I'm going to read from Isaiah 66, the first couple of verses. Thus says the Lord, heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool. Where is the house that you would build me? And where is the place of my rest? For all those things my hand has made, and all these things exist, says the Lord. But on this one will I look, on him who is poor, and of a contrite spirit and who trembles at my word." In a few minutes, we'll be privileged to hear from Dr. Drew Sparks on the doctrine of God, the second chapter of the Confession. Everything, everything, everything depends on what kind of being God is. He is the first domino, so to speak. If you knock him over, he determines everything else. And so the church has struggled throughout its existence, whether it be in the Old Testament, the New Testament, in church history, to get its arms, so to speak, around the doctrine of God. By God's grace, I want to, first of all, talk about three reasons why it's difficult to grasp the doctrine of God. It's difficult to apprehend the doctrine of God. And then we'll look at three times in the history of God's dealings with humanity where the church has struggled to understand more about him. I'd rather kindly pray for us. I'd like to pray again just because of the gigantic momentous doctrine of God that we're about to engage with. Our Father and our God, I take these words upon my lips, but there are so many times when I hardly know what I'm saying. Isaiah thought he knew you, spoke of you as a priest, was a leader in Israel, and then he saw who you were, high and lifted up upon a throne. You weren't just holy, you weren't just holy, holy to the comparative degree, you were holy, holy, holy to the superlative degree. He came apart, he became disintegrated, as R.C. Sproul likes to say. He was no longer whole. John says in John chapter 12 that Isaiah saw Christ. It was not you, Father, but it was your son and his glory on his majestic throne. We come into your presence self-consciously trusting in the finished work of Christ. We could not come into your presence unless he had atoned for all of our sins and his blessed righteousness was imputed to us. So we come bravely, we come expectantly, not because we had a good week, not because we're reformed or baptistic But because Christ is our great savior, we ask you to bless us in Jesus' name. Amen. Humans have always struggled to understand God. There's three reasons that I thought we could look at briefly this morning. First of all, and it's something that we easily forget, God is the creator, and we are but creatures. So why is that a problem? God's not simply a bigger, better version of ourselves. He is a whole other order of being. We have existence. We have beings, so to speak, as creatures. God made us, but no one made God. There is an infinite barrier, an infinite distance between us and God, between his creatures and God. And this creator-creature distinction should never be forgotten. It is always true, before and after conversion, It's very wrong and very misleading to reason from creatures up to the creator. He is not like us. He is not a bigger and better version of ourselves. In his knowledge of the holy, A.W. Tozer rightly argued, there's an infinitely greater gulf between us and God than there is between us and a garden slug. You know what a garden slug is? That's a snail without a shell. He said that we and the garden slug are both created existences. We're both created beings, so to speak. Nobody created God. God's remedy to bridge the gap is his grace-inspired revelation. How could we know anything about God? Not only is he infinitely greater than us, but he's also invisible. And so God has to reveal himself to us. As Packer said in Knowing God, he's not a rock. He's not something we can pick up and examine, maybe break open. but under some kind of electronic microscope and examine more closely. If God doesn't reveal something to us, we would never know him. God is infinite and incomprehensible. What does the word incomprehensible mean? It means you can't get your intellectual arms around him. Now, in high school, I played football, and I actually wore a face mask. And that was a little humor. Anyway, if you haven't had your second cup of coffee, there's coffee in the back. And when I was in high school, one of the big football players was Earl Campbell, who played for the University of Texas and the Houston Oilers. What was so impressive, if you're a high school football player, is that Earl Campbell had 32-inch thighs. Now, when I graduated from high school, my waist was 32, so I tried to imagine tackling a person who had 32-inch thighs. And if you watch NFL highlight films, not too many defensive backs or linebackers were excited about tackling somebody with 32-inch hot thighs. You might hit the man, but you weren't going to get your arms around the man. And that's my, so to speak, analogy to how in the world do we think that we can get our intellectual arms around Almighty God. As Howard Hendricks said one time, if you understand everything about God, then either you or God are superfluous. If you know as much as God does, then one of you is unnecessary. God condescends to mankind. And as Calvin said, he lisps revelation to us as parents would lisp words to a baby. God's being is so far above and beyond us that only by stooping to reveal himself can we know him. If God hadn't chosen to reveal himself, we would have never have known him. A second reason why understanding God and trying to put things together is that not only are we creatures trying to understand the creator, but we're sinful and fallen creatures. Our minds are darkened. 2 and 2 is 5. 