101.
Getting to know our awesome God
You can know
God.
He
wants fellowship with you. God
wants you to depend upon being in touch with Him and not depend upon religious
acts and duties. To know someone
we need to know what his or her character is like. The first thing we need to know about God is that He is the
Creator!
Not only is He
the Creator, but also by Him, all things still exist and are held together.
Colossians
1:16-17 says, “For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that
are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or
principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him
all things consist.”
Hebrews
11:3 (KJV) says, “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by
the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do
appear.”
Hebrews
1:2 (Amplified Bible) says, “[But] in the last of these days He has spoken to
us in [the person of a] Son, Whom He appointed Heir and lawful Owner of all
things, also by and through Whom He created the worlds and the reaches of space
and the ages of time [He made, produced, built, operated and arranged them in
order]. (verse 3b) …upholding and maintaining and guiding and propelling the
universe by His mighty word of power.”
We cannot
possibly describe God because He created us.
But here are some
other facts about God that we may learn from Scripture:
1. He is uncreated and eternal (John 1:1-3; Genesis 21:33).
2. He is all powerful (Luke 1:37).
3. He is all knowing (Psalm 147:5).
4. He is ever present (Jeremiah 23:23-24).
5. He is a
spiritual being (John 4:24).
6. He is triune, three persons in one. God the Father, the Son, the Holy
Spirit (Matthew 3:16-17; John 1:1-14, 14:9-20).
7. He is infinite
(Isaiah 40:12-13).
8. His nature is love (Ephesians 2:1-7; 1 John
3:1; 4:9-10). God does not HAVE
love, He IS love. God loves us
with an unconditional love. His
love does not depend upon how good or bad we are. While we were dead in sins, He loved us. A dead man cannot do anything but
receive life! Humans love with
conditions. “If you are good
enough, or do what I tell you, then I will love you.” Not God! He
loves just because He IS love.
That is called AGAPE, unconditional love.
9. His character is the fruit of the
Sprit described in Galatians 5:22-23.
10.
He never changes. His emotions do
not run hot and cold like humans (Hebrews 13:8).
James
1:17 describes a sun dial shadow that turns as the sun moves during the
day. But James says with Jesus,
there is NO shadow of turning. In
other words, He is always shining like high noon! You can depend upon Him.
11.
Jesus is the Word. Jesus is God
(John 1:1-2, 14).
12.
Jesus was born of a virgin (Luke 1:26-38). Romans 1:3-4 states that: “concerning
His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who was born of the seed of David according to
the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit
of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead.” Can you imagine asking the teenager Jesus, who are your
parents? Jesus might say, “Well,
you see on my mamma’s side, I am from the family of David, but on my Dad’s
side, well, I AM.”
13.
The Holy Spirit is God (John 14:16-23; 16:7-15).
14.
Best of all, God is love! He cares
about you more than you care about yourself, more than your parents and family
cares about you.
The Word of
God expresses God’s love and concern for you and me in the parables in Luke
chapter 15.
No shepherd in
his right mind would leave 99 sheep to go after a stray sheep, but God pursues
us in our lost state.
The woman in the
next parable had lost her hope. The dowry she needed to be married was 10
coins, and she lost one of them.
If she did not find it, she would be in poverty or would have to sell
her body. God pursues us to make
us whole and to fulfill our hopes and dreams.
The Father in the
next parable waited on his front porch for his lost son to return. When he saw him a long way off, he did
the undignified thing, he ran as fast as he could and covered his dirty son
with a robe so the other servants would not see him; he did not want his son to
be embarrassed.
Some common
questions about God.
You need to “stop
the clock” to understand this.
Does God
predestine our lives? Who is in control,
God or me, or the world around me?
Does God only have certain people who are going to get saved and go to
Heaven, and the others have no chance?
Two things
to keep in mind:
1. God created man with a free will and He will
never violate it.
2. God does not live in time, He lives in eternity. Eternity
is not a long time, but it is an absence of time. God knows
the beginning from the end and the end from the beginning.
It says in the
book of Exodus and in Romans chapter 9 that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Was that fair to Pharaoh? God knew in advance that Pharaoh would
not come to Him, therefore, God could justly make him stubborn. Actually, God does not DECIDE to make
man stubborn, but there is something inside of man’s makeup that makes him
stubborn towards God when he rejects God.
When we say no
to God, something inside of us gets hard, little by little. Finally, we can no longer choose.
