We
are beginning a new series today on the attributes of God, and I’d like to
start with a quote from A.W. Tozer’s, The
Knowledge of the Holy. He begins the
first chapter of his work with this statement: “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most
important thing about us.” What is
it that comes into your mind when you think about God? One critique of our day and time is that we
are not a people who know what it is to think very deeply about anything, much
less God. How often do you think of God
and how deeply do you think of Him when you do?
Let
me read you the words of Charles Spurgeon, who at twenty years old was thinking
far more deeply about God than many of us ever have: “The highest science, the loftiest speculation, and the mightiest
philosophy, which can ever engage the attention of a child of God, is the name,
the nature, the person, the work, the doings, and the existence of the great
God whom he calls his Father.
There is something exceedingly
improving to the mind in a contemplation of the Divinity. It is a subject so vast, that all our
thoughts are lost in its immensity; so deep, that our pride is drowned in its
infinity. Other subjects we can compass
and grapple with; in them we feel a kind of self-content, and go our way with
the thought, “Behold I am wise.” But
when we come to this master science, finding that our plumbline cannot sound
its depth, and that our eagle eye cannot see its height, we turn away with the
thought that vain man would be wise, but he is like a wild ass’s colt; and with
solemn exclamation, ‘I am but of yesterday, and know nothing.’ No subject of contemplation will tend to more
humble the mind, than thoughts of God.
But while the subject humbles the
mind, it also expands it. He who often
thinks of God, will have a larger mind than the man who simply plods around
this narrow globe…Nothing will so enlarge the intellect, nothing so magnify the
whole soul of man, as a devout, earnest, continued investigation of the great
subject of the Deity.
And, whilst humbling and expanding,
this subject is eminently consolatory.
Oh, there is, in contemplating Christ, a balm for every wound; in musing
on the Father, there is a quietus for every grief; and in the influence of the
Holy Ghost, there is balsam for every sore.
Would you lose your sorrow? Would
you drown your cares? Then go, plunge
yourself into the Godhead’s deepest sea; be lost in his immensity; and you
shall come forth as from a couch of rest, refreshed and invigorated. I know nothing which can so comfort the soul;
so calm the swelling billows of sorrow and grief; so speak peace to the winds
of trial, as a devout musing upon the subject of the Godhead.”
In
Jeremiah 9:23-24 Jeremiah charged God’s
people with the importance of knowing God.
The Israelites had become a people who had forsaken God and were hoping,
trusting, and boasting in everything but God.
To these people, God would say through the prophet Jeremiah: [23] Thus says the LORD: “Let not the
wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let
not the rich man boast in his riches, [24] but let him who boasts boast in
this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD who practices
steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I
delight, declares the LORD.”
Today
I want to us to contemplate the importance of knowing the only true God of the
Bible and look at three truths that will be foundational for us to become
people who are desperate to know our God.
I.
We Must Beware of the Danger of Idolatry (9:23)
Jeremiah
first warns the people of God not to boast in themselves or their
resources. This is a warning against idolatry,
which is the worship of that which is not God.
All people will either worship God or an idol (Rom. 1:18-32). What we see
in Jeremiah 2:12-13 is that idolatry
is not only a worship of something else but also a forsaking of
God: Be appalled, O heavens, at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate,
declares the LORD, [13] for my people have committed two evils: they have
forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for
themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.
While
we can all identify with the temptation to boast in and trust in idols like the
ones that Jeremiah mentions here, I want to draw our attention today to one of
the subtlest idols of all: an inaccurate view of God. Even if we think we are worshiping the God of
the Bible, we are committing idolatry if our view of God does not match what
God has revealed about Himself in the Bible because we are still calling
something “god” that is not God. Commenting
on this type of idolatry, A. W. Tozer would say: “Among the sins to which the human heart is prone, hardly any other is
more hateful to God than idolatry… The
idolatrous heart assumes that God is other than He is – in itself a monstrous
sin – and substitutes for the true God one made after its own likeness. Always this god will conform to the image of
the one who created it and will be base or pure, cruel or kind, according to
the moral state of the mind from which it emerges.
A god begotten in the shadows of a
fallen heart will quite naturally be no true likeness of the true God.
Let us beware lest we in our pride
accept the erroneous notion that idolatry consists only in kneeling before
visible objects of adoration, and that civilized peoples are therefore free
from it. The essence of idolatry is the
entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him.”
“Wrong ideas about God are not only
the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; they are
themselves idolatrous. The idolater
simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.”[1] Inaccurate
thoughts about God are idolatrous thoughts about God. One of
the reasons this is so important to understand this type of idolatry is that we
can find ourselves living much like the Israelites were in Jeremiah’s day,
wearing God like a badge and then living however we want to. We must remember that a god who is god of the
head but not god of the heart is not the God of the Bible. We would do well to
heed the words of J.I. Packer, that “those
who hold themselves free to think of God as they like are breaking the second
commandment.”[2]
II.