2 and 2 is 87. But it's never 4 when fallen creatures come to think about God. That's why you can explain things so clearly and it goes in one ear, comes scrambled through their brain, and comes out the other side looking so different. I didn't say that. I didn't teach that. But that's what happens when sin darkened minds trying to apprehend the truths of God. The fall of our first parents into sin left humanity with broken minds that are disordered, biased, polluted, twisted. It left us with an allergy to God. Being in God's presence makes us react. Most advanced cultures have places they put people whose minds and perceptions of reality are so terribly disordered that they're a danger to themselves and others. In the States, we used to call them Mental hospitals. When I was living in Indiana before I moved south in the 70s, there was Central State Hospital. And people would joke about coming out of Central State Hospital. But in the late 70s, we determined that mentally ill people had the freedom to become street people. So we emptied their hospitals, saved millions of dollars, and they got to have a place on the street. But that's another story about our culture. Planet Earth's population is similarly disordered. and twisted and blinded by sin. The Bible calls such people unbelievers, non-Christians, pagans, the lost. Genesis 3, Romans 1, teaches that whatever revelation a person has of God is twisted and suppressed by our sin. Our foolish minds are darkened. Fallen human beings don't want to even have the true and living God in their knowledge, Romans 1 says. verses 28 to 32. God gave them over. God gave them over. God gave them over to a depraved mind. Our own nation has not wanted to have the knowledge of God around anymore. And so for the last 40 years, we've been doing everything we can to take the knowledge of God out of our culture. God's remedy for our sinfulness is that he must act in grace again, not only to give us revelation, in the word of God and in the living word of God, his son, Jesus Christ. But he sends the spirit so that anybody would get it, so that anybody would understand, perceive the truths about God revealed in scripture, revealed in Christ. Unlike Islam, where Muhammad is a monad, he doesn't relate to anyone else. He doesn't exist in relation to anyone else. He just exists for himself and unto himself. I once sat on a flight from Atlanta to Philadelphia next to a very wealthy doctor who, as she went on to explain, that she was a Muslim and she had her doctorate, her husband had his doctorate, their kids had doctorates. It was obviously a smart family, wealthy family. And I was praying for an opportunity to have a witness to her. And as we were in the holding pattern coming into Philadelphia, I had been reading my Bible and I watched her out of the corner of my eye watch me reading my Bible. And I said, I've been a Christian at that point 35 years. I said, God's been so gracious to me in showing me his son and saving me from my sins. And by his grace, I've come to know him so much better and to love him so much more. Tell me, how is it with you and Allah? And she put her head down. She said, well, we don't conceive of our relationship in that way. We don't love Allah, we serve him. I hope I serve him better. Because if you know the way Islam works, you accumulate brownie points until you die. And if Allah's having a good day that day and he likes you, you get into paradise. But no matter how good a person you've been, if he doesn't like you that day, kismet, fate, you don't make it. She couldn't say that she knew him better. She couldn't say that she loved him better. And I knew that I had her. God must act in grace by the Holy Spirit for us even begin to understand his word, even begin to understand the personal work of his son. But God has always existed and has always existed as the three-in-one God. And we'll see in a few minutes that part of what the struggle of the church has been, for example, is how can there be one God who exists in three persons? Isn't that three gods? That's what Muslims accuse us of. No? But the difference is, while Allah doesn't relate to anybody, He's a monad. He just relates to himself. But there has always been love within the Trinity. God the Father has eternally loved the Lord Jesus Christ. And the Lord Jesus Christ has loved the Father, and so with the Spirit. There has always been love. Eternally, there's been love. That's not so in other religions. But the gracious work of love of God is not only has he sent his word through prophets and apostles, and he sent his son But the Father and the Son together send the Holy Spirit so that anybody would get it, that anybody would begin to perceive the truth. Psalm 36, verse 9 says, in your light, we see light. God has to give us light to see. It's not because you and I are so sensitive, so humble, so spiritual, so anything. We are recipients of great grace. Why is it that you can be teaching forever on a certain subject? And you go, why don't these people get it? I saw it however long ago. Or I saw it the first time somebody explained it to me. Because God was gracious to you. Because God was gracious to me. I've been a Christian seven years when I came to see the Doctrines of Grace. And it wasn't convenient for my job. I had to quit my job because you couldn't be a Calvinist in the para-church ministry I was involved in. But I saw it in scripture. I couldn't turn away from it. I couldn't deny it. It's never a safe or good thing to deny what you see in scripture and turn away from it, because a relative might get mad. You might lose your job. You might lose friends. Human beings have the revelation of God in the creation. We have the special revelation of God in the scriptures. I'd say the more special revelation of God in the Lord Jesus Christ. And all of this is an overflow of the kind of being God is. Apart from this massive work of his grace, we wouldn't see anything. So we need the revelation of God, and we need the Holy Spirit, because we're sinful. But a third reason, and this hit me. I've been working on this for several months when I teasingly say, yeah, Doug asked me to speak on the history of the doctrine of God in 45 minutes. I mean, it's like, I'd like you to swallow the swimming pool. or I'd like you to put your arms around the ocean. It's a huge task. And after nearly drowning, the Lord helped me to put myself back together and think through some ways where we might make it manageable. But it was true but sad for me to see that one of the reasons we struggle to understand who God is is because human beings, fallen human beings, are lazy. The fall of humanity and descent has left