Eternal, and what's amazing is that this God, who is self-existent, self-sufficient, and eternal, seeks a relationship with His chosen creation. God wants His creation to know Him, and He wants us to know Him by what He is, what sort of God He is, and He tells us that in His Word.
So we got to ask ourselves a question. The question is this: What do we need to know about God? Or, in other words, what sort of God do we worship?
The first thing that we need to learn is that the sort of God that we worship is a God that cannot be compared to anything else. That's His transcendence. Look at our text here in Psalm 86, and verse number eight. David wrote and said, "There is none like you among the gods, O Lord, nor are there any works like yours."
So this first thing that we need to understand about what God is, or what sort of God that we worship, is that He cannot be compared to anything or anyone else. You know, when we speak of God, we can't put God on a list. You can't say that God's number one, and then you've got a god, Jehovah, God's number one, and then you've got a bunch of other gods underneath Him. With Jehovah God, there is no list. He is the one and only.
You know, you talk about the GOAT, if you're familiar with that phrase, the greatest of all time. We talk about Michael Jordan being the GOAT, and I stand firm on that. He is the GOAT when it comes to basketball. Don't talk about LeBron James—no, no thank you. We talk about him being the GOAT of basketball; we talk about GOATs in this and that, and this guy's the greatest of all time, he's the best, the greatest president. We make these lists, but we cannot have that kind of conversation when it comes to God.
That's a conversation we shouldn't have. Jehovah's transcendence demands that there's no place for that kind of talk because if we try to compare Him with other gods, then that is just mere idolatry. We shouldn't take Zeus, for example, and say, "Here are all the good things of Zeus, and here are all the good things of Jehovah," and see how they kind of compare or contrast. No, it doesn't matter about Zeus; all we have is God and God alone. There's no comparison. Jehovah is transcendent above everything and everyone.
There are two ways in which David here in this text declares God's transcendence. He teaches us, one, about God's majesty. We hear that word a lot throughout Scripture; we even sing about it. David says, "There’s none like you among the gods." That's His majesty. Majesty means His greatness, and the greatness by which the Lord is described cannot be compared to anything or anyone else.
There are a whole lot of verses that talk about God's greatness or His majesty. Let's look at a few of them real quick. I've got them right here on my screen. Take some notes real quick; I'm going to speed through this.
Psalm 48:1 says, "Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise."
Psalm 93:1 says, "The Lord reigns; He is robed in majesty. The Lord is robed; He has put on strength as His belt."
Psalm 95:3 says, "For the Lord is a great God and a great king above all gods."
He's talking about His majesty, His greatness. The theologian J.I. Packer writes in his book, *Knowing God*, "Like us, God is personal, but unlike us, He is great." He emphasizes that word "great" in all its constant stress on the reality of God's personal concern for His people. The Bible never lets us lose sight of His majesty and His unlimited dominion over all His creatures.
So we see His majesty. The second way in which David talks about God's transcendence is in His might. He says there at the end of verse 8, "Nor are there any works like yours." Who can create a beautiful universe, an intricate and vast universe, as the one that we live in? Who can take all the details of the body, the beauty of the mountains, and the depths of the oceans? Who can do all that? Who can replicate that or surpass that? Nobody can. There's none like our God.
Psalm 77, verses 11 through 14 says, "I remember; I will remember the deeds of the Lord. Yes, I will remember your wonders of old. I will ponder all your work and meditate on your mighty deeds. Your way, O God, is holy. What God is great like our God? You are the God who works wonders; you have made known your might among the peoples."
The New City Catechism states that God is the Creator and sustainer of everyone and everything. When you look at nature and the intricacies of creation, it should force us to acknowledge that God's hand is in all, and we should go on our knees and worship Him, knowing that He is above all of that, and He is the sustainer and Creator, and He holds it all together.
We'll talk a little bit more about creation in just a minute, but when we think about God's transcendence, how He is above all and everything, and when we're confronted with that, we can't compare God to anything else. When we do, all that is is a useless, idolatrous task that we're doing. It means that we cannot place those things that we hold dear in our life on the same level as God.
Right now, as I'm speaking, I can think in my mind of certain things that I hold dear, that I hold firm to. Those are valuable to me in my life. I cannot take those things and compare them to God. If I do, I'm just an idolatrous mess. God's majesty and might surpass all comprehension, and we can't compare Him to anything.
So we see His transcendence; He's above everything. David talks about that here in our psalm.
