Transcription
I was thinking during the pre-conference uh time that we had this morning and this afternoon where we looked at the legacy of John Calvin in a year that celebrates the 500th anniversary of his birth about what it was that captured my heart to pursue a knowledge of the holiness of God.
I remember back when I was in seminary and was exposed to the great titans of the church through history. Men like St. Athanasius, St. Ansom, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Luther Edwards Spurgeon and men of that stripe. I knew that these men differed in so many points, many times minor points of theology, had different personalities, different gifts and talents. But the one strand that I discovered running through the works of all of these men was that they were intoxicated by a profound sense of the majesty and of the holiness of God.
The very beginning of his institutes, John Calvin remarks about our tendency as human beings to keep our gaze fixed on this terrestrial plane. Our gaze is horizontal and we look around ourselves and among ourselves and begin to flatter ourselves as if we were but little less than demigods. But Calvin says, "If we just once lift our gaze to heaven and contemplate what kind of being that God is, we understand the virtual universal testimony of holy men in the pages of sacred scripture who having had a momentary glimpse of the character of God are reduced to trembling in dust and in ashes."
And my prayer is that through the power of the Holy Spirit in the next day or so that our gaze may be lifted to that high plane. And in our time together, we will contemplate aresh the character of our holy God until the church is gripped by an overwhelming sense and passion for that God. The church will be impotent.
And with that in mind, I'd like to begin this evening by reading a brief portion from the book of Isaiah. And no, it's not going to be Isaiah 6. I do have more than one sermon. Actually, this morning I counted four. God willing, you'll hear one of those on Saturday. But this time I want to look at Isaiah chapter 45 beginning at verse 1 and reading through verse 8.
"Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped, to subdue nations before him, and to loose the belts of kings, to open doors before him, that gates may not be closed. I will go before you and level the exalted places. I will break in pieces the doors of bronze and cut through the bars of iron. I will give you the treasures of darkness and the hordes in secret places that you may know that it is I, the Lord, the God of Israel, who call you by your name. For the sake of my servant Jacob and Israel, my chosen, I call you by your name. I name you, though you do not know me. I am the Lord and there is no other. Beside me there is no God. I equip you though you don't know me that people may know from the rising of the sun from the west that there is none besides me. I am the Lord and there is no other. I form light and I create darkness. I make well-being and I create calamity. I am the Lord who does all these things. Shower, O heavens, from above. Let the clouds rain down righteousness. Let the earth open that salvation and righteousness may bear fruit and let the earth cause them both to sprout. I the Lord have created it."
Will you join me in prayer?
Oh Lord, anytime we approach this sacred text that comes to us from thy holy mouth, we are overwhelmed by a sense of our inadequacy and of our impetency. We know that you have placed your power not in us but in your word. And you have declared that you will not permit your word to return unto you void. So tonight and for the days to come, we plead for the presence of your Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth, who inspired this word in the first place, that he may bring illumination, that the shackles may be removed from our wrists, the wax from our ears, the scales from our eyes. the calcium from our hearts that we may hear your word and love it. For we ask it in Jesus name. Amen.
The text that I've just read to you, beloved, is one of the strangest texts that we find anywhere in sacred scripture. I have read to you a message of divine revelation from God addressed to a man by the name of Cyrus who at the time the prophecy was given was not even alive. At the time of this prophecy, Israel was caught up in bondage in the Babylonian captivity, subjugated by the most powerful empire on the face of the earth, that empire of Babylon. But the message in this text is not addressed to somebody from Babylon. It is addressed to the future king of the Persian Median Empire which would defeat the Babylonians and ultimately liberate the people of Israel to return to their homeland.
And so God now announces a message to this future king of Persia whose name is Cyrus. And so we read in verse 45 this word. "Thus says Yahweh to his Messiah to his Messiah. Messiah with a little M not with a capital M. To his anointed to Cyrus." Now, this verse right here scandalizes the Jewish people that God for a second would call a future gentile king his anointed. But listen to what he says to Cyrus. "Thus says the Lord to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped, to subdue nations before him, to loose the belts of kings, to open doors before him that gates may not be closed. I will go before you, Cyrus, and I will level the exalted places. I will break in pieces the doors of bronze. I will cut through the bars of iron. I will give you the treasures of the darkness and the hordes in secret places."