each of us, to some degree, lazy. We don't want to work hard. Despite what God told Adam, you're going to make it by the sweat of your brow, we tend to think things ought to come easily. I mean, it just ought to flow, right? As a young Christian, I can remember so clearly a time facing a situation. And I thought to myself, well, this can't be God's will for me. It would be so hard. And if you're not thinking to yourself, oh, well, I've been there. Ten years ago, when evangelical and Calvinistic men began to question the teaching of the Confession and the Scriptures on the doctrines of God's simplicity, impassibility, immutability, eternality, I can remember men refusing to even study these issues because it would be just too much hard work. Such men are the kind of men who, when they're preaching from the scriptures, Read three commentaries. This one says this. This one says that. And I'm going to read the third one to see what I believe. Men who are not willing to work hard are not going to impact the world, let alone change it. Men who are not willing to work hard are not going to impact the world, let alone change it. Pastoring is hard work. Studying is to really understand biblical text is hard work. Martin Luther said, by temperament, I'd rather be a knight. He lived in a day when there were knights in shining armor and they were on horses and they would knock each other off. He goes, that's what I'd like to be doing. But what has God called me to do? To sit on a wooden chair for 10 hours a day and get a flat bottom. Reading and studying the Bible and theology and church history and philosophy and hermeneutics is hard work and we should never begrudge it. Becoming and being a workman who need not be ashamed, handling accurately the word of truth requires hard work and persevering faithfulness. Luther also said, some Christians are so lazy they want a fried chicken to fly into their mouth. Now, I've been lazy myself. I'm not throwing bricks at you that wouldn't land on my head. We can each be lazy. Well, how many hours are this required for me to study this? But I really exhort you men and encourage you men not to be lazy, not to refuse to do the hard work that's required of a steward of God's truth. One of the reasons why I always try to help men to become full-time and not have to be part-time pastors is because it requires all of our best efforts to get the message of Scripture and to communicate it to God's people and to the world. It takes a lot of work. A lot of work. Not to camp on that. Let's move on. What are three crises in history and understanding who God is? Three crises in church history and understanding who God is. And I chose three. First one is Exodus chapter three, verses 14 and 15. Moses at the burning bush. Someone said Moses had a scientific inquiry. Why is this bush burning but not being consumed? I'm not sure he was thinking in terms of modern science. I think he was thinking in terms of, whoa, what's going on here? And the bush speaks to him. I am who I am, or I am that I am. Tell them I am has sent you. Yahweh, the personal name of God. He's eternally existent. He's uncreated. He has and will always exist. He has being in himself. I am who I am. I will always be who I will always be. In theology books, this is called the asedia of God, from ase, which is Latin for existence. God is of himself, ase. God didn't have a beginning. God didn't have someone to make him. God is the only independent being. He relies on no one and nothing other than himself. How did he create the world? Out of nothing. There was nothing, and then God took nothing and made everything. How do you pull that off? I don't know. God does. And I think for some types of personalities, We go, I don't want a God that's that big, that's that, what, uncontrolled, uncontrollable. But I want a God that's way infinitely bigger than me. And why is it that many evangelicals struggle to, why is worship so boring to them? Because the God that they worship is not very big and not very much worth worshiping. But a God who can create everything that exists out of nothing, we should fall on our faces on their door. He didn't need previously existing materials to decree the creation and all that exists. He's totally self-sufficient. When the child asks the parent, who made God? The standard answer should always be, nobody made God. He's always been there. He's always existed. The Hebrews had lived in pagan Egypt for 430 years. The kids grew up learning to speak Egyptian. They were daily assimilating Egyptian culture, living in their limited ghetto, without recourse to their own ancient religion, while being immersed in Egyptian paganism. They needed a crash course to awaken their minds and hearts as to who the true God really is. I was disappointed to read an article on the internet by a professor or teacher of Old Testament at a Christian college outside the United States. who tried to argue that I am that I am is a simple claim to faithfulness, that God will be with them. It's kind of like President Clinton saying, I feel your pain. I don't want a leader who can feel my pain. I want a leader who maybe can do something about it. I don't want a God who's faithful if he's not sovereign, if he's not almighty God, if he's not the eternal great one. They needed a sovereign creator who could lift the yoke of Egypt off their necks and carry them through the barren wilderness to the promised land. Whatever knowledge of the true God the Hebrews had left Canaan with, their 430 years in Egypt had provided just the right cultural inundation to muddle their thinking and to shrivel their heads and hearts. We do not live in a culture that exalts God. We have lived in a culture for increasingly for 200 years that shrinks God. And we always want a God kind of like us, but a little bit bigger. and maybe who can help us. Against the polytheism of most of the ancient world, God would drill into their hearts and worship that he is the one true and living God, that he's chosen them, that he's sovereign. And in the great Shema of Deuteronomy 6.4, hereo Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. This self-existing God is one God. Whatever