Hey, good morning everybody. Val Campbell here.Today I'm going to be kind of taking the helm here. We're gonna share it with you real quick what the message is here. So basically, today I'm going to be looking at Psalm 145, "The Perfections of God."
Let me tell you a little bit about it. Basically, we're in the Book of John right now with Pastor Scott. We're going to go back about 400 years before John's gospel. My inspiration for this message is really born out of my study of God's attributes. His Perfections are one and the same thing, and how awesome they are to behold of the God that we serve. So, Psalm 145, "The Perfections of God."
And you could ask, "Why the Psalms?" Among other things, there's a whole lot of things I could say. I'll kind of keep it succinct. But I find God, his character, his attributes are rich in the Psalms. We see pictures of who God is in his Essence. And so, regarding these attributes, I'm going to use the term attributes and Perfections one and the same again, interchangeably.
But the promise identified by the prophet Hosea back in the Old Testament is still with us today: "There is no knowledge of God in the land." So, from the book prone to wander, prayers and confessions and celebration, we might seek to pray, "O Lord, we find great delight in your creation and the good things that you have given us to enjoy, but we rarely spend time delighting in you." So that's my prayer and purpose as we start today, really to help us delight in God.
So by way of intro, I need to set a foundation for our passage and topic today by asking and answering a few questions. We're going to do a little bit of theology one-on-one, if that's okay. So the first question we can ask is, what is theology? Well, Millard Erickson defined it this way. He's a theological study or science of God. Augustine called it rational discussion respecting the deity.
Now I like those descriptions. And a lot of times, you know, you ask this question to people that aren't well studied, aren't academics, aren't pastors, etc., "What is theology?" It kind of comes up in their mind this dry study, kind of some of that academics do, right? Doesn't really pertain to me. But I want to propose to you that that's the wrong thing. We should welcome theology. We should want to embrace it because of what Erickson said: it's the study or science of God. What could be more important, right? And if it's rational discussion respecting the deity, I would say it's pretty important for us, right?
So, C.H. Spurgeon kind of took it up a notch. This is what he called it, sid calling it... he called it the contemplation of God. And Spurgeon said of this... I'm going to stop sharing here real quick, I apologize. Spurgeon said of this... there we go, sorry about that. But he said, "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. The most excellent study for expanding the soul is the science of Christ and him crucified, a knowledge of the Godhead in the Glorious Trinity." Wow, that's a mouthful, but I think he's spot on. So that's... it's pretty important.
So, theology isn't just left, you know, to those people like me that like to study, to academics and all that. It's really important. And Matthew Barrett, in his work None, I've read through and I actually taught at our previous church, he said in Christian theological tradition, metaphysics (and that's the study of God's being or Essence) is but a prelude to worship. So you could put a bookmarker on that. It's the study of God's being our Essence is a prelude to worship, okay?
So the basic metaphysical distinction in Scripture is that between the Creator and the creature, God and his creation, that we find in Genesis 1:1. And worship really originated in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve obeyed God, lived according to his will. You'll find Genesis 2:25 is the inference there. So our aim ultimately is to know God's Perfections, and in so doing, learn what it means to actually know God in a saving way. In fact, Augustine said only then will our affections for God be kindled, and I think he was right on.
Okay, and Michael, or Matthew Barrett, continues, and I would echo this warning too and starting out: "But I must warn you from the start, I will not be interested in wasting your time with a God who is tame and domesticated, a god whose Divinity is humanized. That may be the god of popular culture, but it's not the God of the Bible." In fact, Arthur Pink, man, snow words over 100 years ago when he wrote, "The God of this century is no more resembles the Sovereign of holy writ than does this dim flickering of a candle the glory of the midday Sun.
The God who is talked about in the average pulpit, spoken of in the ordinary Sunday school, mentioned in much of the religious literature of the day (and that would certainly hold true today as well), and preached in most of the so-called Bible conferences is a figment of human imagination." Amen.