The second thing of what we need to know about God, or what sort of God that we worship, is that He is a God that desires to be known and worshiped. It says here in verse number nine, "All the nations you have made shall come and worship before you, O Lord, and shall glorify your name, for you are great and do wondrous things; you alone are God."
This is another way in which we understand God, and the sort of God that He is. He wants to be known; He desires to be known, and He wants to be worshiped. This is something that we can't fully understand—the greatness of God—but we should seek to worship Him.
The New City Catechism gives us a glimpse into the way that God has chosen to reveal Himself. He has said, "These are the ways in which I want to be known," and we see some of that in our answer here. God is the Creator; He's the sustainer; He's eternal, infinite, unchangeable in His power, perfection, goodness, and glory, wisdom, justice, and truth. This is just a small fraction of what we find in all of the Scriptures of how God wants to be known. There are many, many other ways.
We don't have time to go through each and every single one of them now. If we want to spend a couple of hours in a sermon, then let's do it, but I don't think we have time to do that today. But we can understand that these are the ways in which God wants to be known.
We cannot form in our mind a God that we want of our choosing. We cannot go beyond how God has chosen to reveal Himself. When we do, we're creating a God in our own image. Our fallen state has no right to declare who or what God is. We don't have that right. We must be guided in a proper understanding of God, and He has chosen how we must know about Him.
There are three ways how He's chosen to reveal Himself to us. The first, we've talked about this a little bit, and it's called General Revelation. General Revelation means we know about God, or we have an understanding of God through His creation, through something that theologians call common grace.
Psalm 19:1 says, "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork." You know, if you go out these doors right here and you exit this building and you look out and you see the mountains that surround South Green High School, you know that that's evidence of a God. That's His handiwork.
But let's take it a little more personal. Let's do an exercise together, all right? Let's wake up a little bit. Let's take everyone take a deep breath. Now hold that breath for a second. Let it out. I know we're not doing yoga; I'm not doing any yoga. But that breath that you just took is evidence of God's common grace in your life because God is not obligated to let you breathe air. He's not obligated to do that, but He does it anyway. He gives you that ability to breathe air.
So we know that God exists every single time, or it should make us think that there is a God because every time I breathe, I've been given that ability to do that. He has given us that air; He's given us the lungs to breathe. So that is what is called General Revelation.
That in itself cannot stand on its own. You can't fully know God just based on His creation. So anybody that says, "Oh, I can go into the woods and find God there," sure, you can see the evidence of God in the woods and in creation, but you can't base it solely on that. You need something more. You and I need something more, and that's called Specific Revelation, and that comes through His written Word.
God has given us His Word to know more about Him, and we can't treat God's Word as some ancient text that can be just discarded because it's outdated. No, this is a living and active Word that's doing a work in our lives that we need to submit to because this is how God has chosen something more, way more specific than just seeing creation.
Hebrews 4:12 tells us that the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. As God reveals Himself more and more to us through His Word, and as we submit ourselves to that revelation, you know what that does? It reveals to us our brokenness. It reveals to us our sinfulness in comparison to a holy God, and that confrontation demands a humbling response, doesn't it?
D.A. Carson, the theologian, said it this way: "To get to the heart of who God is and to bow before Him in some small measure of genuine understanding, it's important to think through what the Bible says again and again and integrate the whole with the same balance and proportion that Scripture itself gives that cause us to worship."
If we put anything else in the place of God, that is the very definition of idolatry. Anytime you place something above Scripture, you've just become an idolatrous person. Anytime I do that—my opinions, my thoughts, my preferences—I place them above Scripture; I've become an idol worshiper of my own opinions and my own desires and preferences.
God's Word should reign supreme in your heart and in my heart. And how do we know that God's Word is true? How does God's Word validate itself? Well, it's comforting to know that all throughout Scripture, when you compare Scripture with Scripture, there is a cohesiveness throughout Scripture that is incomparable to anything else that we have at our fingertips.
How is it possible that the Bible, which was written by 40 different authors over a period of 1500 years that spanned three different continents, can be cohesive and not contradictory? That's a work of God. As we read God's Word and we find a truth in one place, we can go to another place and find that same truth. An author who lived thousands of years ago could write something through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and that truth could be carried all the way through, and another author writes the exact same thing, and they didn't know each other. They didn't have FaceTime to see, "Hey, what are you writing?" and "Here's what I'm writing." No, they were disconnected through years and continents and languages, and yet it's still cohesive and still doesn't contradict itself.
