God Is Personal

We could do well with reading the whole chapter, but perhaps you would like to read the opening verses later on this evening, for I'm suggesting that we commence reading at verse 11. Verse 11, and it's the 45th chapter of the prophecy of Isaiah. Thus saith the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, and his Maker, Ask me of things to come concerning my sons and concerning the work of my hands.

Command ye me. I have made the earth and created man upon it. I, even my hands, have stretched out the heavens, and all their hosts have I commanded.

I have raised him up in righteousness, and I will direct all his ways. He shall build my city, and he shall let go my captives. Not for price nor reward, saith the Lord of hosts.

Thus saith the Lord, the labor of Egypt and merchandise of Ethiopia, and of the Sabaeans, men of stature, shall come over unto thee, and they shall be thine. They shall come after thee in chains. They shall come over, and they shall fall down unto thee.

They shall make supplication unto thee, saying, surely God is in thee, and there is none else. There is no God. Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Savior.

They shall be ashamed, and also confounded, all of them. They shall go to confusion together, that are makers of idols, but Israel shall be saved in the Lord with an everlasting salvation. He shall not be ashamed nor confounded, world without end.

For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens, God himself that formed the earth and made it. He hath established it. He created it not in vain.

He formed it to be inhabited. I am the Lord, and there is none else. I have not spoken in secret in a dark place of the earth.

I said not unto the seed of Jacob, seek ye me in vain. I, the Lord, speak righteousness. I declare things that are right.

Assemble yourselves, and come, draw near together, ye that are escaped of the nations. They have no knowledge that set up the wood of their graven image, and pray unto a God that cannot save. Tell ye, and bring them near.

Yea, let them take counsel together. Who hath declared this from ancient time? Who hath told it from that time? Have not I the Lord, and there is no God else beside me? A just God and a Saviour, there is none beside me. Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.

For I am God, and there is none else. I have sworn by myself. The word is gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and shall not return.

That unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear. Surely shall one say, in the Lord have I righteousness and strength. Even to him shall men come, and all that are incensed against him shall be ashamed.

In the Lord shall all the seed of Israel be justified, and shall glory. Amen. We come now to our third study on this great and important doctrine, the doctrine of God.

And let me just by means of spending a few moments engage in a little revision, and go over ground that we have covered so that we shall be better prepared for the new ground that is to be broken this evening. You remember we started off this series by asking the question, can God be known? And our launching pad was really a statement found in the book of Job in the form of a question. When Zophar asks if man can by searching find out God.

And to that question we gave a qualified answer, a qualified affirmative. Yes man can, but only because God has willed it. God has made the possibility of being discovered, and he has done this in the world of nature, which we refer to as general revelation.

And he has also done it through Jesus Christ, something that we refer to as special revelation. God has revealed himself, and because God has revealed himself it is possible for man to find out God. You remember my prayer in which earlier on I quoted the verse from Jerry Meyer, If ye seek me ye shall find me, if ye search for me with all your heart.

Well, then that was the first question that we answered, and that we posed and sought to answer in our opening study. And then last week I went on to talk to you about the battle for belief. For belief in God can be a battle in the soul.

The whole world it seems sometimes is opposed to the belief in a personal God. And I itemized for you certain proofs, and I put that word in inverted commas, certain proofs that some put forward to demonstrate that God exists. We looked at them.

You remember the argument from purpose, and the argument from design, and the idea that man has an inbuilt moral indicator in his life that we call conscience, and that this is a voice of God, and that because man recognizes this, so he must automatically, logically come to the conclusion that God exists. We looked at three of these proofs, and there were a number of others, and we said for ourselves they were helpful, but they were not conclusive. That's not the foundation on which we as Christians would want to build our faith.

But we're glad for the testimonia. That was the word I gave you, the testimonia that these so-called proofs bring. Then we looked at the the viewpoint of those who claim not to believe in God, and we thought very, very briefly about the atheist, and the agnostic, the humanist, and the Marxist.

We looked at their opinions, just so that we might inform ourselves as to what men are saying with regard to the negative side of the belief of the Christian church. They are saying that God does not exist, and some are even claiming to prove his non-existence. And then finally, in the last 10 minutes of our study, we looked at the biblical approach.

