“Define God!” a smart-alecky student said to me grinning when I was taking a mission to Bangor University in North Wales. “God is a Spirit infinite, eternal and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth,” I replied. He stopped grinning and slowly nodded his head. He didn’t know that it was the Westminster Shorter Catechism’s fourth answer that I was quoting to him. When Heiro the king of Syracuse asked Simonides the court philosopher, “What is God?” the man asked for a day to think about it, and then for two days, and then, two days later, for four days, and so on and on, constantly doubling the days he needed before giving Heiro an answer. He told the king that the more he thought of God the more unknown God was. But can any man by searching find God? No, he can’t. God has made himself known to us in creation and conscience, but especially by the prophets and in these last days by his Son.
So I don’t have to try to prove the existence of God to you because everyone
of you is made in the image of God and you all have a sense of the Lord the
mighty Creator. I live in order to know this God better and to preach him to
you as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit; this one true and
living God has made himself known to us in the Bible. The supreme proof for
the existence of God is the Lord Jesus Christ. God is because Jesus is. Let
me say this, that if ever you begin to think you are losing touch with God,
that he seems to be getting rather remote, then Christologise your view of God.
I’m saying to you to remember that one who said, “If you have seen
me you have seen the Father.” We know God supremely because of what we
know of Jesus, and my heaviest obligation is never to stop crying to you, “Behold
your God!”
David Wells the professor of theology at Gordon Divinity School has a friend
who is a fellow theologian. The man said to him, “I never hear sermons
about God.” What an indictment on the Christian church. Here is the most
fascinating and glorious being of all and people are being starved of hearing
about him, given instead ‘How to . . .’ sermons. What an infinity
there is in the thought of God! What beauty there is in the idea of the true
and living God. My greatest challenge is to magnify God in your hearing so that
he seems more immense than ever before. I have to elevate him so that he is
high and lifted up. The grandest thought your minds can entertain is the thought
of God, and the weightiest word in your language or any language, must be the
word for God. That your idea of God should correspond as nearly as possible
to the true identity of God is immensely important. I was once witnessing to
a girl and she pointed out a beautiful tree to me and said, “That is God
to me. That is how I think of God.” That is what she said. But does the
willow answer her when she speaks? Does it tell her how much it loves her? Does
she long to live always beside it and lie in its bosom for ever and ever?
There is scarcely any error in belief or any failure
in living that can’t be traced to imperfect thoughts about God. Low views
of God destroy the faith. Once we give the wrong answer to the question, “What
is God like?” then we are like a man driving a car very correctly but
on the wrong side of a motorway. It doesn’t matter how carefully the man
is keeping the speed limit, and smoothly changes gears or operates the brakes
and lights and windscreen wiper, he is going the wrong way; he is facing all
the oncoming traffic and death is before him.
Let me remind you of a couple of truths about
this God whom we are to love with all our beings:
i] How immeasurably great is his love.
God is love! The thought has to fill every part of our lives; our hearts and souls and minds and spirits and affections are all to be flooded and washed to their recesses with this truth. The greatness of the love of God; the immeasurable greatness of the love of God. Think of it, for example, merely from the perspective of the people of God who today in their millions are meeting in congregations large and small all over the world.
God loves them all as he has through all the countless generations that are now past. God loves his people, each and every one of them, from the least to the greatest. He so loves them that he has given his Son for them all in order to save them. How vast the love of God if it embraces such multitudes of men and women, as many as the sands on the seashore, and that he didn’t spare his Son that they might all live.
