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TranscriptIntroduction
Welcome, I’m so glad you have joined me to celebrate God. I firmly believe that the attribute of God we’re going to study this Season is going to cause you to be ever in awe of the Lord. This trait is one that is all-too familiar and yet distressingly unappreciated because we haven’t taken the time to truly understand and appreciate the depth of this concept.
And what is this concept about which I speak? Today we’re going to barely dip our toes into what it means that God is alive. But before we do that, please familiarize yourself with the family of ministries that make up Evermind Ministries. Truth.Love.Family. focuses on marriage, family, and parenting. The Year Long Celebration of God is consumed with worship and discipleship. Faithtree Biblical Counseling & Discipleship helps people in crisis and those who are serious about being conformed to the image of their Savior. And AMBrewster Ministries is our traveling and speaking and preaching arm. And each of these ministries is part of the Truth.Love.Parent. 501(c)(3) non-profit that relies completely on the generous donations of our listeners to continue ministering to God’s people all over the world. Will you please prayerfully consider becoming a donor? If you’re interested in more information, simply visit TruthLoveParent.com/Donate to learn more. And you can also navigate to CelebrationOfGod.com to access todays free episode notes, transcript, and life resources from our blog. And now let’s talk about the Living God! Topic
The various truths, applications, and ramifications that spin eternally from the mere suggestion that we serve the Living God are infinite. God’s people will literally spend eternity learning more and more about their living God, and they will never run out of beauties to consider.
So, today, all I can do is barely look at a small surface of the blessed reality that is our Living God, and then next time we’ll focus in on the beauties of life in salvation, then we’ll talk about the implications the life of God has on us, His followers, and then we’ll talk about the many ways we have to celebrate Life in God this Season and all throughout the year. Now, again, we could talk about how our Living God is eternal and omnipotent and omnipresent and omniscient and self-existent, and we are going to touch on a few of these ideas. But I decided that one way I could limit myself in today’s discussion was to only look at one title for God that is seen throughout the Scriptures. So, let’s look at the times that God’s people specifically referred to God as the “Living God” and understand the unique contexts in which that title was necessary. In our English Bibles this title is used fewer than 30 times. We’re going to consider most of them, and as we do, we’re going to see that this title is used primarily within two contexts—it’s used to communicate only two main ideas about God. 1. The existence of a Living God is a powerful, fearful thing. Hebrews 10:31 reads, “It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” It doesn’t take much imagination to consider that if God exists, and if He is Who He says He is, then that is a very scary reality. An all-holy, all-just, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing, all-righteous, all-demanding being is something that weak, finite, selfish, myopic, hypocritical, sinful men need fear. This is why in Deuteronomy 5:26 we hear Moses reminding the Children of Israel how they were afraid for God to speak directly to them. They said, “For who is there of all flesh who has heard the voice of the living God speaking from the midst of the fire, as we have, and lived?” And in Joshua 3:10, “Joshua said, 'By this you shall know that the living God is among you, and that He will assuredly dispossess from before you the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Hivite, the Perizzite, the Girgashite, the Amorite, and the Jebusite.” Those who dare to stand against God and His people, no matter how many there are or what they have accomplished, they will not stand. I love that some of the first words we hear from the shepherd boy David had to do with the Living God. And it was the Living God Who gave him confidence that he could face a giant warrior all the professional soldiers were afraid to face. In I Samuel 17:26 we read, “Then David spoke to the men who were standing by him, saying, ‘What will be done for the man who kills this Philistine and takes away the reproach from Israel? For who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should taunt the armies of the living God?”” And ten verses later we read “36 Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear; and this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, since he has taunted the armies of the living God.” And then there are two wonderful passages in II Kings that have an identical parallel chronicle in the book of Isaiah. I’ll read the II Kings accounts, but the Isaiah passages are the same. In II Kings 19:4 and Isaiah 37:4 King Hezekiah sends envoys to seek Isaiah’s guidance. They said, “Perhaps the Lord your God will hear all the words of Rabshakeh, whom his master the king of Assyria has sent to reproach the living God, and will rebuke the words which the Lord your God has heard. Therefore, offer a prayer for the remnant that is left.” And then in II Kings 19:15-16 and Isaiah 37:17 we hear Hezekiah praying, “O Lord, the God of Israel, who are enthroned above the cherubim, You are the God, You alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth. 16 Incline Your ear, O Lord, and hear; open Your eyes, O Lord, and see; and listen to the words of Sennacherib, which he has sent to reproach the living God.” The beginning of Hezekiah’s prayer should sound very familiar to you because Isaiah 6:1-5 is a very well-known portion of Scripture where God gives Isaiah a vision of His throne room, and Isaiah writes, “I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe filling the temple. 