3ABN Homecoming

Three Angels Broadcasting Network

Program transcript

Participants:

Home

Series Code: HC

Program Code: HC180013A


00:24 Welcome to 3ABN's Fall Camp Meeting,
00:27 Homecoming, 2018.
00:33 Featuring inspired messages from your 3ABN family.
00:41 And featured speaker Ty Gibson,
00:44 all to prepare your heart for the coming of the Lord
00:49 Hello, friends, and welcome to
00:50 3ABN's Fall Camp Meeting, 2018.
00:54 We've been having a blessed time.
00:55 Can we all say amen to that? Amen!
00:57 If you missed the last program with Miss Brenda
00:59 and these tremendously blessed gifted children,
01:04 then we pray that we'll play back again
01:06 maybe in the second round
01:07 or however the Lord decides to put that in our lineup.
01:09 But now, Pastor Ty Gibson is going to come out
01:13 and he's been talking about the covenant God,
01:16 the messages about the covenant.
01:19 How Jesus became the covenant son.
01:21 And this is about the transcendency,
01:25 the transcendency of the Christ of the covenant.
01:28 And if you've been listening,
01:29 he's not only been teaching but preaching also.
01:31 And I know your life has been transformed
01:33 to hear a message that has never lost his power
01:35 in a new and wonderful way.
01:37 Pastor Ty Gibson is going to have his prayer.
01:39 But before he comes,
01:40 Tim Parton is going to bless us.
01:42 And I know that you've been blessed
01:44 by his ministry of music.
01:45 Let us turn our hearts
01:47 as the Lord lifts us heavenward through music.
01:49 Amen.
01:51 Been so blessed by the preaching of the Word,
01:54 reminding us the love that God has for us
01:58 in this great plan that He amazingly
02:03 put together in eternity past
02:08 and thinking of each one of us.
02:11 He reminds me of this chorus.
02:13 And if you know it, please sing along
02:16 I'm forgiven
02:19 Because You were forsaken
02:24 I'm accepted
02:27 You were condemned
02:32 I am alive and well
02:35 Your spirit lives within me
02:39 Because You died and rose again
02:44 Sing that again, I'm forgiven.
02:47 I'm forgiven
02:50 Because You were forsaken
02:55 I'm accepted
02:58 You were condemned
03:02 I am alive and well Your spirit is within me
03:09 Because You died and rose again
03:14 That's amazing love so sing it out.
03:17 Amazing love, how can it be?
03:24 That You, my King would die for me?
03:31 Amazing love, I know it's true
03:38 And it's my joy to honor You
03:44 In all I do, I honor You
03:49 Sing amazing love.
03:52 Amazing love, how can it be?
03:59 That You, my King would die for me?
04:06 Amazing love, I know it's true
04:13 And it's my joy to honor You
04:18 In all I do, I honor You
04:25 Sing this.
04:26 Jesus, You are my King
04:33 You are my King
04:34 You are
04:38 My King
04:39 Jesus You
04:40 Jesus, You are my King
04:47 Oh, Jesus, You are my King
04:53 Amazing love
04:56 Amazing love, how can it be?
05:03 That You, my King would die for me?
05:10 Amazing love, I know it's true
05:17 And it's my joy to honor You
05:22 In all I do, I honor You
05:29 In all I do
05:33 I honor You
05:49 Praise God.
05:50 Good afternoon, everybody.
05:52 Good afternoon. And happy Sabbath.
05:54 Happy Sabbath.
05:55 Do you like the happy Sabbath greeting?
05:57 Do you like hearing those words?
05:59 Yes.
06:00 Man, I love hearing the words, happy Sabbath.
06:03 But I don't know if you've noticed this,
06:05 I've noticed that when you say something
06:07 over and over again,
06:08 you can go into kind of intellectual neutral
06:12 and forget what it means.
06:13 You know, we say familiarity breeds contempt,
06:17 or at least forgetfulness
06:19 as to what something means, right?
06:21 So sometimes I like to change up my Sabbath greeting
06:25 in order to remember what it means.
06:27 So sometimes, instead of saying,
06:29 happy Sabbath,
06:31 I say happy salvation
06:32 by grace through faith in Christ alone day.
06:36 Now,
06:39 that's because the Sabbath means something.
06:42 The Sabbath means that we have a deep abiding rest
06:47 in Christ
06:48 for all that He has accomplished for us,
06:52 and that there's no merit at all in us to earn His love
06:56 because we already have it.
06:57 So happy salvation by grace
06:59 through faith in Christ alone day.
07:00 Now, try it on the person next to you.
07:02 Go, it's your turn.
07:11 Some of you aren't even trying.
07:15 One Sabbath I walked into the foyer of a church,
07:18 and I used my happy salvation by grace
07:21 through faith in Christ alone Sabbath greeting.
07:23 And this brother, I think he was the elder
07:25 said to me, he looked kind of baffled by it,
07:29 even perturbed.
07:30 He said, "Happy, you better keep the commandments
07:32 before Jesus comes day."
07:38 To which I responded...
07:43 To which I responded, "If you love Him,
07:46 you'll keep His commandments day."
07:50 To which he responded,
07:53 "Happy, the investigative judgment is underway
07:55 and the names of the living are coming up pretty soon.
07:58 So I suggest you get your act together day."
08:02 To which I responded,
08:03 "Happy, I've read Daniel 7 and 8
08:05 and judgment is in favor of the saints
08:07 of the most High God day."
