Is God Too Great to Be Personal?

All right.

Well, we're going to end our series on the attributes of God this morning.

Jimmy.

In fact, I kind of asked for this maybe or Jimmy assigned it to me.

But as I begin to study it, I'm saying what have I done on the basically the communical and incommunical attributes of God and what do we mean by communical?

We mean that which can be shared or transferred.

You know, I can take some money out of my pocket and I can communicate it to you.

The word means to share it with you to give it to you and you can have it to the communical attributes of God or the attributes that God shares with us.

He's the source of them like love mercy and kindness.

He's the source of them, but we too can be like God and be loving and kind and merciful.

So these are called communical attributes.

The other attributes are called incommunical.

That's the attributes that God doesn't share with us.

They don't communicate to us.

God is omnipotent.

No one's omnipotent, but God you can't be omnipotent or omniscient all the Omnia attributes are exclusively God.

And as I was thinking about how God is different than us, he's got attributes that are not like us.

Then there's attributes that he shares with us.

There she's similar to us really.

This is a topic on to what degree is God like us or what degree are we like God and what degree do we participate or share in his attributes and what degree are we not like God where he's different.

Another way of saying it is how far or to what degree is God transcendent?

How far removed is God?

Or another way of saying it how close is God to us or how imminent is God to us.

So the word transcendent means God is removed from us.

He's separate.

He's distinct.

He's holy.

He's above us.

He's transcendent, but he's also near us.

He's like us were made in his image and in his nearness.

He's imminent.

He's close.

I love Isaiah 57 verse 15 and I chose this as our text for this Sunday morning series.

Isaiah 57:15

One of my favorite verses in the Bible says for this says the law for this says the one who is high and lifted up who inhabits eternity whose name is holy.

I dwell on the high and holy place.

So here is God.

He's transcendent.

He dwells in eternity.

He's above us.

He's holy.

He says I dwell in the high and holy place and also with him who is of a contract and Lois lowly spirit to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contract.

You see God is both separate or transcendent.

He's above us.

He's God and we are not God.

There is a great distinction between God and the creature.

The creator and the creature.

There is a great separation.

He's God and we're not God.

But there's also some similarities because he made us in his image.

And because of this theologians ever since probably the Reformation most theologians in their systematic theology books have separated or distinguished the attributes of God into two categories.

The incommunical attributes of God how God is separate and after they deal with God's omnipotence and and all the omni attributes then they go into the communical attributes of God like his love and his kindness and his mercy and gentleness and so forth.

So they make that separation.

But the problem with that separation it's not really a good one.

Now I'm not necessarily all together against it but there's problems with separating God's attributes into those two major categories.

One in some ways when you say God is all-powerful that's true but we share in his power.

We may not be all-powerful but we do have some delegated power.

We may not be all-knowing but we do know something is we can say just as the fact that we're not all-loving but that's a communical attribute.

We're not all-loving our love doesn't generate within ourselves.

We're not the source of our own love or the source of our own knowledge or source of our own power but we have love we have compassion and but God's love and compassion is all-nigh.

So really everything you could say about the incommunical attributes you could say about the communical attributes and so that was a distinction made for hundreds of years but a lot of the contemporary systematic theologians no longer use those categories.

I would say maybe the only attribute of God that is uniquely incommunical is his aseity that only God is God in of himself and has life in himself.

He's the source of who he is and we are we have delegated life delegated power delegated knowledge delegated mercy kindness.

Our attributes flow out of his attributes.

They're on loan to us from God.

So in some ways we're similar to God but we're not self-existent.

We do not have our own existence in ourself.

So those breaking of the categories of attributes to incommunical and communical is somewhat arbitrary and I think not necessarily helpful but it does bring us to the problem.

I think one of the greatest problems in theology and one of the greatest problems in all the philosophy.

That's the problem to what degree is God like us and what degree is God not like us and philosophers have tried to answer that one question throughout the last well 6000 years but we could go back to classical philosophy and they attempt to find out what is ultimate reality.

They wanted to figure out what is God or who is God and they concluded that God must be the ultimate reality and what they did they studied reality or they studied the physical universe and they wanted to look at what is the one thing that unites everything together.

I mean that's the quest of knowledge.

What is the one thing that all things have in common?

So what is the one thing that of God that God is he's the ultimate reality.