How can David here write these words about God being the God that He is, that there's none like you among the gods, that there are not any other works like yours? How could he write that? Because hundreds of years before him, Moses would write in Exodus 15:11 and say, "Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?"
David could find comfort in the words of Moses, and he could take pen—if he had a pen—and he could write that. I don't know how he did it; maybe he chiseled it. I don't know how he did it, but he wrote it down because the Holy Spirit led him, and he found comfort in what was said hundreds of years before him.
God's Word verifies itself, and we can find confidence in that, knowing that there is a reliability in that. Yes, we can go to science, and we can go to geography, and we can go to archaeology, and we can find verifiable things in that to help us in our quest of knowing God's Word, but the Bible itself verifies itself. Does that make sense? That's specific revelation, and we need to place all our trust on that, knowing that God has given that to us so that we know who He is, know what sort of God He is.
But there is a third way that God has revealed Himself to us, and that is called ultimate revelation. Ultimate revelation is found in Jesus Christ. God gave His Son, who came to this earth, took on flesh, and because we know Jesus, we can know God. Jesus said in John 17:1-3, "Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given Him authority over all flesh to give eternal life to all whom you have given Him. And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent."
How do we know God? We have this specific revelation from His Word, but we also have the ultimate revelation through Jesus Christ and what He's done for us. He laid aside His glory; He didn't lay aside His deity. He laid aside His glory, came to earth, and fulfilled the Father's will by bringing all the chosen back to the Father through His perfect sacrifice on the cross. Jesus Christ is the ultimate revelation of God.
But let me caution you when it comes to this revelation that we have—the general, specific, and ultimate revelation. There's a caution here. We can study His creation; we could study His Word; we could study the works of Jesus. We can do all those things and still not know God. Why? Because knowing God is not solely built on information; it's built on a deep, abiding relationship with God that we find through Jesus Christ.
Packer says, "We may know much about God, and yet all the time we may hardly know God at all. Our aim in studying that Godhead must be to know God better. Our concern must be to enlarge our acquaintance, not simply with the doctrines of God's attributes, but with the living God whose attributes they are. We must seek in studying God to be led to God. It is for this purpose that revelation was given, and it is to this use that we must put it."
Knowing God doesn't mean that we just know facts about Him. Knowing God means that we pursue a relationship with Him because He has already pursued a relationship for us. That's mind-blowing to think, but He has already taken the step, and we must know Him more by having that relationship with Him. It's not an informational thing; it's a relational thing.
So we see that God's transcendence—He's above all things. We see that He's a God—what sort of God do we worship? It's a God who wants to be known and wants to be worshiped. But then, thirdly, the sort of God that we are worshiping is a God who saves us, though He knows everything about our sinfulness. That's His redemption; that's what redemption is all about.
In verse 15 of our text, David says, "But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness." For homework, I ask you to take some time, do some internet research, go to some commentaries, and find out all the places where it says that we serve a God who has steadfast love and is faithful to us. It will blow your mind. Over and over and over again, we see that our God is merciful, gracious, slow to anger, and He abounds in steadfast love and faithfulness.
Abounding means it's overflowing; it doesn't end. It keeps going and going. Here, David has just told us—he's just said that Jehovah is transcendent; there's nothing like Him. He's just told us that God wants to be known, and now he takes it even further, and he tells us in clear words that this God wants to save us, even though He knows everything about us, that He is gracious and merciful, and He's slow to anger towards us.
The gods created by men don't exhibit this character or have these attributes. Let that sink in, okay? The almighty, holy God of the universe is not like the other gods because this God that we worship is not vindictive.
You say, "Well, wait a minute. What about all that Old Testament stuff where He's always mad and angry and judgmental?" That's a messed-up idea of who God is. Our God is just holy, and He's the justifier. But those attributes that we all know about God do not contradict all the other attributes that He has—that He is full of mercy, full of grace, slow to anger.
I know that's not a word; I just made it up. I like it; I'm sticking with it. It doesn't contradict His steadfast love and His faithfulness towards us. Even though His attributes work in harmony with each other, and we experience all of that every waking moment of our existence, we continue in our state of constant change and constant defiance toward God, in our constant desire for personal autonomy.
We shake our fists before God and we declare that our ways are better than His laws. We constantly try to rob God of His glory, and we make ourselves little gods when, in reality, we're broken, we're messed up, we're corrupt in all our ways. And when I say "we," I mean me.
