majestic in his holiness, as we read in Exodus. He is so separate and so above everything else and so beautifully perfect and pure that he has a majestic holiness. He's most holy. There's a little book that I was using as I was preparing for this message and our other Wednesday nights as well. It's called the shorter catechism explained from scripture. And he addresses Thomas Vincent, the author that addresses holiness in a couple of really good ways. I'm just going to read two of the questions and answers that he gives here. So first of all, he says, What is the holiness of God? The answer is the holiness of God is his essential property whereby he is infinitely pure, loves and delights in his own purity and in all the resemblances of it which any of his creatures have. And he is perfectly free from all impurity and hates it wherever he sees it. And then the next question, which I think is, I mean, worth, you know, finding this next question answer is worth the price of this book as it is. I'm gonna read through it slowly. Thomas Vincent then says, well, how may God be said to be holy? How does scripture tell us that God is holy? He says this, the name of God is holy. Holy and reverend is his name, Psalm 119. The nature of God is holy. Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, Revelation 4. The persons of the Godhead are holy. The Father is holy. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those which thou hast given me, John 17. The Son is holy. Against thy holy child Jesus were they gathered, Acts 4. The Spirit is holy. Joy in the Holy Ghost, Romans 14. The works of God are holy. The Lord is righteous in all his ways and holy in all his works. Psalm 145. The word of God is holy, which he hath promised to for by his prophets in the holy scriptures. Romans 12. I'm sorry, Romans 1. His law is holy. The law is holy in the commandment, holy and just and good, Romans 7. And his gospel is holy to remember his holy covenant, Luke 1. The worship of God is holy. The matter of it holy, and every place instant shall be offered unto my name, and a pure offering of righteousness, Malachi 1. The manner of worship is holy. God will be worshiped in spirit and in truth, John 4. The time of worship is holy. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, Exodus 20. The dwelling place of God is holy. Thus saith the high and lofty one, I dwell in the holy and high place, Isaiah 57. The angels which attend upon God in heaven are holy. All the holy angels with him, Matthew 25. The people of God upon earth are holy. Thou art a holy people unto the Lord, Deuteronomy 7. God requires, works, loves, and delights in holiness. Be ye holy, 1 Peter 1. This is the will of God, even your sanctification, 1 Thessalonians 4. God hates sin and sinners infinitely, and without holiness will not admit any into his kingdom. Thou hatest all workers of iniquity, Psalm 5, and follow peace with all men and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord, Hebrews 12. And I'm sure he could have even probably supplied more verses. He just gave a snippet for each of those things. So Thomas Vincent defines 11 categories, and each of those has subcategories of the ways that scripture describes God as holy. It's not just his being. Obviously, his being is holy, but it's his name. It's the way he's to be worshiped. It's his word, it's each of the three persons of God, it's his people, because we're his people, he makes us holy, he sanctifies us. And so the holiness of God encompasses every aspect of God and every aspect of God's creation that he chooses to bless. So the holiness of God is just this mighty, majestic, weighty aspect of who God is. He is most holy. And if we're not new creations in Christ covered by His perfect blood, then that holiness of God can only evoke in us feelings of utter terror, of total despair, of absolute nothingness, of hatred of everything that's good and right. Because remember, God is separate. And if you are not partaking in the holiness of God, it's just a terrifying awful thing to see. There'll be no one in hell who'll have a soft, tender, repentant heart toward Christ because they've finally been confronted with God's presence. And then at that point, when they really saw God for who He was, they repented. No, they will be confronted with God's presence and they'll have fear and hatred. And in a way, they can't suppress or deny anymore. I think that judgment scene in the last battle in the Chronicles of Narnia does a really good job describing the holiness of God and what it looks like when people come into contact with the holiness of God. There are some important things about the final judgment that C.S. Lewis gets very wrong, but I think this picture of what happens when we're confronted face-to-face with pure holiness was very helpful and I think can help us kind of understand who God is a little better. So this is the end of Narnia and the final judgment. And it's supposed to picture forth the end of the heavens and the earth as we know them now. And the final judgment that we'll experience. Lewis writes that the creatures came rushing on, their eyes brighter and brighter as they drew nearer and nearer to the standing stars. But as they came right up to Aslan, one or other of two things happened to each of them. They all looked straight in his face. I don't think they had any choice about that. And when some looked, the expression of their faces changed terribly. It was fear and hatred. Except that on the faces of talking beasts, the fear and hatred lasted only for a fraction of a second. You could see that they suddenly ceased to be talking beasts. They were just ordinary animals. And all the creatures who looked at Aslan in that way swerved to their right, his left. and disappeared into a huge black shadow, which, as you have heard, streamed away to the left of the doorway. The children never saw them again. I don't know what became of them. But the others looked in the face of Aslan and loved him, though some were very frightened at the same time." I think that's a good picture of what we can understand the holiness of God to be like, is here we get a sense in a muted way of God's holiness. Paul says that everyone can understand just from the creation that God is eternal and that he is a divine