01.2 - Lesson 01, Part 2: The Creator God; Divine Institutions

Interlocked Series – Lesson #01, Part 2
The Creator God; Divine Institutions
June 27, 2023
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org

Opening Prayer

“Our Lord, it’s a great privilege we have to come together as a body of believers to study Your Word, to learn Your Word, and to be able to think biblically. How tragic it is that so many Christians who spend years sitting under solid Bible teaching never understand how to think and act and talk biblically. Father, we need to do that.

“It starts with us, with transforming our own thinking as we focus upon Your Word. We are not to live, act, think, or talk like unbelievers. But we are to live, act, think, and talk like those who are members of Your royal family.

“Father, we pray that as we continue our study of Your Word in this series, that it just lays that foundation, that framework in our own souls so that we can have a better grasp of Your Word. We pray that You will encourage us with our time in Your Word tonight. We pray in Christ’s name. Amen.”

Slides 1 and 2

All right, everybody, let’s stand up. As you know we’re going through the Interlock system so we can learn how to teach children the Word of God.

Slide 3

This is the overall chart. There are eleven Old Testament events here, and eight New Testament events. We are learning to act out this chart with motions so we can teach it to children and they can remember these.

If you can go through these motions and grasp the overall framework, you’re going to know more about the structure of the Bible than probably 99.9% of believers going to Bible churches in America today.

(In order to go through the motions, watch the video.)

To run through these events, we start with God’s creation. He created the whole world. Then there was the Fall of man. Next was a flood when the fountains of the deep opened and the Flood came. After the Flood there is the Tower of Babel.

After the Tower of Babel God decided to work through one individual so He called Abram. Then we have the Exodus. Next God gave the Law, beginning with the ten commandments. Then came the conquest and after that you have the kingdom. Then there is the exile. First the Northern Kingdom and then the Southern Kingdom are sent out of the land and there’s only a partial return. That’s the Old Testament.

You have four hundred years of silence before the New Testament. The next event is the birth of the Messiah, the birth of Jesus. When Jesus grows up, they crucified Him on the cross and then they buried Him but He rose from the dead and ascended to Heaven. After that He founded the Church.

At the end of the Church Age Jesus comes back and takes us to Heaven. There’s going to be a Second Coming when He establishes His Kingdom on this earth. After that comes the final judgment. That covers all 19 events.

Slides 4 and 5

These events are like pegs in a closet, coat pegs, and you hang details of these events and the doctrines that go with them on each of the pegs. That way you come to understand the totality of Scripture and get a clear picture of the Bible.

What we’re doing with this is showing that the Bible is interdependent, interconnected. Everything locks together. Often what happens is the events in the Bible are taught as if the events are in isolation of everything else. But when we start really looking at the Scriptures we see that all of these events are referred to over and over and over again as you go through the Bible.

Creation is referred to numerous times in the Old Testament as well as in the New Testament. God is referred to as the Creator of the heavens and the earth. If you discount Genesis as many scholars do saying it’s not really historical or accurate and you don’t have the Flood or the Tower of Babel then you have no foundation for the rest of the Bible. The Scripture falls apart and it doesn’t stand.

You should emphasize this in training kids in these things because so much of what is being taught to them in our culture is that humans are just an accident that happened because there was a random electrical discharge on a mass of slime in the ocean that generated some kind of organic life. They say that just happened by chance so there’s nothing significant about them as a person or as a human being. They’re just an accident.

No wonder you have so many suicides and such a spate of people on drugs and alcohol and families falling apart and mass divorce and all of these things. People don’t understand what it means to be created in the image of God and in His likeness and how that makes us distinct, different, unique in the universe. We were created a little lower than the angels only to be elevated above them in the future because angels are not in the image and likeness of God.

Slide 6

Last week we began with Creation in Lesson 1, Part 1. This will be Lesson 1, Part 2. The focus last week was on God’s Creation, especially in relation to the creation of the human race. The focus is on how God not only created the physical environment for the human race, but He created certain social structures that are embedded within the makeup of human beings.