08:11 And that was the end of it.
08:15 I guess, I won with the gospel.
08:17 All right, so this is going to be fun.
08:20 We're going to look into the Word of God.
08:23 But before we do that,
08:25 I want to pray because this message
08:27 is of high significance for me.
08:29 And I want to persuade you to see light, and beauty,
08:34 and truth in what we're about to explore.
08:36 So please pray with me.
08:37 Father, in heaven, You are truly good, Lord.
08:42 And everything we know about You so far
08:45 is beautiful.
08:47 We're deeply impressed with You,
08:49 so much so that we're attracted to You,
08:51 Lord, we're drawn to You.
08:53 We don't feel like slaves.
08:54 We don't feel compelled.
08:55 We don't feel coerced or forced,
08:57 we feel drawn to You
09:00 because of Your beauty.
09:02 And yet, Lord, we know there are things about You
09:04 that have escaped our notice.
09:09 There are things about You that if we could see them,
09:11 we would fall a little bit more deeply in love with You.
09:16 So please God open our hearts right now.
09:19 Help us to see things that we've never seen before,
09:23 in Jesus' name, amen.
09:26 I represent and work with a ministry
09:29 called Light Bearers.
09:30 And one of the things that ministry does
09:32 is we're engaged in running a discipleship school.
09:36 And what that means
09:38 is people from all over the world
09:40 twice a year come to live with us
09:43 in a dorm facility.
09:45 And we have a kitchen, and a classroom,
09:47 and they come from all over the world,
09:48 they live with us for three whole months.
09:51 The program is called Arise.
09:53 And we run it twice a year, once in the United States,
09:55 once in Australia.
09:57 Now, as the students come from all over,
10:00 it's our job to lead them through the story of scripture.
10:02 In fact, the curriculum
10:04 for the program is called The Story.
10:07 And we move from Genesis to Revelation
10:09 in three months trekking right along,
10:13 systematically moving through the Bible as a story,
10:16 as a narrative,
10:17 noting biblical doctrines and prophecies along the way
10:20 that fit in to the overarching narrative.
10:24 Now, we begin the course with some classes
10:27 that are extremely important
10:28 for setting the tone for the course.
10:33 And one of the first classes that we teach
10:35 is one that I have an opportunity
10:38 to teach to the students.
10:39 And so there they are, they've just come
10:41 from wherever they're from,
10:42 we're just getting to know each other.
10:43 They're brand new class,
10:45 and I lead them through a kind of thought experiment.
10:50 I draw a big circle on the board.
10:54 And I tell them, this circle represents the universe.
10:59 Energy, matter, space,
11:03 this is the entire universe, I tell them.
11:07 And then I asked them a question.
11:09 I say, "I want you to think about this.
11:10 Don't answer out loud right away.
11:12 But I say to the students, I want you to think about this.
11:15 This circle represents the universe.
11:16 Where is God?
11:20 Every year same results.
11:23 About half the students answer by saying,
11:26 "Well, God's outside the circle,
11:30 outside the universe.
11:31 He made it, therefore He's outside of it."
11:34 About half the students say,
11:36 "No, no, no, God's inside the circle."
11:40 Now, of course, if you think about it,
11:43 both answers are correct.
11:46 God is both inside and outside the universe,
11:51 inside and outside the circle.
11:52 Think about it like this. Think about it like this.
11:54 God is everywhere within the material universe,
11:58 and God is nowhere
12:01 in the material universe simultaneously.
12:04 Now, there are two words
12:05 that we used to describe these realities.
12:09 One word is omnipresence.
12:11 Omnipresence is the theological idea that God is present
12:16 everywhere within the universe.
12:19 This is David, for example, in Psalm 139,
12:22 "Where can I go from your presence?
12:24 If I ascend into the heavens lo, you are there,
12:26 if I descend to the depths of the sea, you are there."
12:29 Psalm 139.
12:31 I can't go anywhere to escape Your presence,
12:35 because You are omnipresent, You are all present,
12:37 You're everywhere simultaneously all the time.
12:39 Now within biblical theology,
12:42 this is to be distinguished from pantheism.
12:46 Pantheism is the idea that God is in all of creation.
12:52 Omnipresence is the idea that God is present
12:55 to all of creation.
12:58 God is present to, not present in.
13:01 He's not synonymous with the rock, the tree,
13:04 the river, the bird, the zebra.
13:08 So pantheism is a different idea.
13:10 Omnipresence is God is present everywhere.
13:12 And then the second word that we used to describe
13:15 the complimentary reality
13:20 is the word transcendence.
13:23 So we've said that God is present
13:27 in all the universe simultaneously
13:31 and not present in.
13:34 The word transcendence is a very, very powerful word.
13:38 To transcend according to the dictionary
13:41 means simply to be above and beyond,
13:44 to be independent of, to exceed, or to surpass,
13:49 or to be without equivalency to.
13:51 Now you would say all of that about God,
13:52 wouldn't you in relation to creation?
13:56 You would say that God is above and beyond creation?
13:58 Yes or no?
14:00 You'd say that God is independent of...
14:03 He's not dependent on it.
14:04 If all of creation ceased to exist,
14:06 God wouldn't cease to exist, would He?
14:08 So He's independent of energy, matter, space, right?
14:14 Does He exceed and surpass creation?
14:18 Yes, He does.
