If you want to know God, you must meet God. And the wonderful thing is, the scriptures teach that God wants to be known.

June 25, 2008

Knowing God…As He Really Is

1978, it was the year of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. And reports of UFO sightings soared as Steven Spielberg’s 1978 epic gripped our imaginations at the cinema. Newly released UFO files in the United Kingdom show that in 1977 there were 435 reported sightings of unidentified flying objects a year and a hit movie later that tally had been easily outdone with 750 reported sightings. 2008 may be another record year for seeing UFO’s. Why? Not because of a movie but because a Chinese company has said it’s developed a prototype UFO-like aircraft. It is disk-shaped and looks just like we’d expect a UFO to look like. It flies unmanned. It can take off and land vertically and hover in the air and its use: aerial photography, geological surveys and emergency lighting. It’ll beam a light down towards the earth and a lot of people are going to think it’s a visiting alien space craft. We need more information to make good judgments, to know what we’re really seeing. What looks like a UFO might just be an invention of the Chinese. Look out into the natural world, what are you seeing? What’s behind it all? Who made it? What were his purposes? You can guess or you can know. I’m Charles Morris and welcome to Haven Today where we tell the great story that’s all about Jesus. This is “Knowing God” week and this program is called “Knowing God…As He Really Is”. We say we tell the great story that’s all about Jesus. That’s how we’re going to open our program and in a few moments we will be joined by Dr. J.I. Packer, the author of “Knowing God”. But before that, Susan Ashton opens our program and leads us to worship.

Song: Beautiful Savior
Performed by: Susan Ashton

The song is called “Beautiful Savior” and it’s by Susan Ashton as we begin another Haven Today together, “Knowing God…As He Really Is”. Last week is at down with Dr. J.I. Packer who wrote “Knowing God and released it in 1973 and it’s still selling strong because the ideas are powerful. They come from the scriptures. Dr. Packer told me something in our conversation that speaks to the issue of how we know God.
JP: There’s a chapter on the second commandment which says “You shall not make yourself any graven image.” And the lesson I draw out of that and deploy all through the chapter is that we must get our notions of God from God himself in his word and not allow ourselves to imagine things about God, mental images if not metal images but without scripture warrant, you see.
CM: You think that’s increasingly the case then?
JP: Yes I do! I think that people are constantly these days saying, “I like to think of God in such and such a way.” It’s an age of religious pluralism and when it comes to the nature of God people are all over the map.
CM: Dr. J.I. Packer here on Haven Today. We need to get our ideas about God from God. That’s what he was saying. Janet and I were recently listening to the testimony of Chao Min, a young Chinese woman who’s written thousands of praise songs. They’re being sung in churches all over China, in fact Chinese churches all over the world are singing her songs. In her testimony she tells how she grew up in a rural area as a farmer’s daughter. She was sensitive to the sights and sounds and scents of the natural world as she worked in the fields. They touched her deeply and she knew there had to be a Creator behind it all she just didn’t know who he was. And then somebody gave her a Bible and she heard God speak to hear. These were the words of her first prayer. She said, “So that’s who you are!” Isn’t that beautiful! What a relief it is. What an overwhelming joy it is to have God introduce himself, to be able to say, “So that’s who you are!” We were created to know God and the number one thing we need to know about God is this: Number one, he wants to be known. Isaiah 45:18-24 –
For this is what the LORD says—
he who created the heavens,
he is God;
he who fashioned and made the earth,
he founded it;
he did not create it to be empty,
but formed it to be inhabited—
he says:
“I am the LORD,
and there is no other.
I have not spoken in secret,
from somewhere in a land of darkness;
I have not said to Jacob’s descendants,
‘Seek me in vain.’
I, the LORD, speak the truth;
I declare what is right.
“Gather together and come;
assemble, you fugitives from the nations.
Ignorant are those who carry about idols of wood,
who pray to gods that cannot save.
Declare what is to be, present it—
let them take counsel together.
Who foretold this long ago,
who declared it from the distant past?
Was it not I, the LORD?
And there is no God apart from me,
a righteous God and a Savior;
there is none but me.
“Turn to me and be saved,
all you ends of the earth;
for I am God, and there is no other.
By myself I have sworn,
my mouth has uttered in all integrity
a word that will not be revoked:
Before me every knee will bow;
by me every tongue will swear.
They will say of me, ‘In the LORD alone
are righteousness and strength.’”

