The Doctrine of God

 

     We could spend lifetimes upon lifetimes uncovering the great truths about God.  In fact, mankind has.  Theologians, pastors, and others have explored the glories of heaven, the magnificent creation around us, the words of the Bible, and the matters of the human mind and heart seeking to uncover and understand who God is and how He works.  My purpose is not to seek to totally explain all there is to know about God because that is humanly impossible.  However, I want to highlight just a few attributes of God I believe Christians and non-Christians misunderstand and/or misapply to our lives and the lives of others.

     I am obviously starting out with a few presuppositions.  First, I believe God exists (only a fool says He doesn’t – Psalm 14:1).  Second, I believe God is knowable and has made Himself known through creation, human conscience, Scripture, and – most importantly – through the person of Jesus Christ (general & special revelation).  Finally, I believe there are attributes of God that He has allowed us to only see a peak of this side of eternity so we must be cautious to not go beyond Scripture’s testimony.  Time and space does not allow me to seek to explain all of these, but they are all validated by the Word of God – which makes the previous post on the doctrine of the Word so important.

 

1. God is Creator

     The first twelve chapters of Genesis are likely the most debated of the entire Bible.  Of these twelve, chapters one through three are not only debated, but denied by most outside the church and some inside. I would submit the following: If a person does not believe in Genesis 1-3, the rest of the Bible is foolishness and can be rejected.  Each book of Bible is important, but the first three chapters of Genesis are so critical to its theological structure, development, and understanding that denying them denies the whole collection.

 

    I want to demonstrate this by asking a series of questions:
·         Why is murder wrong if we are not created in the image of God? (Gen. 1:26-27)
·         Why should we care about protecting creation if there is no creator? (Gen. 1)
·         What does marriage look like with no Adam & Eve? (Gen. 1-3)
·         How do we explain pain and suffering apart from the fall? (Gen. 3)
·         How can we have any hope without a God who wants a relationship with man? (Gen. 2)
·         How can we say all humans are created equal if we do not have a common ancestry? (Gen. 1:28)
·         How can evil be explained without the perfection of creation being ruined by sin? (Gen. 1-3)

 

     Denying Genesis 1-3 leaves us with more questions and few answers.  We must believe in the testimony that is given in these chapters that God is the creator of everything.  It is He who has no beginning and from Him all things were created out of nothing (ex nihilo). Darwin and theistic evolution theory deny this truth and must be rejected as false.

 

2. God is Holy

     Timothy George says, “Holiness so defines the character of God that it can be said to include all of the other divine moral perfections as well.”  The holiness of God is why Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden.  The flood was caused by people neglecting the holiness of God.  Every covenant in the Bible references the holiness of God.  The Mosaic Law was designed as a holiness code to show all men that no one can live a holy life apart from God.  In the book of Revelation, the group around the throne of God does not cry out “love, love, love” or “grace, grace, grace,” but “HOLY, HOLY, HOLY is the Lord God almighty”.

     However, the God’s holiness appears to be the most hated and despised attribute of God.  Why?  Because if God is holy and we are not, then we are doomed.  Again Georges states, “We cannot grasp the holiness of God without at the same time recognizing our own unworthiness and sinfulness before such a God.”  Our sin in the light of God’s holiness should cause all of us to repeat the words of Isaiah: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.”  If God’s holiness is rejected, His love, wrath, mercy, and grace are misunderstood.  If holiness is rejected, everyone goes to heaven and hell is neither necessary nor exists.  Everyone becomes a universalist.  God’s holiness makes the cross of Christ all the more glorious and amazing – a holy God providing forgiveness to the unholy by Jesus taking on Himself my sin and your sin by dying a gruesome death and becoming a propitiation for all those who will put their faith in Him.

 

3. God is Love

  Dale Moody declared, “As holiness is the starting point, so love is the high point in the biblical unfolding of the nature of God.”  First John 4:8 simply states, “God is love.” But these three words carry with them an immensely important statement about God.  The entirety of Scripture is often described as a 66 book “love letter.” 

     Wayne Grudem summarizes God’s attribute of love by saying, “God’s love means that God eternally gives of himself to others” (199).  We see God’s love from the start of creation.  The very fact that the eternal God would create anything or anyone to share existence with is astonishing. Out of His love, God created the world and humankind to experience in His glory. Not only did He create man, but then entered into a relationship with him in the Garden of Eden.  Then, even after the fall, God forms covenants of love with Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and the sinful world.  Finally, the ultimate act of love was witnessed with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  All of these point to a God who gives of himself for the benefit of His creation – especially mankind.

