Good morning, everyone. Welcome back to Sunday school and our first class of the winter and spring semester of Sunday school. I'm excited to get back into our study of our confession of faith in chapter two. We've been in chapter two for some weeks of the Sunday school semesters, but that's because we're dealing with the doctrine of God and the Holy Trinity, which is a profound and wonderful doctrine, which is worth all the time that we can give it to study so that we better know our God, whom we worship and whom we serve, our God who loves us and cares for us. We're not studying an abstract idea or a myth. We're studying the one true and only living God, our God, I am that I am, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so I want to do the briefest of reviews just to contextualize and locate ourselves in the progression of the doctrine of God in our confession of faith in chapter 2 and paragraph 1. And then we'll get into not all of what's in your handout. That's too much to cover. I never know how far we'll get, but I'm quite persuaded we will not complete everything that you have in front of you. So let's just contextualize and locate ourselves in the development of the doctrine of God. And I want to remind you of a threefold division of the attributes of God. So the review begins by understanding that attributes are various things that we attribute to God. In our minds, We perceive the infinite perfection of God by various attributions. We attribute various things to God, which in God are really one single or simple perfection. So the many attributes, plural, of God are different things, not different things, but different ways in which we attribute many things to God, which in God himself are just his pure being, his pure, singular, simple perfection. There are not many different parts of God. There are not many different attributes, as though this is one attribute, and then there's this other different kind of thing in God, which is another attribute. The attributes are the plurality of them, is not in God. The plurality of the attributes is in our minds as we attribute different things to God because we cannot know God in His simplicity. Our minds cannot comprehend the simple being of God, and so how do we apprehend God? By attributing various things. They are various in our minds, they're plural in our minds, but they all represent different ways by which we perceive or experience the single, pure, simple perfection of God. So as we discuss the attributes of God, plural, We need to remember that the diversity of them is in our predication, our attributing these things to God and not in God himself. It's a notional diversity or a rational diversity in the mind of the subject, in the mind of us, but not in the object, not in God himself. And as we make these various, what we do is we pay attention to the scriptures, and we see the scriptures attribute this to God. The scriptures attribute this to God, and we begin to make a list of the things that the scriptures attribute to God, and we thereby develop our doctrine of God, not as various things in Him, but various things that we perceive. And if we organize them in systematic theology, if we organize these attributes of God, we've been using a threefold division. And so the first of them was negative attributes. Negative attributes, where we attribute a negation to God. Remember that we consider whatever is defective or imperfect or sinful, anything that does not fit the perfect majesty of the being of God, we negate it. We deny it to be in God. And so we went through a list of negative attributes, such as simplicity, which is a negative attribute because it is saying that God is not composed of parts. Composition is an inferior manner of being, and so we deny composition in God. We have divine simplicity. Immutability, we say there's no mutation in God. There's no change in God. That is inconsistent with perfection of being. So he is immutable. He is impassable. He is immortal. He is invisible. And we have these negative attributes. They're all negations. And by stating what God is not, we more clearly understand and perceive what he is. But it's a negation, isn't it? He's not composite. Yes, therefore he's pure and simple and perfect. He's not mortal, so therefore he's immortal. The negations are also attributions of, but in a mode of negation. We attribute something to God in a mode of negation. And we spent quite a bit of time on the negative attributes, where we left off in our last session at the end of the fall semester of Sunday school, was we looked at some of the positive attributes of God. The positive attributes of God. And this is where we consider things that are good or virtuous in creatures and in man. And we attribute those things to God, only we attribute them to him in a way that is infinite, eternal, essential, unchangeable, and so on. And so we spoke of God's Knowledge, to some degree, we'll get into that later. We spoke of his will, we spoke of his freedom, we spoke of his holiness. Holiness is not a negation. Freedom and will, they're not negations, they're positive things. But God possesses them in a way consistent with his perfect being, which is better, superior to man. The third distinction of the attributes, and that's what we're going to get into today, is relative. attributes. Relative. So think about this. Negative attributes negate. Positive attributes, they posit, they say something positive or they place something without a negation. Relative attributes are going to describe a relation. We're now talking about God in relation to something outside of God. The scriptures attribute titles to God, titles that imply or just state a relation to his creatures. And so if we look at the titles that God attributes to himself in the scriptures, we can begin to derive or to discern certain relative attributes from those titles. So relative attributes are the attribution of a name to God, we attribute a name to God, which signifies a relation between God and something outside of God, relative. Your relatives are you and your