If those social structures are ignored, denied, rejected, or there’s an attempt to remake them, then the consequence of that is not only destruction of individuals, but it’s destruction of a society and destruction of a culture.

The first part last time focused on the creation that God created out of nothing. He created in a six-day pattern that demonstrates that God is a God of purpose and God is a God of order. It emphasized the Creator-creature distinction, that God is totally other, He is totally distinct. There is none like God, there is no one like God, and His ways are higher than our ways, and His thoughts are higher than our thoughts, and we can’t comprehend or understand Him.

He created us in such a way that He can communicate to us and we can understand what He communicates to us. That relates to the unique design of mankind. Every single one of us is created in the image and likeness of God.

The second part of the lesson focuses on these social structures, which we refer to as the Divine Institutions. They are foundational. In Lesson One are the first three the Divine Institutions. We’re focusing on this beginning part of Creation, the creation of the heavens and the earth and all that is in them.

Slides 7 and 8

As we approach this, I want to say a few things about teaching your kids or grandkids or other kids in Sunday School or prep school. This material, though, was not written for younger kids so you must figure out how to simplify it. You have to learn how to think about how do your kids learn? How did you learn when you were a kid? You must break these complex things down into understandable ways and illustrations that are understandable.

The chart we’ve been using is a help. In the 1970s, when Charlie Clough was a pastor, a light came on in his mind. Charlie started this because he realized that he had all of these young people, these college-age kids, who were coming out of doctrinal churches who just thought of all these events in Scripture like pearls on a necklace, except there wasn’t a string.

Those pearls in their minds were just scattered everywhere, and they didn’t know how any of those pearls fit together. They needed to see how all of these events in Scripture are integrally tied together and they’re important to understand.

At first, I thought we could just listen to Charlie, but it is designed for adults. A couple, Amos and Jen Kwok from Singapore, took Charlie’s lessons and broke them down so teens can understand it.

On their website you’ll see they’ve broken it down some for children ten and up. All of you adults here have the mental skills to reverse engineer this content and I’ll show you ways to do that so you can make it relevant to younger children.

I like the idea of these events being like coat hooks. If you’re teaching two-, three-, or four-year-olds, you just teach them the basic names of the key people and little stories about what happened. You don’t get into heavy doctrine. Your lessons should only last about ten minutes because they can’t pay attention longer than that.

Each time you teach them you teach the stories again until the children begin to remember the names and a little of what happened. Year after year you come back to these same events in chronological order and add a little more detail. You hang these details on the coat hooks like first a scarf, then mittens, and a hat, and a coat or jacket. All of a sudden as they age there are three or four things hanging on the coat hook for Creation.

By the time they’re in elementary and junior high and high school they’re going to have a lot of material that can be brought together in relation to each of these events. Look at the Interlocked website and you’ll see activities and details to add to each hook and lots of good questions to introduce to help the children think about these events.

You don’t try to dump the whole load on a three-year-old. You just want limited objectives because you’re going to build over the years. What I’ve done here is to show that when you download the Interlocked Lesson 1, what you would do is you would look at the Interlocked material and you would see that there are certain headings.

Slide 9

The first heading is that Creation is out of nothing. The first lesson begins with God’s Creation. It’s out of nothing. Second thing they point out is there’s a six-day pattern which demonstrates that God is a God of order and purpose. And the third thing that we learn from Genesis 1 is that there’s a distinction between the Creator of all things and the creature. Then the next thing is that mankind has a unique design. That’s the first half of the chapter.

We covered most of that in the previous lesson. You have the same outline, basically, when you look at the lesson plan for the ten-year-olds. But they don’t have as much information. For example, the paragraph on Creation out of nothing doesn’t have all of these verses, but it does talk about an illustration of a chocolate cake that God created out of nothing.

Slide 10

It asked if the children have ever tried to create a chocolate cake out of nothing by just saying, let there be cake. Does that ever work? No, it doesn’t work. Why not? Because we’re not God. That’s the first indication of the Creator-creature distinction. We can’t do what God does.

