Beloved,
This Sunday will mark the twenty-sixth message in our AM sermon series on knowing God. What a joy it has been to fix the eyes of our hearts upon the glory of God, attempted to grasp something of who He has revealed Himself to be. As we were discussing forthcoming sermon series last night in our session meeting, it was brought to my attention that in a longer topical series such as this, it can be hard to keep the big picture before us, remembering where we have been and understanding where we are going. So I thought I would take today’s email to briefly flesh that out.
We began with 4 introductory sermons grappling with how the knowledge of God is the lifeblood of biblical spirituality. We then wrestled with how sinful creatures like us can know God in the next 5 sermons, looking at God’s incomprehensibility, His revelation in creation, Scripture, and the incarnate Christ, and His work of illuminating our minds to the knowledge of Himself through His word. We then turned to look at the identity of God as He reveals Himself in Scripture, beginning with His holiness, spirituality, singularity, and simplicity, and then taking 4 weeks to examine what it means for God to be a trinity (including unpacking the eternal relations of origin within the Godhead: the Father unbegotten, the Son begotten of the Father, and the Spirit spirating from the Father and the Son). After that, we looked at God’s infinity, eternity, immutability, omnipresence, omniscience, omnisapience, omnipotence, and sovereignty.
The illustration is imperfect but what I imagine myself doing throughout this series is progressively painting a portrait of who God has revealed Himself to be. In each sermon I am adding another color to the canvas with the goal of all of these sermons coming together to create a beautiful (though woefully inadequate!) panorama of God’s multifaceted glory in its application to our souls and lives.
With twenty-five sermons down, we have ten more to go, and this week begins a fundamental shift as we start to examine what are sometimes classified as God’s ethical attributes. Though the language is wanting in many ways, we could say in a broad sense that what we have been looking at over the past twenty weeks is the greatness of God and what we will be looking at over the next ten weeks is the goodness of God. Here is a sketch of where I plan to take us:
26. Our Good God
27. Our Loving God
28. Our Gracious God
29. Our Merciful God
30. Our Patient God
31. Our Faithful God
32. Our Just God
33. Our Jealous God
34. Our Angry God
35. Our Blessed God
As we near the end of this series, let us be continually praying that through these sermons we might “increase in the knowledge of God” (Col. 1:10). For is this not eternal life (Jn. 17:3)? Is this not at the heart of the blessedness of the new covenant in Christ’s blood (Jer. 31:34)? Is this not to be our chief boast and joy (Jer. 9:23-24; Ps. 43:4)?
Oh friends, can you think of anything more glorious than knowing and being satisfied in our Triune God?
Yours in Him,
Pastor Nick