How do I know that God exists? Well, I know him through Jesus Christ. He is the image of God. He is what the writer to the Hebrew calls, as we shall remind ourselves later on in this study, the exegesis of God.

He expounds God. He illustrates God. All right, that's as far as we have come.

And at this stage, I want to raise another topic with you, which is very important. We're trying to deal with this doctrine in a reasonably logical order, at least as it suggests itself to me in terms of how I understand logic. And we're going to deal with the doctrine of the person of God.

The person of God. Go back to my study last week, or was it the one before, when I reminded you of the story you've all read or heard of, I'm sure, years back of Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe, you remember on his island, finds a footprint in the sand.

And the footprint, well, it indicates that there is someone else there besides him. But as to his identity, as to his sex or her sex, he has no awareness at all. Not until Man Friday comes on the scene, and then Crusoe knows that there is another person to whom he can relate on the island, someone with whom he can be friendly.

Now, I suggested to you really that God, in general revelation through nature, has left his footprint on this earth. But in Jesus Christ, the footprint has been filled out in terms of flesh and blood and personality. You see, it's not enough just to see the print of God upon the face of the globe, even if your eyes were sensitive enough to discern it.

You want to know more about God than this. After all, this God, whether he is personal or impersonal, is very, very important as far as you and I are concerned. And can I enter into a relationship with God, this God? Is he concerned about me, and is there anything in my life that would stop me from having a relationship with him? So you've got, sooner or later, when you're studying the doctrine of God, to come to the point where you think about the person of God, or if you like, the personality of God.

Now, where do you start when you're talking about this sort of thing, when you're discussing this, when you're meditating upon it? What do we mean by personality? Well, let's put it into a human context for a moment. What do we mean by personality on the natural level? What can a person do? What is he capable of? Well, a person can think, can't he? You and I, we think. We make deductions.

We can be somewhat detached from our subject and pass observations and draw up conclusions. That makes us different from an animal, because an animal can't think in the way that a human being can think. But more than that, a person has the ability to will things.

There are certain things that I determine that I will do. An act of volition, an act of the will. And even on top of that, we can say this, that a person feels.

A person has emotions. He might be full of sorrow. He might be full of joy.

He may react with sympathy. He may react with anger. It doesn't matter what the emotion is.

The point I'm trying to stress is this, that basic to personality is the ability to be able to to feel. And so there are a number of ingredients, shall we say, that personality requires. And what we want to find out is, does God have a personality like you and I have personalities? Is God able to enter into a relationship as you and I enter into relationships? After all, what is marriage but the most intimate relationship that a person can ever have with another? And on a lesser scale, there are deep friendships that can be formed one with another.

Remember the friendship formed between Jonathan and David. And David said of Jonathan, his love to me was wonderful. The relationship that I enjoyed with him.

Well, if God is personal, these ingredients that form human personality to some extent only lifted onto the purest scale and taken to the absolute degree, these ingredients should be found in the nature of God. If what the Bible has to say about God being a person is true. And so I want us to approach the Old and the New Testament and the experience of men and women throughout the ages with the idea in mind of finding evidence, with the pursuit in mind of finding evidence for the personality of God.

But I go too quickly. Let me be a little more general just for a moment and then I'll come to the Old Testament. Although in my generalizations, I want to quote a couple of incidents from the Old Testament.

You remember in the in the book of Genesis, the first chapter when God determines to make men, He says, let us make man in our own image. In other words, you would anticipate that there is something of man, in man, that resembles God. And my argument is this, it is the personality of man, not his body, but the personality of man that in some way, in some degree, resembles God.

Recall Moses when he had that remarkable experience in the in the in the backwoods of Midian, when an acacia bush suddenly burst into flames. It was ignited. And the peculiar thing about this bush was that though it was burning, it wasn't consumed.

And Moses realized that something miraculous was happening. God was appearing to him. And when Moses questioned God, he asked the Lord to give to him his name.

And it's most significant to realize that God said to Moses, I am. I am that I am. God didn't say, it is.

He didn't say, that's my name. He said, Moses, I am. And you know, Moses could have made two deductions from that statement, as obviously he did, as you find in the ministry that he exercises to the people of Israel.

He made the deduction that God is the ever-existing one, and the deduction that God is a person. Because God used the first person singular of the present tense to indicate his name. I am that I am.