   Verse after verse repeatedly illustrates Jesus’ death was an act of love:

John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

Romans 5:8 – “God showed his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.”

1 John 4:10 – “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

Galatians 2:20 – “the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

  

4. God is Just/Right

     Righteousness and Justice must be handled as one unit because they exist as one idea in both Hebrew and Greek.  Grudem says, “God’s righteousness means that God always acts in accordance with what is right and is himself the final standard of what is right” (204). Therefore, there is God has the ability to define what is good and evil.  Man can either accept or reject God’s standards, but we do not have the ability to change or alter what God has defined.

   Some verses that testify to God’s justice/righteousness are:

 
Deutronomy 32:4 – “All his ways are just.  A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and right is he.”
 

Psalm 19:8 – “The percepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.”

 

1 Corinthians 1:30 – “And because of God you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption.”

 

Isaiah 45:19 – “I the Lord speak the truth, I declare what is right.”

 

Problems & Unity

     Problems arise when we try to separate these attributes from each other.  In doing so, we distort the nature of God and misrepresent Him to the world.  If God is not creator, then how can He be loving?  If God is not just, then how can He be holy?  If we focus on only God being just, we make Him a cruel being.  If we focus on God only being love, we make Him a softy or a pushover.

     The attributes of God are unified – meaning every attribute of God qualifies, exists, and functions with every other.  We cannot separate love from justice or holiness from jealous, but they are all part of His whole being.  When we comprehend the unity of God within Himself and His attributes, then we can move on to understanding human nature and sin.  We must be careful not to work backwards from man to God because then He looks a lot like us.

The Doctrine of the Holy Scripture

The immovable foundation on which we build the magnificent and mighty house of theology is the doctrine of the Holy Scriptures. These Holy Scriptures are limited to the Old and New Testament as commonly found in most English translations (ie. ESV, KJV, NIV, etc). If we incorrectly understand the doctrine of relevation concerning the Bible, we will incorrectly read, interpret, and apply all of the Scriptures in our lives. Due to this being a blog, and not a book, I want to discuss four main areas concerning the doctrine of the Word: inspiration, infallibility, inerrancy, and interpretation.

 

1. In defining inspiration, I am speaking of verbal plenary inspiration. Let me break this down. First, verbal inspiration means that God is the divine author of the Bible. He inspired men and women to write the books, paragraphs, and very words of the Bible in the form they were recorded in the original languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek). He did not dictate (unless indicated in the text), thus the human writer’s personality was not violated in any way. Therefore, when we read the Bible, we are reading the very words of God. As Millard Erickson writes, “Each word is the exact word God wants used at that point.” Second, plenary inspiration means the entire Bible, both Old and New Testaments, are equally inspired. I do not deny there is a range of importance concerning the Scripture. However, as Paul writes, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16-17). Seeing the verbal plenary inspiration of Scripture will greatly affect how we interpret and apply it to our contemporary lives.
(Concerning inspiration also see Deuteronomy 18:18, 2 Samuel 23:2, Isaiah 59:21, Acts 4:24-25, 2 Peter 1:20-21)

 

2. Because God is the divine author of the Bible, it is also infallible. When speaking of infallibility, I am stating the Scripture never fails in its testimony or its results because its author is never failing and truthful. It provides all of mankind with the truths needed to receive salvation, live holy lives devoted to God, and teach us about other aspects of our world. Therefore, it covers both faith, conduct (practice), and all other areas that it states truth– including creation, worldwide flood, etc.

 

3. Along the same lines, inerrant signifies the Bible is free from all mistakes or falsehoods in its original manuscripts. Therefore, we can be assured of its trustworthiness. The Bible addresses many issues: biology, nature, sociology, spirituality, etc. However, it does not teach us how to add or subtract or how to fix our cars. In the issues that it addresses, the Bible is without error. This will become very important in discussing modern objections to the Bible concerning issues such as evolution, psychology, and ethics to name a few. The Word of God is never misleading, but is always reliable. We cannot say this about any other book! Affirming inerrancy does not deny that some translations of the original manuscripts can contain errors. So they are only inerrant as far as they faithfully translate and rest upon an orthodox foundation of the originals (of which there are over 5,000 copies).