else Israel was to learn, they were to know that there was only one God, not many. And that was a crisis for them, and you can go back and read in Exodus their struggle. God is like, what? He's I am that I am. Books have been written about each of my subjects today, so I can't delve very far into them, other than to say that to go back and read those passages and meditate upon them, the crisis of How great a god is God? Is he like the other gods? Every nation has a god. Even today, I knew of a missionary who was playing soccer in Benin with some Christians at a church he was preaching at. And they were defeating the local pagan team. And during the halftime break, the pagan team went down to the river and complained to the river gods that they weren't helping them. Get your acting gear. We're losing by three goals. And it didn't help. But even today, all over the world, people have their gods. It isn't the true and living God. The second crisis came in 325 AD and 381 AD. This one God that's been drilled into our heads, he's only one, he's the one, is Triune. at the Council of Nicaea and then in 381 at the Council of Constantinople, the church had to wrestle with, what does all this biblical data reveal about who God is? We have to put it all together, even if it doesn't square, so to speak, with the way we think things ought to be. By the fourth century, Bible students saw that the New Testament revealed there is one God who existed in three persons. And I even caught myself working on this saying there's one God composed of three persons. And that's wrong. God's not a composite being. He's not made up of parts. Well, you got the part that's the Son, and the part that's the Father, and the parts that the Spirit. No. The New Testament authors held to the ancient reality there was only one God, one true and living God. And this one God exists as three persons in the Godhead. Whoa. That's not normal. That's not like anything we're used to. And almost every analogy, I don't know of any analogy that people try to come up with to explain the Trinity, doesn't end up in heresy. This additional revelation in the New Testament caused much puzzlement and confusion and was battled out for 300 years. I won't get into all the heresies at that time, but the modalist taught that there was one God who appeared at different times in different modes, three different modes. It's kind of like the old Superman TV show, where Clark Kent went into a phone booth and came out Superman. But this time, he went into the phone booth and came out a third whatever, Lois Lane. I don't know. But the point being is that there was one God who just kind of took on different appearances, modes of existence. But at the same time, Arius and his followers thought that Jesus was not divine, but the first created being. Their famous mantra was, there was a time when the sun was not. There was a time when Jesus was not. And then God created him, and he came into existence. R.C. Sproul has a great clip on YouTube, I think you can find it, where he talks about the struggles in the church in Alexandria, Egypt, and the believers following Athanasius were opposing Arius. And the Arians would sing a song at night to taunt the Christians about there was a time when Jesus was not, and a famous hymn that you sing came from that period. These and other heterodox and heretical groups could not reconcile how God could be one and three. And you'll be glad to know that I'm not going to reconcile that for you either this morning. As the Puritans used to say about things, God doesn't reconcile friends, election and free will, whatever. The early church theologians denied that the Bible taught tritheism. The Bible doesn't teach there are three gods. There is one God who exists in three persons, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. To explain what they understood, the theologians took existing words and gave them new meanings or deeper meanings. As some have accused, they did not merely assimilate Greek philosophy, but carefully and critically adopted existing Greek language and philosophy to explain biblical concepts. if history should go on for 1,000 years. And they said, well, look at the people in the United States in the 21st century. Look at the pastors and theologians in the 21st century. They used American culture, English culture, to explain God. Well, in one sense, we do speak English. We speak American English. But we would not want to say that our understanding of the English language made us twist the doctrine of God. Would you say that's true? We have the most expressive language in the world currently. And to say that the Bible was given in Greek, the first culture that the Bible came into at the time of Christ, it had a Greek background. So they used Greek language and Greek words that they tweaked to help them explain what the Bible was all about. For example, the persons of the Godhead were of the same substance, but identified with different. The Father was of the same substance as the Son, of the same substance as the Spirit. The members of the Godhead, the persons of the Godhead, co-inhabited one another, or coexisted with one another, or mutually indwelt one another. Perichoresis. Now, I'm like you, I didn't know What all this stuff meant until I had to study it, until I had to, what's going on here? I need to understand this. I need to study it. I can remember lying on my cell phone in Indianapolis in 1976, reading Francis Schaeffer. And I'm getting a headache. Epistemology, what in the world is that? The manishness of man, true truth, and all the things that he coined or tried to explain. And every discipline in the world, whether you're a mechanic, Whether you're an anesthesiologist, whether you're a baseball player, you have technical terms that you know if you're going to progress in that. I used to play a lot of baseball. I know what an infield fly rule is. If you don't know anything about baseball, you don't know and you don't care. But it's something that a thoroughgoing baseball player knows what an infield fly rule is. If you're a mechanic, you know what a torque is. If you're an anesthesiologist, you know how