personal being, one with whom we have to give an account. So his eternality and his divinity or his Godhead is so very clear. But we can suppress that truth. But then when we come face to face with the holiness of God, if we're not covered by that blood of Christ, then it will only be fear and terror. Of course, if we are covered by the blood of Christ, then when we see God in his holiness, we will see majesty, and it'll be wonderful. It'll be amazing. It'll be far better than meeting any king or queen here on earth. It'll just be the best experience we could ever have. In theology, it's called the beatific vision, when we finally see Christ in his glory. It's gonna be beatific, which is Latin for blessed. We're going to experience a new type of blessing that we haven't yet even experienced here, even with the Holy Spirit dwelling within us. This is all because God is holy. He's holy. Does anyone have any questions or comments about God being most holy before we move on to the next thing? All right. or feel free to just throw your hand up or ask something at any point. So the next thing that we learn from the confession here is that God is most free. The proof text that the divine supplies, Psalm 115 verse three, but our God is in the heavens. He hath done whatsoever he hath pleased. he hath done whatsoever he hath pleased." Totally his choice to do whatever he wishes to do. A lot of times when I've got into conversations with people about freedom as it relates to theology or philosophy, people tend to focus on free will. You know, are we really free? You know, how could God be, you know, a loving God if he violated our free will? How could we really truly offer real praise and worship to God if we weren't free to do so? You know, because otherwise we would just be robots if God determined what we would think. So there's a lot of focus on our freedom and to what degree we have a freedom here. It's true we have a freedom, but it is limited. And usually when people talk about freedom in our culture today, what they're really talking about is freedom from what they think of as an oppressive authority, which really a lot of times just means, you know, freedom to do anything I want without any limitations, rules or restrictions whatsoever. A totally just normless, lawless type of freedom. That's what a lot of people mean when they talk about freedom. The concept of freedom is seen as so important to people because if they don't have the freedom of self-determination of deciding what they're going to do with their lives and it feels to a lot of people like it's meaningless like if they don't have control then what's the point of all this if we're really aware of this post-enlightenment type of individualist Western thinking, when we really understand that our goal of freedom is freedom from every good thing that God would have for us, freedom from his loving protection, then it actually becomes a scary thing. G.K. Chesterton described this scene where he said, the concluding phrase was, and he was a Roman Catholic, so he said, Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls, but they're walls of a playground. And he said, imagine this, imagine there's this very high cliff, this precipice with just the sheer sides going down on either side. And it's absolutely terrifying. And there's no walls or anything. You could just walk right off and fall down. And imagine you just put a group of children. in the middle of this plateau on this very high cliff and you gave them things to play with and slides and balls and things and well what do they end up doing they end up just huddling together because they're so afraid maybe they do that from the ego maybe they do it once they see someone fall off and they realize how terrifying it really is but they just huddle together and they have no joy then he says ah but if you put walls around the whole cliff then they have so much fun because their fear is gone and they can play and they can enjoy the place that they were put. They can enjoy that as it was supposed to be enjoyed. They went down the slides, they kicked the balls, they ran and tackled each other. They did all these things. And the point is that to be really free is not to be totally without law and limitation and regulation, but it's to be able to act in the way that you were created to act, to be able to think in the way that you were created to think. to be able to be free from the judgment and fear and terror and guilt that is all that's there for you without the presence of God's love in your life. But we in our enlightenment thinking, we think freedom is no one can tell me anything about what I'm supposed to do. We can, I hear people quote, you know, every election season, and there's a lot of truth and goodness in this quote, but it also gets misapplied. That famous Patrick Henry line, give me liberty or give me death. You know, liberty and freedom are pretty much seen interchangeably. That's a lot of talk about freedom. But here the confession says that God is most free. God is most free. And sadly, when we talk about freedom, even in theology and philosophy, even when you go to seminary and have classes, even when people come to me with pastoral questions, 95% of the time, if freedom is on someone's mind, as it relates to God and the Bible, it's our freedom, our freedom. And it's unusual for people to think and ask questions about God's freedom. We're very concerned that we have a free will, but a lot of people don't sit back and think about, well, does God have a free will? Very few people are very concerned about protecting God's free will. But he's the only one that has a truly, completely free will from any external authority or anything else whatsoever. He is the only one who has a completely, perfectly free existence and free will. And that's because God is, as we've talked about, the only necessary being. All of us else, we are contingent. That means we rely on God for our very existence. God doesn't rely on anyone. He just exists. He is. He's absolute. The next one we'll just touch on in a minute. He's the only one. God is the only one who's not constrained by law. There's no law that constrains God. Of course, God never breaks his law. but he's not constrained by it either because the law is not something