“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.”
We’ve been talking God and what’s He’s like. That’s the focus of that sheet you are holding in your hand—knowing what God is like. He’s eternal, incomprehensible, and unchangeable. Now as you get to know God better, you understand yourself better. Knowing God and knowing yourself are intertwined. When you understand God’s holiness, you understand what it means to be a sinner and you understand why sin messes up your life so badly. Understanding what it means for Him to be perfectly just helps you understand your own struggles with wanting everything in life to be right. By understanding God, you come to understand you.
The opposite is true too. By understanding yourself, you open up the door to understanding God. Just ask a new father what’s learned about God as Father. Just ask a woman who just had to forgive a friend what it means for God to be forgiving. Understanding ourselves has helps us understand God. Knowing God and knowing yourself go hand in hand. If that sounds like pop psychology, please know that I’m getting all this from Calvin. He started his most famous book saying that knowing God and knowing yourself are, “connected together by many ties [and] it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.”
The last series—Proverbs—was about helping you understand your own life a bit better—how you deal with relationships, how you deal with work and wealth. This look at Article 1 is about helping you understand God better. Both are part of growing. Knowing yourself better is part of growing. Knowing God better is part of growing. That’s the claim of this sermon: knowing God better is part of growing.
We will study this in four points. First: God is completely wise. Second: God is completely just. Third: God is completely good. Fourth: God is the overflowing source of all good.
First: God is completely wise. We are down to our last four descriptions of God 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, invisible, unchangeable, infinite, almighty; completely wise…”
As we saw in Proverbs that wisdom is knowing how to do something well. Bull riding champion J.B. Mauney doesn’t just ride that bull. He rides it wisely. To do something wisely is to do it well. God does everything well. He does everything as best as it can be done. There is no room for improvement in any of God’s practices. Thinking about that, Paul wrote, ‘Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable His judgments, and His paths beyond tracing out! “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been His counselor?”’
Those are rhetorical questions because the answer is, “no one.” No one has ever taught God a thing about doing anything better. That doesn’t mean that we don’t try to give Him advice on running our lives. It just means that He doesn’t need it. God taught that lesson to Job. Job thought that God was doing a questionable job running the universe. Maybe you’ve found yourself asking the same sorts of questions you see Job ask. I ask such questions when I go through far less pain than Job suffered.
Job was disappointed with God’s plan for his life. God’s response was to ask Job questions. These questions were designed to remind Job that God knows more than Job does—much, much more than Job does. He asked Job, “Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you will answer me. Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!” Job thought he knew more than God about running the universe. God asked, “just how many universes have you made, Job? Zero. That’s what I thought. Keep that in mind when you want to give me advice on running this one.” God asked Job question after question about the weather, the ocean, the stars and planets, to make clear that Job wasn’t wise enough to question God’s wisdom. Job sheepishly shut his mouth, but God wasn’t done. He asked him the question behind all the other questions. “Would you discredit my justice? Would you condemn me to justify yourself?” That’s usually what it comes down to when we question God’s wisdom. We tell God that His plan is wrong because it interferes with our plan. We condemn what He’s doing because it stands in the way of what we want. We tell Him that we know better than Him.
One of the reasons the Bible includes story after story is to show that we don’t know better than God. We have the story of Joseph to show us that even when people do evil deeds, God can use it for good. Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery. Potiphar’s wife lied about Joseph and had him thrown in prison. That’s evil. If I were Joseph, I would have innumerable, angry questions about God’s wisdom in arranging my life. “So I’m here in prison while Potiphar’s wife is partying. What a joke. My life is a sick joke. I’m a slave. My brothers are laughing it up. Come on God. What gives?” What gives is that God had Joseph exactly where he wanted him to save his family from death. Joseph winds up being second in command in Egypt and when he finally gets the chance to stick it to his brothers, instead he says, “Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. So then, don’t be afraid. I will provide for you and your children.” Joseph came to learn what Job came to learn and what you and I need to keep learning—we are not in the place of God. He is completely wise in what He does.
Hudson Taylor recognized that. Thinking about the incredible hardships he was suffering, he told his sister, “I am no longer anxious about anything, as I realize this; for He, I know, is able to carry out His will, and His will is mine. It makes no matter where He places me, or how. That is rather for Him to consider than for me; for in the easiest positions He must give me His grace, and in the most difficult His grace is sufficient.” There is only one way I’m going to get there. There is only one way you are going to get there and that’s by taking these next two words of the Belgic Confession with complete seriousness and believing that God is completely wise.
Secondly, we learn that God is completely just. That’s our second point: God is completely just. If you look at Article 1, you will see that I’m taking the word “completely” to apply not to only “wise” but to “just” and “good” as well. God isn’t merely just. He is completely just—meaning there is nothing but justice in His ways.
Now we love justice. I’m going to need some congregation participation here. Someone please tell me your favorite sandwich shop. There’s Subway, Jimmy John’s, Jersey Mike’s, Potbelly Sandwich Shop. Who’s got a favorite? Okay, so you are waiting in line to order at that sandwich shop and it’s a long line. You wait ten minutes as the line slowly moves forward and as you near the counter three people cut in front of you. The cashier says, “it’s okay there my friends.” Is that okay? No, of course not. It’s unjust.
Now we intuitively hate injustice because we are made in the image of God. We like fair play because God likes fair play. You see it in little kids. Once they consider a game unfair, they will stop playing. We know fair play is right. We know justice is right.
Now for there to be justice, there must be a judge. Years ago, a philosopher wrote a book with the provocative title Whose Justice? Which Rationality? The idea is that we all like justice but whose justice? It matters whether we are talking about an employer’s sense of justice or an employee’s sense of justice. The Bible emphatically answers the question, “Whose Justice?” by saying, “God’s justice.” That’s one of the most constant refrains of the Bible—there is a judge and it’s not you. It’s God.
