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Transcript 262B — The Mystery of God's Personality
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Hello, Brother Camping. In the Book of Genesis, God said, "Let us make man in our image." And then in the New Testament, Jesus was always saying, "I must be about My Father's business." And in the 17th Chapter of John Jesus was praying to His Father in Heaven, and He said something to the effect of, "Glorify Me now, Father, like You did before the world was." And also Jesus said to the thief on the cross, "Today thou shalt be with Me in Paradise." And He also told Mary, when He was raised from the tomb, "Touch Me not, for I am not yet ascended to the Father."
My question is this. It seems to me that this all indicates that Jesus and God are two separate beings. I don't understand. I don' t even know how to ask the question. But it seems to me that when you get to Heaven, there'll be God and there'll be Jesus, because Jesus said He was going to sit at the right hand of God. He's our Mediator so why would there have to be a mediator between He and Himself? I just don't understand it. I wonder if maybe you could shed a little light on that.
HC: The question is raised, and it's a question that has troubled many many people: How can we understand the personality of God? On the one hand we have all of these passages that seem to clearly indicate that Jesus is one person, and that God the Father is an entirely different person. And this is also reinforced by such passages as Genesis 1, which uses the plural, "Let us make man after our image," implying again at least a dual and probably a triple personality, because when we introduce the Holy Spirit into this discussion, then we see a third person of the Trinity.
And yet, on the other hand, we have these passages that speak so emphatically of the truth that there is one God. How can we possibly understand this?
Actually, we cannot understand it. As we look at this creation around us, how much do you know about this creation? How much do you really know? Scientists, for example, try to understand light. Now they can do things with light. They can make it accomplish certain purposes. And yet they don't know what light is. And yet light is one of the most common things all around us. It behaves with a wave motion. It behaves like particles of energy. And they can't reconcile these together. They don't really know what light is.
Scientists look out into the universe with their powerful radio-telescopes, and seemingly they can find no end to the universe. On the other hand, they use their electronic microscopes, and whatever other tools they may have, trying to find the smallest particle of energy, the smallest particle of matter. And again, they have never been able to find that smallest particle. There's always a smaller part, it seems. Wherever they look, they cannot understand this creation altogether.
Even when they look at the phenomenon of life, the phenomenon of growth, or whatever, they must do lots of speculation. They don't really understand.
Now when we realize that Eternal God is the Creator of this universe, therefore He must be infinitely greater than the universe He created. That's very obvious, isn't it? If you make a chair, as an intelligent being, or make an apple pie, or whatever you're going to make, you exercise your mind to do this. Now certainly you are far, far greater than that apple pie. That apple pie doesn't begin to approximate the marvelous mind that God has given you, and which you used in order to bring those ingredients together to make that apple pie, or to plant that garden, or whatever else that we do. The one who is taking the action is much much greater than that which has been made.
And so it is with creation. God, with His divine, infinite mind, has created this universe. And therefore He must be infinitely greater than the universe.
Now with this in mind, we begin to realize that if, in our finite minds, we understand so little of this universe, of this creation, we really understand so little of it, how could we ever pretend or expect to understand God Himself?
Now the principle in reading the Bible, that God has laid down, is that we read by faith. We live by faith, not by sight. We don't life by our understanding. We live by faith. Now that's not an uncommon principle. Actually, in all of our lives we live by faith.
When you sit down in that chair over there, you without realizing it are living by faith. You are trusting that that chair will support you, and you're not going to fall to the ground. When you walk into a building you have never been in before, what a tremendous faith you are exercising! How do you know that that roof isn't going to cave in? How do you know that the builder who build that building was careful that it would be strong enough? How do you know that the contractor put all of the seal into the foundations that he should have, and so on?
Well, we trust that all of these things happened. And so we confidently walk into that building, even though we have never been in before. And there isn't the slightest suggestion in our mind that maybe the roof is going to cave in on us. We live by faith.
Well, this is the way God wants us to live in relationship to the Bible. We live by faith. Now the fact is that when we are reading the Bible, we are in the presence of Eternal God. The Bible is a revelation right from the pen of God. God is the Author of the Bible. Yes, He spoke by human beings. But they were qualified, they were instruments of the Holy Spirit, God the Holy Spirit, as they wrote. And so obviously there are going to be all kinds of things in the Bible we cannot understand.