I am a personal God who can enter into a relationship with someone, Moses, like you. Now, I want, having said that, to look into the Old Testament to find further evidence with regard to the person of God, and to sift the evidence. Obviously, we're going to do this very briefly, very hurriedly, and therefore not in any exhaustive fashion, but we're going to sift the evidence for the person of God in the Old Testament, and try to discover what is this God like? What is he like? We said that a person on the natural level is able to think objectively, he can will, he can feel, he can enter into a relationship.

Well, do we find evidence for this in the Old Testament as we look into it for its teaching on the doctrine of God? And I think that the answer, the unbiased, honest answer is yes, we do find an abundance of evidence. Can I be technical for a moment and use one long word, and I'll try not to use any other technical word this evening, though it's not easy when you're endeavoring to bring theological matters to the attention of a congregation. The Old Testament Hebrews are often accused of having anthropomorphic ideas about God.

Now, that word simply means this, they conceived of God in terms of a man, anthropos is the Greek word for man. And when critics have looked in the Old Testament, there they have seen God referred to in terms of a man. And they have said, oh look, they've got anthropomorphic ideas about God, they've got primitive ideas.

We can't accept what's put in the Old Testament because these ideas are so infantile. But it's not their ideas that are infantile, it's the criticisms of the scholars, I reckon, on this particular plane that are infantile and not worth considering. Why do I say this? Well, look, the Bible tells us in the Old Testament and in the New Testament that the God behind creation, the God of Judaism, the God of Christianity, is greater than the comprehension of man.

I quoted scriptures to this effect in our first study. So if God is greater than I can ever conceive of, if he's so great that my definition of him can never be inadequate, can never be adequate, I must think of God and refer to God in terms of analogy, in terms of illustration. And I know what a person is like because I've seen you and you've seen me and we have an idea of what personality is all about.

Similarly with the Hebrews, they knew that God was a person, but far greater than they could adequately define. And so they use language, that is mannish language, human language, to talk about God. But how else could they refer to him but by using these terms? If they had been given a language, a technical philosophical abstract language, then nobody would have understood them and they wouldn't have understood what they were writing about.

But no, they speak of God in terms of a person because they recognize that God has a personality. And that is why sometimes our employed verbs which seem to suggest that God is a man, they hadn't that idea in mind at all. They thought of God far greater than any man ever could be, but they had to use some words to describe him.

And so they use these human terms and they tell us quite clearly that God is alive. This is what you would expect of a person. It sounds so fundamental.

It's ridiculous to make the assertion. But time and time again in the Old Testament, you see the prophets, you hear the preachers coming to the people, speaking for the living God, the God who has acted in history. And when the prophet Jeremiah contrasts the God of the Israelites with the God of the pagans, he has this to say, The Lord is the true God.

He is the living God and an everlasting king. At his wrath the earth shall tremble and the nation shall not be able to abide his indignation. Thus shall ye say unto them, the gods, that is the pagan gods, that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth and from under these heavens.

He hath made the earth by his power. He hath established the world by his wisdom and hath stretched out the heavens by his discretion. And so Jeremiah continues to paint the picture of the living God, the one who is personal, the one who has moved in history.

And because God is alive, the Old Testament tells us he can communicate. He can speak to men and women. And this is what you find him doing right at the beginning of creation.

God walks in the Garden of Eden at the cool of the day. He's seeking out Adam. He wants fellowship with Adam.

He wants to communicate with him. Think the idea through in terms of the experience of Abraham. And here we find Abraham and God enjoying a relationship.

To this end that James can, in referring to the intimate relationship enjoyed by the patriarch and God, James can say that Abraham knew God, or rather God knew Abraham as his friend. He spoke to Abraham as he had spoken to the rest of the patriarchs. And when we think through the experience of Moses and his relationship with the Lord, well, it's astonishing that we find in the book of Exodus and the 33rd chapter this claim that God spake with Moses as a man speaks unto his friend.

God communicates, says the Old Testament, with individuals. He communicates with a nation. Amos comes along and he says, thus saith the Lord.

And he speaks, you remember, to the Ammonites. He speaks to all the pagan nations surrounding Israel, and he speaks to Israel herself. Amos has a message from the Lord that he is to communicate to the nations of the world.

