Sinclair Ferguson: The Lord Our God, The Lord Is One: The Simplicity of God

today as we come to the end of our evening together and as we turn to this great theme of the simplicity of God and I want us to turn in our Bibles for a moment to the 3rd chapter of the book of Exodus Exodus chapter 3 and we're going to read there from the beginning of the chapter Exodus chapter 3 now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro the priest of Midian and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb the mountain of God and the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush Moses looked and behold the bush was burning yet it was not consumed and Moses said I will turn aside to see this great sight why the bush is not burned when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see God called to him out of the bush Moses Moses and he said Here I am then the Lord said do not come near take your sandals off your feet for the place in which you are standing is holy ground and he said I am the God of your father the God of Abraham the god of Isaac and the God of Jacob and Moses hid his face for he was afraid to look at God then the Lord said I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters I know their sufferings and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land a land flow with milk and honey to the place of the Canaanites the Hittites the amorite the Perizzites the Hivites and the Jebusites now behold the cry of the people of Israel is come to me and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them come I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people the children of Israel out of Egypt but Moses said to God Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt he said but I will be with you and this shall be the sign for you that I have sent you when you have brought the people out of Egypt you shall serve God on this mountain then Moses said to God if I come to the people of Israel and say to them the god of your father's has sent me to you and they asked what is his name what shall I say to them God said to Moses I am Who I am and he said say this to the people of Israel I has sent me to you God also said to Moses say this to the people of Israel the Lord the God of your father's the God of Abraham the god of Isaac the God of Jacob has sent me to you I said this morning as I introduced the subject of the omniscience of God that I felt too ignorant to begin to speak of his knowledge and to complex and complicated at the end of the day to speak on the subject of the simplicity of God and yet perhaps there is an appropriateness in us coming to this theme right at the end of what for all of us has been an extremely long demanding but truly glorious day something appropriate about the fact that this evening our musicians and Stewart have taken us in worship and praise to places and spheres which has gathered Christians we relatively rarely visit and my task this evening is to take you to a sphere about the existence and being of God on which I suspect relatively few if any of us have ever heard an exposition the sheer simplicity of God and just as musically hymnal logically we have traveled into high spheres territory with which we are unfamiliar so when we turn to the Bible's teaching on the simplicity of God we also tread on ground so unfamiliar to us so wholly in its own way that it is very easy to be lost intellectually lost emotionally lost and yet by God's grace as we come as it were to the edge of the abyss of glorious light which is our God we are brought by grace and faith to stand at the edge of that abyss and say with Agustin I see the depth I cannot reach the bottom and where our understanding cannot go our faith can nevertheless apprehend that this is the solid gold glory of our God there where reason fails we bow in adoration and admiration and worship and yet the paradoxical thing about the doctrine of the simplicity of God is that in our time it is rejected by the vast majority of philosophers who regarded as untenable it is ignored by the vast majority of theologians and probably also of Christian believers as irrelevant and impractical and I want us to try and discover a little as we think about God at the end of this day for this last time communally in this day of grace to come to understand that though we can never grasp how utterly sheer simple God our God is we can nevertheless in Jesus Christ who has revealed him to the extent that we can ever understand bow before him and worship Him and recognize as we sometimes sing if my love were but more simple I would take you at your word and my life would be all sunshine in the sweetness of the Lord what do we mean when we speak about the simplicity of God this doctrine that has been held and expounded by almost all the great theologians of the Christian Church from I aeneas in the early centuries through Augustine and Anselm and Thomas Aquinas and the great Puritans and the great Orthodox reformed theologians what do we mean by the simplicity of God we mean something so stunning so singular as to say that God as the Westminster Confession of faith puts it but God is pure spirit that he is without body parts or passions or to put it in other terms echoing what we have already heard today that God is without origin that God is without composition that God is without becoming he is and in a sense that is the first and the last word that has to be said about God he is as God and he is all he is always that he is as the older theologians used to say there is no potential in God God is all that he is and of course the beauty of that is that God reveals himself in such simple fullness to us in the wonderful mystery but the beautiful interconnectedness of his try personal being so that we might say it is never boring for God always to be all that he is and that is God enjoys his own being in a personal way it is not as though we speak like the philosophers of a merely monadic monochromic unmoved first mover but of our glory try personal God who in father and Son and Holy Spirit as it were interpenetrate one another's