Each one of these lessons gives you less information than what you get in the Interlocked. And they have various illustrations. They also have, and I’ve included some of the fill-in-the-blank review questions that they have, which help you engage your kids in the process of learning.

If they know that they’re going to be tested, there just might be one or two kids that get called on, then they’ll pay a little more attention. You don’t give them all the information at the 10-year-old level that you do on the 16-year-old level. If you take it down to first grade, it’s even less information. You just want to communicate just the bare bones of what’s in that lesson.

Notice there’s a lot of Scripture mentioned in the 10-year-olds’ section, but there’s more Scripture in the Interlocked material for those 16 and up. I’m trying to give you ideas as we go through this on how to address both ages. That gives us an idea of how to bring it down to the level of the child or children you’re teaching.

Slide 11

Tonight, we’ll get a little bit into the Divine Institutions so that we can take it just a little bit further. What we saw last time was, first of all, that God created everything out of nothing. You might tell the children to close their eyes and imagine nothing.  I want you to close your eyes. I want you to imagine nothing.

They’ll realize you can’t imagine nothing. Ask them if they’re really imagining nothing. I bet there’s something in your nothing. When God started to create, before He even created the angels, there was nothing. There wasn’t space. There wasn’t the emptiness of the universe. There wasn’t any matter. There weren’t any stars. There wasn’t any air. There was nothing. We can’t imagine that. It’s beyond our comprehension but God created everything out of nothing.

Slide 12

When we look at what Scripture says, we looked at Revelation 4:11, when the angelic host and the 24 elders are praising God they say, “You created all things, and by your will they exist and were created.” Simply by an act of God’s will.

God did more than just thinking it. What else did He do? He spoke, right? In Psalm 33:6 it says, “By the word of the Lord, the heavens were made and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.” What does that word host mean? That means like an army. That’s really the technical meaning.

I don’t think this is talking about the planets and the stars and the asteroids and the comets and meteors and everything else that’s out there. I think this is talking about the angels. “By the word of the Lord, the heavens were made and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.” Psalm 33:9 says, “For He spoke and it was done.” He just spoke. He said something. It was by His word that everything came into existence by His command.

That tells us that God’s command is incredibly powerful. Can any of us speak and have something come into existence? You know, our words have a lot of power. Sometimes we say really nasty, hateful things to people and that hurts. And other times we say really kind and generous and gracious things and that really lifts people up. Our words have a certain amount of power, but they have no power like what God has.

Jeremiah 32:17, says, “Lord God, behold you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and outstretched arm”. Now what does that tell us? What we see here is that God is a thinker.  He just thought and then He spoke.

His speaking things into existence was not divorced from thought. This tells us something about God as a thinker. He’s a planner, and His commands have power the likes of which we’ve never imagined. His power is all-powerful.

At this point you can teach a vocabulary word to your kids which is omnipotent. There are three “omni brothers” in the character of God. He is omnipotent. He is all-powerful. The word “omni” means all. He is omnipresent. He is present to every atom in His creation. And He is omniscient. He is all-knowing. The three “omni brothers.”

Slide 13

In Psalm 139, which is a psalm of David, we learn that we can’t escape God. Wherever we go, God is there. “If I go to heaven, He’s there. If I go down to Sheol, He’s there.” In Psalm 139:7 David says he can never escape from God’s spirit or get away from His presence. God is omnipresent.

Slide 14

What we have learned is that God is the sovereign Creator. Sovereign means that He’s the ruler. He’s the big boss. He is in charge of everything in His creation. He is also present to every aspect of His creation. He is everywhere present. He is all present. He is all powerful.

Slides 15 and 16

Now we’re going to have a test question. Fill in the blanks. I want to hear some answers here. I won’t call on anybody. God created everything out of what? Nothing. Very good. He created simply by what? Speaking. Very good. God created everything out of nothing and He created simply by speaking.

It’s important to know how God created as much as it’s important to understand that God created because you have some Christians that come along and they say, well, we know that God created, but the Bible really doesn’t tell us how. They think science is better. No, the Bible tells us that God created and how He created. If you divorce those two, you’re going to always have problems with God and with the Bible and with your Christian life.