2 Seraphim stood above Him, each having six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. 3 And one called out to another and said, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of hosts, The whole earth is full of His glory.’ 4 And the foundations of the thresholds trembled at the voice of him who called out, while the temple was filling with smoke. 5 Then I said, Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.’” Hezekiah had likely heard or read Isaiah’s vision, and since Hezekiah was one of only a couple kings who actually submitted to God, it’s not surprising that he recognized the power and majesty of his Living God and the fact that those who reproach Him are going to reap the whirlwind. Jeremiah 10:10 says, “But the Lord is the true God; He is the living God and the everlasting King. At His wrath the earth quakes, And the nations cannot endure His indignation.” And later in Jeremiah 23:36 we see, “For you will no longer remember the oracle of the Lord, because every man’s own word will become the oracle, and you have perverted the words of the living God, the Lord of hosts, our God.” And because of this, in verses 39-40 we read, “Therefore behold, I will surely forget you and cast you away from My presence, along with the city which I gave you and your fathers. 40 I will put an everlasting reproach on you and an everlasting humiliation which will not be forgotten.” And this is why the author of Hebrews, the same who warned “It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” said in chapter 3, verse 12, “Take care, brethren, that there not be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God.” Because God is exactly Who He says He is, all those who dare to defy Him should be petrified. Of course, they’re not. They never are because they don’t actually believe that God is Who He says He is. And that’s the petrifying thing about being in that situation. They are not afraid of the only One of Whom they should be afraid, and despite their delusion and ignorance, they will still receive the consequence of rebelling against Him. But those who take God at His Word and truly believe what He reveals Himself to be have only one appropriate response. Such a God is a God to Whom you submit, but not because you are afraid of retribution, but because He is worthy of your life. That’s why . . . 2. The existence of a Living God is a powerful, joyful thing. In Psalm 42:2 the sons of Korah proclaim, “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God; When shall I come and appear before God?” And in Psalm 84:2 these same men who were not afraid of God, but feared Him with a holy fear wrote, “My soul longed and even yearned for the courts of the Lord; My heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God.” In Daniel 6:20, after throwing Daniel in the lion’s den and not being able to sleep all night, the king rushed to the den, opened the pit, and “said to Daniel, ‘Daniel, servant of the living God, has your God, whom you constantly serve, been able to deliver you from the lions?’” The king doubted. He was obviously concerned, but the king also knew Daniel. The king had heard about Daniel’s God, and the King knew that if Daniel’s God was Who Daniel said He was, there was hope that Daniel survived. And this is why in Daniel 6:26 the king proclaimed, “I make a decree that in all the dominion of my kingdom men are to fear and tremble before the God of Daniel; For He is the living God and enduring forever, And His kingdom is one which will not be destroyed, And His dominion will be forever. 27 He delivers and rescues and performs signs and wonders In heaven and on earth, Who has also delivered Daniel from the power of the lions.” In an inverse way and to the same degree that God-haters should be petrified on Him, God-followers should rejoice in the reality that they serve a Living God because He is also all-loving, all-forgiving, all-merciful, all-gracious, all-light, all-good, and an infinite number of joyous attributes. Hosea 1:10 tells us, “Yet the number of the sons of Israel Will be like the sand of the sea, Which cannot be measured or numbered; And in the place Where it is said to them, ‘You are not My people,’ It will be said to them, 'You are the sons of the living God.’” And in a passage about the sovereignty and grace of God and speaking of the Gentiles, in Romans 9:26 Paul quotes that same passage. When asked by Jesus Who He was in Matthew 16:16 Peter could not help but answer, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” In Acts 14:15 we see the tension of both sides of this truth. The men of Lystra were worshipping Paul and Barnabas, so they tore their clothes and proclaimed “Men, why are you doing these things? We are also men of the same nature as you, and preach the gospel to you that you should turn from these vain things to a living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them.” Only a living God could create all that is seen and unseen. And such a God is worthy of us turning from idolatry and giving that worship to Him. In II Corinthians 3:2-3 we read, “You are our letter, written in our hearts, known and read by all men; 3 being manifested that you are a letter of Christ, cared for by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.” The Living God Who carved the 10 Commandments into stone and had to punish the Children of Israel who defied Him, that same God has graciously written His grace on our hearts. And this is why in I Corinthians 6:16-18 we read, “Or what agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; just as God said, ‘I will dwell in them and walk among them; And I will be their God, and they shall be MY people. 