So this living God communicates. But more, the Old Testament tells us, this living God cares. This living God enters into a relationship with people and feels for people.

33rd chapter of Exodus, once again, God is speaking to Moses and he says, you know something, Moses? My presence shall go with thee. That's the nearest Hebrew word that there is to the English word person used of God in the Old Testament. My presence shall go with thee.

And the idea was that God cared for Moses and for the Israelites. But the care and concern that God has for his people is put across perhaps even more clearly by Jeremiah. And in the seventh chapter of Jeremiah, there's a most astonishing reference to God getting up early in the morning.

Indeed, I think I'm writing saying that Jeremiah repeats that seven times in his opening chapters. God getting up early in the morning and sending his ambassadors to the Israelites, bringing them the word of God. And of course, this is using the human language, the anthropomorphic terms that I was talking to you about a little while ago.

What does it mean? Well, God is so concerned for the Israelite that he wakens up his prophet and he sends them about their duty and tells them to convey his message to the Israelites because God would not have them to perish. And when you come through to the minor prophets, you've got another illustration of the feelings of God for his people. The concern, the emotion, the love of God.

Listen to Hosea and the language surely is remarkable in its intimacy. When Israel was a child, then I loved him. And then the prophet goes on again speaking for God and says, how shall I give thee up Ephraim? How shall I deliver thee Israel? And even further, the language becomes more intimate and more astonishing.

Speaking of the, dare one say, the psychology of God, we get this reference. My heart is turned within me. My repentings are kindled together.

Again, you see the Old Testament speaks most clearly about the personality of God. One who lives, one who communicates, one who wills, one who feels. And as you go into the New Testament and you consider the ministry of the Lord Jesus, exactly the same obtains.

The Lord Jesus speaks of a personal God. He talks about a God who hears prayer. You remember how the Savior encourages men and women to ask for the gift of the Holy Spirit? And he uses a little illustration to encourage us to bring this request before the Lord.

And he said, no father if he was asked for bread would give his children a stone. Similarly with your heavenly father. He will give you the Holy Spirit if you ask him.

And says the Savior, your father, God, the first person of the Trinity, is aware of your circumstances. He's aware of your situation. He said you're worried, as he was speaking in the sermon on the mount, you're worried about your clothing.

You're worried about the food that you're going to eat, whether there's going to be enough, whether you're going to have enough money. Why are you concerned? Consider the lily. Consider the bird in the air.

And don't you know that God's care for you is far greater than his care of the flower and his care of the bird? You see the point. The Savior is showing that God is so personal that he knows all about us. Indeed, the Savior says God loves us.

That tremendous comment in John chapter 3, 16, clears the matter up. For God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten son. The Savior went on to say that it's not the will of God for anybody to perish, but rather he has made a way whereby men and women shall be saved.

And when the Lord refers to the first person of the trinity, that is when Jesus refers to him, he employs the word father. Now he does this on many occasions as are recorded in the gospels. You remember when he's speaking to God the father in what we call the high priestly prayer, the 17th chapter of John's gospel, he says holy father, father.

The word is paternal. It speaks of an intimate relationship. And what about that classic, that classic story that Jesus told that sheds more light on the doctrine of God than than most of scripture? The story of the prodigal son who was the father who stands on top of the hill peering into the far country waiting for his wayward boy to return.

None other than God comes down the mountainside in the story and flings his arm around his wayward boy and says, this my son was lost, but he's found. He was dead, but he's alive again. That's the sort of father.

That's the sort of person that God is, says Jesus. Jesus, you see, illustrates God by his words. But I have to go a little further and I'm transgressing upon a topic for my studies later on because Jesus did not only illustrate God through his teaching.

He illustrated God through his person. You see, Jesus was God. Again, I'm going to deal with this in a whole session later on.

But it's right for us to remind ourselves even at this juncture of the words of Jesus to a questioning disciple. Philip says to Jesus, Lord, show us the father and it sufficeth us. Jesus says, Philip, have I been so long with you and you never knew me? Do you not believe that I am in the father and the father is in me? Believe me.

Believe me for the very work's sake. You see the point? Jesus is the father. He reveals the father and this is what the apostle Paul tells us.

