God is Knowable Jeremiah 31:31–34 INTRODUCTION No one greater than God could ever occupy our thoughts. Contemplate Him long enough and you will be humbled. Investigate him and your mind will be enlarged. Meditate on him and your soul will be nourished. Dwell on Him and you will find comfort in the midst of any trial. When you begin to study the attributes of God, you realize that he is the most perfect being conceivable. His attributes are in fact perfections. He is not simply holy, but perfect in holiness. He is not merely love, but perfect in love. He is not simply wise, but perfect in wisdom. He alone is the most perfect being imaginable. Jeremiah the prophet once said, “There is none like you, O Lord” (Jeremiah 10:6). Or consider what David wrote in Psalm 145:3, “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable.” How often do you think about God? And I mean more than a passing thought, but rather a lingering upon what you know to be true of Him. What comes to your mind when you think about God? Perhaps, you think of Him seldom. Perhaps you think of Him seldom because you have little knowledge of Him. But I believe that knowing God, and thinking rightly about Him, is at the very center of our identity. Failure to know God, and study God, has a real consequence. Listen to how the theologian David Wells puts it: “It is one of the defining marks of our time that God is now weightless….He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable….Those who assure the pollsters of their belief in God’s existence may nonetheless consider him less interesting than television, his commands less authoritative than their appetites for affluence and influence, his judgment no more awe- inspiring than the evening news, and his truth less compelling than the advertisers’ sweet fog of flattery and lies. That is weightlessness. It is a condition we have assigned him after having nudged him out to the periphery of our secularized life.… Weightlessness tells us nothing about God but everything about ourselves, about our condition, about our psychological disposition to exclude God from our reality.” (God in the Wasteland, 88-90) Everyone is a theologian We desperately need to devote ourselves to a lifetime of study - the study of who God is. You’ve heard me say this before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again and again. Everyone is a theologian. I’m a theologian. You’re a theologian. Your neighbor who sleeps in most Sundays is a theologian. Even the atheist who can’t stand Christians is a theologian. Not matter what you think, thoughts about God are inescapable. Everyone has some conception of who God is - good or bad. Everyone has opinions about who God is. The question is, “Are your thoughts and opinions about God correct or incorrect? Are you a good theologian or are you a bad theologian?” I plan to take the next 12 weeks (with a few breaks in between) to study with you the attributes of God. Attributes such as His holiness, his love, his power. And my hope is that this series of messages will whet your appetite for a lifetime of study concerning who God is. And understand this, there is a danger that one might make knowledge as an end unto itself. We should not come wanting nothing more than to “know the answers.” That will only lead us to a place of arrogance and cold understanding. Instead, we should pursue the knowledge of God in order that we might respond with our hearts, and that our lives would be conformed to what we observe. It’s possible some of you don’t feel the need to study his attributes. So let me tell you who this study is for: • The person who is ignorant of God’s character. That’s not meant to be a put down of sorts, but my guess is that some in here simply not capable of articulating the attributes of God. And therefore, you are not able to meditate on them. • The person whose love for God has grown cold. There is certainly a place in the Christian life for feelings and experience. But our affections can only be proper when they are built upon objective truth. And so if you find yourself in a place of where your love for God seems to have dwindled, the answer is not necessarily a mountain top experience. You need to give yourself to the study of his attributes. • The person who has yet to learn everything there is to know about God. Well, I guess that makes all of us, doesn’t it? Thinking About God from the Top Down So how do we get started? I want this morning to serve as a bit of an introduction. And it’s important we lay some groundwork because we don’t simply want to attain knowledge about God, we want to then turn it into knowledge of God. And what I mean by that is this: We should strive to turn each attribute of God into a matter of meditation before God. So that our understanding of who He is drives us to our knees in prayer, and opening our mouths in praise. We want to contemplate his greatness, so that we might experience the depths of his riches. That’s only going to happen if we learn to think from the top down, and not bottom up. Here’s what I mean by that. We all of have a tendency to think about God from the bottom up. We work from our experience to who God is. For example, love is a common emotion. And after all God is love. And we easily begin to define God’s love according to our own experience. But if we aren’t careful we end up creating a God according of our own limitations. You see, God is the measure of all things. There is no entity called “loved” floating in the cosmos that is the measurement of God. Instead, love is to be understood in light of who God himself is. We need to work our way from the top down. We need to let God himself become the definition of what love, grace, mercy, and judgment is. And if we can do that, we just might be surprised as to what we will discover. It will change the way we speak about God Several months ago we were reading from 2 Peter at the breakfast table. And something struck me in the first chapter that I had never noticed before. Peter is talking about the transfiguration of Jesus. It was an experience like no other. Jesus took his inner circle of disciples, which included Peter along with James and John up to a mountain. And while praying, His appearance transformed in a glorified form. His face shone like the sun. His clothes became white as light. His true identity couldn’t have been more displayed. What’s more, God the Father spoke from heaven saying, “This is my beloved, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” And as Peter is recalling this, here’s what I noticed this time. He refers to God the Father as “the Majestic Glory.” The Majestic Glory. Peter, hearing the voice of God could find no other way to describe his presence, his transcendence, his weightiness - than to call him the Majestic Glory. Now, here’s what that made me realize: not only is it important how we think about God, but how we speak about God. It is all too common for us to speak casually about God, as if he is one of us. And while we can have an intimate relationship with God, He is wholly other. He is not like us. True, God is near to us and involved in our lives. But yet He is set apart from us in fundamental ways. “There is no one holy like the Lord” (1 Samuel 2:2). And this is the God we want to know. God is Incomprehensible, Yet Knowable If I say, “God is knowable,” that statement is best understood in light of the fact that God is incomprehensible. What do I mean by that? Well, let me read you a few passages. • Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable (Psalm 145:3). • Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways, and how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand? (Job 26:14). • For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8–9). • Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” (Romans 11:33–34). You will never know everything there is to know about God. Nor can we know everything about even one aspect of God’s character. Every attribute, whether it be his holiness, his power, or his wisdom - is beyond your ability to fully comprehend. Now, why is this the case? Well, first off you and I are finite beings.