joys in one another share together all that it means for God to be all that he is all of the time and as it seems to me as part of the extraordinary revelation that has given to Moses here in Exodus chapter 3 at the burning bush of course this revelation is a revelation of God's covenant faithfulness he is the God of Abraham and Isaac the God of Jacob this is a revelation of God's exquisite compassion that he has heard the cries of his people and he is coming down to deliver them from their bondage and bring them into a good and broad land flowing with milk and honey but it's also a divine human encounter in which Moses finds himself faced with the stark simplicity of God's being that cannot be analyzed or further described in terms other than God himself and so having responded to the call of God here I being terrified at the prospect of what God is sending him to do by asking God Who am I in the midst of all this infantry and she says to the Lord but Lord who are you when the people say to me what is his name what am I to say in response and Jehovah gives this enigmatic answer that has puzzled the theologians and the exegetes ever since I who I tell them I has sent you and among all the other things God is saying I am the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob I am the God who has come down to deliver you in redeeming power with my outstretched right and he is also saying to Moses there is nothing that you can provide by way of analogy to describe Who I am in the very quintessence of my being I simply sometimes scholars suggest that the Hebrew mind was so different from the Greek mind the thoughts of the divine simplicity that seemed to be such a metaphysical philosophical idea could never have been part of old testament scriptures revelation but the truth of the matter is that the Hebrew mind was perfectly capable of grasping metaphysical truth it was just accustomed to grasping that metaphysical truth through the historical revelation of God in space and time and here in this remarkable way when God says to Moses I am Who I am he provides as it were a space-time illustration of what that means in this bush that was burning and yet was not consumed the fire that was in the bush present in the bush but preserving the bush it was a symbol of God's redemptive power but notice especially the fire that was in the bush but was not dependent on the bush for its energy to burn a fire that was independent of that on which all fire depends a fire that was in a bush with burning up the bush a most pure fire a fire that was nothing but fire a fire that was not a compound of other energy sources but had its energy source in itself as though God in the singularity were seeing to Moses Moses in your pilgrimage here you will never encounter another analogy of Who I am the everliving ever being God who cannot ultimately be described in any other terms than I am who I if you want to know who I am then you cannot get to know who I am without knowing who I am there is no other way and so not surprising that he finds himself as we're told in verse 6 hiding his face because he was afraid to look at God as the philosopher Nietzsche said sometimes in his ravings sometimes expressing the truth of the human heart with stark simplicity if this be God how can I bear not to be this God because his very existence threatens the weakness of my existence so what do we mean when we speak about the simplicity of God we mean by the simplicity of God but God is not a compound of anything God is not dependent upon his attributes for his being God is not the consequence of those attributes being balanced together God simply is God when the older theologians brought about this and spoke about this one of the things that they emphasized about this was the simplicity of God harmonized beautifully with the attributes of God but the simplicity of God harmonized perfectly with the Trinity of God but the simplicity of God evoked wonderfully doxology to God and I want us as we close our day to meditate for a few minutes on these three things the simplicity of God and His attributes the simplicity of God and His Trinity the simplicity of God and our worshipped first of all the simplicity of God and His attributes the simplicity of God means this that the being of God and the attributes of God are one with each other that the essence of God's being and the attributes of God's possession are not two different things that by some kind of inner divine superglue are held together but are in fact one and the same thing God is his attributes that's different from you and from me you and I have attributes but we lose one of that attributes for example we are kind and gentle and something happens to us and we become malicious and personally dangerous we lose that attribute people say he used to be so characterized by kindness but he's lost at all it was too much for him and he lost it all and yet you're still the same person you're still the same man the same woman you are not identical with your attributes your essence and your attributes are two different things but the essence of God's being is his attributes and his attributes are his essence it isn't that God has goodness God is goodness it isn't that God has holiness it is that God is holiness but the holiness that he has is the holiness that he is and that the goodness he has by which he is good is actually the goodness that he is but the attributes of God are not as it were attached to his being this is what he is through and through and the implication of that is if you will follow me for a moment that if as being and his attributes are one with each other then his attributes and his attributes are also one with each other which is to say that his goodness is his holiness and his holiness is his goodness and his righteousness is his holiness and his goodness and his goodness is his holiness and his righteousness and that these are not many things in God as they are discrete and distinct things in you and in me but these are one and the same thing in God this is who God is in a sense we could say God has only one