Well, good morning and welcome to Christian Life Academy. This morning is the first Sunday of the month, so we are once again in our systematic theology We are looking at our Confession of Faith, the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689. We are in Chapter 2. We are in what we would call Unit 1 of the Confession, which deals with first principles. Chapter 1 of the Holy Scriptures is dealing with the principle of knowing. How do we know the things that we know about God and about theology? Well, they're derived from the scripture. Chapters 2 through 5 deal with the principle of being, and so the doctrine of God, chapter 2 particularly, is dealing with the doctrine of God as he is God, right? So, this is the technical theological term that's used is ad intra, God's internal relations and existence and being within himself. And then chapters three through five will deal with the works of God ad extra or external to God's being. So, as we begin this, this morning, I want to open by reading a passage to you from Isaiah chapter 40, beginning in verse 18. To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness will you compare to Him? The workman molds an image, the goldsmith overspreads it with gold, and the silversmith casts silver chains. Whoever is too impoverished for such a contribution chooses a tree that will not rot. He seeks for himself a skillful workman to prepare a carved image that will not totter. Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in. He brings the princes to nothing. He makes the judges of the earth useless. Scarcely shall they be planted, scarcely shall they be sown, scarcely shall their stock take root in the earth, when he will also blow on them and they will wither, and the whirlwind will take them away like stubble. To whom then will you liken me, or to whom shall I be equal, says the Holy One? Lift up your eyes on high and see who has created these things, who brings out their host by number. He calls them all by name. By the greatness of his might and the strength of his power, not one is missing. Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel? My way is hidden from the Lord, and my just claim is passed over by my God. Have you not known? Have you not heard? The everlasting God, the Lord, the creator of the ends of the earth, neither faints nor is weary. His understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the weak, and to those who have no might, He increases strength. Even the youth shall be faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall. But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint." And so we see in this passage in Isaiah that God is not to be compared with anything else or with any other being. And so as we begin to investigate the doctrine of God in chapter 2 of our confession, we ought to keep that in mind, that we are engaging in an undertaking here to speak about that which is incomprehensible in its totality. The doctrine of God is greater than our minds are capable of. We'll do a quick review. Last month we looked at paragraphs one and two, and I want to quickly just review those. Here's paragraph one, and the thing to note about paragraph one is the importance of these, whoop, I missed it, the importance of these semicolons that we see right here and here. These semicolons were put in here by the authors of the Confession intentionally, more so even than in the Westminster Confession. The semicolons in the 1689 really help us differentiate between the ideas that are being built upon in the paragraph. So, if we look at paragraph one now and compare it to the Westminster, we'll notice a good deal of additions to the paragraph. Can we turn this light off right here, please? Might make it a little easier to see. But everything that's in blue here is not in the Westminster. You can compare the two. Most of the stuff that is an addition to the 1689 is actually from the First London Baptist Confession from 1644-1646. So you can see that there's quite a bit of additions happening in the confession. This first phrase here, the Lord our God, is but one only living and true God, the Westminster just simply says there is but one only living and true God. The addition of this phrase, the Lord our God, gives us a clue to the mindset of the Baptists as they were putting this confession together. They wanted to be clear And we'll see this again at the end of paragraph three, but they do it right here at the beginning of the chapter, that as we engage in trying to understand this doctrine of the incomprehensible God, that this doctrine is not dry doctrine that's just knowledge that shouldn't have any effect on our hearts, but rather, this is the God that we are in relationship with. This is the Lord, our God, and so this doctrine in chapter two should move us to worship with glad and thankful hearts." And so, they added that there. He is the living and true God, as we saw in Isaiah there. He's not like a carved idol. He is the true God. All other gods are false. They added this phrase, whose subsistence is in and of himself. This is the word subsistence that we will see again in paragraph three in just a moment. It's a very important addition to the confession. We can define subsistence as the property by which an entity is capable of existing, per se, in itself or in its own right. It focuses on the aspect of the independence of the existence of what there is. So, what is being said about God here is that God exists in and of himself, not being dependent upon any other being. So, that's an important thing to hold in our minds as we move towards paragraph three this morning, particularly looking at the doctrine of the Trinity. He is infinite in being and perfection. That means that there are no bounds to his being, right? We're finite creatures, right? I exist in this space, Doug exists in that space, but God is not bound in that way. He's infinite in his being and in his perfection. We're very finite, none of us have even attained perfection, but God is infinitely perfect in every way. We have another addition, again this is not in the Westminster Confession at all, whose essence cannot be comprehended by any but himself. And we saw that in the passage we read at the beginning there in Isaiah 40, that God is incomprehensible