14:19 Would you say that God is without
14:22 equivalency to creation?
14:25 Well, of course, you would.
14:26 You're a Bible believing Christian,
14:28 you're not a pantheist.
14:30 You believe that God is present to, present in,
14:35 but you do not believe
14:36 God is synonymous with creation.
14:41 These are two separate things.
14:42 Now, this is how Job is contemplating it
14:46 in the midst of his suffering.
14:48 In Job 26, the first 13 verses,
14:52 Job is naming aspects of creation.
14:55 That is the material universe,
14:58 everything around us that we see,
15:00 and hear, and smell, and touch, all right.
15:03 God is contemplating.
15:04 I mean, Job is contemplating all of creation,
15:06 He names different parts of creation.
15:08 And then the last verse of Chapter 26 of Job's,
15:10 he says this profound thing.
15:12 He says, "Indeed these..."
15:14 That is all these parts of creation that I've named.
15:17 "Indeed these are the mere edges of His ways,
15:22 and how small a whisper we hear of Him."
15:30 What Job is saying is that God is of such majesty,
15:36 such enormity,
15:39 that whatever we know about God is just scratching the surface.
15:43 We're just around the edges.
15:45 This is by the way
15:47 how it can be true that in future glory,
15:51 eternity future, new heavens, new earth,
15:54 this is how we can be forever approaching to the heart,
15:58 and character, and mind of God,
16:00 and never exhaust the titanic reality of who He is.
16:06 You will never get bored for all of eternity
16:10 in your discoveries of who God is.
16:14 You will always be on the edge of your seat
16:17 with one big long continuum of ah-hah moments.
16:22 You will be literally blown away forever, non-stop,
16:27 and not get tired
16:29 as you approach the heart and mind of God.
16:34 Because whatever we know of God,
16:36 come short of the totality of God.
16:40 So think about it like this.
16:42 God made the material universe, we're good so far.
16:47 God made the material universe.
16:48 Therefore, God is not part of the material universe,
16:52 in nature, substance, or kind.
16:56 He made it, therefore He is not equivalent to it.
16:59 This is like you pull out your iPhone,
17:02 and you have evidence of the creative genius
17:07 of Steve Jobs' design,
17:10 but you don't expect to find Steve Jobs himself
17:12 in the iPhone.
17:14 There's evidence of the creativity
17:17 and the genius of the designer of the item,
17:21 but the item is not equivalent to the designer.
17:25 Are you tracking with me?
17:26 Okay, so if you were to ask God, if you could so,
17:29 God, what are You speaking of nature, the nature of God?
17:33 So God, what is Your nature?
17:35 I'm not talking about nature, in the sense of character.
17:39 If you were to say, "God, what are You made of?"
17:43 God would say,
17:44 "That's out of your intellectual orbit."
17:48 You're asking a question that is for big boy pants,
17:52 and you don't have any.
17:54 You are asking a question that you can't even begin.
17:57 I can't answer the question for you
17:59 because you're a made thing, and I'm an unmade thing.
18:04 So if I were to try to wrap
18:06 language around describing to you what I'm made of,
18:09 the best I could do is to say to you,
18:10 I'm not made of anything because I'm not made.
18:15 So God is utterly beyond anything that we in our puny,
18:20 itty-bitty,
18:22 finite humanity can fully grasp.
18:27 Are you still with me?
18:29 Yes. All right.
18:30 This should not be the meeting after lunch by the way,
18:32 I'm just warning you.
18:33 Okay?
18:35 So what you see on the screen right now is this.
18:38 One of these two circles.
18:40 One of these two illustrations is truth,
18:42 and one of them is heresy.
18:48 Either God exists
18:51 within the parameters of creation
18:57 or creation exists
19:00 within the parameters of God's reality.
19:06 Are you tracking with me?
19:07 Okay. Let's say it like this.
19:09 God does not exist within the microscopic puddle.
19:13 Picture a puddle in your mind, just a little mud puddle,
19:16 you can splash in with your foot.
19:19 God does not exist within the microscopic puddle
19:21 of our reality, rather we exist
19:23 within the macroscopic ocean of God's reality.
19:30 And this is the fork in the road
19:32 in the anti-Trinitarian debate.
19:36 This is the fork in the road with regards to all of theology
19:41 and philosophy at the most foundational level.
19:44 Everybody's partying right here
19:46 and going one of two directions.
19:49 Now, what I'm suggesting to you at this part of the message
19:53 is that all words literally all words,
19:57 terms and categories
19:59 that arise in human consciousness
20:02 are necessarily temporal, time bound,
20:07 and material and therefore
20:09 can only approximate who God is.
20:12 Are you tracking with me? Are you still with me?
20:15 Okay, sit up a little straighter.
20:19 Some of you look like,
20:20 you need to breathe deep right now.
20:23 Oxygenate your frontal lobe right now.
20:25 Take a few deep breaths.
20:27 You need blood flow right now to your frontal lobe.
20:30 Okay.
20:31 So all language comes short if you can fully explain God,
20:37 it's not God you've explained.
20:43 There is a manifest arrogance on display
20:48 when an itty-bitty human being
20:52 with strident and authority
20:56 claims to know
20:59 that this one called God and Christ
21:02 began to exist at some point in eternity past.
21:07 As if you know, you are way outside, I am out.
21:13 We don't know what we're talking about,
21:15 in response to the question, what is God?