much of a certain chemical to give a person to keep them under. There are technical things you need to know. And as a pastor, as an elder, as a deacon, you should know basic theological truths. Christ was born of the Virgin Mary by the operation of the Holy Spirit, yet was eternally begotten of the Father and not a created being. These early theologians believed that certain things could be said truthfully about this triune God While we had true knowledge of God, though, we do not have exhaustive knowledge about God. I can apprehend him. I can go up and hit Earl Campbell, but I'm not going to get my arms around Earl Campbell's thighs. I can apprehend truth about God, but I cannot comprehend truth about God. I saw a pastor embarrassingly stand up at a conference one time and arguing against what the confession said about the doctrine of God. And he said, it says right in the first chapter, God's incomprehensible. He doesn't expect us to understand it. God doesn't expect us to comprehend him, but he expects us to take the knowledge that's revealed in scripture, and having studied it with the help of 2,000 years of brothers and sisters, we should understand it much better. Our own confession says in the first chapter that we cannot comprehend God. And I say amen. But the Bible also teaches, I believe our confession does, that we can apprehend real truth about God. This is not imaginary truth. Did you ever play baseball as a kid and go, we got imaginary men at first, imaginary men second, because we didn't have enough players to take all the places. But God expects us to understand what's revealed. The secret things belong to God. Who are the elect? How many are there? When's Christ coming back? The secret things belong to God. But the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever. One of the reasons why I was very thankful that Doug gave me the privilege of speaking on this topic is, brothers, we live at a time, and you know this in a sense, but my thing was church history, and we live at one of the bleakest times in some sense in the history of American Christianity, certainly. We have more books available. Praise God. I mean, if I had a million bucks, I'd spend almost all of it on books. Look at all the things that are out there that's available that have never been available, you know, in 300, 400 years. But every single thing, if you went down the table of contents of the systematic theology book, every single doctrine is under attack. And in one sense, you kind of know that because you got to teach your people. And new people come to your church. They kind of sort of like your church, and they kind of sort of are bringing baggage with them. And you have to help them work through that baggage, OK? But we need to be standing for the truth so it's not lost. The truth is for us and for our children. And I shudder to think what my grandchildren are going to have to grow up with if God doesn't grant greater grace to the churches and greater grace to our culture, because we're swirling around the drain. The third major crisis was enlightenment thinking shrinks God and the Trinity. Enlightenment thinking shrinks God and the Trinity. And that's from 1800 till today. We looked at 1700 BC with Moses at the burning bush. We looked at 325 and 381 for early councils, putting together the data and what the Bible says about God. But since the Enlightenment, or I call it the Endarkment, It's been shrinking God and the Trinity. The Enlightenment supposedly began around 1800. It's ongoing today. It was called modernity. Now we call it postmodernism. But it's still the same thing. Man has become everything. Man is the mystery. God, we don't want to have God even in our thinking. Across Europe, philosophers were throwing off what they considered to be the shackles of Christianity and biblical revelation. We don't need biblical revelation. Man, beginning with himself, can reason to whatever he needs. The good life, the better society, self-fulfillment, self-actualization, whatever you want to call it. We don't need God. But mankind, unaided by divine help, cannot reason and feel this way to the good life and to God. I read the big, fat books about, well, this guy had this influence, and this guy had this influence. And I suppose it makes me feel smarter that I know who said what and taught what. But the bottom line is, each of these men rejected their creator-creature distinction. Man became the center of the universe. And man's mind was the measure of reality, not God's revelation. In the 20th century, New Testament critic Ruff Bultmann spoke for many when he said that no one who's ever seen an electric light bulb could really believe in the supernaturalism of the Bible. Well, people who've seen a lot more than an electric light bulb believe in the supernaturalism of the Bible. But he said we must demythologize, take the supernatural parts out of the Bible. And what do you have left? A little kernel, a little sense of aughtness toward God. The father of liberalism's name was Friedrich Schleiermacher. Not a family name. You don't invite Uncle Friedrich. You don't want him in your family lineage, probably. But his most famous book was On Religion, subtitled Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. Doesn't that tell you everything where he's coming from? You who sneer at God, I have some good things to say that you might want to. look at, and he's not John McArthur, he's not R.C. Sproul. He's not going to give you the truth. He's going to bend the truth. Well, 20th century theologians who had demythologized God and emptied the Bible of its supernatural content began to, or I should say, continue to reason up from the creature to the creator. All liberal theology, you read it, always reasons up from us to, well, I think God is this. You ever had somebody come to your church? I like to think of God as, or the God that I know as, we had a person who hated seeing the Holiness of God videos or discussions from the book. That's not the God that I serve. I didn't have any, I understand that, ma'am. You have to be careful how you say things. You eat snacks. In fact, the culture we live in today is the God that so many even professed evangelicals serve as just a bigger and better version of ourselves. I was reading a statistic of the theology survey that was done by Ligonier Ministries in consultation with LifeWay. 