to our human minds. He really is beyond us. So we're dealing with something very large as we deal with the doctrine of God. We can see that very similar here to the Westminster Confession, a most pure spirit invisible without body parts or passions." This phrase, without body parts or passions, is very, very important for us, particularly as we head towards paragraph three in the doctrine of the Trinity. Obviously, if God is a spirit, then he doesn't have a body, right? He's a pure spirit. He doesn't have a body. So, when we look at passages in the scripture, which we will this morning, In the sermon, where it talks about Christ ascending to heaven and sitting at the right hand of God the Father, God doesn't have a right hand. So when we talk about God in that way, we're using what theologians call an anthropomorphism. That is, to take descriptions that we would normally use for human beings, that we have a right hand, and apply those to God by way of metaphor in order to make a point. But God is a most pure spirit. He does not have a body. He is not made up of parts, and this becomes important in two ways. Here in paragraph one, as we look at the attributes of God, we recognize that God is not the sum total of all of his attributes. He's not one part mercy and one part justice. He is God in the simplicity, His divine simplicity, but He's also not parts in the sense of the Trinity. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit combined to make one God. Each of them is the fullness of God. So the Trinity is a divine mystery for us. He's also without passions. This means, this goes back to his infinite perfection. This is the doctrine of divine impassibility. That we have passions, we're moved by our emotions. And so we may feel love or kindness one moment, and then at a different moment we feel anger or hatred. God is not like that. He's not moved by passions the way that we are. He has perfections instead. So He is infinitely and always loving. He is infinitely and always merciful. He is also infinitely and always angry at sin. So His anger is a divine perfection. It's not a passion that moves Him the way our anger is a passion that moves us. And then we have the addition here of who only has immortality dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto. This is a direct quote from Timothy added to the confession just speaking to God's immortality and his divine glory in this light to which we cannot approach. Here is a quote from Jeremiah Burroughs who says, With God, whatsoever you can say of God is God. The wisdom of God is God. The mercy of God is God. The justice of God is God himself and so all the attributes. It doth appear diverse to us. Wisdom, mercy, justice, power, life, holiness, and faithfulness appear many things to us, but in God all is but one excellency." So what this is speaking to is that divine simplicity. God is without parts. Now, what this means is that as God exists in himself, All that is in God is God. As God works that out in relation to His creatures, we see a diversity of attributes. But in God, there is a divine simplicity. This is not to say that His mercy and His justice are exactly the same thing as they're worked out in relationship to His creatures. but as they are in God, God is not the sum of his parts. He is fully just, fully merciful at all times. So that's the doctrine of divine simplicity. He is immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, every way infinite. And the Baptist added this phrase, every way infinite. And so we can see he is infinite in regard to space, in regards to time, in regards to his knowledge and wisdom, and in regards to his power. He's infinite in every way, so he's incomprehensible to us. This is exactly the same as the Westminster, except that the Baptists moved the words wise and holy, reversing them and making holy the leading attribute here, because God's wisdom is holy. everything about God is holy, so they moved holy to be the leading attribute here. And this is the section of the confession that we talk about God's communicable attributes. He is most holy, most wise, most free. Men are capable of being wise or free or Absolute is a term that's applied to sovereigns and rulers in the system of kings and queens and that sort of thing. You talk about an absolute sovereign, but God is most absolute. So these are attributes of God that we can find to some degree in humanity but God is most of these things. He is most righteous, whereas men are only partly righteous. So, here again, this is the communicable attributes of God, and we see that here that he is most merciful, but he's also most just. So, those two things happen at the same time. Again, God is not moved by passions, but he is always merciful and always just at the same time. This is paragraph two. Again, we're just reviewing quickly what we did last month. Again, pay attention to the semicolons here, because when we look at paragraph two, we'll notice that the semicolons divide it into four sections, as I find the rest of them right here. So there are four sections to paragraph two, and if we notice, The first section deals with God's goodness. The second section deals with his sovereign dominion. The third section deals with his infinite knowledge. And then the fourth section deals with the obedience that his creatures owe unto him. So this paragraph in chapter two is really an expansion of a phrase that we saw in chapter one, paragraph one. In chapter 1, paragraph 1, it says, So this idea of the goodness, wisdom, and power of God is displayed for us here in paragraph 2 of chapter 2. His goodness, his power there in the second phrase, his wisdom there in the third phrase, and then the consequences of that, the obedience and service that is owed to him as a result of those things. So paragraph two is really an expansion of that little phrase in chapter one, paragraph one, which helps us to recognize as we move through the confession, the unity of the confession. chapters and paragraphs later in the confession are building on things that were given to us earlier in the confession. So we need to make sure that we remember the context as we're going through it. Okay, so here is paragraph three. This is where we're at as we begin to dive into this doctrine