attribute he is only one attribute and his attribute is godness this is godness that through and through he actually is all he appears to be what does it mean then when we speak about the goodness of God and the holiness of God the reason we try to balance these attributes as often because we don't understand that he is these attributes and we are left puzzling how these things that surround the being of God can be connected to the being of God in such a way that there is a linkage that holds them together when they seem to strain apart but the simplicity of God is far more profound and mind-bending than this he is all of this in himself these are one and the same reality in God why then do we ask is it that when we encounter God and His Word that emphasizes His Holiness now his love now his goodness now his patience now his righteousness now his faithfulness now his loving-kindness now for this very simple reason but it is not possible for a human being to bear upon his or her soul the full blast of the revelation of God as he is in the intense strength of all of those attributes that at the end of the day turn out simply to be this attribute that this is how God is you remember later on at the end of the book of Exodus or towards the end of the book of Exodus Moses has been emboldened from this early point where he is he is backtracking from what God might be sending him to do and he is bald enough to say to God all God he says you are so great and mighty I pray he says that you will show me your glory and do you remember how as he asks that the Lord will show him his glory the Lord says to Moses Moses I will make my goodness pass before you I will proclaim before you my name the Lord and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy but he said you cannot see my face for man shall not see me and live and the Lord said Behold there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock and I will cover you over with my hand until I have passed by then I will take away my hand and you shall see my back but my face shall not be seen what's he saying he's saying Moses I can show myself to you in my mercy and in my faithfulness in my covenant love but my glory you dare not see you dare not bear upon your human soul both because it is creaturely and because it is twisted by sin you cannot bear upon your being the Fulbright laser light of the single revelation of the actual glory of God because this is what the glory of God ultimately is the theologians sometimes say it is a manifestation of all of God's attributes but it's more than that it's a manifestation of God that bright light that we can only begin to bear upon our souls when it goes through the prism of some created rial and breaks down as it were for us in two different colors by which we can begin to get a handle on the glory of the incomprehensible God God says the Apostle to Timothy dwells in unapproachable unbearable light and don't you remember how in the very next chapter in the book of Exodus as Moses met with God on the mountain and he came to meet with the people down the mountain he didn't know that the skin of his face Shawn because he had been talking with God and the people of Israel saw Moses behold the skin of his face Shawn and they were afraid to come near to him and so whenever he went in to meet with God whenever he went in as it were to see the glory of God now refracted through a safe prism he would wear the veil on his face because the people could not bear to look upon the glory of God as it appeared to them first of all broken down through the prism of accomodated revelation and then reflected on the face of a fallen and sinful man even as it were at that distance the singularity of God was overpowering to them and sorters that even when our Lord Jesus Christ comes and the Apostle John was with him on the Mount of Transfiguration is able to say as he does in John 1:18 that the only son who is in the bosom of the Father he has executed God to us we beheld his glory what he means is not that he gazed upon the bright perfect light of the perfection of the glory of God that we can only begin to describe in several different attributes what he means is that God accommodated himself to the ultimate manner in which we could begin to grasp who he really is veiled in flesh the Godhead see veiled in flesh the Godhead see you remember that moment to which John may be alluding there in John chapter 1 as Simon Peter does later in the New Testament do you remember that occasion when they went up the Mount of Transfiguration and Jesus was transfigured and his whole being seemed to glow with light from within do you remember what their response was it's very interesting that Matthew and Mark record one response and Luke records another response that mysteriously harmonized Matthew and Mark tell us they were absolutely terrified my dear friends the idea that it would be wonderful to see the glory of God is in many ways not the testimony of the scriptures to see the glory of God is so awesome even when it has veiled so profoundly in the flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ Matthew and Mark tell us they were terrified Luke tells us but fell into a deep sleep and some of you will know from personal experience that those two things far from being contradictory precisely describe the exhaustion of terror that is so overcoming that we lose all of our strength isn't this something at the end of the day I wonder if you thought this at the end of the day at last we're going to turn to something really simple the simplicity of God and then we discover it's the simplicity of God and we really are too complicated psychosomatic unities we may be wonderfully woven together but the sight of the infinite glory of the singularity of God's being overwhelms every single individual in scripture whoever encounters it because it is as it where all the attributes of God as we speak as they truly are more and more concentrated as they reach their Center in the very existence of God's being and there we have if one might put it this way the infinitely glorious godly