relations, father, mother, brother, sister, second cousin twice removed on your mother's side, if you're good at that kind of thing. Your relations, your relatives. So in our confession of faith, we come to the relative attributes at the end of paragraph 1. And in our confession, chapter 2, paragraph 1, towards the end of it, we read the following statements. We confess that our God is 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, the word no should be there, who will by no means clear the guilty. And this part of paragraph one is a mixture of systematic theology attributing certain relative attributes to God, together with just quotations from scripture. Much of this text here comes from Exodus 34, six to seven, where God passes by Moses and proclaims his name, the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty. So a good portion of our confession here is simply lifted and drawn straight from Exodus 34, as God declares his name to Moses. And it's also drawn from Hebrews 11, 6, which says that God is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. So our confession of faith is using direct quotations from scripture, but also a few other related attributions to give to us what are mostly here relative attributes. relative attributes. It's not a negation. It's not a positive attribute, although you could possibly classify some of these under positive. We're dealing mostly with relative attributes, the way in which the scriptures speak of God in relation to something or someone outside of God. And oftentimes, we see this through his titles or names. So number one, and we may just sit on this for the rest of the lesson. we're going to talk about the love of God, the love of God, which is, perhaps more properly stated, the goodness of God. we're discussing the goodness of God, which is truly his love, or if you say we're talking about the love of God, which is truly his goodness, and here's where classification can get a little bit tricky, not so much right or wrong, but what's a better way of thinking about it. God's goodness could be considered a positive attribute, but when it becomes his goodness in relation to us, it becomes love, relative attribute. So, Obviously, the way we classify things in systematic theology is at times adjustable for the sake of presentation. The truth is not adjustable. But are we talking about God's goodness in himself? Then it's goodness. Is it God's goodness in relation to things outside of God? Then it's love. You see, we'll develop this further. So, God, our confession says that God is most loving. most loving and remember we said at the end of last semester that the word or the qualifier most is added to words like this to make a distinction where you and I we love and we can we are loving But God is most loving because we attribute love to him infinitely and supremely, essentially, unchangeably, and eternally. So he is most loving. This is saying that while we know love and we understand love and we do love acts of love, God is most loving in a supreme and eminent manner. This is the way of eminence. God is most loving. But I want to begin by talking about God's goodness, because we don't get to love until it's with relation to us, really. God is goodness itself. Whenever we talk about attributes or attributing things to God, there are not abstract virtues and ideas that God happens to possess in some way. He is the source and the sum of these things. There's not some eternal idea of goodness, and God happens to have that the most. Rather, he is the source, and he is the sum. He is goodness itself. And if we think about his goodness in nature, we would call that his perfection. The goodness of his nature, we would call his perfection. If we looked at the goodness of his actions, we would say that's his holiness. And if we looked at the goodness of his disposition, although that's a very improper way of speaking about God, disposition, there are no dispositions properly speaking in God, we would say that it's his benignity, his willingness to do good. his willingness to do good to others. He's good in himself, he's perfect. The things he does are good, he's holy. He is in himself willing to do good to his creatures. That would be his benignity, or we would say that God is benign or benevolent, although that's not exactly the same thing. So God does not possess goodness. God is goodness. itself, in and of himself, and he is the measure, the source and sum of all goodness. Now, think about God's goodness in relation, relative attributes, in relation to creation, all things not God. When we think of God's goodness in relation to creation, When God, who is good, does good to his creatures, we call him our benefactor. See this word bene, factor. Bene, well or good, factor, doing. the one who does good to his people. And we see this in many passages, but a very good one is Psalm 119 and verse 68, where the psalmist says, you are good, that's God's goodness in himself, and you do good, you are our benefactor. You are good and you do good to your creatures. God blesses those outside of God. He is the benefactor of creation, the one who does good to it. And to illustrate the way in which God is goodness itself, but we can be said to be good, but only by way of participation in God's goodness, is to compare the sun and the moon. The sun has light of itself. It is a light source of itself. The moon only shines when it receives the light of the sun. And then it reflects or transmits that light to us. So also, we are not good in ourselves. God is good, and he communicates his goodness to us. And so we are good only to the degree that we reflect God's goodness. He is the source. He is the sum. He is the measure of all goodness. You are good. And you do good, says the psalmist. Now, because God is infinite, he can pour out goodness on his creatures, and it doesn't diminish him at all. He's not losing goodness to communicate goodness to us. For example, in our confession in the next paragraph, it says that God, having all goodness in and of himself, is alone in and unto himself all