21:20 But we can know
21:22 the answer forever and ever and ever
21:24 with increasing comprehension and depth.
21:27 We can know the answer to the question, who is God?
21:30 God is a what that we can never probe.
21:33 God is a who that is revealed
21:36 in scripture and in Christ.
21:39 We can know, in other words, the character of God,
21:42 but we cannot know the nature of God
21:44 by virtue of the fact
21:46 that we are ourselves created beings.
21:49 We are temporal material creatures.
21:53 We don't even have language at our disposal
21:57 to talk about who God is
21:59 in His ultimacy by virtue of His nature?
22:04 I don't know if you're familiar with Abraham Joshua Heschel.
22:07 He is a Hebrew scholar, He's deceased,
22:10 the late Abraham Joshua Heschel.
22:12 He marched with Martin Luther King Jr.
22:16 You'll see him in some of the photos of that era
22:19 in that great movement.
22:21 And he was a Jewish scholar
22:24 who stood in the civil rights movement.
22:27 But my goodness,
22:29 this guy is firing on all cylinders
22:31 when it comes to understanding Yahweh.
22:34 In one of his remarkable books that I've read twice,
22:37 and I'm about to start a third time
22:40 because it's so remarkable, God in search of man.
22:45 Heschel says this,
22:47 "It is a fact of profound significance
22:49 that we sense more than we can say."
22:53 Have you ever had those moments
22:54 where you're just awestruck with God?
22:58 And you're thinking there's no way
22:59 I can explain to anybody what I'm sensing.
23:02 I could do my best to try to testify to somebody
23:07 regarding this overwhelming sense of God's beauty,
23:10 His Majesty, His glory.
23:12 I sense more than I can explain.
23:14 Heschel says this,
23:16 "All statements about God are understatement."
23:20 Literally, if you just marshal
23:23 all the vocabulary at your disposal,
23:28 and you attempt to explain the goodness of God,
23:31 the beauty of God, the character of God,
23:33 the love of God,
23:34 you will come short of the task.
23:38 He is always more, and yet more,
23:43 and yet more than any of us can comprehend.
23:46 By the way, parenthetical statement.
23:50 This is why the body of Christ is necessary.
23:54 I love 3ABN, but you cannot be
23:58 a vibrant, thriving,
24:00 flourishing follower of Jesus and stay home channel surfing.
24:05 You need the fellowship of the body of Christ,
24:10 because in the fellowship of the body of Christ,
24:14 cross pollination occurs.
24:16 You see God in ways I'll never see Him,
24:19 but you can try to explain to me what you see.
24:23 And I can be enriched by your perspective,
24:26 and vice versa.
24:28 And we can grow corporately in ways
24:30 that we can never grow individually.
24:35 It's vital that we cross pollinate.
24:38 Or this is what Martin Luther the great reformer,
24:41 called the priesthood of all believers.
24:45 So really, there's a sense
24:47 in which as we try to describe God,
24:49 vocabulary comes short.
24:51 We're always kind of in a crisis of vocabulary.
24:55 If we're really digging in to the gospel,
24:58 to the character of God,
24:59 we're always in a crisis of vocabulary.
25:03 By the way, that's great language.
25:04 And I'll just,
25:05 this is just a little short marriage seminar,
25:07 has nothing to do with our subject here.
25:09 But to my brothers, I will say,
25:11 if you forget an anniversary card
25:12 or birthday card or something like that.
25:15 This is what you say, say, "Baby, you're so beautiful.
25:18 You're so amazing. I had a crisis of vocabulary.
25:21 I couldn't even write the card.
25:23 I couldn't even
25:26 write the card.
25:30 No extra charge for that. Okay.
25:33 So Abraham Joshua Heschel clinches his point
25:36 by saying this, "We have an awareness
25:40 that is deeper than our concepts."
25:45 We have an awareness with regards to God
25:47 that is deeper than our concepts.
25:49 "We possess insights," emotional insights,
25:51 relational insights,
25:54 "we possess insights that are not accessible
25:56 to the power of expression."
25:59 I'm telling you, sometimes I am overwhelmed
26:02 with a sense of God's love for me
26:06 that I could never do justice to with words.
26:10 I just know that it's true
26:12 at the deepest level of my being.
26:14 That's what John's talking about,
26:15 by the way, in 1, 2, and 3 John,
26:19 when he says,
26:21 nobody can explain this stuff to you.
26:23 You have a witness in yourself.
26:26 And that witness in yourself is the greatest evidence
26:28 of God's existence and His love for you,
26:31 and nobody can ever take it from you.
26:33 Now, that which can be named or described by us
26:38 is not God as God is in God's ultimacy.
26:43 We can say true things about God,
26:46 we cannot say everything about God.
26:48 Now, I'm setting you up for something, obviously.
26:51 All of this is to move us in to asking
26:56 and answering a question as best we can.
26:59 So if God is transcendent,
27:05 if God in fact, exists above and beyond
27:08 anything that we can ever fully comprehend,
27:11 if God exists beyond
27:13 all material creation,
27:18 the question is, why do we encounter God
27:23 within the parameters of material and temporal
27:29 and progenerative categories?
27:32 Why is God introducing Himself to us as a Father?
27:35 Why is Jesus called a Son?
27:38 But we know that those are procreation terms.