In love God has taken them aboard, that is, he has taken responsibility for their salvation, that is, for justifying them, and providing for them, and sanctifying them, and defending them, and preserving them, and glorifying them all. God has made a commitment to save not a little remnant but an innumerable multitude, and he loves them; he knows their names, and he cares about them. They all matter to him so much. He won’t rest until they are all with him. I may be a very ordinary Christian, a very immature believer, a very untalented person but God is my Husband; he loves me with a husband’s love. He says to me, “I shall use my God-ness for you. All my God-ness is yours. All my wealth is yours -—the wealth of my attributes and functions and prerogatives—all of it is yours—it’s at your disposal. All I am is yours because I love you.” That is the commitment of God. Each of us has God’s undivided attention. He is for each one of us in the splendour of his resources. More than the love for his wife of the best husband in the world; more than the best mother loves her child is God’s love for us. He cares for me with a perfect love as though I were the only man on the planet. It is as if he were Robinson Crusoe and I were Man Friday; just the two of us with God loving me purely and fervently. Wonderful things in the Bible I see; this is the dearest that Jesus loves me. He loved me like this before I was born. When his Son was hanging in darkness on the cross then I was there too on his heart and mind. “I’m determined to give Geoff Thomas eternal blessedness,”—that is what he was thinking on Golgotha—the cross was all about me.
“My name from the palms of his hands
Eternity will not erase.
Impressed on his heart it remains
In marks of indelible grace.”
(Augustus Toplady, 1740-1778)
He loved me and gave himself for me. Surely that is an end to all my sulking and sadness. Here is a Lord passionately devoted to his people; he is committed to every one of them. Remember in Ephesians 5 we find the marvellous picture of Christ’s love for the church, and we are told that he nourishes and cherishes his people, and that is what the Lord’s love accomplishes. There is a marriage contract between him and them so that at every point of their lives, in all the activities of their youth as in all the weakness of old age his love is always regulating the relationship. He is bestowing his love upon them exceedingly abundantly above what they ask or even dream of.
It’s that love which caused him to give himself for his people. It is the gift of Christ that is the measure of God’s love more so than the vast numbers of the saved. God’s love didn’t spare his only Son in his determination to save these people. Christ’s sublime sacrifice shows the lengths to which the love of God will go to have them with him for ever. We have no other experience of such a love. Our own souls are strangers to such generosity and commitment. There is nothing in human history that is comparable to the love of God. I cannot say, “Let me illustrate this by this example in nature, or this example in human history, or in the life of the angels in heaven.” The love of God is singular; it is like nothing at all. And so God is set before us as immeasurable and incomprehensible in his affection.
ii) How unimaginably vast is his mercy.
People today take the forgiveness of God for granted as though it were the most predictable of all the divine attributes, but in the Bible the mercy of God is breathtaking. That God should deal with sinners in a way that’s so different from what you’d expect—-men who’ve caused such tremendous offense—is miraculous. There were times when the Old Testament church would shake their heads in wonder and say, “He has not dealt with us according to our sins.” You think of the experience of King David. We find his conscience burdened with the enormity of his own guilt. His desire has got a man’s wife pregnant, and David has arranged for that man to be killed. It was an action of total carnality, utter cruelty, terrible selfishness that would stop at nothing to get what he lusted for. Yet David dares to go to God and to ask God for forgiveness. Many are too proud to ask, and many wouldn’t forgive would they? They’d scorn a pardon as a mark of weakness. If a man had been hauled before David and found guilty of such reprehensible conduct would this king sitting on his throne of judgment have shown him mercy? But David is saying to God, “Don’t let the way I’ve behaved . . . don’t let that determine how you are going to deal with me. Please don’t let that conduct fix your attitude and relationship to me.” David is so conscious on the one hand of what his sickening behaviour merits, and yet on the other hand David is praying that God, because of his mercy, can deal with him in a way that isn’t determined by what he deserves.
Surely all of us today with our own pasts, carrying our own files, our lives
before God so indelible, so irrecoverable, so irremediable, we’re crying,
“Is there any hope at all for us?” Think of the prodigal son finding
every door closed to him, and considering again the door of his father’s
love, and slowly turning his back on the pigs and setting off home to cast himself
on his father’s pity—the man he’s treated so shabbily. Yet
his father runs to embrace him before he gets to the farm gate, weeping because
his boy has come home. There is joy and renewed status and the robe and sandals
and ring of sonship restored. The past is all forgiven; his son was dead and
is alive again, and was lost and is found. That is the mercy of God. Peter is
restored to preach—“Feed my sheep, Peter.” Saul of Tarsus
the torturer is made a missionary.