Slide 17

What was it that God used to create everything? His Word. He spoke and it came into existence.

Slide 18

Next, we saw that there’s a pattern in the Creation so that in the first three days He creates the domains or the space. And in the next three days, He fills the space.

He creates and separates light from darkness. It’s interesting. He doesn’t create darkness. Darkness is there. Where did it come from in Genesis 1:2? I believe it’s from the fall of Satan, and we’ll talk about that. We’ll plug that in when we get to Genesis 3.

I believe that the darkness is a result of Satan’s fall. How do we know that? We know that God is light and He dwells in unapproachable light, the Scripture says. John tells us that in Him there is no darkness at all. So something had to generate this darkness. Darkness is an absence of light.

There’s darkness on the face of the earth in Genesis 1:2. I don’t think that’s how God originally created it. It came from somewhere, and I believe it’s from the fall of Satan and the fallen angels. So you have darkness on the face of the earth. You can’t imagine what that’s like. It’s absolute, total, thick, black darkness. And God creates light. He created the light, and you think the light dispelled the darkness, but wait a minute, it says then God separated the light from the darkness. We can’t quite grasp that.

Don’t put the light in a sun or in a star or in a moon or in a flashlight because it’s not localized. That doesn’t happen until you get to the fourth day. He separated light from darkness. We can’t fathom that because we have no experience with what that must have been like.

On the second day, He separated the land from the sea and the atmosphere. And on the third day, He separates the dry land, and then what? What’s important here is He creates the grass and the herbs and the plants and the trees.

There are some people who come along and say that these days are really just thousands of years, 10,000-, 20,000-, 100,000-year periods. They’re geological timeframes, they say. Wait a minute. Then that would mean that on the third whatever you call it, third millionth year, God created the plants and the trees and the herbs and everything, but they didn’t have any sunshine for another million years. They can’t grow without sunshine. They all depend on photosynthesis. You can’t have photosynthesis without sunshine.

The Bible says God created them on the third day and the next day there’s sunlight. They could last 24 hours, but they can’t last 24 million years. God has an orderly process, and we start to see that God has an order, He has a purpose, and He does things in an orderly and purposeful manner. He is not a God of chaos. He is not a God of chance. He is not a God that just does things randomly. We see that God is a God of order and purpose.

Slide 19

Next, we have the Creator-creature distinction. That means there’s a difference between God as the Creator and you and me who are creatures. Not long ago, I gave an example. Somebody had questioned something I said in relation to defining God as infinite and I said you can’t have two infinities, meaning two things that are infinite in being.

The person who questioned me applied a mathematical principle to that. The trouble was he was violating the Creator-creature distinction. We have to let the Creator-creature principle affect our thinking or we’re going to hit boundaries a lot of times where we can’t quite grasp everything that God is saying.

We can understand what He is saying, but not fully. We can’t comprehensively understand it because God’s ways are not our ways, and His thoughts are not our thoughts. There is a point of analogy. At the very first level in the Creator-creature distinction, we have God. He is an infinite personal Creator.

Infinite means that He has no boundaries, that whatever you say of God, He has it in an infinite way. God can think. He has knowledge. He has infinite knowledge. God exists, but He exists everywhere. He’s infinite spatially. He’s infinite in time. He is eternal. God is an infinite God, but He’s also a personal God.

When you are talking to kids that are a little higher up in education, you can talk about the fact that when you look at all of the various religions and philosophies that are in the history of the world, they fall apart at this point. They either have an ultimate reality that is infinite and you can’t really know it, or that they have gods and goddesses that are very personal, but they’re not infinite. It’s either one or the other, because man on his own can’t create a God he can’t comprehend. Only the Bible tells us about a God that we can’t fully comprehend. He is an infinite personal God.

At the second level, there’s the creature. Creatures are limited. They have a beginning in time and an end in time. They have limited knowledge. Whatever it is that they do, it’s limited, finite. I don’t really like the word nature because when you hear a lot of people use the word “nature,” they personify it like nature is having a lot of trouble with pollutants or nature is having trouble with global warming as if nature is a person.