We Must Understand the Importance of Knowing God (9:24)
Jeremiah
calls God’s people to boast in understanding and knowing God. Do you know
God? What does it mean to know God? Now there is a sense in which we both can
and cannot know God. Firstly, we cannot know God apart from
His intervention into our lives (2
Cor. 4:3-6). Apart from the grace of
God, we would remain stuck in Romans
1:18-32 to our own eternal destruction.
Also, we cannot know God fully,
or exhaustively, because God is incomprehensible! [7]
“Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the
Almighty? [8] It is higher than heaven—what can you do? Deeper than
Sheol—what can you know? [9] Its measure is longer than the earth and
broader than the sea. (Job 11:7-9)
[145:1] I will extol you, my God and
King, and bless your name forever and ever. [2] Every day I will bless you
and praise your name forever and ever. [3] Great is the LORD, and greatly
to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable. (Psalm 145:1-3) Our knowledge of God will never be exhaustive (John 21:25, Romans 11:33), which is
one of the things that will make heaven joyful: an eternity of knowing God more
and more!
There
is a sense in which we can know God though.
First, we can know God personally,
which is a far greater privilege than knowing God exhaustively. It is a far greater joy to me to know my wife
personally and to experience life together with her than it would be to simply
know all the facts that I could about her.
Another very important sense in which we can know God is that we can know God accurately as He has
revealed Himself in Scripture. For
instance, in this passage, God reveals to His people (1) Who He is: YAHWEH, (2)
What He is like: He practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the
earth, and (3) What He delights in: He delights in these things. In the Bible, there are many ways in which
God reveals Himself: His names, His images, His actions, and also what are
called His attributes, which is where we will focus over the next few months.
Knowing
God is the most important matter in the universe! Consider the following passages: John 17:3: And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and
Jesus Christ whom you have sent.
This is what eternal life is!!!
This means that there will be eternally terrible consequences for not
knowing God. According to 1 John 2:14, knowing God is the mark of
maturity for a believer: [14] I write to you, fathers, because
you know him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, because you
are strong, and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil
one. In Jeremiah 31:31-34, we see that the aim of the New Covenant is that
God’s people might know Him: [31] “Behold,
the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with
the house of Israel and the house of Judah, [32] not like the covenant
that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring
them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their
husband, declares the LORD. [33] For this is the covenant that I will make
with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law
within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and
they shall be my people. [34] And no longer shall each one teach his
neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know
me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will
forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” Nothing matters more than knowing God, which
is why Paul would say in Philippians
3:8-11: [8] Indeed, I count
everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my
Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as
rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ [9] and be found in him, not
having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes
through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—[10] that
I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings,
becoming like him in his death, [11] that by any means possible I may
attain the resurrection from the dead.
Do
you know God? Does this passion to know
God burn deep in your heart? I am not
speaking of mere head knowledge and lip service. I am talking about the most joyful and deeply
satisfying experience available to a human being: knowing their Creator.
III.
We Must Understand the Path to Knowing God (9:23-24)
In
this passage, Jeremiah’s presents us with three paths to knowing and
understanding God. The first path is
that of humbling one’s self. I say humbling one’s self because this charge
is one of repenting from self-boasting to God-boasting. Notice that a humble person is not
someone who isn’t boastful: a humble person is simply someone who boasts in
that which most deserves to be boasted in, namely, God. The second path we see is to knowing God is
that of making the pursuit of knowing
and understanding God our boast and delight. This is not just a call to understand and know God, but a call to boast in understanding and knowing
God. It is a call to make this pursuit
our boast and delight. Finally, the third
path we see to knowing God is that of God’s
self-revelation. What we can know
and understand of God is what God reveals to us about Himself. We learn about God by revelation, not speculation.
1 Cor. 2:14: The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for
they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are
spiritually discerned.
Paul’s
prayer for the Ephesian believers is my prayer for us as we journey through
this series: [15] For this reason,
because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all
the saints, [16] I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in
my prayers, [17] that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of
glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of
him,” (Ephesians 1:15-17).
How
are we going to avoid the danger of this becoming merely a pursuit of learning
about God? Packer gives us some simple
but demanding advice here: “we must turn
each truth that we learn about God
into a matter of meditation before God,
leading to prayer and praise to God.”[3]
May we become a people who humble ourselves and become desperate to know
our God, and in studying God, may we be led to God Himself. God brought some of you here today to reveal
Himself to you so that you, by faith, could know Him.
[1] A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, 3-4
[2] J.I. Packer, Knowing God, 47
[3] J.I. Packer, Knowing
God, 23