I ask you, what is the thing that matters, that really matters in life? What
is supremely important, that I can give my loyalty to it and pursue it all my
life? “God!” the Bible says. The living God of the Bible, so loving,
and so merciful. How precious is God to me! Today, are we all seeing him in
that way? This is the most important and the sublimest thing that surrounds
us anywhere in the whole universe, the mercy of God. That is what we single
out as the most important reality in our world, not our spouses and not our
families. There is nothing, not a single thing so precious to me as the love
of God. It is immeasurable.
We go to him because his word tells us that men may come to him; bad people
may come; prodigals may come. Sinners Jesus will accept. Christ receiveth sinful
men! We have heard of God’s love and mercy, that he doesn’t deal
with men as they deserve, and we go to him. The world is full of people who
let you down. This town is full of broken relationships and broken promises.
The weeping is about abandonment and loneliness, broken reeds and broken hearts.
But we’ve heard that God never abandons; he never lets people down; he
never breaks his promises. God forgives sinners, even the worst; he’s
forgiven the very worst one. He does more for people than they could imagine.
He doesn’t turn them away. He doesn’t command them, “Squeeze
a few more tears out of your heart before you come to me.” We come to
him as ordinary people — no one more ordinary— because he says we
may come and put our trust under the shadow of his wing.
David came and said to God, “Lord, today, the only thing that I can say
about my life . . . my yesterdays . . . last weekend . . . last month . . .
last year . . . all I can say about it all is, ‘Please cover it.’
I never want it mentioned. Never talk to me about it again. Don’t bring
it back to haunt me. I couldn’t bear it if you did. I want it left in
the depths and remembered no more.” David comes to God and he asks God
to do that because of God’s mercy. You’re aware that it’s
a sad world, and a very empty world, more empty than many of you know, but out
there, objective, and real, and pulsating with life, almighty and sovereign,
there is the only God there is, and you might think, “What augustness,
how wholly other he is, what majesty, what righteousness. He designed and created
this inconceivably vast universe. He made the galaxy, the eye, the brain, the
atom, and he is light, and he speaks with such awesome holiness in his law and
to our consciences.” All that is true, but out there I tell you is a Being
so tender, a heart so loyal, so generous and forgiving that the person in the
world today whose life is in the biggest shambles imaginable, may go to this
God and cast himself on his love and mercy, and ask him to forgive him and bless
him, and God will be loyal to every word he has spoken, every promise he has
made, and loyal to what his Son has done in becoming the lamb of God who takes
away the sin of the world.
I have a great problem, and that is the problem that I speak to such an odd
group of people, a people who give me the impression that they’re trying
to make themselves different and special so that God will show them mercy. You
don’t want to come to God ordinary. You want to come to God erect, standing,
head held high. But everyone I’ve known who comes to God comes kneeling.
They come to God feeling very unqualified and unprepared, wishing they were
more sincere, with more conviction, and more hunger and thirst for righteousness.
They come to God feeling terribly unprepared, but many of you are odd because
you are trying to prepare yourselves first. You won’t come ordinary. You
won’t come just as you are without one plea.
There are other very odd people who also listen to me, and they are afraid of
being ‘saved’. They are afraid of a fit of emotion. They are afraid
of religious embarrassment. They are more afraid of making fools of themselves
because of Jesus than afraid of missing the Christmas Ball at the University,
because they imagine being converted means no more dances, and that worries
them far more than losing out on the love of God and a lost eternity. So they
do all they can to avoid being forgiven. They wont go to God and say, “O
God my life needs your mercy. My life with its appalling emptiness needs your
love, but I’m a very ordinary person, and that’s how I’ve
got to come to you. If I tarry till I’m better I will never come at all,
so here I am. You must deal with me, and please deal with me in pity.”
This is the God whose Son is Jesus Christ, the God we stand before in our need
today. This is the God of whom Jesus spoke and he said the greatest commandment
was love him with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.
GEOFF THOMAS