of the Trinity. Paragraph 3 reads like this, In this divine and infinite being there are three subsistences, the Father, the Word or Son, and Holy Spirit, of one substance, power, and eternity, each having the whole divine essence, yet the essence undivided. The Father is of none, neither begotten nor proceeding, The Son is eternally begotten of the Father, the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son, all infinite, without beginning, therefore but one God, who is not to be divided in nature and being, but distinguished by several peculiar relative properties and personal relations, which doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of all our communion with God and comfortable dependence upon Him. So, we have very minor changes made here between the 1689 and the Westminster, but a few of them are important. Here we're dealing with God's internal being, his relations with himself as we look at the three subsistences of the divine being. We can see the difference here between the Westminster and the 1689. The Westminster says, in the unity of the Godhead, there be three persons of one substance, God, power, and eternity. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. The 1689 changed this, and you can see the biggest difference is between the word persons and the word subsistences. And they used that in paragraph one, and I said it was important. And the reason that this is important is because the word persons had historically been used when speaking about the Trinity and about the three persons of God, right? The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And that was derived from the Latin and the Greek as theologians discussed it. At the time of the first London Baptist, at the time of the Westminster, that wasn't a problem. But what happened was, in the mid-17th century, a group arose in England known as the Sassinians, who began to teach Unitarianism. They began to teach that there was one divine person. And they argued that the language of the Westminster, that there were three persons in the Godhead, was teaching tritheism, that there were three gods. And so this was their argument, a person has a will, a person has a mind, and so if there are three persons in God, that means there are three wills, three minds, so therefore there are three gods being taught in the confession. So the Baptists, when they modified the Westminster and the Savoy Declaration in 1677 to put forth this confession, they wanted to put a put a kind of a stop to those accusations of the Sassanians and so they changed the language to use this word of subsistences. So there are three subsistences of the one divine essence. They're being careful here to reject Socinianism while answering its objections. There is one God, three subsistences of the one divine essence." And the word subsistence, again, means from self, right? It means the self-existence or the aseity of God, that he exists in and of himself. The Reformed understood it that way, and so Richard Muller in his post-Reformation Reform Dogmatics comments that the traditional dogmatic understanding of person as hypostasis or subsistentia was increasingly less understood. and the identification of individual human beings as persons left the doctrine easy prey to those who viewed it as tritheistic. So the substitution of the word subsistence for the word person was an attempt to sort of head off these accusations by the Sosinians there in the 17th century. So that's a very important theological concept to get right in our minds. Another thing that I want to point out is that as we move through this, now we deal with the Father, the Word, or Son, and Holy Spirit of one substance, power, and eternity. So, the Baptists are called, they added here, the Word as part of the definition of the Son, the second subsistence of the divine being. And the footnote here, footnote A, gives us a couple of scripture references, and one of those is 1 John 5-7. For there are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. This is a disputed text, right? If you look at modern translations such as the ESV or others that are taken from the modern eclectic Greek text. They will either not have this verse at all or they'll have it in a footnote or within brackets and tell you that it doesn't really belong there, it's not part of the oldest manuscripts we have. The Reformed of the 17th century were fully aware of textual variants, and it is clear from their writings that Nehemiah Cox, John Owen, and others clearly accepted this verse as authentic scripture. They did not see it as a variant that should be excluded. They included it as a footnote in the Confession, as a proof text for this doctrine of the Trinity. There would be no reason for us to question that verse as being authentically part of Scripture. They conclude that little section by this addition again to the confession, each having the whole divine essence, yet the essence undivided. So again, this is a way of saying there are three subsistences, and each of those subsistences has the whole divine essence. So the Father is fully God, possessing the whole divine essence. The Son is fully God, the Holy Spirit is fully God, and yet, essence is undivided. It's not that the three of them put together equal three parts that make up God. No, each of them is fully God and yet there is one undivided divine essence. So again, they're shoring up this doctrine of the Trinity to make it stronger than it had been. The Father is of none, neither begotten nor proceeding." So here we have the beginning of the teaching on each of the individual subsistences of God. But here James Renahan comments in his Baptist Symbolics Volume 2 and says, So he's commenting there on that first phrase that's in blue, each subsistence having the whole divine essence, yet the essence undivided. And so what he's saying is that everything that was said about God in paragraphs one and two of chapter two, all of his attributes, all of those things can be said and is true about each of the divine subsistences, the Father, the Son and the Spirit. So we should not look at the scripture and go, well, the Father clearly is full of wrath. and anger towards sin, and the Son is clearly full of mercy in the New Testament. No, the mercy, the wrath of