Do you hear what he's saying? I am the Lord God and I have anointed you and I will go before you and I will give you the power in your armies to lay waste to the strongholds that rule the world right now. I will take your right arm in my right arm and I will break the bars and the bronze shields in all the rest. Why is God going to do this? Listen to what he says. "that you may know that it is I, the Lord, the God of Israel, who call you by your name. I'm going to do this Cyrus so that you may know who I am. That I am the Lord God of Israel and for the sake not for your sake but for the sake of my servant Jacob and the Israel my chosen I call you by your name and I am naming you though you do not know me. I am the Lord. There is no other besides me. There is no God."
We studied Calvin this morning, this afternoon, and one of the things that Calvin wrote on occasion which I've always appreciated is this. "When God closes his holy mouth, we should desist from inquiry." That was Calvin's warning against unbrided bridled speculations about the truth of God. And in spite of the influence that has had on my life, I can't resist a few moments of speculation here. And so with my apologies to the magisterial reformer John Calvin, I will speculate for this one second.
I I try to imagine what would be going through Cyrus's mind when he hears this prophecy for the first time. Particularly where we get to this refrain that is occurs three times in this chapter. "I am the Lord and there is no other besides me. There is no God." Let me just start with the beginning of that. "I am the Lord." I see Cyrus hearing those words where this foreign deity declares that he is the Lord and that this foreign deity would like to have a word with Cyrus. And I'm thinking that this gentile king would think to himself, "Oh, Yahweh, he's the Lord of Israel, but I'm Cyrus and I'm the Lord of Persia." So, I guess what happens here is that this deity of Israel would like to get together with me and have a summit meeting. So the two of us can sit down and plan my future military campaigns. Maybe that is what Cyrus would think in the first clause.
But God won't allow him to rush to that conclusion because he adds to his declaration, "I am the Lord Cyrus. There is no other besides me. There is no God." Does that sound familiar to you? Did you hear anything like that from the pen of Moses? "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt. Thou shalt have no other gods besides me."
What I'd like to focus our attention on briefly tonight is this refrain. "I am the Lord. There is no other." This declares the uniqueness of God of the God of the Old Testament. And I want us to consider briefly what it is about the God of the Bible that is unique.
When we talk about the holiness of God, the term holy has two common references. The first and primary meaning of the term holy refers to God's otherness. the sense in which he is different from anything in the created world. The secondary meaning refers to his purity and his perfection in righteousness which we contemplate regularly. And in that sense, holiness is a communicable attribute because he says you shall be holy because I am holy. But that can only be true in the secondary sense of the meaning because the primary meaning of holiness describes something about God that you and I cannot be in this world or in the world to come. It really refers to his transcendent divine nature. the sense in which he is other from us.
Now in systematic theology when we try to set forth our doctrine of God and detail the attributes of God we struggle with the limitations of human language to do that. And historically, the theologians of the church have relied chiefly on three distinct methods by which we seek to describe the being and character of God. One of the most common methods and certainly the favorite one employed by Augustine is what's called the via negationus or the via negativa. That is the way of negation. And quite simply, the way of negation is defining something by saying what it isn't.
Now, there are several ways in which in theology we use that method. I'll just mention two of them in passing. When we talk about God, we say that God is infinite. Well, all that means is that God is not finite. We are finite. And to be finite means that we have boundaries. There is an edge, a limit to where we live and move and have our being. We heard this morning the testimony of Dr. and Duncan about the rigorous problems that he ran into yesterday trying to get here from Jackson, Mississippi via Atlanta. The idea is in the South that if you want to go to heaven, you have to go through Atlanta. Sometimes it makes me not want to go. But the struggles and the ordeals that he experienced in his travel plans just underlined in red his finitude. Being finite, he could only be at one place at the same time. He couldn't be in Jackson and Atlanta and Orlando at the same time in the same relationship because he's finite. But God is not bound by the borders of creaturliness. He is not finite. He is infinite. We can send spaceships to outer space and try to probe the deepest places in a universe that may be even expanding. But however far we go, we can't reach the end of God because there is no end to a being who is infinite.