As Christians, we need to constantly substitute the biblical word, which is creation. We’re going to go out and not go for a walk and enjoy nature. We’re going to go out and enjoy God’s creation. We’re going to enjoy the trees that God created. We’re going to enjoy the flowers that God created, and we’re going to enjoy the beautiful sky and the waterfalls or the rivers, and the animals that God created.

Slide 20

There’s a distinction between these creatures in the creation and the Creator. So here we have a chart. In the top level, this is the first level, we have an infinite personal creator God. And at the second level, we have the creation event. See, the infinite personal God has no beginning and no end, but creation comes at a point that begins time.

Before that Creation event, there was no time. There may have been a succession of events, but there wasn’t time. Now you can chew on that while you’re trying to go to sleep tonight. See what that looks like. What we see here is we have an infinite personal God, and then in Creation we have God’s natural Creation and mankind.

Slides 21 and 22

Let’s have a little fill in the blank test. What’s at the first level? Infinite, personal, Creator, God. What’s at the second level? Man and God’s creation or nature. We have an infinite, personal, Creator, God, and we have what He created in terms of inanimate objects and as well as sentient beings or thinking beings, human beings.

Slide 23

Here’s a couple of Scriptures to think about. Isaiah 44:24, “This is what the Lord says—your Redeemer and Creator.” Might be an interesting study to find out how many times you have God referred to as both of those terms. Sometimes it’s just one or the other, but He is our Creator.

We are under His authority because He created us. And second, He is our Redeemer. Now for Israel, that meant that He had redeemed them from slavery in Egypt. That’s when God is first identified as their redeemer.

What does God say? He says, “I am the Lord who made all things.” Can anybody think of something that does not fit in the category of all things? All things means everything. God created it. He says, “I alone stretched out the heavens Who was with me when I made the earth?” See, God can tell us about His creation because God was the only witness. He was the only one there.

Slide 24

In the New Testament, in Acts 17:24–25, we read, “He is the God who made the world and everything in it. Since He is Lord of heaven and earth, He doesn’t live in man-made temples.” And then in verse 25, “... and human hands can’t serve his needs—for he has no needs. He himself gives life and breath to everything, and he satisfies every need.”

Now, a good assignment would be to go home and write down 50 things that you are getting out of those two verses. It may take you a while, and don’t repeat yourself. When I took Bible Study Methods at Dallas Seminary, when Howard Hendricks taught it, the first assignment was to go home and write down 25 things that you could observe about Acts 1:8 where you were to stay in Jerusalem and leave Jerusalem and go out and be His witnesses in Judea and Samaria and to the uttermost parts of the world.

The next class period, we were told to go home and write out 25 more. And then the next class period, we had to write 25 more. And that went on for three weeks. And then he said, just go home and see who can write the most. And I think in our class, we had somebody who came up with over 600 observations on that one verse. Most people just barely scratched the surface.

Slide 25

In Isaiah 46:9, God says, “Remember the things I have done in the past”. That tells us that history is important. Remember what God has done in the past, “for I alone am God! I am God, and there is none like Me.” Now that really relates to what we call holiness, that God is one of a kind, He is unique or distinct. That’s what holy means, something that is set apart, something that is unique or distinct.

I grew up hearing people who’d say, okay, righteousness and justice combined is holiness. That’s not what either the Hebrew word or Greek word means. It means to be set apart. It says that the temple prostitutes were holy. Wait a minute, that’s immoral. That’s right the morality and righteousness and justice are not inherent to the meanings of the words for holiness. It means to be set apart. God is set apart and when we are sanctified, we’re being set apart to His service.

Slide 26

What we learned so far is that God is the Creator of everything and nothing was made apart from God creating it. Nothing just happened by chance. God didn’t create something and let it kind of morph into something else or there wasn’t something already existing that God used to morph into something else. That’s what people claim the pagan gods did.

Second thing we learned is that God is different from His Creation. He did not make it out of His own body, or out of something else. He created it out of nothing. Third, we learn that God must be all-powerful. The God who creates everything out of nothing must be all-powerful, for with Him nothing is impossible.

