| Introduction – Knowing the Character of God
Jeremiah 31:31-34 - 11 April 2010
Andrew Lim
Over the next many months we will be exploring the character of God
what is called the attributed of God
We will explore what it means / to speak about
the holiness of God / justice of God / sovereignty / mercy / love
faithfulness / wrath /
I thought it would be good to set the stage
before we begin the series proper next week
This morning I want to jump-start the series
by exploring the question of knowing God
What do we mean by “knowing God”
How is the infinite God known by infinite human people
Only a hundred years ago / the word “God” quite naturally / simply
conjure a Judeo-Christian idea of God
one that fairly accurately described the God of the Bible
Only a hundred years ago / people in the Western world
generally have a fairly accurate idea of the God of the Bible
Even if you weren’t then a Christian
you understood the nature and character of the Christian God
the holiness of God / the wrath of God / His righteousness
His mercy / faithfulness / you understood all that
That’s no longer true today
In such a time when we talk about “God” we may no longer presume
that people have a knowledge of the God we mean
The idea of God today has been hollowed out of its Christian meaning
and people have only a very vague idea
of the character of the God of the Bible
Secondly / people in past centuries lived in what was a Christian world
where Christian values were generally the accepted values
people were quite happy to live by those values
It is no longer the case today
The very idea of truth / is questioned
But that is not because we live in an immoral society
where people clearly understand right from wrong
but prefer to choose the wrong every time
Rather we live in an amoral society in which
right and wrong are categories with no universal meaning
and everyone does what is right in his or her own eyes
We now live in the shadow
of a mighty worldview that is now virtually totally collapsed
And we are living on borrowed principles / morally speaking
And it is not going to be sustainable for very long
Whatever virtues we still hang on to
simply won’t stay intact for very long more
To be sure / you could still sell flowers on country-roads
without anyone manning the stalls / but not for very long more
Rob sent me a video of an interview with Peter Hitchens
the brother of Christopher H / one of the four horsemen of atheism
Unlike his brother Christopher
Peter Hitchens has recovered the faith he once lost
And that interview ended with him making a rather sad note
“This country ceased to be truly Christian in terms of people genuinely
consciously in an educated way believing in the Christian faith after
the First World War. People still continue to behave as if they’re
Christians. And society continues to function as if it’s a Christian
society for sometime after its gone We’ve been living in the past 40
or 50 years in the afterglow of Christianity but eventually –
eventually the darkness falls”
Now because we live in the afterglow of Christianity
the Christian message / the Christian lifestyle / Christian ethics
makes no sense
Because you do not know who God is
things Christians do and believe in make no sense to you
The ten commandments make no sense
and they have been largely abandoned
people think nothing of disrespecting their parents
stealing / killing / lying / sleeping around
Because people do not know who God is
stealing / killing / lying / sleeping around isn’t any big deal
Easter makes no sense
Why shouldn’t one be allowed to open shop on an Easter day?
What’s the big deal?
What’s the big deal when few can tell if
Easter bunnies eggs are not part of the resurrection story
Christmas makes no sense
On an average Christmas morning / people who normally
won’t be in church are in church
And they would sing
“Veil'd in flesh the Godhead see / Hail, th'incarnate Deity
Pleased as man with men to dwell / Jesus, our Emmanuel!
Mild he lays his glory by / Born that man no more may die
Born to raise the sons of earth / Born to give them second birth”
And they can stand there on Christmas morning / singing those lines
and all they feel is a sense of nostalgia of their early days
growing up in country churches / nothing more
And then you’ll see Mrs Smith
singing those lines with a mist in her eyes
singing with deep joy in her heart / she is moved to tears
What is the difference between the two people
One knows God / the other does not
And that / is what I want to talk about this morning
With Easter now passed
Its a great time to set aside the next many months
to explore each week / one great character / attribute of God
We will look each week / into one aspect of God’s character
the eternity of God / un-changeability of God
wisdom / power / faithfulness / goodness / justice / mercy
grace / love / holiness / sovereignty of God
Before we proceed / there is a note I need to make
Can God be known?