sufficient, not standing in need of any creature which he has made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting his own glory in, by, unto, and upon them. So God has all goodness in and of himself. And as he communicates his goodness to his creatures, he's not in any way diminished. He's not losing goodness to give us goodness or make us shine. Rather, we simply reflect the infinity of his goodness. The title that we would use is benefactor. Can you be a benefactor if there's no one to whom you do good? You see how the title itself implies a relation to something outside of you. You are good, Psalm 119, and you do good. There are those who receive your goodness, so this is why we classify goodness and love under the relative attributes. We could put it under positive in terms of God's goodness in and of himself, but because he is the one who does good to his creatures, we call him benefactor, and we deal with this under relative attributes. And so now we come to his love. When God does good to his creatures, he is blessing them. And when he blesses his creatures, what is that except to love them? Because what is to love? To love is to bless. To love is to do good. So God is benign. He is willing to do good. And he is a benefactor. He does good to his creatures, which means that he loves. In fact, the scriptures say in 1 John 4, 8, God is love. He is goodness, and he pours out goodness. He is love. Now let's consider the love of God under this heading of God's goodness, that God is most loving. Why would we say that God is most loving? Well, we need to make some distinctions. The first distinction we need to make is between God's common love and his special love. Or if you want to keep the terminology a little tighter, you could say generic and special. Genre, or genre then species. So it would be generic and special, common and particular would be the way to better pair those words. Anyway, doesn't matter. Generic, common love. What are we speaking of here? God's goodness in relation to all his creatures. Does God love everybody? Yes, God loves everyone in the whole world. What? Yes, the rain falls on everybody. The sun shines on everybody. Everyone gets to behold the mountains. Everyone gets to swim in the sea. Everyone gets to sit on the sands of the seashore and bask in the warmth of the sun. Everyone gets to eat tri-tip and drink wine. Everyone gets to have cinnamon rolls and chocolate I'm not joking. This is actually the love of God to the world. God who is good does good to his people in special, which we'll get to, but he does good to his people in general, his creatures, by giving them a good world and good things in that world that they can enjoy. He even gives the light of nature, common knowledge of the existence of God and morality to mankind. He gives the knowledge of himself, I exist. He gives the knowledge of what is right and wrong, you should do this, you should not do that. All men have access to this knowledge because the heavens declare the glory of God. The heavens declare we have a maker, you have a maker, excuse me. So the revelation of God to the whole world, as well as the benefits and blessings that God gives to the whole world, these are his love to all of his creatures. Because we're following our definitions. It's God's goodness and his doing goodness to those that are outside of him. We see God's love for all mankind specifically made particular in the Noahic covenant, where God promises to everyone the stability of the seasons and the preservation of the world until he fulfills all of his purposes and promises. Everyone, your neighbor, gets to enjoy the blessings of the Noahic covenant just as much as you do. God made it with Noah and all flesh throughout their generations, so long as the earth remains. Is it only Christians who get seed time and harvest No, it's everyone. So we see God's common love for mankind, not just by observation, but even in scripture, where the Noahic covenant blesses everyone indiscriminately. Now, it's also true that men who receive these wonderful blessings and knowledge from God horribly misuse and abuse them. They suppress the truth, and they sin with the good things that God has given them, and they defy their creator and their horrible recipients. Sometimes you give gifts to your children and they're not very good receivers of those gifts because they're not as thankful as they should be or they're not as careful as they should be with those gifts. Well, however frustrating that may be for us, the way that God's creatures handle His gifts is infinitely worse. because we take them and we turn them into gods. We say, this statue made my fields fertile, and this statue made my cows give birth, and this statue has increased my gold fourfold, and et cetera, et cetera, which is just ridiculous, isn't it? And yet God gives good things to all his creatures. So we can in a very legitimate and true and direct and straightforward way say that God loves everyone in the world by blessing them and doing good to them in these common ways. And then we can descend in our distinctions to God's special or particular love for the elect, whom he chose in his Son, Jesus Christ, and upon whom he lavishes every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, and makes them heirs of the world as co-heirs with Jesus Christ. He forgives their sins in the blood of Christ. He justifies them with the righteousness of Christ. He sanctifies them with the holiness of Christ. He adopts them with the sonship of Jesus Christ, giving us the spirit of Christ. He preserves us for Christ's sake. And he will bring us into the inheritance that Jesus has won for us. And when we get to his decree in Providence, we'll see that God's providence has a special care for the elect and for the church, so that in the unfolding events of history, God is so guiding things that he ultimately accomplishes his purposes for the good of his people, for those who are called. All things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose. So there is a special love of God for his son, Jesus