The second way we use this way of negation to describe God is with the term immutable. We're always talking about the immutability of God. And all of that is to say that God is not mutable. Nothing defines creaturely existence more clearly than the phenomenon of change. Everybody in this room since you came into this room this evening has changed. The change may be imperceptible, but if nothing else, you're a half an hour older, a half an hour grayer. a half an hour heavier. Whatever it is, you have changed because that's the defining attribute of all created objects and all creatures. And that's the world in which we live in in a world that is constantly changing. But you can't apply that category to God. He is the same yesterday as he is today and will be tomorrow. One of the most comforting concepts in all of sacred scripture about the character and the nature of God is that he is immutable. not subject to change in his person, in his behavior or in his very being.
The second way and a common way we define God is what's called the via eminentia. That is we take normal human earthly categories and exalt them to the nth degree. We say one of the things that we possess as creatures, as human beings, is the capacity to learn, the capacity to accumulate knowledge. And so you've heard already today from some extraordinarily knowledgeable men. But what you haven't heard from any of us is from one who has all knowledge. We possess elements of science, but God has omni science, omniscience. We've all experienced the ravages of human violence and we've seen the exertion and the exercise of power at a creaturely level. And sometimes we're overwhelmed by the manifestation, for example, of the power of nature. When you have hurricanes that come through the southern United States, as we've seen in recent years, when you see the power of a tsunami, when you see the power of a volcanic eruption, even the inventions of human power like an atomic bomb, boggle the mind. But these things are pop guns compared to the power of God. whose potency is omnipotence. Omnipotence defines God because only God in all of reality has all power. "I am the Lord. There is no other." and his uniqueness includes this dimension of power.
But in addition to the way of negation, the way of eminentia is also what's called the via affirmatos, the way of affirmation. And again, I'll just use one or two illustrations to define the otherness and the uniqueness of a holy God. And here's where it begins to take us to the extreme edges of our ability to comprehend who God is. That God and God alone is eternal and selfexistent. I've mentioned in conferences here before that of all the theological attributes that are found in the theological poems of history, the one that sends chills up and down my spines, I can hardly write it on the chalkboard in the seminary classroom without becoming almost overwhelmed. And it's the word asset. A si t y. Say I've never heard the word. No idea what it means. Well, if there's any word in the English language that captures the otherness of God, it's the word of assity. It means his self-existence. that God and God alone has the power of being in and of himself.
When they set up the Hubble spacecraft, they had an announcement by a very famous entitled cosmeto cosmologist, not cosmetologist, [Applause] an astrophysicist whose name you would recognize if I if I mention it, said, "I was driving my car down the road and I heard him say on the radio, What I'm excited about with the launch of the Hubble telescope is that we're going to learn all kinds of things about the origins of the universe because this much we know already 12 to 18 billion years ago. That gave him a six billion dollar window there. 6 billion dollar. See, even astrophysicists get bailouts these days. [Applause] six billion year window. And he said 12 to 18 billion years ago, the universe exploded into being. That's the closest I've come to a fatal automobile accident since I've moved to Orlando. I almost lost it. I mean, my hands came right off the wheel. I exploded into being. What was it before it exploded into being? In historic in historic categories, being is the antithesis of non-being. And non-being is a synonym for nothingness. And you all know what nothingness is. Not because nothing has no isness. Jonathan Edwards wants to find nothing is that which sleeping rocks dream of. [Applause] In all my years of philosophical inquiry, I never could find an adequate definition of nothing until RC Jr. went to junior high school and I finally came to a realization of the meaning of nothing. That nothing was what he did in school every day. He would come home and I'd say, "What'd you learn in school today?" Nothing. Well, nothing is obviously the absence of something. So, you can't even talk about what it is, only about what it is not. Nothing is the absence of being. And I've said until my congregation gets sick of hearing it, if there ever was a time when nothing at all existed, what could possibly exist now? But nothing. But if something exists now, that tells you indisputably that there never was a time when there was nothing. Not 12 billion years ago, not 18 billion years ago, not 18 trillion years ago. Now we're reaching the proportion of the national debt which is not nothing but it's a very large something. [Applause] Everything that we know of including the universe had a beginning. Amen. is contingent, is derived, is dependent on something outside of itself to lend being to it. Except for God, God is not created. There ever was a time when he was not. He derived his being not from something before him or something outside of him, but eternally he is. He has that power of being in and of themselves. I wish everybody had a chance to delve into the depths of the inquiries of western philosophy to explore that very concept of being because there's nothing more profound to say about God than how he reveals himself by name. "I am who I am. I am the Lord. There is no other. I alone, Cyrus, have the power of being within myself. Cyrus, you couldn't exist for a second. You couldn't possibly be apart from my being because in me you live and move and have your being. I am the Lord. There is no other."