What's the one thing that he has that all of us share in that that that's the one common denominator.

I mean we all share in humanity right.

We're not all the same but we have some similarity in that we all exist and we share in the human the human race.

We're all humans.

So that's something that unites us together.

What unites the universe together that we get the word the universe trying to find the one thing that unites everything together now listen play Aristotle will start with him.

He tried to determine who God was and he did this by the studying the physical universe.

Most of his writings is the study of physics science and so he studied everything in the universe and he come to the conclusion everything the universe there's there's multiplicity every there's a tons of things to study.

There's not one thing to study.

There's thousands of things to study but all of all of the thousands things to look at observe to study.

He noticed that everything has one thing in common in the universe everything the universe is in motion.

Everything's moving.

You know as a show was said no one man steps in the same stream twice one.

He's not the same man nor is it the same stream.

I mean every seven years you're all yourselves have been reproduced.

I mean after seven years you're not who you used to be physically speaking.

You're a new new physical body every cell has been replaced with a new cell within seven years.

That's going to crazy think about so everything is in motion everything's changing and so Aristotle was studying the things that this emotion he come to conclusion.

That everything is emotion is finite and mutable and and so forth he come up with the attributes of motion and therefore he says therefore the ultimate reality the thing that has everything in common everything can be reduced to something that is not the and everything in motion is not the source of its own motion that is everything in motion is contingent upon an outside mover.

Therefore he stripped away all these as you boost and concluded that God must be the unmoved mover that God must not have he does must not have something that moves him.

He must be unmoved or could he be a a plurality of things.

He has to be a simple the most simple undifferentiated being the problem with that concept of God.

What is a being that is pure simple?

Well, how do you define that being well, he's not personal.

He's not relatable.

He's not a person because a person to know someone has to make a differentiation between himself and that which is not himself and this ultimate reality is the simplest thing that you can imagine without any it's it's beyond unity.

It's because unity implies plurality.

It's just oneness.

It's a simple blob undifferentiated concept that you can't put your work can't put a term to it.

It becomes God becomes unknowable and in personable reality.

And so they concluded Aristotle concluded that the ultimate reality is oneness.

So therefore God is completely transcendent.

Does that make sense?

He's how how what's the relationship between the universe and God and from us and God?

Well, there's not any really relationship because God is the complete opposite of the universe.

He's everything the universe is not so you stripped away God everything that we can say about the universe you strip away and what's left that's God.

Well, what is that what we have no idea no terms can define God.

So he's an unknowable in personable reality even the word reality comes short and has no real meaning when it comes to God.

Well, Plato did the same thing.

He says the ultimate reality is this something that's he's called the the ultimate good.

But what is this good?

It's the same thing Aristotle said.

It's something it can't be defined and everything and that listen.

This is classical philosophy.

They're trying to figure out what relationship is between God and man and they come to the conclusion.

God is completely entirely transcendent.

You get Deism agnosticism.

You get all kinds of the problems that we're facing today because God's undefinable.

He's completely transcendent.

Well during the modern era, you got classical philosophy which led to modern philosophy in the transitional thinker was a Jewish man in the 16th century named Spenzola.

He is 16th early 17th century.

He was a Jewish philosopher and he took the reality is a classical philosophy that God is ultimate reality, but it's undefinable in personable and he says, okay, that is God but everything has come out of God.

All reality has this one thing in common.

And so like remember the pre-circratic philosophers.

They want to reduce reality to fire or water or air or earth.

What while they try to do that?

Well take a hundred things in this room and says what does all these things have in common?

Well, there has to be one substance or one reality that's in all the realities and if you strip away all the parts like you take a cat and take the tail off take the ears off take the nose off start taking the parts off the cat.

What do you have left when you come down?

You know, you do take the ears as what does the ear have in common with the tail and what does the ear and the tail have in common with this microphone and you take all the parts.

There's got to be one reality that exists in all reality in all the realities and they would say maybe it's earth or as far as water in this.

These are simple physical realities.

Well, Plato and Aristotle says it's a simple spiritual reality.

Well, Spenzola took this line of thinking.

He says well, if God is the ultimate reality in all realities then all things are God.

Or God is in all things.

So he's the one that kind of brought in the logical conclusion of classical philosophy says this leads to pantheism.