When Abraham is talking to God about the destruction of Sodom, he never once questions God’s right to judge. He simply asks, “will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” When Hannah prayed to God during the chaotic days of the Judges when life was about as unjust as it is in a failed state, she put her hope in God’s justice, “The Most High will thunder from heaven; the Lord will judge the ends of the earth.” Such calls for justice because more urgent when you suffer rank injustice and fear worse for your children.
God is a judge. He is constantly judging. Psalm 9:7, “The Lord reigns forever; He has established His throne for judgment. He rules the world in righteousness and judges the peoples with equity.” During high school, my friends and I wanted to write an episode of a particular television show. We got together during lunch a few days to sketch out ideas. We decided not to invite another of our friends. We judged him to be insufficiently funny. Now as we were judging, God was judging too. He was judging our treatment of our friend. That’s what it means to say that God is constantly judging. He’s not running around scolding everyone. Rather, He is bringing everything that happens into judgment. Now that was unwelcome news for me but welcome news for my friend who was excluded. Your delight in justice depends on where you are sitting.
Now that’s good news when you think about it because it means that everything matters. God took seriously the way I treated my friend in high school because friendship matters. God takes seriously how I speak to my wife and of my wife because that relationship matters. If you want God to lay off judging everything what you are asking for is a life in which nothing matters. You can either have a meaningful life with a Judge or a meaningless life with no Judge.
The Bible was written, in part, to help you see what life is like with God as judge. It also portrays God as just. God is a perfectly just. He treats everyone fairly. He hates injustice not just because it’s wrong but because He’s always just. As He told the Israelites, “Do not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there. That is why I command you to do this.” God’s commands to us are God’s way of pushing us toward treating each other fairly. Stealing isn’t fair. Stealing your friend’s wife isn’t fair. Harming others isn’t fair. The commands exist to help us selfish creatures learn to treat others the way God treats others—with justice.
So, God is completely just. He is also completely good. That’s our third point: God is completely good. The next description of God in Article 1 is that God is completely good. We teach our children that God is good quite early on, “God is great, God is good – let us thank Him for our food.” Good isn’t simply a step up from great. God is great means that He is almighty. God is good means that He is virtuous. He uses His great power toward good ends.
There’s a famous scene in The Chronicles of Narnia about this. The children and the beavers are talking about meeting Aslan the lion. One of the girls asks the beavers, “is [Aslan] – quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.” “That you will, dearie, and make no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver, “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.” “Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy. “Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about being safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
It always comes down to goodness. You don’t become good by declawing yourself and making yourself weak. Goodness lies knowing how to use the strength you have. God has all strength and He knows how to use it. “The Lord is good to all, and His tender mercies are over all His works.” That’s Psalm 145:9. “O taste and see that the Lord is good; how blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!” Psalm 34:8; or, to turn it around, Psalm 92:15, “The Lord is upright; He is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in Him.”
God’s goodness is the only hope humanity has. If God weren’t good all His other attributes would be deadly. Can you imagine the horror of living under a completely wise torturer or the hell of living under an almighty sadist? There only thing that keeps life from going south in a hurry is the goodness of God. Psalm 100:5, “For the Lord is good; His loving kindness is everlasting And His faithfulness to all generations.” The goodness of God is all you’ve got.
Now compared with God, none of us is good. Our aims in interactions are never as virtuous as God’s aims. Our motivations are nowhere near as pure as His. That’s why in Psalm 119, the Psalmist said, “You are good, and do good; teach me Your statutes.” That’s what I imagine you want deep down. You want to know how to use what you’ve got to serve some worthy cause. You want to be good and do good.
There’s only been one person like God in that way, and that’s Jesus. A man once called Jesus “good teacher,” and Jesus playfully responded, “Why do you call me good? No one is good—except God alone.” Jesus is the only human who could be trusted to do what was right in every situation. We need to take that burden off each other’s backs. We should stop expecting others to be consistently good. We should stop expecting it from ourselves. We need to learn to pitch our expectations for ourselves and others much lower because we aren’t good like God.
God is not only good, He is the source of all good. These two points on God’s goodness are both shorter because they go together. God is good and He is the source of all good. That’s our final point: God is the overflowing source of all good.
God overflows goodness. That’s what led to creation. God didn’t create us because He was lonely or bored. He didn’t create us because there was any real need for us to exist. He created us because He is good and goodness overflows. Evil is selfish. It turns in on itself. Goodness is generous. It goes out.
It’s no surprise that we see this word “good” so regularly at creation. The constant refrain was, “it was good.” The beauty, majesty, and harmony of all creation was and is a reflection of the goodness of God. People were the best reflection of the goodness of God and were therefore their introduction was termed “very good.”
God is so good that what He makes is good. He is also so good that what He controls is good. That’s Romans 8:28, “all things must work together for the good of those who love God.” God has your best interest at heart. He is good and is guiding you toward goodness. That’s Psalm 84:11, “For the Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord bestows favor and honor. No good thing does He withhold from those who walk uprightly.” That’s Jesus, “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!”
Now if you want to take those words seriously, you are going to need to wrestle with yourself because there is a part of each of us that doubts God’s complete goodness. We’ve seen too much of this fallen world to be naïve. You need to ask yourself what’s happened in your life that causes you to doubt the complete goodness of God? Wrestle with that and you will understand yourself better. Know yourself better and you’ll be able to see the goodness of God better.
The difficulty when it comes to this list of descriptions of God in Article 1 isn’t memorizing it. The difficulty is living as if it were true. What would it be like for you to live this next week as if the one ruling your life was completely wise? What would it be like to trust that the one who has everything that matters most to you in His hands is good? That’s what it means to know God by knowing about Him. Amen.