That’s the Word of the Lord. The Lord wants to be known. He hasn’t hidden himself. He hasn’t spoken in secret for in the beginning when he created the earth to be inhabited he’s been pouring forth revelation about himself. You don’t have to scale some high, Himalayan mountain to find him. He wants to make himself known to you. He wants you to know him as he actually is. He’s actively engaged in revealing himself. The reason Chao Min could say, “So that’s who you are!” is because the Lord broke into her world and introduced himself. He didn’t leave himself to her imagination. God wants to be known. And number two, he wants to be known as he actually is. There is only one True God. We heard that in Isaiah that I just shared a moment ago. But all through the Bible God warns us about idols. Idols are God substitutes. They’re God impersonators. They’re not just statues in a Hindu temple or in a museum. Our minds create idols. We carry around ideas about God that just aren’t true. We have thoughts about God that amount to nothing more than slander. The Lord wants us to know him as he is. The scriptures are full of instructions from him about who how really is, what he’s really like. Over and over again you find him correcting a wrong idea that people have about him. You find him speaking to people whose minds don’t grasp the concept, who live as if he doesn’t exist or as if he were weak or small or indifferent or uninvolved in this world. We can’t come up with an accurate idea of God on our own. We can’t think our way to God. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:21 that, “the world in its wisdom did not know God.” We need him to reveal himself to us and he does that through his Word, through the words of scripture. We need to be immersed in the words of God about himself and let our minds and hearts get filled with his revelation about who he is. Charles Spurgeon wrote about what happens when we contemplate God as he is. He said, “There’s something exceedingly improving to the mind in a contemplation of the divinity. It is a subject so vast that all our thoughts are lost in its immensity, so deep that our pride is drowned in its infinity. Other subjects we can maybe understand and grapple with and then we feel a kind of self-content and go on our way with the thought, ‘I’m wise.’ But when we come to this master science, the knowledge of God, we find that our plumb line can’t sound its depth and that our eagle eye cannot see its height. And with a solemn explanation we say, ‘I am but of yesterday and know nothing.’ No subject of contemplation will tempt more to humble mind than thoughts of God. But while the subject humbles the mind it also expands it. He who thinks of God will have a larger mind than the one who simply plods along this narrow globe. Nothing will so enlarge the intellect. Nothing so magnify the whole soul of man as a devout, earnest, continued investigation of the great subject of the deity.” Now did you hear the two things Spurgeon said would happen to us as our minds are filled with the knowledge of the True God? We’ll be humbled first and second we’ll expand. First, we’ll be humbled. On our Haven Today website we have offered a debate between Richard Dawkins – probably the world’s most famous atheist living today – and Dr. John Lennox, a Christian scholar who is also from the University of Oxford. As I was listening to Professor Dawkins expound his vision of a God-less world I was struck by how much pride there is in this view of atheism. If God is out of the way that leaves the top spot open for me. We get filled with the delusion of our unlimited potential and our autonomy. We start thinking of ourselves as the source of the knowledge of good and evil when we clear God out of our minds and hearts we just naturally step into the roll ourselves unless God shows up and makes himself known. That’s what happened to King Nebuchadnezzar. He was congratulating himself in Babylon on his greatness when God instantly humbled him. He stripped him of all his greatness and even his sanity. And then he restored him, a very changed man I might add. What happened to Nebuchadnezzar needs to happen to all of us. Let me share that with you, Daniel 4:33-37 –
At the end of that time, I, Nebuchadnezzar, raised my eyes toward heaven, and my sanity was restored. Then I praised the Most High; I honored and glorified him who lives forever.
His dominion is an eternal dominion;
his kingdom endures from generation to generation.
All the peoples of the earth
are regarded as nothing.
He does as he pleases
with the powers of heaven
and the peoples of the earth.
No one can hold back his hand
or say to him: “What have you done?”
Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and exalt and glorify the King of heaven, because everything he does is right and all his ways are just. And those who walk in pride he is able to humble.
First, when we come to know God we’re going to be humbled and second we’ll be expanded. It’s so easy for us to start living in a cramped little universe where our thoughts circle around the same old anxieties, the same old petty desires but when we turn our hearts and minds to the Living God and begin to contemplate him our world enlarges, our thoughts are set free and we begin to expand. Especially when we contemplate the love he’s revealed to us in Jesus. Listen to the Apostle Paul’s prayer for the expansion of the church in Ephesus. Ephesians 3:17-19 –
I pray that you, being rooted and established, (or grounded as some translations say) established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
You and I need a daily fill up of the love of the Living God for us in Christ, who he is, who we are, what he’s done. We need our minds to fill up with this love. We need to grasp this love, the vastness of it, the beyond knowing-ness of it. When we do that, it’ll have a profound effect. We’ll be filled with the fullness of God. Our very souls will enlarge. We’ll be expanded, as Spurgeon put it which brings me to a number 3 thing we need to know about God. Number one, he wants to be known. Number two, he wants to be known as he is. And number 3, he’s only known through Jesus. It’s all about Jesus. In my sit down session last week in his office in Vancouver, British Columbia with Dr. J.I. Packer I asked him about that, about knowing Jesus.
JP: It is all about Jesus in the Trinitarian sense. Jesus is the Son of the Father doing the will of the Father. Jesus with the Father sends the Holy Spirit to lead us into the life of fellowship with both the Father and the Son. It’s Jesus in a Trinitarian context all the way through. I think it was meant to be. And if it doesn’t come across that way well, then I’ve written the book wrong but frankly I think I was enabled to write it correctly at that point. It’s Jesus in a Trinitarian frame. The third person is shy, never calls attention to himself. I think of him and I speak of him as the executive, the hands on person within the Godhead. The Father makes the plan, the Son does what the Father wants him to do for the fulfillment of the plan. I think of the Son as the CEO and the Father, you see, as the chairman and then the Spirit comes in, as well, I said it, as the hands on person, executive
CM: Does all the work
JP: who makes everything happen.
CM: Yes.
JP: but he only calls attention to the Father and the Son. He never calls attention to himself. And he isn’t given a personal name in the way that Jesus has a personal name. Holy Spirit is a functional name. Spirit means God in action. Holy means partaking of the divine nature, Holy Spirit means the person who is like that, who comes and makes things happen and the supreme, joyful truth about the Holy Spirit is that he indwells each of us. Being divine he can indwell millions of people at the same time and he does. And that means that as I live my life day to day I am able, by the grace of God, to buck myself up by remembering, “Hey! The Holy Spirit is living in you to enable you to do the will of God and be a Christian properly! Come on Packer, get on with it!” Ask the Spirit to help and he will.
CM: and does
JP: And does, yes! Sometimes I say what I believe to be true, the Holy Spirit, on behalf of the Father and the Son is supernaturalizing my life every moment of every day. I like that word, supernaturalizing. It’s a way of saying there is more in a Christian’s life than there is in a non-Christian’s life. There is, namely, the fellowship with the Father and the Son through the Spirit. The fellowship which the Spirit generates and sustains and that, that is a fellowship which we know stretches beyond this world. We shall leave this world but we shan’t laps from the fellowship. An eternal reality and when you know that you are on the Lord’s side and the Lord, therefore is on your side, well it means that you look at a great deal of life in a way that another person can never do. God is in charge. Christ is in charge.
CM: Isn’t that incredible? To think that we are allowed to participate. We’re not divine. We’ll never be divine but we are allowed and even invited to participate in that fellowship.
JP: And it’s the supreme privilege of life to be part of it.