God knew this in
advance. Did God cause it? NO! Pharaoh’s own free choice caused it.
God says in
Ephesians 2:10 that our life is predestined for us. Yes, there is a plan for each of our lives, but it is up to
us to choose to walk on that path.
God is sovereign,
He rules, yet He does it in such a way that does not overwhelm the free will of
man, even evil men that plot against God’s people and purposes.
Even the
people and demons who are God’s enemies are working His plan for Him.
Psalm 33:10-11 says, “The LORD brings the counsel of the nations to
nothing; He makes the plans of the peoples of no effect. The counsel of the LORD stands forever,
the plans of His heart to all generations.”
Psalm
2:1-4 says, “Why do the nations rage, and the people plot a vain thing? The
kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together,
against the LORD and against His anointed, saying, ‘Let us break Their bonds in
pieces and cast away Their cords from us.’ He who sits in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall hold
them in derision.”
If you are still
having a hard time with this idea, just remember, God lives in Eternity, not
time. He looks into our future,
our past and our present all at the same time and attempts to bless us with
this knowledge. But He will NEVER
violate our free will.
God is the
Word, and we can trust it (Him).
If there is one
thing the Word of God dares to do that no other book in the world does, it is
to accurately predict the future.
This proves
beyond argument that only God could have authored the Bible.
There are 8,352
verses directly or indirectly concerned with prophecy in Scripture. About one verse out of six tells of
future events. God’s challenge to
the world is that we might prove Him.
“I am the LORD: I will speak, and the word that I shall speak shall come
to pass” (Ezekiel 12:25a, KJV).
Buddhists,
Confucianists and the followers of Mohammed have their sacred writings, but in
them the element of prophecy is conspicuous by its absence. The destruction of Tyre, the invasion
of Jerusalem, the fall of Babylon and Rome – each of these events was
accurately predicted and fulfilled to the smallest of details. The entry of Jesus into Jerusalem was
foretold hundreds of years earlier by the prophet Daniel – TO THE VERY DAY! The forming of Israel as a new state in
1948 was foretold to the day and month in the Old Testament.
There are over
300 prophecies that Jesus fulfilled in His birth, life, death, and
resurrection. Let’s consider only
17 of the most prominent ones.
The combined
probability against these 17 predictions occurring is equal to:
1 chance in
480,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
or 480 Billion x 1 Billion x 1 Trillion
Concerning the
over 300 fulfilled prophecies about Jesus, it is ridiculous to imagine that
these prophecies would all be fulfilled by accident by one person. Only one chance in a number followed by
181 zeros! To give you some idea
of the size of this immense figure, think of a ball that is packed solidly with
electrons (two and a half million billion makes a line about one inch
long). Now in your mind imagine
this ball expanded to the size of the universe, some four billion light-years
in diameter (a light-year being the distance that light travels in a year at
the speed of over 186,000 miles per second). Multiply this by 500 quadrillion. Out of this vast container of electrons, remove just one electron, “color” it red and return it to the
container. Stir it with the other
electrons for a hundred years.
Then blindfold a man and send him in to pick it out the first time. Impossible? With the same chance, Jesus the Christ lived, died, was
resurrected and is now alive according to the Scriptures by “accident”!
There are many
other Old Testament prophecies too numerous to list. There are 1,817 individual prophecies concerning 737
separate subjects found in 8,352 verses.
These comprise 27% of the whole of Scriptures.
Isaiah 42:9 says, “Behold, the former
things have come to pass, and new things I declare; before they spring forth I
tell you of them.”
Who
is Jesus now?
In the Gospels we see who Jesus was when He walked on
earth. He showed us the
personality of God, His Father.
Jesus showed us He was the Lamb of God who took your sin and mine, and
Who humbled Himself to suffer the criminal’s death on the cross you and I
deserved.
The Apostle Paul had a revelation of what Jesus did
for us, even though Paul never met Jesus in the flesh. We see those revelations in Paul’s
epistles.
However, Jesus chose to reveal Himself in a very
special way to John.
Notice Revelation
1 verse 1. It says, “The
Revelation of Jesus Christ.” I
believe that God gave us this view of Jesus because we cannot see Him as He
really is in any other way. Many
walked with Him, many saw Him die, some saw Him resurrected, but no one has
really seen Him as He is right now.