And this is going to be particularly true when it speaks of God Himself. Now one things we know about God is that He is from everlasting to everlasting. The Bible says so. But what is that? Can our minds understand eternity? Not really, because we are created to understand time. We can understand seconds and minutes and days and years. In order to get hold of something, we try to relate anything we're touching to time. And the moment the Bible begins to talk about a God who is from everlasting to everlasting, this is beyond the ability of our minds to really get hold of. God did not create our minds with an ability to altogether understand it. So we accept that statement by faith, without understanding it.
Likewise we are creatures of space. When we think in terms of something, right away we try to visualize it. We think in terms of length and width and height. But when we talk about God, we can't talk about space, because God is everywhere present. And God is a Spirit, so He cannot even be seen. And so immediately we're left out in the cold. Our minds can't fathom that. We were not designed to be able to understand these concepts. But we read about it in the Bible. And therefore we use these words of the Bible and say, they are true. They are absolutely trustworthy. God has said so. By faith, by faith we know it to be so, even though we haven't the slightest understanding of what it really is.
Now the same thing is true when God is describing Himself. On the one hand, constantly and consistently in the Bible He speaks of Himself as three separate persons. The Bible is very clear in this language. And yet He comes through again and again with the fact that there is one God. We can't reconcile these two statements at all. Our minds are not able to grapple with this, to take hold of this. And so we simply stand aside and say, "Oh God, You have said so. We believe you with all our hearts. We have faith that this is really so. But we don't understand. And we are not going to try to understand it because we realize that we are the creation, and You are the Creator."
And so there are some things in the Bible that after we've tried to put every verse to bear on it, we have to say, we don't understand, but we accept it because the Bible says so. And this is particularly true of the person of God Himself.
Actually, when we think about salvation, do you understand salvation? Oh yes, we can understand something about the justice of God, which is required to be satisfied, and Christ enduring the wrath of God for our sins. We can understand a little bit about the concept of love. We can figure out some words to describe grace, by saying that that's unmerited, undeserved favor. We can get somewhat of an inkling of the nature of salvation. But really now, can we really comprehend this salvation, that Eternal God, who is perfect and holy and blameless in every way, and who created mankind good and holy and after the image of God, and mankind of his own volition rebelled against God and has gone deep into sin and is in his every thought antagonistic to God, that God would leave Heaven and become man, and take upon Himself our sins, and endure all of the humilities He endured, and all of the reviling, and the wrath of God Himself on our behalf? Can we really understand that kind of love? Of course we can't.
We can say we have some understanding, but really, really, it's an incomprehensible love. It's beyond our minds to really take hold of. We really say by faith, "We know it happened because the Bible says so." Why God would take this kind of a grievous path to glorify Himself, that's beyond our ability. We simply say, "We believe it because the Bible says so."
And this is the nature of God. He is infinite. He is far, far, far beyond the ability of our minds to get hold of. We get one little picture of this in the Book of Isaiah. In Isaiah 55 God is explaining there that no matter how we have sinned, if we will repent and return to the Lord, in verse 7, He will have mercy on that person, and He will abundantly pardon. That's again talking about salvation.
And then God explains how incomprehensibly great this idea is, incomprehensible in the sense that our minds can't really take hold of it. He says in verse 8 of Isaiah 55 "For My thoughts are not your thoughts. Neither are your ways My ways, says the Lord." And now He gives an equation, or a comparison: "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts." Now how high are the heavens above the earth? Well, if we think of our atmosphere extending up a hundred miles or so, that's still part of the earth, we could think. But how far do the heavens extend? Well, man, with his instruments, peers out into space, and it seems to go out for billions upon billions of light-years out into space, hundreds of millions of miles. It just seems like it's infinitely greater than the distance of our earth.
And so is the proportion of God's mind, God's love, God's grace, God's justice, God's wrath, God's being, to our finite minds. Any time that you begin to feel proud of who you are, proud of your accomplishments, well put these accomplishments and all in the crucible of who God is. And then we'll come back to a proper understanding of ourselves, that really, after all, we're not much, are we?