antithesis of a black hole light so intense as the Apostle Paul attributes so unified and actually one that in God there is infinite concentration of goodness that is almost unbearable infinite brought together goodness and wisdom and power might and justice in God in all the sheer density of an infinite being let me try an illustrate if I can what this means at the personal level I have known to individuals I think above all other individuals I have ever met one of whom I knew intimately well another I would be proud to call my friend although I would not have the intimacy with him I had was the first man the first man was my minister when I was a student in Aberdeen William still and of all men I think I have ever met he loved me and poured himself into me with a simple single passion that when I was a young student for the ministry I would leave his house and run down the street not sure whether I was running for the ecstasy of the privilege of being in the presence of God with him or running from the intensity of his passionate love that I might be for Christ the very best I might be and I discovered then that simple love is awesome and the other perhaps the most brilliant mind I have personally encountered at least in one area one discipline Lord Makai of clash firm until some years ago the Lord Chancellor of Great Britain and a wonderful humble Christian man the senior law figure in the United Kingdom a man who was first of all a professional mathematician and then became the leading lawyer in Scotland and then in the whole of the United Kingdom and in conversation with him as in conversation I think with very few if any others I have always felt here is a man who sees things that seem to me to be almost impossibly complex with extraordinary simplicity I remember a friend who conducted a trial before him telling me that at the end of this complicated trial Lord Makai did the summing up and it was almost as low at the end of the day was just teaching the jury the two times table he made the issues so profoundly clear that's just a taste in the image of God thank God he gives us those tastes in those he makes as his image redeemed by His grace it's just a taste of the intensity of the love of God that is omniscient in its character and infinitely holy in its character and the holiness that is passionately loving in its character because in God there is nothing complex everything is gloriously simple I who what then of the simplicity of God and the Trinity don't these two things rub against one another how can he be three if he is uncompounded well these theologians who spoke about the simplicity of God were not theological simple tenants they understood that it was possible for God to be absolutely one and yet in that oneness further to be genuine diversity of person one in three in one as though one might all must say what I'm sure is not mathematically precise but at least serves as something of an analogy that one has a sense that when you multiply one by one by one you have a kind of greater sense of the intensity of that one so the scriptures in marvelous ways and especially our Lord Jesus Christ in the last evening of his life with his disciples this is so marvelous to think about spoke to them about what later Christians have described as the perichoresis the choreography of the Trinity in which is aware they intertwine one another in their exhaustive self-knowledge and understanding so that all that belongs to one belongs to all all that is known by one is known by all because it is the knowledge of all all that is planned by one is planned by all because it is the plan of all that thing that we get these glimpses of in the pages of the New Testament when it indicates to us that everything God does he does in a triune way never just the father never just the son never just the Holy Spirit so that when the father raises the son from the dead the son who has laid down his life as authority to take it up and in his taking it up he is declared by the Holy Spirit to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection from among the dead and in that glorious unity of being in that Perry courageous in that cocoon in sessile that that indwelling that mutual indwelling I am in the father and the father is in me we will send the Holy Spirit to you who proceeds from the father within this glory uncompounded unity of god there is that which jesus expresses to the disciples at the end of Matthew's Gospel by saying to them now at last the time has come when you may learn to pronounce the ineffable and unpronounce name of Yahweh to Moses that was said say Yahweh has sent you and now our Lord Jesus Christ sends his apostles into the world to the end of the age and says when you go in the name of Yahweh you go in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit three persons one perfect indivisible glorious name so God is simple yes simply one in three and three in one I remember when our oldest boy was about seven years old going upstairs to see him at bedtime and he was sitting in his bed puzzled looking and I said what are you thinking about David he was one of those boys who wanted to ask questions but as long as he knew the answer he was never really interested in the answer but he was interested in this answer he said dad he said if I got it right but God is one in three and three in one and I said with much pleasure that is exactly right and he looked at me and he said you know that's a very difficult thing for a wee boy like me to understand and I said to him that's a very difficult thing for a big man like me to understand the factors that like that glorious love of God about which the Apostle Paul speaks in Ephesians chapter 3 we cannot comprehend it it is incomprehensible but we can apprehend it so we understand that the simple God is all of his attributes that the simple God is three in one and one in three and we understand that the simplicity of God does make a difference to the Christian believer for one thing to me at least it enhances my appreciation of the wonder of my Lord Jesus Christ as I think of my dear