He is a Warrior, a Judge, the Lamb, Almighty God, He is on the Throne,
no being can stand up to Him, He is the Victor, a “terrifying sight” to His
enemies, and He is active on your behalf.
John needed to know all this.
I believe Jesus
showed this vision to John to comfort him by bringing him faith and hope, to
make sense of his crazy circumstances, to do the same for the churches to which
John wrote this letter almost 2,000 years ago and to do the same for you and me
in our lives today when we see all the crazy things going on around us. It is a handbook for obtaining victory
in our lives.
John’s condition
was similar to ours. The world,
for John, was going crazy. For
some of us, the world is going crazy.
Just imagine, John had been living with Jesus for at least 3 years, he
saw Him perform mighty miracles, he saw Him crucified, he saw Him
resurrected. Certainly, after the
resurrection he thought, “Now there was victory.” He saw the Holy Spirit fall on mankind and the start of the
church. He established churches
and he saw people getting saved.
All of the sudden, all of the original disciples were gone and some were
crucified (Peter upside down), some were beheaded, others done away with by
other means. He saw the world
going into a wild spin.
John himself was
almost killed by being boiled in oil, but they could not kill him. Now, at this time, he was taken
prisoner and banished forever to the Isle of Patmos
(definition = my killing – a rugged and bare island in the Aegean Sea). His daily chore included working a rock
quarry and hauling rock up and down hills on his back. He must have thought, “Has the world
gone crazy? Did I really know
Jesus? Was He really God in the
flesh like I wrote about in my Gospel book? Is the church doomed?
Is my life wasted?” Then,
all of the sudden, BAM! Something
appeared to him that he had never seen before.
“I was
in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day, and I heard behind me a loud voice, as of a
trumpet, saying, ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last,’ and,
‘What you see, write in a book and send it to the seven churches which are in Asia:
to Ephesus, to Smyrna, to Pergamos, to Thyatira, to Sardis, to Philadelphia,
and to Laodicea.’ Then I turned to see the voice that spoke with me. And having turned I saw seven golden
lampstands, and in the midst of the seven lampstands One like the Son of Man, clothed with a
garment down to the feet and girded about the chest with a golden band. His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and
His eyes like a flame of fire; His feet were like fine brass, as if refined in
a furnace, and His voice as the sound of many waters; He had in His right hand
seven stars, out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword, and His countenance
was like
the sun shining in its strength.
And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead. But He laid His right hand on me,
saying to me, ‘Do not be afraid; I am the First and the Last. I am He who
lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. And I have the
keys of Hades and of Death’” (Revelation 1:10-18).
Christ
Revealed
In
Revelation chapter 1 John sees Who Jesus is now! He is different from the last time he saw Him. He is the ascended Christ revealed! He is revealed as the faithful,
trustworthy witness, the firstborn of the dead, the Prince of the Kings of the
Earth, the soon coming One, and the Alpha and Omega, the first and last, the
Almighty Omnipotent One!
He is
revealed as the one who is coming to judge His church with fire in His eyes, a
golden girdle, and feet that shined as burnished brass. This judgment is not to condemn the
church, but to protect it from the coming wrath. Holiness is what will protect the church!
In
Revelation chapters 2-3 Jesus is speaking to the church, both then and now, as
if a general was speaking to his troops getting them ready for battle. Because
a major conflict was soon to occur, and the seven churches would be destroyed
if not prepared, Jesus addressed each church according to its own
shortcoming. He encouraged them to
get in right standing with God.
Holiness is what will protect the church!
In
Revelation 4, Jesus invites John, and you and me, to come up into the
heavenlies to see the events from His vantage point. We need to see events in life from God’s perspective. We can get so earthly minded, and our
sight can be so horizontal in looking at our circumstances that we miss seeing
things from God’s point of view.
We are sitting in the heavenlies with Christ; therefore, the Holy Spirit
can give us that view. When we see
our circumstances from God’s vantage point, they do not seem as bad.
In
Revelation 5, God
is the one who originates the battles.
Satan does not originate battles in our lives. Notice, no one was worthy to unroll the scroll and take off
the seals except for Jesus, as the Lion of the Tribe of Judah and, at the same
time, the Lamb of God. Jesus is
the Lion, or the victor, and the most powerful force. Jesus is the Lamb, the one who takes what we have
coming. We could not stand in the
difficult circumstances of life except that Jesus, as the Lamb, takes what we
have coming!
Jesus
is the one who originates battles.
