The Baptist Faith And Message Article II: God Part 1
We are now in Article 2 of The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 and find ourselves in a doctrine that is incredibly difficult to understand. In fact, it is beyond our understanding. This may trouble some people, but I believe that it just makes sense for God to be incomprehensible.
So, there is a guideline that I think is helpful. And, this guideline has served me well when interpreting Scripture. And, this guideline comes from a passage of Scripture.
The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.” (Deuteronomy 29:29 ESV)
The principle derived from this passage is that there are some things that God knows that I am not allowed to know. The only things that I can know are those things that are revealed. And, I am obligated to learn and to know those things that God has revealed in His Word. This gives me definite boundaries. And I am to stop where God’s Word stops. I am not to go beyond what God’s Word says. And I believe that The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 does a good job of describing what Scripture says and going no further.
Here is Article 2,
II. God
There is one and only one living and true God. He is an intelligent, spiritual, and personal Being, the Creator, Redeemer, Preserver, and Ruler of the universe. God is infinite in holiness and all other perfections. God is all powerful and all knowing; and His perfect knowledge extends to all things, past, present, and future, including the future decisions of His free creatures. To Him we owe the highest love, reverence, and obedience. The eternal triune God reveals Himself to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, with distinct personal attributes, but without division of nature, essence, or being.
Now, just as last week, let’s take a look at this line by line.
“There is one and only one living and true God.”
This statement is so commonplace to us that we don’t think of it as being all that meaningful, but it is. It places the beliefs of Southern Baptists and Christians as a whole as completely different than much of the world and much of what has been believed in the past.
There are many, many beliefs from yesterday and today that hold to many different gods. The “pantheon” of gods found in Ancient Greece and Rome are not the only examples of this. Most of the religions that surrounded Ancient Israel were this way. Egypt, who held them captive was definitely this way. And as we move through history, it is easy to see that this was a very popular belief. As was noted in our discussion over the First Commandment, in the series over the Ten Commandments, this belief is growing in popularity even in America. And this also separates us from Mormons, which claim to be Christian but believe in many different “gods”.
Living and true are not insignificant here either. God actually exists, He is alive and He is actually God. We believe that every other “god” that other people worship are false. They are not truly God. For there is only “one and only living and true God.” And that God is the God of the Bible. He is the God we worship.
One passage of Scripture that that teaches this plainly is Deuteronomy 6:4.
“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” (Deuteronomy 6:4 ESV)
God has revealed Himself in Scripture as one God. The one true God reigns supreme.
He is an intelligent, spiritual, and personal Being,
This is not a comprehensive statement on the attributes of God, rather it is a statement about God really existing and acting in a personal manner. God is a being that is intelligent, that is He is a thinking being. He is spiritual, that is God does not have a body like man. Yet, He acts personally, not as a force.
Modern man has desired to state that God is not a being that exists but a force that holds all things together in the Universe. We are saying clearly that this is wrong and that God is a personal thinking being. As Herschel Hobbs pointed out,
“The Bible presents God as the supreme personal Spirit (John 4:24); He possesses all the qualities attributed to personality.”[1]
This means that God is not just acting in time as a machine or a force, but as one who is personal. The history of God’s relationship to His people bares this out quite plainly. God responds, time and time again, in a very personal way to His people and all the people of the world.
the Creator, Redeemer, Preserver, and Ruler of the universe.
This personal God created. That is what we discussed this past Sunday from Genesis 1:1.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1 ESV)
God, who is personal, decided to create. No one and nothing else gets to claim that they created the Earth.
When people fell into sin and brought ruin to God’s creation, He did not sit back and just let things go. God is also the Redeemer. He will save His people and Creation from the results of mankind’s sin. This would be accomplished through the work of the Second Person of the Trinity, God the Son when He took on human flesh to accomplish the work and will be ultimately fulfilled one day.
And as we think about the creation of the world, we also realize that God did not just create it and leave it. God still oversees the world and its preservation. If God were to withdraw from the world completely all things would fall apart. God is preserving life on this Earth as we speak.
“These all look to you, to give them their food in due season. When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things. When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.” (Psalm 104:27-30 ESV)
And when Jesus responded to the people frustrated at His healing a person by the pool of Bethesda His argument for being able to work on the Sabbath was that His Father was at work preserving the world. Since He and the Father are one, it was okay for Him to be at work as well.
“The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because He was doing these things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” (John 5:15-17 ESV)
God, who “is an intelligent, spiritual, and personal Being” is at work even now preserving the world that He made.
