“We all believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths that there is a single and simple spiritual being, whom we call God—eternal, incomprehensible, invisible, unchangeable, infinite, almighty; completely wise, just, and good, and the overflowing source of all good.”
My best friend from high school is named Rob. Throughout high school Rob drove a gold 1977 Impala that was about as big as the narthex. He had white twin racing stipes painted down the middle of the hood, roof, and trunk. His family had dogs and cats. The dogs were given very regal English names, and the cats had Korean names. He has a sister who was adopted from Korea. Rob’s dad was the vice-president of human resources for the chain of grocery stores where Rob and I worked.
All of that tells you a little bit about Rob. You know him better now than you did when I told you he was my best friend from high school. You know something about his personality from his decision to put racing stripes on a boat of a car. You know him better because I told you a bit about him.
As you learn more about anyone, you know them better. That’s true with you and Rob. That’s true with you and the person sitting nearest you in the pew. To know anyone better, you need to learn about them. The same goes with God. As we learn more about God, we know Him better. That’s the claim of this sermon: as we learn more about God, we know Him better.
We will study this in four points. These points come from the order given after the dash in Article 1 on your sheet. First: God is eternal. Second: God is incomprehensible. We will skip “invisible” because we thought about God being invisible when we talked about what it means for Him to be spirit. That makes unchangeable the third point and fourth is that God is infinite and almighty.
First: God is eternal. God didn’t have a gold Impala in high school. He was never even in high school. He was never even born. He has always been. He is before the beginning. That is how the Bible opens, “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
Before there was time, there was God. That’s quite something. This God, whom you hopefully know as a friend, has always been and always will be. As Article 1 puts it, “We all believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths that there is a single and simple spiritual being, whom we call God; He is eternal.”
We can’t get our minds around what it means to be eternal because everything we know has a beginning and an end. This beautiful sanctuary had a beginning. This church made decisions that led to the construction of this room. Imagine the alternative to this sanctuary having a beginning—a visitor comes, admires the sanctuary, and asks how old it is. We tell them, “It’s always been here.” The visitor says, “No, I mean what year was it built,” and we say, “There never was a time when this sanctuary wasn’t here. It was here before the mountains or the rivers.” That would creep that visitor out.
The idea of eternity is, to be honest, a little unsettling. That’s true when we think about what was before the beginning. That’s true when we think about eternity going into the future. Some people find not just hell but heaven a bit scary because it has no ending, and everything they’ve experienced has an ending.
The Bible tells us that eternity is nothing to be afraid of because it is God who is eternal. Moses encouraged the tribe of Asher by reminding them that God is eternal. They were going to battle the Canaanites who had had the homefield advantage in battle because they had been there for generations. That would scare any of us. Moses told them, “The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” God was around before the Canaanites. He was around before the swords and spears and now missiles and drones. Christians living in war-torn Syria need to hear what the tribe of Asher need to hear, “The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” Christians living in the Inwood area need to hear that too.
We need to hear that God is eternal because we live in anxious times. The book of Revelation was written to Christians living in anxious times. The first word we hear from God in that book is, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.” The message here is that God was around the story began and He will guide the story to the ending He desires.
The fact that God is eternal is great news for us time-bound creatures. Many of our anxieties stem from the fact that we are bound by time. We can’t go back and fix the past. We can’t know the future let alone control the future. What we do know about time is that our time is limited. Our lives are an hourglass, and the sand is continually sliding from the top to the bottom. “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures,” as Moses put it. God’s eternal nature gives us hope as the sands of time fall to the bottom. That’s why Moses, in that same Psalm about the shortness of our lives, said, “from everlasting to everlasting You are God.” Eternity isn’t something Christians needs to fear. We know the eternal God.
Now we only understand this in part. That’s to be expected because God is incomprehensible. That’s our second point: God is incomprehensible. Incomprehensible is the next description of God in Article 1, “We all believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths that there is a single and simple spiritual being, whom we call God—eternal, incomprehensible.”
By saying that God is incomprehensible, we are not saying that God is completely unknowable. There are plenty of people who will tell you that God is so unknowable that no one religion can do Him justice. They say that God is so big that Christians only see a part of the truth and that Muslims see a part of the truth, that Hindus see part of the truth, and that the New Age movement sees a part of the truth. These people say that humility means realizing that none of us has a corner on the truth.
The famous illustration of this is of a group of blind men encountering an elephant for the first time and trying to describe it. The first blind man feels the elephant’s side and says that an elephant looks like a wall. The second feels the elephant’s trunk and says that an elephant looks like a snake. The third feels the elephant’s leg and says that an elephant looks like a tree trunk. The fourth feels the elephant’s tusk and says that an elephant looks like a spear. Universalists would say that, that’s what trying to know God is like.
That story only works, however, because there is someone else’s viewpoint at work. There is your viewpoint at work. You’ve seen an elephant and so you know what it looks like. There is another viewpoint at work when it comes to knowing God and that is the viewpoint given by Scripture. God has revealed what He is actually like. Now that doesn’t mean that He has revealed everything. It just means that what He has revealed is known. That’s Deuteronomy 29:29, “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.”
The message here is that we can trust what God has revealed to us, but He hasn’t revealed everything. No one here thinks that I told you everything there is to know about my friend Rob—I don’t know everything there is to know about my friend Rob—but you can trust that he had cats with Korean names. You can trust what you know about Rob but don’t imagine that you know everything. You can trust what you know about God but don’t imagine that you know everything. It’s possible that the Bible only tells us .02% of what there is to know about God. Now that .02% it tells us—that He is holy, that He is merciful, that He is loving—this is 100% true. It’s just not all there is to know. There might be 5,000 times more to learn about Him. “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror,” as Paul put it, “then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” That’s what you’ve got to look forward to in eternity.