God, all of those things can be said and is true about each subsistence of the divine essence. So then we begin to look at each member of the Trinity. The Father is of none, neither begotten nor proceeding. So here we have the self-existence of the Father. He is of none. He does not derive His existence from any other being. But then we also see his relation to the other members of the Trinity. He is not begotten, nor does he proceed from the others. He is the Father, and so it is in his nature to beget but not to be begotten. So this is the nature of his relationship with the other members of the Trinity. When we look at the Son, the Son is eternally begotten of the Father." And this is a very important phrase right here, that He is eternally begotten. He is not begotten in time. He doesn't become the Son at some point. He is eternally the Son, eternally begotten of the Father. Not in time, but in relation to the Father. So, the Father beginning the Son eternally means that there's not a point in time, as Arius had argued, that the Son was not and then the Son came into being. Rather, what it's saying, that would be a multiplication, right? We have offspring, we're multiplying. Be fruitful and multiply. God is not multiplying the divine essence. as the Son is eternally begotten of the Father. Rather, the divine essence is communicated continually, eternally, between the Father and the Son. Never a time when it wasn't, never a time when it won't be. The Son is eternally begotten by the Father. That divine essence being communicated between those two subsistences. And then we see that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. He is breathed out by them. Again, eternally. I wish that our confession had retained this word eternally there in regard to the Holy Spirit the way the Westminster had it. But the Holy Spirit is eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son. A few months from now in our church history, we will get into the division between the Western and the Eastern Church over this idea of the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son. That was what caused a major division between Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy. It was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak. There were other things causing division. The addition of this phrase, and the Son, to the creeds and confessions of the church was what divided the East from the West, finally, around 1100 AD. But our confession has included that, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son, eternally breathed out by them. Now what we're dealing with here is the relations between the three subsistences of the Trinity. And so what we have is the Father who is of none, the Son begotten of the Father, the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son, and these relations are relations of order, not relations of authority and submission. We are not conveying the idea here that the Son or the Spirit are somehow less than the Father. That is not what is being conveyed to us. Francis Shinel commented and said, this is the natural order. I've retained his 17th century spellings, by the way. Those aren't me not knowing how to spell. This is the natural order of these uncreated persons. For the son cannot be placed in order before the father because he is naturally begotten of the father. The Holy Ghost cannot be placed in order before the son because he doth naturally proceed from the son. This is the proper and natural order, but the natural order does not overthrow either the equality or co-eternity of the persons. So what we're dealing with is the order of their relations, but not authority, power, or submission. William Perkins comments and says, it may seem that he, that is the father, hath some prerogative over the Son and the Holy Ghost, because he is set before them. But we must know he is set before them neither in regard of time, they're all eternal, nor of dignity, for therein all three are equal, but in regard of order only. I love the spelling, I would have fit right in in the 17th century. So he's arguing, again, that what we're talking about when we talk about the Father being of none, the Son eternally begotten, the Holy Spirit eternally proceeding, is that these are order of relations, not commenting on authority or submission in the Godhead. James Renahan says, it is clear when contemplating the eternal relations of the persons of the Trinity that Orthodox, Puritan, and Reformed theologians made careful distinctions between what may be said of Christ as God and what may be said of Him as mediator. As God, He is glorious and majestic, of the same essence with the Father and the Spirit. At the same time, scripture texts, which seem to indicate some form of subordination of son to father, may only be understood of the son in his office of mediator. They do not and cannot support doctrines such as human role relationships. There is no subordination in the persons of the Trinity," add intra. So what he's talking about here is when we see passages like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane praying and saying, not my will be done, but yours. The son is submitting himself to the will of the father. What we're not saying is that the father and the son as God have separate wills and that the son submits his will to the father. That would indicate that the Sassanians are right. that there are more than one God with different wills that are then having to submit in relationship and authority to one another. Instead, what we're saying is that the divine essence has one mind, one will that is shared by all three subsistences or persons, but the Son, in his incarnation, took to himself a human nature, including a human mind and a human will. And so in his flesh, in his humanity as the mediator of the new covenant, Christ submitted his human will to the divine will. And so that's what's being conveyed to us in the scripture. And so he says we have to understand those sorts of passages as speaking about the Son in his office of mediator, not as he is in his divinity. Then he says this, they do not and cannot support doctrines such as human role relationships. What is he speaking about there? Well, he's speaking about a controversy that has sort of raged in