27:41 We know that the man
27:43 is to the woman a sexual counterpart,
27:45 and that the woman is to the man
27:47 a sexual counterpart,
27:49 and the two shall be one and that the only way
27:51 you get a son or a daughter is by procreation.
27:55 We know that father and son,
27:59 not to mention the fact that in Isaiah
28:01 once God introduces Himself as a mother,
28:05 we have no way of comprehending except by asking, answering,
28:10 in my opinion, this question,
28:12 "Why would God who transcends all of creation,
28:18 speak to us in language of creation?"
28:23 And the answer is very simply and profoundly, love.
28:26 God is love.
28:28 And because God is love.
28:29 Listen, listen, listen.
28:31 Love is by its very nature social.
28:34 God likes you, and He wants you to like Him back.
28:39 So He condescends by love to engage
28:43 in something called mediation.
28:46 Love necessitates mediation.
28:48 If God is infinite, and we're finite,
28:52 there's some serious ground that needs to be bridged.
28:56 Yes or no?
28:58 We can't bridge the ground
29:00 in the direction of infinitude.
29:04 So God, because He loves us
29:06 must bridge the ground toward our finitude.
29:12 He's infinite, we're finite.
29:13 He's got to come down to where we are,
29:15 or we will never know Him.
29:19 And so God is humble, because God is love.
29:24 Love by its very nature is social.
29:25 And that means that love
29:27 by its very nature is communicative.
29:29 Love wants to know and be known.
29:33 That is its nature.
29:35 And so God wants us to know Him.
29:40 So knowledge and perspective is mediated to us
29:44 so that we might know Him.
29:47 John Chapter 1 unpacks
29:49 what this mediation looks like in its ultimate form.
29:54 Now, God mediates to us in lots of other forms as well.
29:58 The laughter of children, if correctly perceived,
30:03 will open your mind to the beauty of God.
30:08 Blooming flowers,
30:10 a sunrise or sunset
30:11 will whisper to you of the character of God,
30:14 if you're tuned in.
30:17 But in its ultimate sense, God bridge to the gulf
30:22 between the finite and the infinite
30:24 in the person of Christ.
30:26 John 1:1 says it this way,
30:28 "In the beginning was the Word,"
30:31 the logos, that is the thing, behind the thing,
30:34 behind the thing that defines reality.
30:37 That's what logos means.
30:39 Logos means the rationale of existence,
30:43 the true meaning and significance of reality,
30:47 the logic of existence in life.
30:51 "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God,"
30:55 check this out, "the Word was God."
30:59 Now, if you do a little bit of editorial sculpting,
31:01 and just pull out some of the words here,
31:04 you have some pretty amazing theology,
31:07 because the scripture says, "In the beginning was the Word
31:09 and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
31:14 So literally, look at the text on the screen,
31:16 literally, within the quote marks
31:19 you can say, "God...
31:22 was with... God."
31:29 God was with God. That sounds redundant.
31:33 It's not.
31:34 God is love and love is a social reality.
31:36 Therefore, God has always been engaged
31:38 in some kind of social interaction,
31:41 else God could not be said with any intelligible meaning
31:45 to be love.
31:47 So this scripture is telling us that there is a...
31:49 This isn't a word, but I'm going to use it.
31:51 There is, in God's reality there is a withness,
31:55 a withness, a social dynamic.
32:00 God was with God,
32:01 I can work through it with you like this.
32:03 If I ask you the question is the Father God,
32:06 you'll say,
32:08 and if I asked you the next question,
32:09 is the Father all there is of God,
32:12 you'll say, "No."
32:13 If I say, "Is the Messiah, the word God,"
32:16 you'll say, "Yes."
32:18 If I asked you, "Is the Messiah,
32:20 all there is of God," you'll say, "No."
32:24 If I say, "Is the Holy Spirit God?"
32:26 You'll say, "Yes."
32:27 And if I say, "Well, is the Holy Spirit,
32:29 all there is of God?"
32:30 You'll say, "No."
32:34 In order to have a complete picture of God,
32:38 we need to understand that there's a sense
32:39 in which God is a social unit, God is with God,
32:42 Father, Son, and Spirit collectively
32:46 constitute the totality of God.
32:50 So the scripture goes on and says this
32:53 in verses 2 and 3.
32:55 "He," the word "was in the beginning with God.
32:59 All things were made through Him."
33:01 This is very complex language, you got to slow down to get it.
33:05 "All things were made through Him,
33:07 and without Him, nothing was made."
33:09 That was made.
33:11 Nothing was made, that was made.
33:14 Nothing was made, that was made.
33:17 I'm going to say to you like this.
33:19 There are only two basic categories to reality.
33:23 The made category and the unmade category,
33:27 and the word, the Messiah, the Christ
33:30 occupies the unmade category.
33:34 There is no point at which in any sense,
33:37 the one being described here began to exist
33:41 distinct from the Father.
33:43 This one has always existed,
33:47 and that's beyond our comprehension.
33:50 If you think too long about what it means,
33:52 you say, "God, what does it mean for You
33:53 to have always existed?"
33:55 See, we're time bound creatures,
33:57 we only think in terms of
33:59 a linear succession of historical events.
34:03 That's all we know.
34:04 So we're saying, "God,
34:06 what does it mean for You to have always existed?"
34:12 If you think too long about it, your hard drive,
34:13 your mental hard drive will start to wobble
34:15 and smoke will come out of your ears, guaranteed.