Slide 27

The fourth thing that we’re focusing on next is the unique design of mankind and this is what makes us different. This fourth category is that we are uniquely designed by God. God designed us absolutely perfectly. The passage is Genesis 1:26–27. If you have kids, get them a children’s Bible so they can read those verses out loud. They need to get used to seeing the verses in the Bible and it helps for them to read them out loud.

Slide 28

“Then God said, ‘Let us make human beings in our image to be like us.’ ” That’s the key phrase. Now the plurals there, “let US make man in OUR image to be like US,” indicates the Trinity. It doesn’t overtly state it, but it conforms to the idea that God exists as three Persons with one essence.

He says we’re going to make man in our image to be like us. An image is a reflection of something. We are finite reflections, limited representations, representatives of God. That’s what human beings are. That’s what makes us different.

Slide 29

The angels were not that way. The angels were not created in the image and likeness of God. No other creature is said to be in the image and likeness of God. And then in Genesis 1:27 we read, “So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God ...” How many times has it said in the image of God? In Genesis 1:26, “Let us make man in our image.” Genesis 1:27, “In the image of God, He created them.” God created human beings in His own image. Number two, in the image of God, He created them.

Number three is that He created them male and female. Now, this is really interesting. Most people don’t probe this nearly enough because what this is telling us is that in God’s intentional, purposeful way, He has thought through, to use it anthropomorphically, He has thought through what this creature is supposed to be like.

Why did He have to think it through? Of course, we know in His omniscience He always knew everything and He didn’t learn anything, but just in terms of our humanity, because God knew, knowing all things, knowing about sin coming, and knowing about the crucifixion coming, and knowing that He will be the One who will have to pay the penalty for our sins, He’s going to create a body that can be the best possible body for Him to incarnate Himself as, to reveal who He is.

He didn’t use a body like a Klingon. He didn’t use a body like a Romulan. He didn’t use a body like a Wookiee. He used a body that He created for human beings. The psalmist says a body, and it’s in the words of the Messiah, Jesus said in eternity past, “A body You have prepared for Me.”

The way we are built isn’t some accidental afterthought. It wasn’t the result of something happening by chance. God made us with this kind of body. But it’s more than just the physical. He designed every detail in human beings. He designed our ability to hear. And He constructed all those nerves that go into our brain so that by hearing language, we can have our brains formatted to be able to learn and then to speak.

There have been very few opportunities for people to ever study someone who has never heard a language. It’s very difficult. They can’t learn to pronounce words. The first person we see speak in Scripture is who? God. God is formatting with vocabulary, which we’ll look at in just a minute. He called the light day and the dark night.

God is beginning the language and He’s formatting things for Adam. Then He’s going to turn it over to Adam and say, you know, you go ahead and have fun with it. Come up with new words and name the animals. That’s what happened.

God is creating them and He’s created them male and female. And we know from studies of science that maleness and femaleness do not simply relate to sexuality. It doesn’t just relate to the physiological reproductive systems. There are hundreds of differences between men and women that have nothing to do with reproduction. You have everything from hormones and hearing. Women hear with four parts of their brain and men hear with one.

Women see a more distinct and broader color bands than men do, generally speaking. There are lots of different things that are going on. The way that a woman’s brain works is different from the way a male brain works, because God designed them because they had different purposes and He had a different intention for men and women.

The idea that we can come along and wake up one day and say, I’m going to be a girl when they’re biologically a boy is absurd. They can’t do that. You can’t take them into the operating room and turn them from one to the other. I mean, you look at some of these men who’ve gone through the whole operation, the whole change, that say they identify as a woman.

Take Bruce Jenner, for example. He acts, moves, talks, thinks like a man. He doesn’t think, act, talk, and move like any woman I’ve ever seen. And whenever you see somebody who’s a transgender, you can identify the fact that they’re not a real woman. But we have a world today that thinks that they can negate this whole issue that God created them only male and female.