Lord Jesus within hours of his crucifixion entering into the moments of his passion surrounded by his troubled disciples his own soul profoundly disturbed overcome even to the point of death what does what does our dear Lord Jesus find his resting place in this is really amazing in John 14 and 15 and 16 and 17 he finds his resting place in the knowledge but he belongs to this glorious unity and so he begins to speak to them about mysteries they'd never heard him discuss before how the father is in the son and the father and the son are one and how the Holy Spirit proceeds from the father and is going to be sent by the son and how the father loves the son and how the son loves the father and how the Spirit appears as Augustine said all must to be the bond of love between the father and the son experiencing everything in which both and son share in the glory of the ineffable Trinity and our dear Lord Jesus Christ finds in his humanity that this glorious triune being of God becomes the very anchor piece of his soul and then you remember he goes out into the garden of gethsemane and rising from his agony which John does not describe the soldiers come for him and ask the question and Jesus responds very significantly in John's Gospel by using the ineffable divine name ergo I'm a and that's why even unbelieving pagans fall back before just a glimpse of varible glimpse of the inner glory of our ineffable Savior and God Jesus Christ and so it is wonderful to think about our dear Lord Jesus meditating for his own security on the wonder of God's being and demonstrating in his own Majesty the glory of that God and in our flesh plumbing the mystery I don't know what it meant for Jesus you don't know what it meant for Jesus we are Outsiders from this circle to be the one who was ever the son of the glorious father ever absolutely one with the father not just one with the father as you as a son might be one with your father at one with your father but to be one in the unbreakable unity and simplicity of the very being of and then to take this frail flesh and on the cross bearing our sin as the holy son of God in our humanity to cry out my God why have you forsaken me how is it the God without fracturing the unity of his own being can never last forsake his son in our humanity all wonder of wonders of wonders and yet you see it as the unity it is the unity that makes it possible had he forsaken his son absolutely and broken the Trinity our salvation would be impossible God's existence would have ceased to be it as almost as though God comes to the very edge of the cessation of his own existence because he has staked his existence on keeping this covenant of salvation and in that abyss of darkness to which perhaps we will never be given access your salvation and my salvation was right but it not only in that way helps us to appreciate our dear Lord Jesus Christ it helps us to know what it is to worship God did it strike you this morning when we came to Isaiah chapter 6 and heard again those glorious words holy holy holy is the Lord but Isaiah's response to that revelation of the intensity of the God who is even as it were through the prismatic fragment of light that we call God's holiness that Isaiah's response to that was to say I am disintegrating and that's how the gospel works by disintegrating our sinfulness and reintegrating our lives with the one who is simple I have no doubt that of Isaiah went down from the temple that day to see his good friend Rabbi Eliezer with ashen face and Eliezer said tomb what on earth has happened to you Isaiah I have little doubt that Isaiah would have said I think I've been to the temple for the very first time in my life and the paradox is that ever after he wanted to call God the Holy One of Israel it was the experience that almost killed him that transformed him and so as we thought today about the omniscience of God as we've thought today about the holiness of God as we thought today in this wonderful way about the Asiya T of God and thought today about the beauty of God at the end of the day we've just been thinking about God who says to us because I change not you are not concerned and Moses covered his face our Heavenly Father our words our minds are too many and too complex to begin to express the glory that lies in your eternal simplicity we confess that we have often spoken where we did not understand we have gone with light spirit and not knowing that you have been present we have sung and not penetrated through the curtain behind which you reside in eternity in majesty and glory but as we come to the end of this day with our minds fool our hearts expanded our lives blessed by the fellowship of your people our deepest desire is to prostrate ourselves before you who has made yourself known to us in the human face of our dear Lord Jesus Christ and to thank you with all our hearts that you who are so beyond our understanding should come for our salvation and help us to know you O God in heaven we pray that you would take from our hearts because of the knowledge of your glory all fear and enable as we pray saw to live trusting in you that by your grace we may be brought from this world of sin disintegration and need so that better and brighter world we will see the lamb slain face-to-face be made like him and pure in heart see you as we cannot see here Oh God grant that this may be so and that none of us may fail of that glorious destination for Christ our Savior sake

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Keywords: ligonier, ligonier ministries, sinclair ferguson, reformed, reformed theology, theology, reformation theology, educational, christian, The Lord Our God, The Lord is One, The Lord Our God The Lord is One, the shema, Shema Yisrael, the trinity, christian trinity, god is one, god is not divisible, the attributes of god, the simplicity of god, Deuteronomy 6:4-9, ligonier conference, ligonier conference 2004, god is one essence, god is three persons, one essence three persons, bible

Id: tOtZNDMpPMY

Length: 52min 57sec (3177 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 08 2015