17 Therefore, come out from their midst and be separate,’ says the Lord. ‘And do not touch what is unclean; And I will welcome you. 18 And I will be a father to you, And you shall be sons and daughters to Me,’ Says the Lord Almighty.” We have been made into the very temple of this Living God! What a privilege and a responsibility. But we’ll talk more of the responsibility in a couple episodes. But Paul touches on this responsibility in I Timothy 3:15 when he wrote, “but in case I am delayed, I write so that you will know how one ought to conduct himself in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and support of the truth.” We should act in certain ways because the Living God gloriously deserves it! And in I Timothy 4:10 he wrote, “For it is for this we labor and strive, because we have fixed our hope on the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of believers.” And how did this salvation come to be? In Hebrews 9:13-14 we read, “For if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have been defiled sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh, 14 how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” And Hebrews 12:22-24 proclaims, “But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, 23 to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the Judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, 24 and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood, which speaks better than the blood of Abel.” And though that would be a glorious place to leave our study today, the last occurrence of the title “Living God” appears in Revelation 7:2-3. “And I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun, having the seal of the living God; and he cried out with a loud voice to the four angels to whom it was granted to harm the earth and the sea, 3 saying, ‘Do not harm the earth or the sea or the trees until we have sealed the bond-servants of our God on their foreheads.’’” Here again we see the tension between our two points today. The same Living God Who gave authority to the angels to judge the planet, also loves His people so much that He is going to protect them from the devastation. Wow! One of the powerful realities that God lives is that those who do not follow Him have an infinite number of reasons to be absolutely petrified. He is holy, He demands worship, He is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-present, and there are none who can escape Him. But to those who submit to His rule and authority, we do not fear as those who defy God. We rejoice as those who fear Him with awe and reverence and love. He is beautiful and gracious and merciful and loving and life-giving. Now, I want to finish out today the same way I did at the beginning of our Mercy and Grace series. I want to read a chapter from AWTozer’s amazing little work entitled “The Knowledge of the Holy.” Chapter 1 of his book is “Why We Must Think Rightly About God.” Chapter 2 deals with God’s incomprehensibility. Chapter 3 explains what Tozer means when he talks about an attribute of God. He says that it is simply something that is true of God. And then with what truth does Tozer start his list of attributes? What trait is the foundational reality from which alter others flow? Chapter 5 is called “The Self-Existent God.” Enjoy with me Tozer’s profound observations about this self-existent God. The reading will take about 12 minutes or so, but it is incredibly worth it. It not only reveals what we’ve learned, but it sets up our following episodes so well. Enjoy. “‘God has no origin,’ said Novatian and it is precisely this concept of no-origin which distinguishes That-which-is-God from whatever is not God. “Origin is a word that can apply only to things created. When we think of anything that has origin we are not thinking of God. God is self-existent, while all created things necessarily originated somewhere at some time. Aside from God, nothing is self-caused. “By our effort to discover the origin of things we confess our belief that everything was made by Someone who was made of none. By familiar experience we are taught that everything ‘came from’ something else. Whatever exists must have had a cause that antedates it and was at least equal to it, since the lesser cannot produce the greater. Any person or thing may be at once both caused and the cause of someone or something else; and so, back to the One who is the cause of all but is Himself caused by none. “The child by his question, ‘Where did God come from?’ is unwittingly acknowledging his creaturehood. Already the concept of cause and source and origin is firmly fixed in his mind. He knows that everything around him came from something other than itself, and he simply extends that concept upward to God. The little philosopher is thinking in true creature-idiom and, allowing for his lack of basic information, he is reasoning correctly. He must be told that God has no origin, and he will find this hard to grasp since it introduces a category with which he is wholly unfamiliar and contradicts the bent toward origin-seeking so deeply ingrained in all intelligent beings, a bent that impels them to probe ever back and back toward undiscovered beginnings. “To think steadily of that to which the idea of origin cannot apply is not easy, if indeed it is possible at all. Just as under certain conditions a tiny point of light can be seen, not by looking directly at it but by focusing the eyes slightly to one side, so it is with the idea of the Uncreated. When we try to focus our thought upon One who is pure uncreated being we may, see nothing at all, for He dwelleth in light that no man can approach unto. Only by faith and love are we able to glimpse Him as he passes by our shelter in the cleft of the rock. ‘And although this knowledge is very cloudy, vague and general,’ says Michael de Molinos, being supernatural, it produces a far more clear and perfect cognition of God than any sensible or particular apprehension that can be formed