43% of professed evangelicals believe that God changes and reacts and learns in relation to new things. What to me was disturbing was the people who were analyzing the data saw one or two things that were wrong with that and said, well, then that means God's not immutable, or God's not omniscient. But they didn't realize that what they were leaving out is does God change? In the 1990s and into early 2000s, Clark Pinnock and others were into the openness of God. God's in the flux of human history. The future hasn't happened yet. Free will preachers haven't made their choices yet. So God can't really speak to what's going to happen in the future. As Roger Nicole withstood him at the Evangelical Theological Society meetings in Atlanta, he said, nobody's believed what you're teaching since the Sassanians of the Reformation era. And they were out and out heretics. And in fact, worse than being called a fundamentalist is being called a Sassanian. If somebody calls you a Sassanian, You should punch them and then ask forgiveness. It's not a good thing to be called. God's in the flux of history. He doesn't know the future. Then Roger Nicole said, fine. Then all bets are off. How do you know that 1,000 years from now God doesn't change his mind? You know, now that I think about it, you can all go to hell. I don't care. I don't want you around me anymore. I mean, he said the promises of scripture only become probabilities if this teaching is true. Many modern theologians deny that God is simple. They say, without always realizing, that God has parts. But if God has parts, then he's not God. I would really recommend Samuel Ranahan's Deity and Decree, where he goes through the first chapter of the Confession and talks about the doctrine of God and talks about God's decree to create. God is simple. God is immutable. He doesn't change. Read, what was the first sermon that Spurgeon preached in London? Malachi. Because I do not change, O worm, Israel, you are not consumed. A million years from now, you're safe in me. In eternity, you're safe in me. I do not change. And the first half of that sermon is one of the most exhilarating, confidence-building sermons you're ever going to hear. And the second half of that sermon would make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. He says that those who refuse Christ are damned forever. When you've been in hell 10,000 years and you look up and the lights are still blinking, forever, forever, forever. I do not change, O Israel. I do not change, you who reject my Son. That's a scary sermon, and it's an exhilarating sermon. It's all based upon the immutability, the unchanging nature of God. God's impassable. Or as John MacArthur's right-hand man, Phil Johnson, says, he's a God without mood swings. God is omniscient. The future of free creatures and their choices hasn't happened yet, so he can't know everything that's going to happen. I don't want a God who's always working on his best guesses. The God that's revealed in scripture is not that way. Modernity has prided itself on how smart and learned it is and how stupid and naive the earlier theologians and pastors and authors of creeds and confessions were. We know so much today, and these people were a bunch of nincompoops. Really. In his introduction to Athanasius' On the Incarnation, C.S. Lewis wrote a famous overview of why we need to not be men of our generation, but men of long term. He called it chronological snobbery. Looking down Cronos time, looking over the time, those dumb guys, Plato, Aristotle, Athanasius, Anselm, Augustine, Aquinas, all these guys, they know nothing. The mindset that everything that's old and outmoded is outmoded, everything that new is just wonderful. The older wisdom was not so wise as modern wisdom. He said, for every contemporary book you read, no matter if you agreed with it or not, you need to read three books from previous generations. Why? Because they had their biases and blind spots, too, but almost undoubtedly not yours. And everybody in your generation shares the same blind spots, even with people you disagree with. There's some things neither of you see. In Atlanta, there's a liberal seminary. And it went through their library. Books written before 1900 were called, they were pre-modern. They don't have much to teach us. How arrogant. We live in a culture that believes that things that are old and written down, like a confession, are irrelevant and that our confession, by its very nature of being historical, is out of step with reality. As one wag said, you don't ask grandpa for the wisdom of fixing your iPhone, you ask your teenager. And that applies to many people's understanding of theology. I'll close with this. I've rambled through a lot of stuff. I've more tried to prick your thinking than establish anything comprehensively. Man, we have the Bible on our side. We have church history on our side. We must study and know the truth. We must marinate in the truth. Do you ever marinate a piece of meat? Well, we need to marinate in the truth. we must preach and teach the truth and the power of the Holy Spirit. One of the books that was a freebie was my friend Pastor Kurt Smith, Reform Baptist Church on top of a mountain in Alabama, wrote a book, Thundering the Word, the ministry of George Whitefield and the awakening ministry he had. Calvinists are evangelists as well as faithful Bible teachers. We must stand firm in the truth. When Al Mohler reformed Southern Baptist Seminary back in the 90s, one of the first things he published was a great article. It's online. Don't just do something. Stand there. See, most people are exhorting you. Don't just stand there. Do something. Get off your duff. Get work. Get busy. And he said, no, you need to stand on the truth. Don't be doing something until you first stand on the truth. And he brought it back to the abstract of principles. I almost read this beforehand, and I didn't, but you know the reference, 1 Corinthians 4. It's required of a steward that he be found faithful. Not creative, not innovative, not he pushed the envelope. I heard a famous megachurch Calvinist pastor in 1995 speak from the pulpit on how he wanted to be innovative, creative, and push the envelope. And brothers, we leave that for the heterodox and for liberals. We want to be found faithful. Let's pray. Our Father and our God, thank you that you have been gracious to us and shown us things, not because we deserved it, but because you're the God of love, the God of grace and mercy. Help us to be faithful in our lifetimes. We only have one life to live. Help us not to pour it down a rat hole. Help us not to go off into Bypass Meadow. Help us not to lose the truth. May we be beavers of the Bible, destudious and industrious, and may we preach it in the power of the Holy Spirit. We leave the results in your hands. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you, Brother Martin. Gentlemen, based on the nature of this talk, the Q&A could get away from us real quick, and so we want to keep on schedule and everything. But if anyone has any questions, Maybe not so much the confession of faith, I think that's more appropriate for Pastor Sparks' talk, but connected with perhaps church history or even resources, maybe that you'd be interested in asking Pastor Martin. We can take a few questions if you don't mind, Brother Martin. I would like to ask you, what spoke to me in your talk is the exhortation to to study and do the work. As a bi-vocational pastor myself, I'm at times intimidated by the doctrine of God, I'm just being frank about it. Intimidated because I see the work that's involved in really getting down and getting an accurate articulation of the doctrine. But I don't hesitate in the pulpit to preach what the word says about God, which you said just now, the word of God is on our side and so I proclaim it But I do desire to be a little bit more proficient, you know, not sloppy in my articulation of it. Considering all of that, my limits with time and things like that, can you suggest any, I'm almost embarrassed to say it, but like an abridged work. Cliff Notes on the Doctrine of God. Cliff Notes, there you go, on the Doctrine of God. I mean, is there anything like that or like a podcast that you know of or a ministry where a man is, you know, giving good audios that I can listen to while I'm driving or something like that? I'll tell a quick story, and then I'll answer your question. NASA scientists was going around speaking at different universities. And the government had given them a motor pool driver to drive them around. And he was going to speak at Purdue. And he'd never been to Purdue. And he told the driver, those people at Purdue don't know me. And the driver said, well, you know, I've heard you so many times. I can give your lecture for you. I'll be you, and you be me. You be the driver. And we'll go, and we'll do this. OK. So they went to Purdue. He gave a perfect word-for-word lecture on this very esoteric, astrophysical lecture. But there was a Q&A they didn't plan on afterwards. And some grad students stood up. And of course, he always wanted to know how to show you how smart you are. So he had a five-minute question. It was so detailed. It had so much back story. And then he puts it up there. The guy in front said, you know, that's such an elementary question. I'm going to let my chauffeur here answer it. Drew Sparks is my chauffeur. The Drew Sparks podcast is only $59.99 this week. I think that the better expositions of the Confession, both Second London and Westminster are very helpful. You can go on different seminaries, have different access to different lectures. But for my money, I would say that Dr. Jim Renehans, there's a copy of his exposition of the first and second line of the Baptist Confession. There are demo copies in the back. You can't purchase it, but you can have a look and see what it's all about. And I think, I don't know that Sam Renehans or Jim Ranahan's are available as a podcast. I guess you just have to go out there and look. Let me say that when I came to the Documents of Grace in 1976, and then my generation had to struggle to come to understand everything in the Confession. It was like kind of coming to understand everything in your Bible. There's so much there. And I'm still not saying I understand everything. I don't make that mistake. But having expositions of the confession, our confession, Westminster, if you can find an exposition of the Savoy Declaration, which our confession was taking Westminster, taking Savoy, taking things we agreed with, changing the doctrine of baptism and church government. Let me also address something that's in the background of what you said. I try to pray and help men to get out of being bi-vocational if they can. I realize not everybody can, but it just takes a lot of hard work. And I had a pastor friend in New York who was a postman. He carried a 50-pound pack six days a week. and did it until his retirement. And they had a Wednesday night part-time and Sunday morning service, and he didn't have the time to teach or do anything else. I could feel for it. But the post office was really paying a salary, and his church chipped in a pittance. As I got to meet him at different Banner of Truth conferences over the years, my co-author and myself exhorted him to consider quitting the post office and going full-time at what the church could pay him, or going half-time at the post office, which he managed to finagle that. They don't normally do that, but his postmaster gave him the ability to do that, and he did it for three or four years. He finally got some seminary training during that time, and the church blossomed. But then the new postmaster came and wouldn't let him do half-time, and so he went back to working full-time. And one of the things we observed was that the people kind of liked it when the pastor was only part-time, because he wasn't really available to meddle in our problems. We'd just get a little seminar from him on Sunday, maybe Wednesday night, and he doesn't meddle with us. He leaves us alone. We can kind of be on cruise patrol. I don't think it's healthy for