Quickly in Thomas Aquinus's investigation into this con concept he bequeath to the west western world all kinds of well-known arguments for the existence of God some of which have been blatantly ignored by modern evangelicals to their shame and to their impoverishment. But I think of all of the considerations of the angelic doctrine doctor, the two most compelling arguments that he rendered for the existence of God was in the first instance that God is the ends necessarian. that God possesses necessary being. That God and God alone possesses necessary being. This is what makes him holy. That he alone has being that is necessary. Well, what in the world does that mean? Or I should say, what beyond the world does that mean? Because there's nothing on this planet or in this universe apart from God that possesses necessary being. And we can define necessary being quickly in two ways. Ontologically and logically. And Aquinus was arguing for both. What he meant by the ontology by the way is the study of being, the science of being. And so when Aquinas said that God has necessary being, he was saying that he's the kind of being who cannot possibly not be. God is who he is from everlasting to everlasting. And he cannot be anything other than what he is eternally in and of himself. If he could be something other than what he is, it would require him to change. And if he changed, he would stop being God. Sunday morning at St. Andrews, we sang one of my favorite hymns, and Can It Be and by Charles Wesley. I love the hymn, except I have to edit it. I try to tell my congregation when we get to the refrain that thou my God should die for me, Charles Wesley, shame on you. God died on the cross. Are you crazy? Does God suffer an end to his being? If the being of God perished on the cross, the cross would have perished with him. The hill outside of Jerusalem would have been vaporized. Jerusalem would have vanished along with the whole rest of creation because apart from the being of God, nothing can exist for a split second. God didn't die. The God man died. The God who took upon himself a human nature died touching his humanity. But the deity didn't perish on the cross. It may sound great in our hymns, but it's a ghastly thought because God has necessary being which cannot stop being and so he is ontologically necessary. But what has also been almost completely lost in our day is that his being is not only ontologically necessary, it's logically necessary. There's no reason that I can offer why Sproul should exist. There was a time when I didn't exist. There's a time when you didn't exist. And you cannot claim any logical necessity for your existence. But not only is God ontologically necessary, you have to take leave of reason. Park your rationality in the parking lot and deposit your scientific certainty there as soon as you explore the idea that perhaps God does not exist. You have to take leave of your senses. You have to stop thinking logically to argue that the universe came into being by itself out of nothing. When you talk like that in the name of science, you've just traded in science for ignorance and for nonsense. Nothing could be more irrational than the idea that something comes from nothing. I've told on another occasion an article I read by Nobel physicists in the west coast who said the time has come when we have to give up the paradigm that was introduced during the enlightenment. The idea that we can explain the origin of the universe through spontaneous generation. We now know through our scientific investigation that things cannot come out of nothing spontaneously. And he went on to say, and I'm not lying, for something to come into being out of nothing requires time. [Applause] You can't get something out of nothing quickly. You have to have patience. And you have to wait on it. This is the rabbit out of the hat. Without the rabbit, without the hat, and without a magician. That's nonsense. That's not science. That's mythology. That's fantasy. Logic demands that if something exists now, something has always existed or you have to choose an irrational alternative. That's what Aquinus was getting at that God not only has necessary being onlogically, but he has logically necessary being.