They don’t seem to understand that there is a male brain and there’s a female brain, and a male soul and a female soul that God designed. We hear people say all the time that things seem really messed up. That’s because of what happens in Genesis 3. We have to start with God who says what normal is in Genesis 1 and 2.

When we put that chart up earlier, the timeline, there’s a line that occurs after Creation. There’s a line that occurs just before the end of time. That line shows that there’s two chapters in Genesis 1 and 2 where there’s no sin. And in Revelation 21 and 22, there’s no sin. What’s between Genesis 3:1 until the end of Revelation 20 is abnormal. Everything we experience in life now is abnormal and subnormal, or abnormal like the young Frankenstein.

We’ve got man. God creates man in two sexes, male and female. He designs them to be what they are physically and what they are in terms of their immaterial nature. Their bodily chemistry is different. Many things are different.

Slide 30

What we see is that God’s created man in His image. That drives us to think a little bit more about who God is so that we can understand who it is that we’re in the image of. Let’s go back to our Creator-creature distinction chart here. What we see at the Creator level is that Yahweh Elohim in the Bible is infinite. He is without beginning or end. He has no limitations. He has no boundaries.

The fact He is infinite, which applies to all aspects of His being. On the other hand, we are finite. We are absolutely finite. There are limitations in many, many different ways. We’re limited spatially. We’re limited in time. We’re limited in every one of our characteristics.

God is all loving. God is love, the Scripture says. He is love. Every aspect of His being, every other aspect of His, or attribute of His character, is characterized by love. God is omniscient. But He’s lovingly omniscient. God is omnipotent, but He exercises His power in love. God is righteous, and that is a loving righteousness. It’s also a righteous love, so that all these come together in complex ways.

God is all-knowing. He knows everything there is to know. God never learns anything. God is never surprised by any of your silliness, stupidity, or any of your sins. You know, I often say that when we confess our sins, people feel bad because they did something that shocked them or shocked their family.

Now they’re in remorse so they tell God they’ll never do it again. God must say, well, you know, don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes. I know you’re going to do it 26,732 more times. And that’s just this year!

We try to act like we’ve surprised God and done something that He didn’t know and or that He didn’t pay for on the Cross. Oops! God forgot that one. Sorry, it’s not paid for. No, God’s all-knowing. He never increases knowledge or decreases knowledge. He has infinite knowledge. He knows everything that could be, should be, might be, could have been, in all of its infinite extrapolations. He’s all-powerful. He can do whatever He desires to do.

Does He do silly things like make a square a triangle? The person who asks that question is irrational. God can do whatever He wants to do. Remember, He’s the One who created the laws that determine squares and triangles. That’s the Creator-creature distinction. We think squares, triangles, and circles are absolutes, but God created them. You’ve got to maintain that Creator-creature distinction. 

Man is a reflection of God, so he’s not infinite, man is finite. His love is limited. His knowledge is incomplete, it’s imperfect. He has to learn things, and then he forgets things. I know nobody here ever forgets anything, but we forget things. And our understanding is always imperfect. We have certain abilities, but they’re limited. We’re finite. We can’t do everything that we want to do. If we could, we would eat a lot of chocolate cake and ice cream and we would lose weight, but we know that won’t happen.

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On the other hand, God is righteous. That means He is the absolute standard for what is right and wrong. Man has a conscience, which is where we store God’s standards, the norms and standards, So that if our conscience is connected to the Scripture, then we have an anchor and we know what the absolute right and wrong things are. If not, then that’s what’s in the right panel on our chart. Our conscience is just tossed to and fro by every wind that comes along.

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Finite man can understand truth, but it’s finite. And then when he runs out of truth, he just makes things up. That’s called fantasy, psychosis, or neurosis. But God is infinite truth. Truth never runs out.

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Psalm 119:160 says “The very essence of your words is truth. All your just regulations will stand forever.”

God never thought anything that wasn’t true. That’s our standard.

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Numbers 23:19 says, “God is not a man, so he does not lie.” He’s not human, so He does not change his mind. “Has he ever spoken and failed to act?” And it assumes the answer is no. “Has he ever promised and not carried it through?” No, because God is always true.