34:18 You can't answer the question
34:20 because you don't have not only the vocabulary
34:24 to answer the question,
34:26 you don't have the nature to access the concepts
34:31 that transcend the made category.
34:34 You're created.
34:35 All you know is contingency, temporality,
34:39 all you know, is time material categories.
34:43 It's all you can even bring words to articulate.
34:47 So there's the made category, there is the unmade category.
34:50 And then wonder of wonders.
34:54 The most astounding thing
34:55 in all of universal history occurred.
34:59 There's not even a close second.
35:01 This Word, this logos,
35:03 this one who was in very nature,
35:05 God, and with God
35:08 in this beautiful social dynamic
35:10 of other centered, self giving, outgoing, incoming, outgoing,
35:16 incoming love.
35:18 This one
35:22 came to be with us
35:26 in our reality
35:30 in a stunning manner.
35:32 And the Word became...
35:35 I'm going to pause right there, the Word became.
35:40 What did it mean to become?
35:44 It means to be and then to become,
35:51 to become means to undergo some kind of transition
35:54 from one configuration to another configuration.
35:59 For example, you are right now
36:00 in the process of becoming something
36:04 that you weren't just five minutes ago
36:05 by the thoughts that are being downloaded
36:08 into your mind right now,
36:10 you are receiving ideas and concepts
36:12 that are incrementally changing who you are.
36:17 The same thing will happen to you
36:18 when you have conversations with your loved ones.
36:21 You and I were always were malleable, we're plastic,
36:24 we're plateau.
36:25 We're always in the process of becoming what we're not.
36:29 Any given moment
36:31 is a transitional moment for us.
36:36 And the logos who always was has now become.
36:41 He's not become something
36:43 that by natural composition he never was.
36:49 Now when it says he became, when it says,
36:51 "The word became flesh, and dwelt among us,
36:58 and we beheld his glory,
36:59 the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,
37:01 full of grace and truth."
37:02 We're being told something astounding.
37:07 Jesus, the logos, the word, the one in whom was life,
37:12 and light unborrowed, original, underived life.
37:18 The one who always wasn't never,
37:19 ever came into existence.
37:21 Now, on some level comes in to an existence
37:25 He's never known before.
37:27 Now, that is to say this,
37:31 the incarnation or the enfleshment of God.
37:36 God becoming human
37:38 was not merely God making a journey through space,
37:42 it's not a geographic,
37:44 a geographic relocation.
37:47 He didn't just come
37:49 from one place to another place.
37:52 He didn't just come from heaven to earth.
37:55 Jesus, God underwent what we might call
37:58 a transmigration of nature,
38:02 He became human,
38:04 He didn't just move
38:06 and relocate to another place in the cosmos.
38:11 He was forever and only eternal God.
38:17 And for love of you and me,
38:20 He entered into an eternal solidarity
38:25 with the human race.
38:26 Incarnation means
38:29 that God came down in humility.
38:34 It means that God came close in empathy,
38:38 and I love Him for it.
38:40 And it means that God came as one of us
38:45 in an epic act of solidarity
38:48 that will never ever be reversed.
38:52 According to the Book of Hebrews,
38:53 He has become our eternal brother,
38:58 and He's not ashamed to call us brethren.
39:03 And this means as we're going to discover this evening
39:07 that redeemed human beings
39:09 are destined for the throne of the universe with Him.
39:16 We'll get there tonight.
39:17 But here's the point.
39:19 I want you to engage with me in a thought experiment.
39:22 We began with a thought experiment.
39:24 Let's begin to wind this down with a thought experiment.
39:28 Albert Einstein, of course,
39:29 was famous for thought experiments,
39:32 people would interview him in journals,
39:33 "Hey, how do you come up with these ideas,
39:36 these groundbreaking scientific insight?
39:38 How do you come up with this stuff?
39:40 Do you spend a lot of time at the blackboard
39:43 or with a pen in hand, working out equations?"
39:45 He said, "I do equations, mostly,
39:47 I close my eyes and I play my violin."
39:54 And he said,
39:55 "The first time I began to understand relativity
39:59 was through a thought experiment."
40:01 As a little boy,
40:02 Albert Einstein out in nature
40:08 imagined himself riding straddling like a horse,
40:13 riding a sunbeam, a light beam.
40:16 He knew the speed of light, because he had been taught.
40:21 He knew that light moves because he had been taught.
40:26 But Einstein discovered relativity,
40:31 the time space continuum,
40:33 and that the fact that time and space are one and curved,
40:38 he discovered this first in its most embryonic form,
40:42 he didn't have it all worked out.
40:44 But as a child, he discerned it by imagining himself
40:48 like riding a light beam and imagining the trajectory.
40:53 Where does this go?
40:55 What shape does it take?
40:57 Where does it end?
40:58 Doesn't end?
41:00 And he imagined,
41:02 and it came to him that it's not linear,
41:07 it's curved.
41:09 And if you, I mean, one of the things he said,
41:12 that's just mind-blowing, he said,
41:13 if you had a telescope powerful enough,
41:15 you could look through it and see the back of your head.
41:20 Everything in the universe is round and rotational.
41:24 That's his basic discovery.
41:27 In other words, geometrically,
41:30 the whole universe operates in circular motion,
41:34 everything receives to give.
41:38 And the moment you stop giving,
41:42 your life begins to be extinguished.
41:45 The fact is,
41:47 that the whole universe was built on a grid,
41:50 if you will, a template after the image of God.