And there's two forms of pantheism.

There's pantheism that all things are God and God is all things but also another more lightweight form of pantheism is pan in theism and that says that God is in all things and in all things is God.

So we see that's a lot of the mystical religions believe that that all reality has this God in God element in common.

And postmodernism, I mean flows out of modernism postmodern philosophy says okay, if all things are God and God is an unknowable reality.

It's a then there's really no personal being at all and rather than ultimate reality being this one simple substance or one simple reality.

Ultimate reality is just a plurality of things.

They went to the stream and said hey, there's no unifying conception.

What is postmodernism?

What is you know, what you know, we get relativism and all that was the day that we live in it.

It's the reality.

There's not a common link that brings everything together.

There's no universal concept that brings knowledge together.

It's just a everything's fragmented.

Everything's just exists.

You know and led into existentialism and relativism and nehalism and all these words you want to remember.

But the point is it leads to the world of plurality of things the multiplicity of things that's ultimate reality without there being God.

And so here we have in philosophy.

From classical philosophy modern philosophy and postmodern philosophy.

They can't explain which is ultimate is it one or is it many?

And that's really the problem when we think about what's the relationship between God and man is God this transcendent oneness that we can't understand or is he one with all the plurality of things that we see around us?

Is he a mini?

And thus they're left confused and I'm telling you the Bible says in 1 Corinthians that it was the wisdom of God that man in his wisdom cannot know God.

Philosophy doesn't get us to God.

Because the problem with philosophy it can't explain which is ultimate one or the many.

But there is a biblical solution which comes to us through Revelation 1 we know that God is ontologically as a word for the word for being he's he's not we didn't flow out of God.

We're not an emission of God.

You know what an emission is?

Think of the Sun and go outside on a hot day.

Can you touch the Sun?

They're all not really.

Can you touch the heat or can the heat touch you?

And can you feel the heat of the light?

Can you see the light of the Sun?

I mean in a way are you touching the Sun one way or not in the way you are because the heat and the light has blown are emanated out of the Sun.

Does that make sense?

And so.

Plato, that's the belief of Plato that all things have emanated all of reality is emanated from that ultimate reality and thus it leads to that pantheism wherever you see you touch something and feel something and oh you're touching God.

Well, it's not really God because God is beyond this but everything's flowed out of God.

So it's kind of like are you touching the Sun?

Are you touching God when you touch other people and touch physical things?

Yes and no.

The Bible says no God created the world out of nothing.

We didn't flow out of God.

He didn't take his own substance and says I'm going to make the world out of me.

No, he says he created the world out of nothing in the beginning.

There was just God and nothing else and he spoke and X Nihilo out of nothing all things came into being so we're not a emation from God.

There is a separation on the logical separation between God and man.

We're not the same.

That's wonderful doctor.

However, we're made in the ethical likeness of God.

We're not totally separate because he says let us make man.

Not let us make animals or let us make the earth or creation.

He says let us make man in our own likeness or own image.

So in what way did he make us in his image?

He didn't make us out of his own substance, but he made us out of this and this is key.

He made us out of his own ethical likeness.

So we're to be righteous as he is righteous were to be holy as he is.

Holy were to know good and evil as he knows good and evil.

We're made for a relationship with God.

You know in Corinthians we talked about this before was we preaching through Corinthians.

It says let that man and woman are both made in the image of God.

There's no doubt about that, but it does say in Corinthians that woman he made in the image of man.

What does that mean?

Well, Adam was looking at all the animals is like there's not a good partner.

I don't have a help me among the animals.

They're all paired up together, but I don't fit with the animals any of them because let me make us a companion.

That's not like that is not perfectly like you.

It's different.

There's a distinction between male and female, but yet compatible to you.

Let me make someone like you in your image that thus being made in image of God means be made where you can have a relationship with God and that relationship is based upon ethical.

Stustagion love God love your neighbor.

Love is the heart of the relationship.

And you understand where does love come from?

Well, love doesn't come from get this love does not come from a God who is ultimately a undefinable oneness.

If God was just a monad.

This undefinable ultimate reality.

That's just simple.

Then who does God loves and how does God love?

Who does he love?

He can't love.

Look if love is giving up.

But God is not just a monad.

He's a Trinity of persons.

He is one.