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A couple of other charts that I use to communicate this Creator-creature distinction is that God is a personal infinite Creator God up here on the top. Then there’s a hard boundary. And below we have a finite universe. We have finite human beings, finite animals, finite vegetation, matter and energy. Those are all finite and we’re totally distinct from God.

Paganism says that the universe is infinite and impersonal, and that’s described by this white line here [around the circle] and that God, man, and nature are all encompassed within this universe. So that you hear people say things like, the universe must not want me to get a job. And my response is, I didn’t know the universe could think. The universe must not be pleased with these actions. We hear that a lot.

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This goes back to an ancient thing called the chain of being. There are lessons on that for a more advanced study on the website.

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In the essence of God, we learn that He’s the sovereign Creator. He’s holy and infinite. He’s holy or unique in His sovereignty. And He’s unique as Creator.

In His abilities to create, He has infinite abilities. So holy and infinite apply to every one of those other attributes. He’s omnipresent, which means He’s present to every particle of His universe at the same time. He is infinite, and because He is present to every aspect of His universe, He is unique in that, so He’s holy. He’s omniscient, He’s all-knowing. He is omnipotent, He’s all-powerful, and in both of those, it’s infinite knowledge, infinite power, infinite presence, And He’s unique in each one of those attributes.

In terms of time, He knows no time. He is infinite with respect to time. He is eternal. His love is all loving. He’s righteous in an absolutely perfect way. He does nothing that is wrong. And people point out how bad things are in the world. Look at the Holocaust, they say. Look at the suffering of people. Look at the famine.

That’s all the result of human bad decisions on the part of man and sin. God did not create things that way. There was no sin until Adam sinned. And everything that we see that is wrong is the result of wrong decisions made by human beings. And God allows or permits men to see the consequences of their bad decisions.

People ask why God doesn’t stop it. God will stop it one day and the instant He stops it, nobody’s going to have a chance to be saved anymore. We don’t necessarily want God to stop it right now. We want people to come to understand salvation, come to understand the gospel so that they can be saved.

God allows sin. He also restricts it. There are many things that could have happened much, much worse than what we see. Scripture says that there is a restrainer of evil right now. That’s the Holy Spirit. He restrains evil. So that Hitler was not as bad as he could have been if God weren’t restraining him. Putin is not as evil as he could be because God is restraining him.

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We have this Creator-creature distinction.

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What we’ve learned is, number one, that God is the Creator. He owns everything because He made everything. Second, we’re made like God, but a smaller and more limited reflection of God and now we’re corrupted because of sin.

Third, we have seen God’s attributes. He’s all loving. He’s all powerful. He’s present everywhere. He’s perfectly righteous. That’s who God is. That defines God. Number four, all of God’s attributes are without boundaries. He’s infinite in every way.

Fifth, there’s nothing like God. We can’t compare Him to anything and have an adequate analogy, because whatever we’re comparing Him to is limited and finite and corruptible and God isn’t. That’s one reason it’s so hard to understand the Trinity.

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That brings us to what we’re going to get to next time, which is the Divine Institutions. The review won’t be quite as in-depth, but I wanted to do that, needed to do that tonight, to get my head back into this after being gone for almost a month. Also, we have some visitors tonight.

We’ll come back next time, and we’ll start with part three of Lesson one and we’ll get into the Divine Institutions.

Closing Prayer

“Father, we thank You for this opportunity to think about You as the Creator, to think about us as being created specifically, intentionally, purposefully in Your image and likeness for a distinct reason.

“Even though we are fallen, You have provided a solution for us to recover from that sin so that we might have everlasting life. One day we will be elevated to that position You intended originally, that we would be above the angels.

“Father, we pray that someday we might come to really understand the significance of the last five sentences I’ve uttered, because this is hard for people to comprehend. We have a purpose, a meaning in life, which goes beyond anything that we have ever thought or imagined. And You have made it possible through what Christ did on the Cross. Father, we pray for the parents and the grandparents and the teachers that are here and those listening that this will give them a greater vision on how and why they’re putting their lessons together so that they can build a framework of biblical thought within their children and their students. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”