One thing we know for certain is that God is unchangeable. That’s our next description of God and our third point: God is unchangeable. “We all believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths that there is a single and simple spiritual being, whom we call God—eternal, incomprehensible, invisible, unchangeable.”
As with all these descriptions of God, it’s hard for us to get our minds around this one because we are very changeable. We change all the time. In some ways, I’m not the same person who spoke to you last week. I’ve got another week of experiences under my belt. You’re not the same person that you were last week either. You’ve grown too. We are always changing. We can always change. That’s a reason for hope.
God is different. God doesn’t change. Now it is good that God doesn’t change because any change in God would be a step down. God is the greatest good. He cannot be improved in anyway. That’s why the greatest commandment, “love the Lord their God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind,” is a way of saying put everything you are and can do into pursuing what’s best.
God has never gotten any better. He’s always been perfect. That’s part of what He meant when He revealed Himself to Moses through the burning bush as, “I am who I am,” or, “I will be who I will be.” That bush was in the middle of fire, but it never changed. It never burned up. God never changes. He’s as good as He’s always been.
This unchangeable nature of God is what makes faith possible. Think about it this way—none of us could depend on the floor of this sanctuary for walking if pieces of it were always disappearing and reappearing. No one could depend upon God if He was constantly changing. You can trust that God is as willing to be gracious to you today as He was on the day when Jesus died on the cross. You can trust that God is as devoted to His people today as He was when He divided the Red Sea. God is, as James put it, “the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” We change. God doesn’t.
Jesus shows us the unchangeableness of God. The gospels weren’t written to just tell you what a man named Jesus was like two thousand years ago. They were written with these words in mind, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” When you read about Jesus asleep in the boat during the storm, you learn something about how to trust when it seems God is asleep during the storms of your life. When you read about Jesus crying with Mary over the death of her brother Lazarus, you learn something about how he responds to your grief. When you read about Jesus meeting a woman where she is at and then saying, “go and sin no more,” you learn something about how Jesus responds to your sin. You are dealing with the same Jesus. You are dealing with the same God. Your life is going to change. It will change in some welcome ways. It will change in some unwelcome ways. God doesn’t change. That’s good.
It’s also good that nothing is beyond God’s power and wisdom. That’s our last point: God is infinite and almighty. Those are the last two descriptions of God we will study from Article 1, “We all believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths that there is a single and simple spiritual being, whom we call God—eternal, incomprehensible, unchangeable, invisible, infinite, almighty.” The idea here is that nothing is beyond God. He is omniscient, or all-knowing. He is omnipresent, or everywhere at once. He is omnipotent, or all-powerful.
Nothing is beyond God. As we mature, we learn that a great deal of life is simply beyond us. We can’t control all that much. We can’t control what will happen. We can’t control what others will think or do. So much of what affects us is totally beyond us. That’s a hard but healthy realization. As the Shakers sang, “it’s a gift to be simple, it’s a gift to be free, it’s gift to come down to where we ought to be.”
Now we are responsible to control what we can—most notably ourselves—but we can’t control much beyond that. With the number of people here, it’s probably that someone has forgotten that. It’s possible that someone here is living as if the universe rested on her shoulders. If that’s you, no wonder you are weighed down. Put the universe back on God’s shoulders, or rather realize that that’s where it’s always been. He, “has established His throne in the heavens and His sovereignty rules over all,” as Psalm 103 puts it. I can either have a big Adam and a small God or a small Adam and a big God. One leads to trouble. The other leads to trust. The story of the Bible is that God is big and that we are small. Martin Luther put it this way, “The God whom we worship is not a weak and incompetent God. He is able to beat back gigantic waves of opposition and to bring low prodigious mountains of evil. The ringing testimony of the Christian faith is that God is able.” I hope that is more the ringing testimony of your heart after this look at God’s power than before.
God reveals His power to that purpose. He reveals His power to help you trust Him. Imagine a boy has climbed a tree about twelve feet up and is too scared to get down. His father stands at the bottom of the tree. Now perhaps this isn’t the best way to handle the situation, but fathers don’t always know best. The father decides that he’ll catch the kid. He tells the kid to jump, and he’ll catch him. The kid won’t do it. The father goes to the garage and comes back with a fifty-pound dumbbell. He throws the dumbbell up in the air and catches it. He throws it higher and catches it. He throws it all the way up to where the kid is in the tree and catches it. Then he says, “jump. I’ll catch you.” What’s that father doing? He is showing his power so the kid will trust his catching ability. “Dad caught that weight with no problem. He can catch me.” That’s what God is up to when He reveals His power. He is inviting us to trust.
The Father resurrected Jesus as invitation for us to trust Him. Death is as scary as it gets. If we saw a power greater than death, we creatures who will die might trust it. Paul was telling the Ephesians about God’s power hoping that they would trust it. He said, “That power is the same as the mighty strength He exerted when He raised Christ from the dead.” The message is that God is more powerful than death. He’s able to handle what you are going through.
Now that’s just a bit about God just like hearing that my friend Rob had a 1977 Impala is a bit about Rob. There is more to Rob. There is more to God. You know Rob a bit better after hearing about Him. Far more importantly, you know God a bit better after hearing about Him. That will do a lot more for you than riding in a 1977 Impala with racing stripes will, as fun as that was. Rob loves me, but his love isn’t coupled with almighty power. God’s love is. Rob wants to steer me in the right direction when we talk on the phone, but he’s as stuck in time as I am. God isn’t. That makes God’s advice way better. That’s why knowing about God is better. That’s why knowing God is better than knowing your best friend. Amen.