Yet in all of this, God doesn't change. He's still merciful; He's still gracious; He's still slow to anger; He's still steadfast in His love towards us; He's still faithful. The New City Catechism asks a very hard question to answer: What is God?
Here, standing before you, I've just spent almost 40 minutes trying to explain it, and I can't do it in my own human nature, my human reasoning, because it just doesn't make sense. Why would God remain faithful even when my mutinous, rebellious heart continues to defy Him?
But the fact that God remains faithful even when I'm not faithful brings me great comfort. Again, with J.I. Packer, he says, "There is unspeakable comfort—the sort of comfort that energizes—in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good. There is tremendous relief in knowing that His love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me. There's certainly great cause for humility in the thought that He sees all the twisted things about me that my fellow humans do not see. He sees more corruption in me than that which I see in myself.
There is, however, equally great incentive to worship God in the thought that for some unfathomable reason, He wants me as His friend and desires to be my friend and has given His Son to die for me in order to realize this purpose. All that God knows, and yet He still loves me. And yet He still extends mercy and grace.
We blatantly sin against Him, and yet He's slow to anger towards us. When we reject Him and we take all those things that we just love and hold dear and we transfer our love onto those things and completely offend His character, He is still faithful, and His love abounds steadfastly.
All those of us who hear these words should just fall on our knees and say how wicked we are and just rejoice in His goodness. You may ask, "How does God take my brokenness and the sin and turn it into something beautiful? How's that possible? I've gone too far; I've done too much."
I love the last words in our answer here in the New City Catechism. It says, "Nothing happens except through Him and by His will." If you think that the Creator of the universe can create something so beautiful and yet He's unable to fix your brokenness, you don't fully understand God.
If you believe that He has the power to create beauty in this world, but you don't trust that He can take your broken life and create something beautiful, you don't grasp God's desire for you and the love that He has for you. The God of the Bible is fully capable of taking every evil deed and every evil word that we have said and done, and He could take all of that and form it as something redemptive for His glory.
And that doesn't happen because you or I deserve it or earn it; it happens all because of what Jesus Christ has done for us. We can find rest and comfort in the finished work of Jesus Christ.
That brings us to three quick application points. I'm almost done; I promise.
Number one: We should recognize our unholiness and call out to God for salvation. You can try to explain away sin; you can try to create in your mind and in your imagination a God who doesn't condemn you of your sin, but that doesn't change what the Scriptures say about what God is. The sort of God that we have—He's a God that hates sin and declares to us through His Word that all have sinned, and we are in need of a Savior. Our only hope in life and death is to submit to the fact that we belong, body and soul, both in life and death, to God and to our Savior, Jesus Christ. He's the only one that can save you.
Let me ask you, do you believe this? Will you accept this? I hope you'll do that today.
Number two: We should be moved to worship God every day. To know God accurately should humble us. We should recognize and proclaim the goodness of God. To worship God is to place ourselves in the right perspective of who God is and who we're not. I am not the Creator; I am not the sustainer of everything; I am not infinite; I am not merciful and gracious, and all those things that we saw in the catechism. I am not my Savior.
It's good to remember these things every day, and when we think of those things, we should worship Him because He is all that.
Number three: When we think of all these things that we've just mentioned, we should have hope when the world seems hopeless. Our God is amazing; He's eternal; He's beyond the wisdom of man. This is the God that we should run to because we belong to Him because of what Jesus has done for us. We belong to Him, and we should hold on to Him and trust Him when we experience the brokenness and the hopelessness in the world.
There's hope in Jesus Christ. If you're sitting there hearing all this that I'm saying, and if you're treating all this info about God the same way that my kids treat their vegetables, I pray that you just don't stare at it all and just sit there and do nothing. I pray that you actually take it and realize the benefit in it. See it for what it is—it's God drawing you to Himself, urging you to Himself. He's calling you to know Him, to find joy in Him, even when it seems like there is no joy to be had.
I want to leave you with this verse, and we'll be done. Psalm 34:8 says, "O taste and see that the Lord is good."
Let's pray.
Our Creator and sustainer, everything holds together in You. The smallest creature is known to You; the mightiest army is at Your command. You rule with justice. Help us to trust in Your goodness and to know that You want us to do Your will. Help us to know You more and worship You because You desire to know us, even though we're so broken. Thank You for taking our brokenness and making it something beautiful through the power of Jesus Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit. Thank You for taking all that to bring You glory. We pray these things in Your precious name. Amen.
on Nov 05, 2023