All right. Quickly. This is a brief portrait of who God is as he's talking to Cyrus. But what I want us to consider is what this God does. "I am the Lord. He says, there is no other besides me. There is no God. I equip you even though you don't know me that people may know from the rising of the sun from the west that there is none beside me. I'm the Lord. There is no other."
Verse seven, which has created all kinds of problems with people who walk around still with King James Bibles. "I form light and I create darkness. I make well-being and I create calamity. I am the Lord who does all these things." In the old King James, it translates this, "I create evil. I make the light. I make the darkness. Make prosperity. I create evil." And I've had how many students come to me with their Bibles. You teach us that the biblical opori is that God is not the author of evil. And yet here it is right here in my Bible. "I am the Lord. I create evil." Take that, professor. And I say, well, let's see if we can slip away from this. Let's look at this text and we can look at it in terms of the words that are employed and we can look at it in terms of the poetic structure of the passage which in this case happens to be a case of parallelism a common Jewish literary form of various types and in this case it's anothetical parallelism. God makes light. God makes darkness. God brings prosperity. God creates evil. Wait a minute. Those don't fit, do they? The word that is translated there by evil is a word in Hebrew that has a multitude of meanings stretching all the way from food that tastes nasty all the way to full orbed moral evil. Burke, your little girl has invented a new word for food that doesn't taste good. What's it? The plague. It's the plague. That's her word for the plague. She looks at her uh uh broccoli. Broccoli. She calls it the plague. I second the motion. So that's one form of evil that the term can refer to. And anything in between the plague of broccoli and full orbed moral imperfection, same word is used. But in this case, contextually and with the parallelism, God is saying to to Cyrus, Cyrus, I am the Lord. There is no other. I form the light. I bring the darkness. I bring well-being. I create calamity.
You all know what happened on 911. And immediately after 911, everybody in the world was asking me as a theologian, where was God on 911? I said he was the same place he was on 910 and on 912. He didn't move. Well, how could God allow these things to happen? And then bumper stickers appeared all over the place and cards with this prayer, God bless America. And then Pat Robertson and Jerry Fwell opined that perhaps the reason for the collapse of the Twin Towers in Washington and the destruction wre upon the Pentagon building I mean Twin Towers in New York was that it was the go judgment of God upon our nation. The hue and cry of the people of this country and of the press was so severe that Fwell and Robertson recanted their statements because it was unthinkable to American people that God could have anything to do with calamity. We are a people who believe that God can bless a nation but refuse to accept the idea that God can judge a nation. And the reason for that dichotomy, dear friends, is because we don't know who God is. Because the God of popular religion is not holy. It's not the God that is being introduced here. "I am the Lord. There is none other. I bring prosperity. I bring calamity. I bring the bare market. I bring the bull market. I raise kingdoms up. I tear kingdoms down. I'll raise you up, Cyrus. If you don't watch out, I'll bring you right back down. I make the light, I make the darkness."
You know, the two books that I've written that have received more response than any other two are the holiness of God and chosen by God. And I can't tell you how many people I have met who have said to me, you know, I read that book on holiness of God and it just blew me away. It just gave me such a an exalted, lifted up view of the majesty of God. Then I read Chosen by God and I didn't like that one at all. And I said, 'Well, one of two things. Either you didn't understand the holiness of God or you didn't understand chosen by God. Because the God who is holy is the God who is sovereign. The God who is transcendent in his majesty is the Lord. He brings good things. He brings bad things. Job understood that when he said, "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." That's the God with whom we have to do. You may not like him. Let me give you some pastoral counsel. If you don't like this God tough, [Applause] dear folks, it's the only one we have. That's what God is saying to Cyrus. "I am the Lord. You may try to make another one. You might try to fashion another one. You might like to prefer another one. But there is no other. I am the Lord your God. There is no other."
Let's pray.
Father, the more we learn of you, the happier happier we are that you are the Lord. The more delighted we are in our souls that there is no other. We cannot begin to contemplate the wonder of your majesty. Such knowledge is too high, too holy for us. But we thank you for lisping to us in our childishness as you reveal and give glimpses of your transcendent being. for which you are most worthy of our praise, our honor, our gratitude, and our obedience. Amen.