But that is not all. God is Himself the supreme ruler of the Universe. God is king over all things.
“Sing praises to God, sing praises! Sing praises to our King, sing praises! For God is the King of all the earth; sing praises with a psalm!” (Psalm 47:6-7 ESV)
God is…
The next statement concerns the attributes, or characteristics of God. This is not a thorough list of God’s attributes, but it is a very good beginning and way to differentiate God from all other “gods” that people worship.
“God is infinite in holiness and all other perfections. God is all powerful and all knowing; and His perfect knowledge extends to all things, past, present, and future, including the future decisions of His free creatures.”
To say that God is “infinite in holiness and all other perfections” is a way of saying that we are only making a beginning of describing God. But it is also a way of saying that God is completely and totally perfect in every way. For Him to be described as infinitely holy is to say that
“God is…the greatest of all possible beings, perfect in all He is. He is not bound by time or space as we are. Thus, the fact that He has no body is not something that makes Him less than He would be if He did have once since to have one is to be limited at least by space, but also by time.”[2]
God is not limited as we are by the condition we live in. God is able to do everything to a degree to which we cannot nor can we imagine. Humans cannot be infinitely holy, but God can. Humans cannot be infinitely loving, but God can. And that list can go on and on. But the point is clear. God exists differently than we do.
God is all powerful
All powerful is the best way we can say that God has the power to do whatever He desires to do. Omnipotent is another word for it, but since people don’t speak like that anymore we will stick with “all powerful”.
Stephen Charnock, in his book, “The Existence and Attributes of God” stated that
“The power of God is that ability and strength whereby He can bring to pass whatsoever He pleases, whatsoever the infinite purity of His will may resolve.”[3]
The Lord is able to accomplish all of His will because He is “all powerful”.
“The LORD does all that pleases Him in the heavens and on the earth, in the seas and in all their depths.” (Psalm 135:6 ESV)
God is all knowing; and His perfect knowledge extends to all things, past, present, and future, including the future decisions of His free creatures.
This passage was part of a few changes that were made to The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 that were brought in due to dangerous beliefs that were becoming more prevalent.
The Bible teaches unequivocally that God knows all things. One good example of this comes from a text in 1 John that we discussed a few months ago.
“By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before Him; for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and He knows everything.” (1 John 3:19-20 ESV)
And when we say that God knows all things, we really mean that He knows all things. And because God is Spirit and out side of time He knows all things past, present, and future. And this includes the free decisions that you will make a few minutes from now.
And here is where the problems that had to be dealt with raised their ugly heads. People were stating that it was not possible for God to know all things because people were created with free wills. They surmised that if God knew all things, even the future, then it was not possible that people were actually free. And from there, they reasoned that God did not know the future choices of His free creatures. This belief is still held by some today. It is called “Open Theism” and has been renounced by nearly every Bible believing Christian because of how the Bible addresses both God’s knowledge of the future and the free will decisions of creatures.
The Bible does not reason as people reason, therefore it can teach both the free will decisions of creatures and that God knows the future perfectly. As Scheiderer put it,
“The God of the Bible knows all that will happen, even the decisions of His creatures, because He has decreed them to happen. All things happen according to His will, and thus He knows all that will happen.”[4]
And, that is exactly what Scripture teaches. Everything is worked out according to God’s will.
“In Him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will.” (Ephesians 1:11 ESV)
And I know that it is difficult for us to wrap our minds around a creature having a free will and God ordaining all things, but that is what we find in Scripture. We find that both are true at the same time. That is why I began our lesson with the rule of engagement that stated that we don’t go beyond the Scriptures. It’s a good rule, but sometimes we want to go further.
To Him we owe the highest love, reverence, and obedience
We owe to God our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer everything. We owe Him all that we are. We owe Him our “highest love, reverence, and obedience”.
Conclusion
I know that we did not get completely through that first statement, but I do believe it is as much as time will allow. So, next week we will discuss Divine Simplicity and the Trinity. Well, we will see what we can do. Those two doctrines are probably the most difficult to understand in all of Scripture.
R. Dwain Minor
[1] Herschel Hobbs, The Baptist Faith and Message, Convention Press, Nashville, Tn. 1971, p. 37
[2] Daniel Scheiderer, Still Confessing: An Exposition of The Baptist Faith And Message 2000, Founders Press, 2020, p. 18
[3] Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God. Volume 2. Baker Book House, 1979, p. 13.
[4] Daniel Scheiderer, Still Confessing: An Exposition of The Baptist Faith And Message 2000, Founders Press, 2020, p. 20