Christ, and for all of his people who are chosen and redeemed and called in Jesus Christ. This is something that not everyone experiences, although it is declared to everyone. The offer is for all to come to Jesus Christ, to repent of your sins and to receive salvation and all these blessings and all these mercies in Christ. There's no one who's excluded from that gospel call. All who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved. So those who do not receive it are those who do not ask for it, and they do not ask for it because they do not want to ask for it. And this is their fault as well as Adam's fault in whom they fell in the garden. And God leaves such persons in their sins. He passes over them. God does not positively, he does not positively reprobate them, but he negatively reprobates them by passing them over. Think about God's love and his goodness, which are the same thing, just distinguished. And this definition of love and understanding of love makes sense of various passages in scripture that teach us what love truly is. For example, it says whom the Lord loves, he disciplines. Whom the Lord loves, he disciplines. Discipline is painful and unpleasant for the one who's being disciplined, isn't it? How can something painful and unpleasant for me be called love? Well, it's because love is to do good. And discipline is good for you. You need it. And if God didn't discipline you, he would not be giving you that love that you need because he is your father and you are his child. This is part of God's special love for his children who are adopted in Jesus Christ. Whom the Lord loves, he disciplines. Let me make one more distinction that, sorry if I'm writing a little bit small. God is not obliged to give every possible good to his creatures. The common love of God proceeds from the freedom of God. He can bless whom he desires to bless, and he has no obligation to give every possible good to his creatures. If he had an obligation to give every possible good to his creatures, God would be responsible to prevent all sin, to give us the grace that we need to restrain or to refuse sin in us or around us. And so we should not blame God. Why don't you do good to the world and stop sin? He has no obligation to stop sin that we want to do, and we do, because he's not obliged to give every possible good. But for God's children, to whom he has committed himself by covenant as our father, He has committed himself to preserve us and care for us in a fatherly way, and so he does discipline and reprove us. He does warn us, and he does work through the means of grace and Christian fellowship and in our own lives, the testimony of the Spirit, to keep us from sin. So whom the Lord loves, he reproves, or he disciplines. Another helpful example, two more, in the scriptures of just confirming these definitions of love would be when Jesus speaks about our enemies. He says, love your enemies. And then what does he say? Do good to those who spitefully use you. Bless those who curse you. So notice the parallelism, love them, do good to them, bless them. It's all the same thing. To love is to do good, to love is to bless. And then the third scripture passage is when, we just read it in the Spanish ministry, when Jesus asks, he asks, He's teaching what love truly is, to love your neighbor. And he gives the parable of the Good Samaritan. And so the interpreter of the law wants to know, who is my neighbor? Love the Lord, your God, and love your neighbor. And then the interpreter says, who is my neighbor? And Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan. And so first, a priest passes by the man who was robbed and does nothing. He just passes by. Then a Levite goes by and does nothing. And the Good Samaritan actually does good to the wounded and robbed man. And Jesus says, who was the neighbor? Who actually did good? Who loved? So to love my neighbor is to do good to them. And only the Samaritan actually loved because only the Samaritan did good and blessed the one that he saw. And so to love is to bless, to love is to do good. We think of love in terms of purely emotional loyalty or excitement and such things. But true love is to be willing to do good, benignity, and to do good, to be a benefactor, to have a disposition towards someone to bless them and to then actually bless them. Now, to bring this to a conclusion, and we'll just cover the love of God today, we need to, the last thing we need to do is to distinguish between love in God as a perfection and love in man as a passion or an affection, which we've talked about many times, but we need to refresh what this means. When and why do we love others? When and why do we do good to others or bless them? There are going to be many motivations and reasons, but the base reason is that we have been drawn or moved to do good to them. We have perceived in that person something good, and we want to bless them because we perceive goodness in them. When someone says, I love you, it's because they are drawn to you in some way, and then they want to do acts of love. They want to bless you as a result of that. But when you see someone that repulses you, either outwardly or inwardly, their heart or their looks, we're just being honest as humans, we would say we don't love that person because we're repulsed by them. Is that the way we should act? Not necessarily, and in many cases, no, but it's the way we are. So our love is a passion, it's a motion, it's a movement. We're drawn to what we perceive to be good in someone that gives us a certain disposition towards them, and then we act, we do acts of love, or we bless them and do good to them as a result. But for God, who is love, God who is goodness in and of himself, his love is not a passion where he's drawn or moved to us because he perceives some goodness in us and then decides to bless us, but rather God loves us from the fullness of his own goodness, from the infinity of his own love. If God's love were a passion, would he ever love us? No, and what does 1 John say in multiple ways and times that, and this is love, not that we first loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be a propitiation for our sins. He loved us while we were yet sinners. He set his love upon us when we were not objects of, when we were not good and therefore not objects of love in the human sense. God is love, and his love is therefore perfection. It's his goodness in relation to us. He cannot cease to be love, therefore. He is good and does good. Even his justice upon the wicked is good. It's not bad, but they're suffering. They should suffer for their sins. It is good that the wicked be punished. So God is not ceasing to be loving when we feel things that do not feel very loving from our perspective. You should have in your handout a quotation that gets at this distinction between our love as a passion and God's love as a perfection. It's from a theological student studying under Theodore Beza in Geneva. in the 16th century, which says, the love that is in God is no passion arising of some good that it apprehends. So it's not moved by some goodness in us that God sees. But rather, the love that is in God is the very simple essence of God, who is graciously affected or disposed, that's his benignity, his willingness to do good, towards his creatures and blesses them as he thinketh good. He blesses his creatures. But the cause of that love of his is not in the creatures, as though they were such as could allure God to love them. But the cause of that love is rather in God, who of himself is good and pours goodness upon his creatures. And this is a wonderful comfort to us as his people. We say, does God love me? Does God love me? And as you may have heard from me and others before, he cannot stop loving you because he never started loving you. He is love. He is goodness. And yes, of course he loves you. And his discipline is love to you. His reproof is love to you. His providence is love to you. His common and special grace is love to you. We don't always see or feel that, as our confession says in chapter 17 about the perseverance of the saints. It says in chapter 17, paragraph one, part of it, the sensible sight of the light and love of God may for a time be clouded. So our ability to perceive the light and love of God may be clouded and obscured from God's people, yet he is still the same, and they shall be sure to be kept by the power of God unto salvation. Every day at lunch, I sit in my backyard, and I place my chair in such a way that the shadow of the pergola just covers my shoulders upward, and the rest of my body is in the sun as I eat my delicious lunch. And then sometimes the clouds come by, which we didn't pay to live in this part of the world for clouds, right? And it's amazing the difference of heat and cold from just a cloud. And I think, oh, maybe I should go inside. But the cloud passes, and the sun is right back again. And what was behind the cloud the whole time? The same sun. The same sun. It's like when you get in a plane and you take off in a rainy airport and you get above the clouds, you think it's a whole other world up here. A world where nothing changes in the best of ways because God is perfect and his goodness shines at all times. So the goodness of God, the love of God, positive attribute, relative attribute, yes. God's goodness is his goodness in and of himself, the perfection of his nature, the holiness of his actions, his willingness to do good. Remember, disposition is an improper term. It does not perfectly fit God, but it's the way we speak of him. His willingness to do good to his creatures. In relation to us, we call him a benefactor, because Psalm 119, 68, you are good and you do good. And then of the goods that God does to his creatures, there is a generic common love to mankind, where he blesses everyone with common blessings. and then a special love for the elect in Jesus Christ. And this love is not a passion in God drawn to goodness in us. This love is the perfection of his nature, his goodness that he pours out as he wills, as he deems fit according to his freedom and his wisdom. And we see his goodness and his love towards us, especially and above all in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, saving us from our sins and bringing us to unimaginable bliss and glory because God being the source and sum of all goodness is, if he's the sum, he's the highest good, none greater. And is this not the very good that God gives to us because of salvation? Salvation is a preparation for communion with God. And so we know God's love in the greatest way because he gives himself to us and he is the greatest good. If He is the source, and He is the sum, and He gives Himself to us to have perfect, endless communion with Him, then His love will satisfy us, and we will delight in it forever and ever and ever. We will enjoy the everlasting, unending, special love of God as His people, as we enjoy the sum and source of all goodness. And that will be eternal life. That will be joy forever at His right hand, delights. forevermore, and we can all look forward to that day, because it's not some lesser good that we await in heaven, although there are lesser goods, but ultimately, it's the greatest good, the summon source, our God himself, I am that I am. Even now, we have a right to this. Even now we've begun to taste and enjoy God himself, the sum and source of all goodness, but we will enjoy it in new ways when our souls are perfected, in new ways when our bodies are perfected and reunited with our souls, and forever and ever with our Lord. What a wonderful and loving and good God we have. Praise to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Very good, that concludes our first Sunday School lesson. You can see already the outline for the subsequent ones. We'll go through other relative attributes. You'll find that much of what we've just covered gets repeated in the other relative attributes because they tend to be, to some degree, God's goodness distinguished in further ways towards us. But that's okay because we're just learning more about the love of God to us. So thank you for your attention, you are dismissed.