41:55 Everything is created on its multiplied
42:00 different levels on the pattern of giving.
42:05 And the only thing wrong with the world.
42:09 And I say the world because this problem
42:11 has been localized and quarantined.
42:16 That's why your travel by the way is restricted
42:18 to United Airlines.
42:20 And you can only travel if the quarantine were lifted,
42:22 you could travel the whole universe.
42:25 In fact, you will travel the whole universe
42:28 sometime in the future, right now you're too dangerous.
42:32 You have to be held captive here in a sense,
42:34 because you're so messed up
42:37 that God can't expose the universe to you, to me.
42:42 But the plan of salvation is so deeply healing
42:45 and restorative that God is leading us
42:48 to the place where you and I can literally,
42:50 not in imagination,
42:51 literally ride sunbeams throughout the universe,
42:54 and discover worlds afar that we have only begun to imagine.
43:00 So the whole universe is round and rotational,
43:03 everything is moving out and in,
43:05 out and in, out and in.
43:08 One author calls this the circuit of beneficence.
43:12 So circle, it goes round and round,
43:15 and round and round.
43:16 And that's the secret of life.
43:18 And it exists in the person of Christ.
43:23 In Him was life
43:26 and the life was the light of man.
43:31 So Einstein had his thought experiment.
43:35 I like for you to engage with me
43:37 in a little bit of a thought experiment.
43:41 Imagine on the premise
43:43 of what we have looked at so far in scripture.
43:46 Imagine deducting
43:51 from reality everything material...
43:58 And ask yourself the question, what do you end up with.
44:01 So just in your imagination,
44:03 remove all of the cosmos,
44:08 planetary systems and their rotation,
44:11 the rotational bodies, sun, moon, and stars,
44:15 innumerable throughout all of cosmological space.
44:20 Remove from your understanding the sun that lights the earth,
44:26 generating the photosynthesis process
44:28 by which we get blueberries,
44:30 and strawberries, and broccoli, and kale, yuck.
44:33 But anyways, we have it and as well we eat it.
44:36 Supposedly, it's good for you,
44:38 put it in a smoothie and mascot
44:40 with a lot of berries, you'll be fine.
44:43 But remove
44:45 the whole photosynthesis process.
44:48 Remove in your imagination,
44:52 the entire progeneration process,
44:55 the sexual process in all of animal creation
45:00 by which the male and the female produce,
45:06 arrays maleness, femaleness,
45:08 arrays sons and daughters, fathers and mothers,
45:12 everything that has to do with generating life,
45:18 remove all of it.
45:20 And you will find yourself face to face
45:22 with the profound reality of God and God alone.
45:28 God who alone occupies the unmade category,
45:33 which is to say,
45:35 God who occupies that category of reality
45:40 in which there is only pure love
45:44 and eternal existence in love,
45:47 and no procreation or progeneration.
45:52 And having imagined
45:55 what you get when you delete
45:57 all of material creation from your imagination.
46:00 Take in what Moses says to us in Numbers 23:19,
46:05 "Explicitly God is not a man that He should lie,
46:09 nor the son of man, that He should repent."
46:16 Moses is writing this when...
46:19 Well, let's just say he's writing this prior
46:22 to at very least
46:23 the incarnation of God in Christ.
46:27 And Moses is articulating an ultimate truth
46:32 about reality and about God.
46:33 There is an ultimate sense in which God is not a man,
46:40 and God is not a son of man.
46:43 There is an ultimate sense in which God is...
46:47 Can we say it like this? God is just God.
46:51 And transcends anything that we can comprehend
46:54 and so God condescends.
46:57 And His condescension is perpetual
46:59 throughout scripture,
47:01 not just father, son, mother, God says, "I'm like fire.
47:08 I'm like bread and wine.
47:09 I'm like an eagle.
47:11 I'm like the stars that shine forever.
47:15 I'm like the rose of Sharon."
47:18 God is constantly condescending, condescending,
47:21 condescending,
47:22 or else we could never know Him.
47:25 And the ultimate condescension is that God
47:29 in the person of Jesus Christ became one of us.
47:35 Listen, listen, listen,
47:37 you will sometime soon and very soon,
47:41 you will find yourself face to face
47:47 with the God of the universe in the person of Jesus Christ.
47:50 You will have eye contact with God.
47:54 You will be able to reach out your hands
47:56 and touch the flesh of God.
48:01 A God who prior to Christ never had any flesh.
48:07 The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
48:12 God is not a man, God is far more than a man.
48:16 And yet think this through with me.
48:19 God is not a man.
48:20 God is not a man, Moses says, and yet He is.
48:25 In the person of Jesus Christ,
48:28 the God of the universe
48:30 has entered in to a relationship
48:34 with the human race
48:36 that is just absolutely nothing short of staggering
48:40 and having become a human being.
48:43 Listen,
48:45 He took our very humanity, our flesh.
48:50 The Book of Hebrews says it like this, "He became us."
48:54 And having become us, one of us, one with us.
48:59 In eternal solidarity, He became us,
49:02 Jesus took that flesh,
49:06 and He marched it
49:09 through the Garden of Gethsemane
49:12 to the cross of Calvary.
49:16 The nails were driven through His hands and His feet.
49:20 And the vicious Roman soldiers with no empathy pulsating
49:26 through their emotions lifted the cross
49:30 and dropped it in the hole prepared for it.