Ultimate reality is one, but it's not only one.

Ultimate reality is one and many you have the essence is one and the persons are three and the person of the father the son and the Holy Spirit there in eternal communion and relationships and loving one another and this is where ethics come from.

This is why God is a communicable being.

He's not an impersonal being that doesn't know the world.

Aristotle's God the unmoved mover doesn't know the world can't know the world because if he knew the world then it would be a separation in his thinking between who he was and who the world was.

But God can know the world because God can have differentiation and distinctions in his thinking because he's a Trinity of persons the father's loving the spirit talking the spirit communion with the spirit and the spirit and the son or the or likewise communion with the father.

This is is this is where you see that how do we know that God is a loving being his love is not arrogant or proudful.

It's like what I thought God did everything for his own glory.

But the father is trying to glorify the son.

The father's not look at me the father should look at my son and what do you think the son's doing the son's not going to look at me the son's looking at it.

No, I did all this for the father.

Look at him.

I I've lived my life.

So Glory be brought to the father and the spirit the spirit is not he's like I'm worried about the spirit.

I'm afraid he's going to be jealous because we're always talking about the son spirits and jealous.

If you can't meet the spirit says no look at the son.

These all three persons are humble.

Now they all see the glory of one another but they're humble persons because they're holy.

They're pure and they're ethical and they're in this perfect relationship with one another and thus within the Trinity you have the answer to the the philosophy cannot provide of what's ultimate reality.

It's not ultimate reality is a plurality of things nor is ultimate reality just some undefinable oneness.

It's really both ads and this gives us a clarity of what is the relationship between man and God and that's the topic that was given really what's the communical incommunical attributes how we related to God and how we're not related to God.

Well bottom line related to God is because we're not made in his because we're not made in his essence.

We're not a Emation.

We don't flow out of his essence.

There is a creature creator distinction.

However as God is holy as the father loves the son and son loves the father and there's ethical distinctions.

Perfection in the Trinity and there's communication in the Trinity God made us in that lightness so that we too can enter into a relationship with him that we can also have love knowledge mercy all the attributes not the say it.

That's one distinction.

We're not self-existent but through his relationship with us we can share in those very attributes of God and this is what brings me back to our text and I love this text because the God of philosophers is in personal and that's one key thing that we know we can toss them away philosophy doesn't get us to a personal God.

Platal Aristotle the priest Socratic philosophers the modern philosophers the postmodern philosophers one thing is in common if they say ultimate reality is a unknowable oneness or ultimate reality is a plurality of things regardless that God is not personal.

You don't there's you don't have a relationship with substance.

You know Plato says God is is this idea ultimate reality of the single idea.

You know like think of the number two.

You know it's part of mathematics two plus two is four that's a concept of mental concept.

You can know about the concept but you can't relate to it.

You can't have a conversation with it.

The mathematical equation is not going to speak back to you.

You're not it doesn't love you.

Math doesn't love you.

Sorry Jimmy.

Now you might love math but it doesn't reciprocate it.

You know you can you can love the unmoved mover but I can promise you the unmoved mover doesn't love you.

You can love the pantheistic gods that all things are in God but and that type of God doesn't love you.

But the God of the Bible does love you.

The God of the Bible is a Trinitarian God and I think the Trinity is the thing that holds or worldview together holds the biblical worldview together to Trinity is not something we have to apologize for.

Oh, I don't understand the Trinity the Trinity on that kind of weird.

No, that's what makes our belief system or worldview coherent.

Any worldview that doesn't have a Trinitarian foundation runs into self-observity.

Let's go to the Lord in prayer.

And I'm given a couple minutes to run because I'm my clock's broken.

Dear Lord, we are grateful for the fact that you're not just a mental conception.

We're also thankful that all things are not God.

We're thankful for the great distinction between God and the universe.

But thank you that you made us in your ethical lightness that we can be in a relationship with you because you're a relational God.

You didn't need us to be a relational God because you are a Trinitarian being.

We see that more marble.

We thankful for it.

Lord, we're glad that you made us in your lightness help us to live our lives to grow in a greater and deeper relationship with you.

That the God that dwells in the high and the lifted up place who inhabits the Trinity.

We're thankful that you also dwell with us who are humble and have a contrite spirit.

This we pray.

Amen.

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