(Concerning infallibility & inerrancy see 2 Samuel 7:28, Proverbs 30:5, Matthew 24:35, John 17:17, Hebrews 6:18, The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy)

 

4. Based on the first three areas, we now come to interpretation. The Bible is meaningless if we do not interpret and apply it to our lives. Therefore, realizing the inspiration, infallibility, and inerrancy of Scripture, the only viable interpreting option to affirm these three truths concerning God's Word is historical grammatical interpretation. The main issue in interpretation is: Who has the right to determine the meaning of a text?  The grammatical interpretation of Scripture holds that the words as the author wrote them down and their structure in sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books, genre, and location in the cannon contains the meaning of the text.  Therefore, the study of the original languages is paramount in interpretation.  We have many faithful English translations, but as the saying goes, there are some things that are lost in translation.  The only way to recover this is to faithfully study or rely on other’s faithful research of the original languages.  Also the historical setting determines what the author meant when he or she wrote it.  The meaning of words has changed over the years. For example, the word “apple” a hundred years ago would be describing a fruit.  Today, it could be describing a fruit or a computer.  Therefore, to correctly interpret Scripture, we must investigate the historical setting of the text to determine what those hearing or reading the text (the first audience) would have understood the writer to be saying.  The meaning of a text cannot mean something that the first audience would not have understood.  I affirm that a text can have many different applications, but can only one meaning.  Therefore, no one has the right to say, “This text means this for me, but means this for you so both of our interpretations are correct.” You and I do not have the ability to determine the meaning; God has already determined it in the grammar and historical setting of the text as He inspired the human writer.  Roy Zuck offers a one sentence summary, “The better we understand the grammar of Scripture and the historical setting in which those sentences were first communicated, the better we can understand the truths God intended to convey to us.”  (As a side note, my philosophy of preaching is best described by John Piper as “expository exultation” because it is most faithful to historical grammatical interpretation.)

 

If you and I perceive the Bible as anything other than inspired, infallible, and inerrant, our resulting interpretation and understanding about all other areas of theology will be wrong (at best) or blaspheming (at worst). Furthermore, denying these truths leaves the entire Bible void of any authority to tell us about God or ourselves. Therefore, we have no source of meaning because the Bible then becomes a book of novel stories written by imaginative men and women. Salvation means nothing. All hope is lost. We are left with nothing. We may have differing views concerning election, church government, and end times. But if we do not agree on the inspiration, infallibility, and inerrancy of the Bible, we are at odds with the Bible’s own testimony about itself, and we will totally abolish any chance at grasping the great truths of God, interpreting them correctly, and applying them to our contemporary lives.

 

The authority of the Bible upon our lives and the lives of all people testifies that disbelieving or disobeying any word of Scripture is disbelieving or disobeying the holy God – its Author. And disbelieving or disobeying a righteous God has grave consequences.

 

Pause and let this sink in.

 

 

[For more study see: Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem (chapters 2-8); 40 Questions about Interpreting the Bible by Robert L. Plummer, A Theology for the Church ed. by Daniel Akin (chapter 3), Basic Bible Interpretation by Roy B. Zuck, Hermeneutics by Virkler & Ayayo, and The Chicago Statement on Inerrancy at this link http://www.bible-researcher.com/chicago1.html]

What is "Biblically Speaking..."?

Simply put, Biblically Speaking is blog about viewing the world/culture/our lives with a biblical worldview. For the Christian, I hope it will help you think more biblically about your own actions and the events taking place in our culture - conforming us more into the image of Jesus. For the non-Christian, I hope it will point you to your need for salvation and illustrate that Jesus is the answer to everyone's sin problem. I pray it allows all of us to understand what it means to see the world through the eyes of Scripture.

The first several posts will briefly (and I emphasis briefly) take us through a few "Foundations of a Biblical Worldview." These will cover the areas of the Bible, God, mankind, Jesus, and salvation. A sort of condensed version of a systematic theology class, if you will. (If anyone would like to investigate theology more in depth please buy a good Christian theology book like "Systematic Theology" by Wayne Grudem or "A Theology for the Church" edited by Daniel Akin.)

Next, given what we see in Scripture, we will begin examining our own lives and the things around us in media, current events, government, etc. through the lenses of what the Bible says. One week we may cover a news topic. The next we my look at a hot button issue in our culture. Then we may take a popular song or movie to see what is glorifying or detrimental to the worship of God. The discussion may make you mad or happy. You may not like what I say, but I want to be honest and faithful to rightly divide the holy Word of God.

So what areas or topics would you like to discuss? What questions do you have about God or the Bible? Leave them in the comments sections and I will try my best to address them.

Thank you for your interest. Think, enjoy, and be encouraged!!