Song:
Performed by:

This is Haven Today and that was Dr. J.I. Packer and this is “Knowing God” week here on the program, “Knowing God…As He Really Is” and I’m glad we can have Dr. J.I. Packer on with us again today. May I invite you to know God more? And may I invite you to get a copy of this book by Jim Packer called “Knowing God”? It’s been out since 1973. It has blessed so many people. I first read it as a student and I must say that through the years I’ve read parts of it over and over again and it has been such a blessing to me. Some people think that it’s actually the second most important book after the Bible. I’ve heard that said by more than one person. Well, I would like to invite you to get in touch with us and make a gift to help us through this summer at Haven Today. And in return I would love to send you a copy of “Knowing God”. Here’s how you can get one. Just give us a call on our toll free number at 1-800-654-2836, that’s 1-800-654-2836. We’d love to hear from you. And you can also go online and read more about the book “Knowing God”, make your gift there and we’ll get it to you on its way right away. Just go to haventoday.org, that’s h.a.v.e.n.t.o.d.a.y, haventoday.org. And be sure and let us know the station you’re listening to. And if you would ever like to hear the program again or send it on to a friend we have an easy way to do that. Just go to the website, haventoday.org and there hit the little button that says “Listen” and there you’ll see very easily how you can listen again and also how you can send it on to a friend. Now we’ve been asking people to help us through the summer and I’ve just got to tell you I was so moved last weekend. Someone in Arlington Heights, Iowa – and of course Iowa has had its share of problems in the last several days due to the flooding – someone, a listener in Iowa wrote to us and said, “The Lord was challenging me to tithe my inheritance. You’re getting part of it because someone called asking for support.” Well, that was quite moving. I’m not going to mention your name but you know who you are in Arlington Heights, Iowa and I praise God and have thanked the Lord and all of us here on the Haven team have thanked you for your support. Can you help us? Can you make a difference in telling the great story that’s all about Jesus? Well, there’s that phone number, 1-800-65-HAVEN or you can do it online at haventoday.org.
I’m Charles Morris. I want to thank you for joining me with J.I. Packer. Would you come back again tomorrow? It’s still “Knowing God” week and we’ll get together in light of the great story that’s all about Jesus here on Haven Today.