outside of God. This is another tricky question for philosophy. Well, you know, does God have to obey the law? Well, that's a bad question to begin with because the law is not some separate thing outside of God. And it's certainly not something over God. The law is just a revelation of God's character to his people. It's the way that God is revealing who he is and how his people are to emulate him and worship him rightly. We're supposed to strive for perfection, the scriptures tell us. We're supposed to be holy, even as he is holy. So God gives us his law, both so we can see our failures and trust in him for his grace, but also so that we can use it as a lamp to walk in the path of righteousness. So there are things God cannot do. And that in no way, shape or form infringes on his freedom. And one of them is God cannot break his own law. But that's because God can't be not God. If the law is a reflection of his character, if it's him disclosing who he is, if it's him showing us who he is, he can't go against that. God can't be not God. He can't go against his own nature. So that's not a constraint on him. It's not a limit on his freedom. That is rather true freedom, is that he is operating exactly as he is. He's God's God never tries to be someone else. God never tries to go against his nature all the time. We try to go against what's good and right and about how God created human beings in our culture. I think we're at a high high point for human beings trying to go against their own nature. Maybe forever or certainly for the first time in Western civilization, do we have just this rampant abuse of human nature and this desire to break free of what human nature really is. We've got it, of course, in the LGBTQ nonsense, that's massive problem for this, but then also in just even new strange technological utopian vision things that people are pursuing like transhumanism, I mean that we can somehow escape our humanity and that would be a good thing. This is just reinventing the old fanciful sins of the Greeks. Both the moral problems and these weird philosophical things like we're somehow These materialists, they don't believe in a soul, but they believe we could transcend our humanity. I don't understand how anyone could get there and be logically consistent, but God never does any of that. And it's not because he's constrained, it's because he's free. And he acts perfectly in accord with who he is. So he's most free. God's freedom, when we do sit back and think about it, which as I said, is not often enough, it might not as immediately as some other of his attributes lead us to worship. You know, we can think God, God is most loving. Easy, easy to worship when we think about God being most loving. We love to be loved, right? Who doesn't want to be loved? There's nothing wrong with that. That's a good thing. God's put that desire in you. You know, God's almighty, how we love to be connected to some type of power. We wanna be on the winning team. Everyone gets excited when they know someone really important or really powerful or really strong. They'll go around telling people, oh yeah, my uncle was in this movie. My cousin plays football for this college team. Everyone wants to be connected to someone like that. We think, ah, God's really free. Okay, you know, some people might think, I don't know what to do with that. You know, good for him. But this should absolutely move us to worship in a massive, massive way when we reflect on what it means for God to be most free and how that relates to how he works with us and loves us and treats us. God was free to create the heavens and the earth. He was free to do that, which you know what else that means? It means he was free not to. He didn't have to create the heavens and the earth. God does not owe you your existence. You exist purely because God chose to have you exist. Wow. And yes, of course, that's God's love. That's God's provision, but it's his freedom. He wasn't constrained one way or the other on how to plan the heavens and the earth. He was also free When Adam disobeyed and broke God's law, God was also free to just leave all of us in our sin. Romans 5, sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, God could have just left right there. He could have said, you messed up. I gave you everything, everything, and you just threw it away, you're done. And he could have damned every single one of us, every single one of his creatures. He could have said, you are consigned to hell. You were judged, you were condemned, you were found wanting. Apart from God's grace, that's what we all deserve. But God, once again, freely, totally freely, out of his own goodness and freeness and love, chose to send Jesus Christ to pay for our sins, to become part of his creation. God the Son didn't just wear humanity like a costume. like a dress-up, he became a man without losing any of his divinity. Think about that when we just talk about holiness being separate. That's the miracle of the incarnation, is that the separate God became intimately and permanently wedded to his creation. He chose to do that freely, lived a perfect life under that law that God's not supposed to be under, because no law can constrain God. He chose to live under that law, obeying every part of it, and then died a sinner's death as a sin offering to God, freely chose this so that we could be forgiven, so that we could win back that relationship with God through the merit of Christ's blood. God was not bound to do any of that. God was not required to save us, but he freely chose to, freely chose to. I think if a lot of us had the freedom of choice in this area and we could die for someone who hated us, because in our flesh we all hate God, or we could send our son, our only begotten son, to die for someone who hated us, and we have a free choice here, we're all gonna say no. We're all gonna say, no, no, no, you chose sin. You hate me. You don't ever love me. You disobey me. Why would I go through such pain and torture myself for you? An ungrateful creation. But God chose to because he loves us so much. This all relates to his freedom. It's a free choice, which just magnifies his love. If he was somehow constrained to sin Christ, it still shows how almighty he was to offer a perfect sacrifice, to give that perfect