in this life; since all corporeal and sensible images are immeasurably remote from God. “The human mind, being created, has an understandable uneasiness about the Uncreated. We do not find it comfortable to allow for the presence of One who is wholly outside of the circle of our familiar knowledge. We tend to be disquieted by the thought of One who does not account to us for His being, who is responsible to no one, who is self-existent, self-dependent and self-sufficient. “Philosophy and science have not always been friendly toward the idea of God, the reason being that they are dedicated to the task of accounting for things and are impatient with anything that refuses to give an account of itself. The philosopher and the scientist will admit that there is much that they do not know; but that is quite another thing from admitting that there is something which they can never know, which indeed they have no technique for discovering. “To admit that there is One who lies beyond us, who exists outside of all our categories, who will not be dismissed with a name, who will not appear before the bar of our reason, nor submit to our curious inquiries: this requires a great deal of humility, more than most of us possess, so we save face by thinking God down to our level, or at least down to where we can manage Him. Yet how He eludes us! For He is everywhere while He is nowhere, for ‘where’ has to do with matter and space, and God is independent of both. He is unaffected by time or motion, is wholly self-dependent and owes nothing to the worlds His hands have made.” And then Tozer quotes Frederick W. Faber. “Timeless, spaceless, single, lonely, Yet sublimely Three, Thou art grandly, always, only God is Unity! Lone in grandeur, lone in glory, Who shall tell Thy wondrous story? Awful Trinity!” And Tozer describes the state out of which we are presently striving to remove ourselves, “It is not a cheerful thought that millions of us who live in a land of Bibles, who belong to churches and labor to promote the Christian religion, may yet pass our whole life on this earth without once having thought or tried to think seriously about the being of God. Few of us have let our hearts gaze in wonder at the I AM, the self-existent Self back of which no creature can think. Such thoughts are too painful for us. We prefer to think where it will do more good - about how to build a better mousetrap, for instance, or how to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before. And for this we are now paying a too heavy price in the secularlzation of our religion and the decay of our inner lives. “Perhaps some sincere but puzzled Christian may at this juncture wish to inquire about the practicality of such concepts as I am trying to set forth here. ‘What bearing does this have on my life?’ he may ask. ‘What possible meaning can the self-existence of God have for me and others like me in a world such as this and in times such as these?’ “To this I reply that, because we are the handiwork of God, it follows that all our problems and their solutions are theological. Some knowledge of what kind of God it is that operates the universe is indispensable to a sound philosophy of life and a sane outlook on the world scene. “The much-quoted advice of Alexander Pope, ‘Know then thyself, presume not God to scan: The proper study of mankind is man,’ if followed literally would destroy any possibility of man’s ever knowing himself in any but the most superficial way. We can never know who or what we are till we know at least something of what God is. For this reason the self-existence of God is not a wisp of dry doctrine, academic and remote; it is in fact as near as our breath and as practical as the latest surgical technique. “For reasons known only to Himself, God honored man above all other beings by creating him in His own image. And let it be understood that the divine image in man is not a poetic fancy, not an idea born of religious longing. It is a solid theological fact, taught plainly throughout the Sacred Scriptures and recognized by the Church as a truth necessary to a right understanding of the Christian faith. “Man is a created being, a derived and contingent self, who of himself possesses nothing but is dependent each moment for his existence upon the One who created him after His own likeness. The fact of God is necessary to the fact of man. Think God away and man has no ground of existence. “That God is everything and man nothing is a basic tenet of Christian faith and devotion; and here the teachings of Christianity coincide with those of the more advanced and philosophical religions of the East. Man for all his genius is but an echo of the original Voice, a reflection of the uncreated Light. As a sunbeam perishes when cut off from the sun, so man apart from God would pass back into the void of nothingness from which he first leaped at the creative call. “Not man only, but everything that exists came out of and is dependent upon the continuing creative impulse. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…. All things were made by him and without him was not any thing made that was made.’ That is how John explains it, and with him agrees the apostle Paul: ‘For by him were all things created, that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him; and he is before all things, and by him all things consist.’ To this witness the writer to the Hebrews adds his voice, testifying of Christ that He is the brightness of God’s glory and the express image of His Person, and that He upholds all things by the word of His power. “In this utter dependence of all things upon the creative will of God lies the possibility for both holiness and sin. One of the marks of God’s image in man is his ability to exercise moral choice. The teaching of Christianity is that man chose to be independent of God and confirmed his choice by deliberately disobeying a divine command. This act violated the relationship that normally existed between God and His creature; it rejected God as the ground of existence and threw man back upon himself. Thereafter he became not a planet revolving around the central Sun, but a sun in his own right, around which everything else must revolve. “A more positive assertion of selfhood could not be imagined than those words of God to Moses: I AM THAT I AM. Everything God is, everything that is God, is set forth in that unqualified declaration of independent being. Yet in God, self is not sin but the quintessence of all possible goodness, holiness and truth. “The natural man is a sinner because and only because he challenges God’s selfhood in relation to his own. In all else he may willingly accept the sovereignty of God; in his own life he rejects it. For him, God’s dominion ends where his begins. For him, self becomes Self, and in this he unconsciously imitates Lucifer, that fallen son of the morning who said in his heart, ‘I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. . . . I will be like the Most High.’ “Yet so subtle is self that scarcely anyone is conscious of its presence. Because man is born a rebel, he is unaware that he is one. His constant assertion of self, as far as he thinks of it at all, appears to him a perfectly normal thing. He is willing to share himself, sometimes even to sacrifice himself for a desired end, but never to dethrone himself. No matter how far down the scale of social acceptance he may slide, he is still in his own eyes a king on a throne, and no one, not even God, can take that throne from him. “Sin has many manifestations but its essence is one. A moral being, created to worship before the throne of God, sits on the throne of his own selfhood and from that elevated position declares, ‘I AM.’ That is sin in its concentrated essence; yet because it is natural it appears to be good. It is only when in the gospel the soul is brought before the face of the Most Holy One without the protective shield of ignorance that the frightful moral incongruity is brought home to the conscience. In the language of evangelism the man who is thus confronted by the fiery presence of Almighty God is said to be under conviction. Christ referred to this when He said of the Spirit whom He would send to the world, ‘And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.’ “The earliest fulfilment of these words of Christ was at Pentecost after Peter had preached the first great Christian sermon. ‘Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do?’ This ‘What shall we do?’ is the deep heart cry of every man who suddenly realizes that he is a usurper and sits on a stolen throne. However painful, it is precisely this acute moral consternation that produces true repentance and makes a robust Christian after the penitent has been dethroned and has found forgiveness and peace through the gospel. “‘Purity of heart is to will one thing,’ said Kierkegaard, and we may with equal truth turn this about and declare, ‘The essence of sin is to will one thing,’ for to set our will against the will of God is to dethrone God and make ourselves supreme in the little kingdom of Mansoul. This is sin at its evil root. Sins may multiply like the sands by the seashore, but they are yet one. Sins are because sin is. This is the rationale behind the much maligned doctrine of natural depravity which holds that the independent man can do nothing but sin and that his good deeds are really not good at all. His best religious works God rejects as He rejected the offering of Cain. Only when he has restored his stolen throne to God are his works acceptable. “The struggle of the Christian man to be good while the bent toward self-assertion still lives within him as a kind of unconscious moral reflex is vividly described by the apostle Paul in the seventh chapter of his Roman Epistle; and his testimony is in full accord with the teaching of the prophets. Eight hundred years before the advent of Christ the prophet Isaiah identified sin as rebellion against the will of God and the assertion of the right of each man to choose for himself the way he shall go. ‘All we like sheep have gone astray,’ he said, ‘we have turned every one to his own way,’ and I believe that no more accurate description of sin has ever been given. “The witness of the saints has been in full harmony with prophet and apostle, that an inward principle of self lies at the source of human conduct, turning everything men do into evil. To save us completely Christ must reverse the bent of our nature; He must plant a new principle within us so that our subsequent conduct will spring out of a desire to promote the honor of God and the good of our fellow men. The old self-sins must die, and the only instrument by which they can be slain is the Cross. ‘If any man come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me,' said our Lord, and years later the victorious Paul could say, ‘I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.’” Conclusion
God is the one and only Living God of the universe. That reality must either be petrifying or glorious. I pray that is glorious for you, and I pray that you will share this series with your fellow disciples of Christ so they too may glory in the life of God this Season.
So join us next time as we seek to better know, love, and worship God and help the people in our lives do the same. To that end, we’ll be discussing the life of God in salvation.
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The Year Long Celebration of God is a discipleship experience designed to equip followers of Christ to better know, love, and worship Him as they help others in their lives do the same. We exalt God, teach His people how to practically worship Him every day of the year, and train them to disciple others.
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