49:34 And every tendon of His body wrenched downward in pain.
49:43 And as God in Christ
49:48 hung, suspended, beaten, bloody,
49:52 bruised, spat upon, naked before the universe,
49:58 it became evident
50:00 not only to those humans right then
50:03 and there who were thinking and processing
50:07 and then later to the other humans
50:09 that would hear the good news and believe.
50:13 And then not only you and I, right here right now
50:18 knowing and believing the love that God has for us.
50:21 But the whole on looking universe
50:24 saw in Christ,
50:28 that God is love
50:30 in the most extreme and beautiful sense imaginable,
50:35 that if push comes to shove,
50:37 God always chooses the other over Himself,
50:44 that if we would prove unfaithful,
50:48 and we did and we have,
50:50 that God would remain faithful,
50:54 that He would follow through with His covenantal love
51:00 to reach not only out of Himself,
51:03 but to reach down to where we are,
51:07 and to embrace us, not just with His arms,
51:12 but by taking our very nature
51:15 and becoming the Son of God.
51:20 We were always meant to be
51:22 in order to show us how it's done,
51:25 to demonstrate what it really looks like to be human,
51:31 the way God created humanity to be.
51:34 And so John Chapter 1 doesn't just say,
51:38 "That in the beginning was the Word,
51:39 and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
51:42 It doesn't just say that the Word became flesh
51:45 and dwelt among us.
51:47 John Chapter 1 says, "To as many as received Him,
51:52 to them He gave the power,
51:54 the authority to become sons of God."
52:00 Jesus is not the Son of God
52:03 in some kind of
52:04 ancient ontological, metaphysical sense.
52:09 Jesus is the Son of God
52:10 in precisely the way you and I
52:11 were meant to be sons and daughters of God.
52:16 Jesus is the second Adam.
52:18 Jesus is the one who has come into this world,
52:22 and put on full display
52:25 what it looks like to love like God loves.
52:29 And when He died at the cross for you and I,
52:33 something happened
52:36 that crossed a vital line
52:40 that made it possible for you and I
52:42 to become what we were always meant to be.
52:47 And so we can say, with the Apostle Paul,
52:49 with all the enthusiasm we can muster,
52:53 we can say looking at the cross of Calvary,
52:56 "I am crucified with Christ.
53:01 Nevertheless,
53:04 not I,
53:06 but Christ lives in me, and the life which I now live,
53:12 I live by the faith of the Son of God,
53:18 who loved me
53:20 and gave Himself for me,
53:25 so that I might become a son of God."
53:30 So that you might become a son of God,
53:32 a daughter of God.
53:36 And having died,
53:38 Jesus was in the tomb for three days,
53:42 but the grave couldn't hold Him for one reason,
53:45 He never ceased loving us
53:51 all the way to the point of death.
53:55 And the devil's kingdom
53:57 in that moment was completely defeated.
54:01 He died, and Scripture says that death couldn't hold Him
54:04 because He died with the keys of hell
54:06 and of death in His hands.
54:09 He defeated death because love trumps sin.
54:15 And Jesus, having died for you and me,
54:17 came forth on the third day,
54:21 having lived as the Son of God,
54:25 having now died as the Son of God,
54:28 He rose as the Son of God.
54:33 His humanity came up out of the grave,
54:38 and He ascended
54:40 to the right hand of the Father,
54:43 the position of favor,
54:46 the position of victory,
54:48 bearing our humanity.
54:51 Listen, listen,
54:54 a human being,
54:56 this very moment
54:58 occupies the throne of the universe,
55:04 hypothetically, just hypothetically,
55:07 don't dwell on this too long because it's really depressing.
55:10 Hypothetically,
55:12 if all of us said no to the gospel.
55:15 If every human being said no.
55:16 If all of us were eternally lost,
55:21 humanity's already saved in Christ.
55:24 A specimen of the human race is already there.
55:29 A human being occupies the throne
55:31 of the universe awaiting our arrival.
55:37 And so we set our affections on things above,
55:39 not on things of this earth,
55:41 where Christ sits at the right hand
55:42 of God for us,
55:46 awaiting our arrival,
55:48 waiting for us to catch up to where He is.
55:53 The point of the gospel,
55:55 the point of the biblical narrative
55:59 is not that God
56:02 would take back control of the world as God,
56:07 but that God
56:10 would take back control of the world as man.
56:16 So that human beings
56:17 are returned to their rightful position
56:21 as stewards of the earth
56:24 given charge in the vast cosmos of this world,
56:30 and in Christ given charge of the whole universe,
56:34 as Paul says, "We shall reign with Him."
56:38 As John says, "To Him who overcomes,
56:44 He will grant to sit with Him in His throne,
56:47 as He overcame and He sat down with His Father
56:50 and His throne."
56:51 You and I, we are destined for the throne of the universe
56:53 by the grace of God,
56:55 because the Son of God is there
56:57 and to as many as received Him, to them,
57:00 He gave authority and power to become the sons of God.
57:05 Father, You're incredible.
57:08 Yes, we're just scratching the surface,
57:10 but we like what we see.
57:12 You are amazing beyond our estimation.
57:17 We can't imagine what life would be like
57:22 if You had not gotten hold of us.
57:25 Thank You for loving us
57:26 with an infinite love that is beyond our grasp,
57:30 but thank You that we can grasp...


Home

Revised 2019-01-03