We need to keep this in mind when trouble comes. It may be an evil attack, but it is
Jesus who has put a hook in the nose of our enemies to come at us so that we
may destroy them in His name!
Blessed be the Name of the Lord forever!!! Hallelujah!
In
Revelation 5-16, there is great war, conflict, judgment and persecution as the
scroll is unfurled. Things are
going crazy, and events go from bad to worse to almost intolerable. But in this, God is looking for those
who will overcome and stand.
Revelation
7:3 shows that those believers who are faithful in this overcoming process are
stamped by God for safe keeping.
Things are going to get worse!
A
parenthetical statement is made in Revelation 11 showing the victory of the
Cross and showing that the dominion of the world’s system has been given to the
Kingdom of God and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Revelation
12:11 shows us that if we stand during this time of great trouble that we will
overcome the enemy by the blood of the Lamb and by the Word of God being
testified by our mouths, provided that we do not love our own lives more than
we love God and His purposes.
Revelation
17 is
the revelation of the “world” system and its corruption. It shows the cooperation between the
spiritual and the political.
Revelation
18 is another warning to God’s people to come out of the “world” system because
it is about to be destroyed and it is unreliable. The destruction of this system is demonstrated.
In
Revelation 19 there is victory, and the Lord returns on His white horse to
fulfill His promise and to bring His rewards. “Now I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse. And He who sat on him was called Faithful and True, and in
righteousness He judges and makes war. His eyes were like a flame of fire, and on His head were many crowns. He had a name written that no one knew except Himself. He was clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and
His name is called The Word of God.
And the armies in heaven, clothed in fine linen, white and clean,
followed Him on white horses. Now
out of His mouth goes a sharp sword, that with it He should strike the nations. And He Himself will rule them with a
rod of iron. He Himself treads the
winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. And He has on His robe and on His thigh a name written: KING
OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS” (Revelation 19:11-16).
In
Revelation 20, Satan is bound; judgment takes place.
Revelation
21 shows the Kingdom of God becoming more real, the New Jerusalem. It shows a deeper intimacy with Jesus
as a result of all we have been through.
Revelation
22 shows ministry for those people who have stood and overcome to the end. Here is a picture of the Flowing River,
mentioned in Ezekiel 47, with fruit on both sides for the healing of the
nations, meaning the gentiles, or the people who do not know God. In my experience, real ministry comes
after much tribulation and overcoming.
We take dominion over demons through the battles.
Revelation
22 is also a word of encouragement.
“I am coming quickly, hang on, and you will be blessed. Hang on, and you will turn all this
tribulation and trouble in your life into a blessing.”
This
revelation, or glorification, of Jesus Christ most likely is similar to what
Jesus spoke to the two on the Road to Emmaus, and later to the 11 disciples, explaining
the Scriptures beginning with Moses, the Psalms and the Prophets in Luke
24. Most likely, however, this was
a more complete revelation. When
we see Jesus glorified in this way, we are candidates for the filling of the
Holy Spirit (John 7:39).
I do
not pretend to understand all of the Book of Revelation, nor do I claim to do a
complete teaching on it here.
Neither am I saying that it does not apply to future world prophecy and
events. All I am saying is that it
is MORE than that. It is an
important application for our lives today. We need to know who Jesus is NOW! I also know that on August 26, 1979, while reading the Book
of Revelation, Jesus miraculously saved me and filled me with the Holy
Spirit. He revealed Himself to me,
and I have never been the same!
John
then understood. There is more to life than just making
it to Heaven and living a good life here.
We are called to be in a war, and Jesus is alive and powerful to make
sure we get the victory! This is a picture for us to understand when things are
not going well. We need to place
ourselves somewhere in this process and know that it is God ordained. Then we can stand!
Here
you have the first picture of God.
He is uncreated. He always
existed, He never did not exist.
He will never cease to exist.
He is all powerful, He knows all because He lives outside of time in
eternity. He knows the future
because to Him it has already happened.
He is all knowing. He can
read your mind, and He knows what you are going to think before you think
it. He is present everywhere
through the Holy Spirit.
He is
God the Father, Jesus the Son who is also called the Word of God, and God the
Holy Spirit.
He
is ruler over all.
He is the victor over all enemies.
All things are in His hands!
You
can trust Him and His Word no matter what!
God is awesome! We cannot begin
to understand how great He is! He
loves us beyond what we can imagine!