the church if the pastor can possibly ever get out of being bivocational. You can come to me and say, well, my situation's different. They're all different. But it's not for nothing that Paul tells Timothy, it's best if a man isn't involved with other things. I know Doug's situation. He's trying to plant a church in Newcastle. And he doesn't have any big ticket givers. So he's working in a construction company. And maybe you have other situations. But if you can possibly get to the place of not being bi-vocational, that would be best, both for your studies and for your people's edification. I received that, brother. Yeah, that was good. Thank you. Is there any other questions for Brother Martin or Drew? All right, well, hey, we'll take a break and let's try to keep it to five or 10 minutes. There is coffee in the back. It's not much time, but you can help yourself. Look at the book table back there. They're going to pass out those envelopes we were talking about, and then we'll have a few announcements after the break, and we'll get to a second coffee. Thanks so much, brother. I appreciate it. I've got a couple of questions. What was that survey? Who was pretty specific that you mentioned? Oh, Charles Kirkland, the first sermon in the New Parchute Pope. It was his first sermon in London. You can find it online. I think it's Malachi 3.6. Who was that pastor in the 90s that was counting the money? He said other things that were not as nice as I can remember. Yeah. Would you recommend him today? I was in a mess today. If you're a liberal, I'm going to reach Karl Barth and ask him a few questions. What did Karl Barth see that nobody else did? And they couldn't figure it out. And what does John Piper see that nobody else is seeing? I don't believe in his basic premise that God's most glorified and most satisfactory thing is biblical. God doesn't need my approving of him. Right. But he tends to, you know, it's not going to, justification is now, but works on the background of that. He muddies the water. I heard that too. I don't look good to it, but I've heard about it. I have never put any of his books on my bookcase. I might read that in one different place. I don't know that he has anything that people need that they could get better or less badly. I'm not saying I'm better than anyone, but as I said, he's off. I admire him. I've listened to him on some subjects. I like his passion. I haven't, I've heard people say things that I was nauseous about. I was acupuncturist the last 10 years. And what he did with the Fermi-Rigour administration, you know, back in 2008 or 2009, that was very troubling. And he said, when I was there, he had posters up in his room of Promise Keepers, which are still alive. He had the last Billy Graham concert. And someone asked him, why did you just take Billy Graham and the Promise Keepers? And he said, well, because he loves them. This brings to light some of his interviews he did with Rick before. I really didn't like how he interviewed Rick Warren because I felt like he should have been a little more harsh with him. Yeah, he was just very sentimental towards Rick Warren's methods. So he's kind of like the seeker. He didn't confront Rick Moore like Pastor John McArthur did. And so I was concerned about his sermon there with Rick Moore. Ian Murray was also speaking at this conference. They asked Ian Murray to send a question. Did you support Promise Keepers? And it was Billy Graham. And he goes, I had to stay with Dr. Lloyd-Jones, who in the 50s was asked by Billy Graham to head up the Greater London Crusade. I will 100% if you don't have liberals and Catholics sitting up on the platform confusing us as a Christian. And number two, if you don't ask people physically to do something, they're called repentant bullies and not called to move around. If you will do one of those two things, I support you in this. Billy Graham wasn't going to do that, and Martin Luther King was going to support him. Yeah. There's that methodology again. People don't realize how ecumenical Billy Graham was. Even the counselors after people came to Christ, they were sending them to Catholicism. Priests and everything. They used some of those methods in the megachurches, as they grew, when they grew that evangelization. So now we got today is... Thank you for your message. Appreciate it. You down in Texas for a while? I was in Mansfield, yes. Okay, I grew up on it. There's a lot to do. Oh, yeah. Yes. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But one of our favorite things is to think that we just got dealt with. Oh, yeah. And we have a joke to write a script. Yes, sir. I know. Mark, you seem blown up. Oh, yeah. What a place to die. Yeah, yeah. Barbecue. Yeah, exactly. Not me. Well, how long have you been back in Indiana? So, I've lived up here, you know, for eight years. Eight years. What do you do? I'm an inside salesman here at George's Company on the west side. What's that? So, we sell, basically, automation, industrial automation. and stuff like that. And I'm a part-time associate pastor at a church over in Eastburg. It's on the west side of the border. It's on the left. Kind of, sort of. Yeah, we're reforming, so we've got a lot of... We have a majority of our churches. We're kind of up to you. We're going to let you do that. I don't know. I don't know. It's as if they come back. Yeah, exactly. This church never took off, but see, never. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's a good one. We don't want to talk about those things. I just want to know if that's all you do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So what's the gospel? Oh, yeah. She was like a daughter to me. I'd say, well, when he got there, he was like, oh, good. That makes me feel a little better. Because he was very weird. He used to do that a lot. I was like, this is, yeah. If you ever think I could use some help, if I could get a little bit of help, what's that? And he'd be like, oh, yeah, that's what it is. That's what it is. That's what it is. That's what it is. That's what it is. That's what it is. We're going to find a church, I'm not going to say anything. We're going to do like a backside.