The agnostics say / God cannot be known
There are two forms of agnosticism
“Soft agnosticism” says “We do not know if God exists
“Hard agnosticism” says “We cannot know if God exists”
“Soft agnosticism” in principle / does not eliminate the possibility
of knowing God’s existence and knowing God
They simply say they do not have enough evidence
to make a rational decision on the question
But the “hard” agnostic says
“We can nothing about God; He is completely unknowable”
This is self-refuting / because that itself is a claim to knowledge
The claim that “reality is unknowable”
is itself a claim of knowledge about reality
They know enough of reality to conclude that reality is unknowable
In their explicit attempt to deny knowledge
the implicitly make a claim to knowledge
They enough about God to conclude that God cannot be known
The truth is that one has to assume some knowledge about reality
in order to deny all knowledge reality
So agnosticism self-destructs
But other people don’t go that way
They simply says that it is sheer arrogant to claim to know God
They listen to Christians say things like
“God spoke to me about my job / marriage”
and they say you Christians talk like you’ve a hot-line to heaven
and they say Christians are arrogant
But when you conclude this way
it shows you don't know the basic Gospel message
which is that it is not the morally good people
but the humble who know him
God says "I am the high and holy one
and I dwell in the high and holy place
but also with him who is of a humble and contrite heart”
Still other people say they could never know God
They look inside themselves and see all the faults weaknesses depravity
and they say “I'm too bad and I could never know God”
When you respond like that / you too don't understand the gospel either
which is Jesus died as your substitute and your mediator
and He paid the penalty that you should have to pay
and He satisfied the justice of God
and it is through grace that you know God
So whether people says they’re agnostics and God cannot be known
or Christians are arrogant think they have special knowledge of God
or “I’m too depraved to ever know God”
- all three challenges don’t cut it
The Christians claim is that God can be known
In the Jeremiah passage we’ve just read / it tells us God had always wanted
to be in a relationship with human people
He had a covenant with Israel
A covenant is a relationship based on a legal commitment
God says / “I’m a husband to my people / I brought them out of Egypt”
Marriage is the most common human example of a covenant
- a relationship based on a legal commitment
Jeremiah is here saying in the old covenant
God only appeared to His people
in some kind of a manifestation / what is called a theophany
like in the burning bush / pillar of fire / cloudy pillar by day
And He lived in a Tabernacle / in a Temple
and if people wanted to meet with Him
they went to the Temple
But Jeremiah tells us / that covenant broke down
because the people turned against Him / broke the covenant
And now God says a time is coming
when I will cut a new covenant with you
And it will be a far greater covenant
He will now appear to us not in a burning bush / pillar of fire
but through the Person of His Son Jesus Christ
And now He no longer live in the Temple / Tabernacle but in our hearts
John 1 / “The Word became flesh
and tabernacled with us and we beheld His glory”
What’s the upshot of all this?
God says it in His own words /”Now everyone of My people
from the least to the greatest / will know Me”
We can know God
Jeremiah 24:7 says / “I will give them a heart to know me”
God has built into our heart / a desire to long for God / and know Him
Here in v. 33 / “I will write (my laws) on their hearts”
This is why there is always a quiet ache in the human heart
- people don’t always know that they’re aching for God
- they fill it with people and stuff / all less than God
and they don’t ultimately satisfy
We long for something / someone / to make you more complete
to take away your loneliness
The human soul is built for something bigger than they could ever find
if they didn’t find it in God
The writer of Ecclesiastes says / “Wise men and fools alike
spend their lives scratching for food
yet his appetite is never satisfied” / Eccl 6:7
This writer also says / “God has planted eternity in our hearts” Eccl 3:11
The Song of Songs speaks of one
who is driven by desire and longing unsatisfied and unfulfilled
From the first opening words (1:1)
the Song ring with desire and urgency
And the story closes in deep longing (8:3)
Of course some people are more in touch with it than others
but we all experience that in some measure
We all know / something is missing
Camus the Algerian playwright / called it absurdism
Sartre / the French philosopher / called it nausea
Samuel Beckett gave it a proper name / Godot
presumable a play on the word God
A few weeks ago I quoted Marie Antoinette
Archduchess of Austria and the Queen of France
to say / rather famously / “Nothing tastes”
Ronald Rolheiser has rightly said that
is not because we’re over-sexed / hopelessly neurotic
- it’s not because we’re too ungrateful
or too greedy to be satisfied with life
The reason why we’re so restless is because congenitally
we’re overcharged / we’re over-built for this earth
We’ve been built for infinity / built to relate to God
but for now trapped in earthly garment of skin and flesh and bones
Our hearts are made to know God / but down here
we’re relating only to mortal people and perishable things
Our soul is so deep that nothing less than God could ever satisfy
We’ve been built to relate to God
And right here / God gives us the hope we look for
“And they shall all know me / from the least to the greatest”
Right here / we have the answer to all the longing of the human heart
KNOWING GOD
God has built us / to know Him / and relate to Him
How is that going to happen?
In verse 33 / after saying / “I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts” / God says / “I will be their God
and they will be my people”
I’ve said before that God on numerous occasions
compared His relationship to us as that of a groom to his bride
Like a husband making a lifetime commitment to his wife
God commits himself to us
But if the wife is to come to know her husband
she too must commit herself to the relationship
In the same way / God has pledged to be faithful to us
to love us and care for us and hear us
How many times / God reminds us / “When you call I will answer”
We can be sure of His faithfulness to be there to listen to our cries
But do we hear Him speak?
Sometimes we fail to hear God
because we fail to relate to Him as a Person
Could it be that some of us are coming to God
as a power to be tapped rather than a person to be related to
Could it be that we're using God / rather than seeking Him
What do you sense / to be your greatest need right now
- the need for God to take away your pain
- or the need to come to a place of real surrender to Him
and finding Him true
regardless of whether He takes away your pain
The third thing we need to understand is that / there are times
when we imagine that God does not speak / when in actual fact
we have been praying with stoppers in our ears
We come to God / with our minds already made up
We know what we want / and if God does not answer our prayers
in the way we want Him to
we unconsciously stop listening / to what He has to say
and we walk away wondering why He hasn't spoken
How many people there are who have long stopped listening to God
and yet complain that God is silent
Be careful that you're not praying with stoppers in your ears
In your praying / give time for self-examination
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