sin offering. But it wouldn't show his love in such a wonderfully magnificent way. But he freely chose to do that. Why did he do that? Because God is love. God is love. He doesn't just love or have love, but God is love. And he's not willing, his word says, that any one of his children should perish. He's willed that all of us would be reunited to him. Any questions about God's freedom? We're gonna work through it quick. That's right, he's not gonna die again, that's true. All right, our last one is shorter, just because I think that God being most absolute is actually covered by a lot of the other attributes. It's more of an overarching attribute, but God is most absolute. And our proof text for that is Exodus chapter three, verse 14. And God said unto Moses, I am that I am. And he said, thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I am, hath sent me to you. So God is absolute, the confession says. And that means that he is the source of all existence. He is the source of all existence. He is sovereign, like we've said, over everything that exists. Nothing can be higher than him, nothing can be greater than him, but nothing can also be before him. He is the, to use philosophical language, he is the uncaused first cause. If everything that begins to exist has a cause, then everything here we know began to exist. This building wasn't here at one point. We all didn't exist at one point. There had to be a cause to all this. Well, God is the first cause of everything, but he's uncaused because he's always existed. He has always existed. His self-existence, his immutability, his infinity and his unity are all underneath the umbrella of him being the absolute. And in our postmodern age that we live in, especially if you go to college, and this is a great reason not to go to college, because you're gonna be bombarded with this. I remember in any type of humanities course or, you know, history, English, philosophy, religious studies, this is just being rammed down the throats of the young people of the West. But there are no such thing as absolutes. that everything is subjective, that everything is culturally located. And I'll give you an example here. I've heard a lot of people say, if you're doing evangelism or apologetics, I've heard a lot of people say that, well, there is no absolute truth. And this goes back to this idea of freedom. They wanna be free. If there's an absolute truth, that means it has a claim on your life. Because if it's absolute, it's true at all times and all places. But people say, well, there is no absolute truth. Who knows how you would answer that to just absolutely shut that conversation down? Exactly. Good job, Sarah. Well, that's not true then. Why should I believe that that's true? Is that absolutely true? That there is no absolute truth? It's a self-contradictory, self-defeating statement. It just cuts out its legs from underneath it. But any attack on the reality of absolutes, absolute truth, that there could be a objectivity that transcends all cultures, all societies, all times and places. Any attack on that is in effect an attack on God because God is truth. God, Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. He is absolute. He is the reference point for everything. If we want to know something, we have to go to God. Truth isn't just a bare correspondence of facts to reality, you know, facts to events that happen, or statements to what's in our head that we're being truthful if we speak in accordance with our thoughts. What truth really is is something that corresponds to Jesus Christ. You know, Jesus Christ is the ultimate reference point. So he's almighty, he's everlasting, and he's absolute in his truth and his revelation. And it's not a theoretical truth, it's a real person, Jesus Christ. And that we are called to joyfully submit to him as Lord over everything. Like I said, I'm going to keep absolute there for now because I think we're covering the absoluteness of God and other attributes Does anyone have any questions about God being absolute or about anything else from tonight? Otherwise we'll close it in here. Yes. I don't know exactly if it's a question, but the, I think it is, the free will of man back to the freeness, free, absolute freedom of God. Right. Does our, I think definitely yeah because a tree doesn't choose you know like which way to grow its branches you know even less than that does a machine choose something you know we're not machines the washing machine doesn't decide when to start so we're not robots even though God's in control And yeah, even animals that they have some degree of, you know, freedom of the will as well. They don't have that higher type of thinking that we do. So I definitely think that it's a reflection of us being made in God's image that we do have a freedom. We do have a free will, but our free will is not most free. It's not absolutely free because our free will is bound by our nature, but our nature has been subjugated to sin. And so we can't not sin. We can't do anything that's not tainted by sin somehow, even if it's a good act. So we have a free will, but it's a free will that is bound also. It's not totally free. One example would be, and this, I think it's, you know, all analogies break down at some point. But an example I heard once was, think of like a parent-child relationship. The child has freedom in how he wants to play or what he wants to do when the dad or mom says go play. But that freedom is very limited in a sense because they have certain parameters. You can't go outside right now because it's lightning. Or the parent could come in and say, hey, I know I said go play, but you're doing this, which is just super dangerous. You've got to stop that. Well, in that scenario, it's not the child has no freedom, but the parent has more freedom. Parent has freedom to make those decisions. I'll let my kids play in the lightning. You know, I'll let my kids go, you know, run down the road or some, you know, parents, you know, they want to keep a very close watch. And so God is most free. And then we have a freedom, but it's limited. But I think it is because that relationship and that image bearing, it's a good question. Yeah. Any other questions or comments or thoughts or something you were confused about? All right, good.