Reformed Baptist circles for the last several years. What happened was that in the arguments over authority and submission in the church and the home, Some theologians began to teach that we have the Father and the Son, and the Son is submissive to the Father, and in a similar way the wife is submissive to her husband. They have taken what we see external to God in the manhood of Christ submitting to the divinity and imported it back into the Trinity as God is in himself, and said that the son is eternally submissive to the father, and then used that as an example to build a doctrine concerning the submission of wives to their husbands. I'll go ahead and name names. Wayne Grudem and John Piper published a book about complementarianism, about these role relationships in the family, and the name of the book was I can't remember now. But they published a book a few years ago dealing with that subject, and this was their argument. And they didn't come up with this in a vacuum. Bruce Ware, a theologian, seminary professor, was also teaching something very similar, arguing that the son was eternally submissive to the will of the father. And so this became known as eternal functional subordination. And they try and kind of, argue and massage it and go well yeah he's fully God but he has to submit himself to the father because the father is the father and he's the son and they want to use it to teach that wives should be submissive to their husbands we don't need to do that the Bible just tells us that this is how you're supposed to organize the family in the home or the church. We don't need to root that in the relationships of the divine subsistences in the Trinity. What we're dealing with is eternal relations of order, not authority and submission. We also have a few other well-known theologians who have dabbled in this sort of thing. Doug Wilson will say he doesn't believe in eternal functional subordination, but then he'll turn around and talk about the son being eternally submissive to the father. James White is another one who has said some very confusing and inconsistent things regarding the son's relationship to the father. as God in the Trinity. So, we need to be careful regarding this idea because we need to guard against tritheism, guard against even taking the first step towards that. We need to guard against modalism and against eternal subordination of the Son. We need to be clear that the son is co-equal, co-eternal with the father, that they share the divine essence. It is only in his humanity that the son is submissive to the father. Describing them as father, son, and spirit who is breathed out by the other two is merely eternal relations of order and not eternal subordination. That eternal relations of order is the phrase that has historically been used by Reformed theologians to describe this. We get to the end of paragraph three and we have this large section that is simply not in the Westminster Confession of Faith at all. The stuff that is in blue here was brought over from the First London Baptist Confession. The stuff in orange at the bottom was brought over from the Savoy Declaration. This first section, all, and I put in brackets three subsistences, that's what we're talking about, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, all are infinite, without beginning, therefore, but one God. So again, the Baptists are being very clear to guard against Socinianism. Who is not to be divided in nature and being, but distinguished by several peculiar relative properties and personal And so there we have that idea of the eternal order of relations, not authority. So, this is the idea that God is eternally relating to himself in this way, but he is one God, not to be divided. And then they brought in this phrase here at the end that was in the Savoy Declaration. Which doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of all our communion with God and comfortable dependence upon Him? This takes us all the way back to that very first line that they added to paragraph one, the Lord our God. That line that was added to paragraph one, I said, was intended to move us to recognize that the doctrine of this chapter should cause us to worship to be thankful because we are in relationship with this God. He is our God. How can we have confidence that He is our God, that we are in relation with Him? We can have confidence because of the doctrine of the Trinity. God is in relationship with Himself eternally. the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So that order of relations eternally within the Godhead is the foundation of our communion with God. We can have confidence that God is our God, that He is in relationship with us because He is a relational God by nature, eternally. We can have confidence and be dependent upon Him for our salvation because He works out our salvation, our redemption, by His relational properties. The Father sends the Son, the Son takes human flesh to Himself and acts out our redemption in time, and then the Holy Spirit applies that redemption to us. by faith. We worship Him in Trinity, right? We worship the Father in the name of the Son by the power of the Spirit. And so God's relations within Himself are the foundation for our relation to Him and for our worship to Him and our dependence upon Him. for our salvation. So that opening line of chapter 2, the Lord our God, and this closing phrase that the doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of all our communion with God and comfortable dependence upon him, adds an element of devotion to the doctrine of this chapter that I think really makes it much more warm and lively in our hearts and our minds than it would have been otherwise. So this is the doctrine of God, such as we have time to cover it. Again, as I said last month, we breezed through this in two 40-minute sessions, understanding that The statistics that I shared last month were that Stephen Charnock wrote over 2,400 pages on the doctrine of God and his systematic theology. So for us to cover it in two 40-minute sessions, we are very much just hitting the highlights. There is much more that could be said and studied concerning the doctrine of God, and I encourage you to do so if you have opportunity. Let's close this morning in a word of prayer.