Does he not, in the verse that I quoted at the beginning of your notes, God who, God has revealed himself. God has manifested himself in and through Jesus Christ. He is given the light of his knowledge.

The light of the knowledge of the glory of God has been revealed in the face of Jesus Christ. The writer to the Hebrews referring to the savior and his relationship with God the father, as we remembered some moments ago, calls Jesus the image of God, the exposition of God, the eisegesis of God. So then, the Lord Jesus Christ indicates that he himself as his father has the ability to think, to will, to feel, to enter into a relationship.

Now, let's consider just for a moment or two the evidence of believers in the Old Testament and the New Testament and today to the existence of not just a God, but a personal God. I must be brief at this point. The quotation I think I gave you in the notes is from the psalmist.

You remember David? He says of God, the Lord is my shepherd. And if you read through the book of Psalms, you can't but come to the conclusion that God is personal and that God was known by the psalmists. Oh, they used these men who were responsible and mainly David for writing the book of Psalms, the Psalter, they used such intimate language in describing the experience that they had with God.

God to them was not some abstract philosophical being divorced from the affairs of men and women. He was nigh. God is our refuge and strength.

David recognized that the Lord was his rock and he took refuge underneath him. The man in the 73rd Psalm who went through such a distressing emotional experience comes to realize that God has his hands upon him and he said that when he went into the temple or rather when he went into the sanctuary, then he understood all about his circumstances. Why? Because God had drawn near to him.

I tell you the language of the men in the Old Testament indicates that God is a person. Go through to the New Testament dispensation. Listen to the Apostle Paul speaking of Jesus Christ.

He says, he loved me. I like to read that statement because Paul here who's so often accused of being an academic, being an intellectual, Paul is going beyond this. His experience of God is not just that of a scholar.

His experience of Christ is personal. He loved me. He gave himself for me.

It says the Apostle Paul that I might know him, that I might know him more and more in my life. Writing to Timothy, he refers to a most unpleasant experience that he had probably at Rome. He said, you know Timothy, I was on trial for my life.

You know all about that. And on the day that I was brought before the magistrates, I looked for somebody to be with me. One of the Christians perhaps from the local assemblies, but nobody was there.

But Paul goes on to say, notwithstanding, the Lord stood by me. The Lord strengthened me. Again, the intimate language is such that you can't make any other conclusion, but that God is personal.

And that Paul knew God as a person. And I want to say, speaking of myself, if one dare use a personal illustration this evening, that that too has been my experience. The experience of so many people surely here in the tabernacle.

So many people over the centuries of Christian history. They have known God not just as some philosophical, theological entity. They have known God as a person.

When a man is facing death, the concept of God in as just some intellectual form is not good enough. You need a greater God than that. You need a God who goes through experiences with you.

And the history of the church, of men and women who have lived through all the centuries, underlines the fact that God is personal. Read the testimony of the martyrs. Read the testimony of the reformers.

Read the testimony of the revivalists. And again, you get underlined time and time again the concept of a personal God who is known by these men. Come back just for my last moment to the definition that I gave you earlier on personality, of personality.

We were thinking along a human plane and we said that personality has with it the ingredients of will, of feeling, and of being able to enter into a relationship. Now again, think this through on the human level. If a person's going to get married, generally speaking in this country at any rate, we feel it's good that they should get introduced to the prospective wife before the day of the marriage.

In other words, they should get to know one another and then they enter into that deep relationship that we call marriage. So the period of courting is a period of self-disclosure. One coming to grips with the other, coming to terms, getting to know one another, and to realize that there are certain attractions that one has for the other that inevitably is going to lead towards marriage.

Self-disclosure is a prerequisite to marriage, is it not? You understand what I mean? Well, if God is personal, as the Christian gospel declares, we would anticipate logically that this God had disclosed himself to the world. And this is precisely what the Bible testifies to be the case. God has disclosed himself.

He disclosed himself in the very print that he has left on the world through the miracle of creation. But he has disclosed himself finally in Jesus Christ. And through Jesus Christ, I can enter into a relationship with him.

This is why the Lord Jesus came into the world. To reveal God fully. Jesus is God's final revelation to men and women.

The Bible says, yes, God can be known. God can be known because he's a personal God. And you and I belong to God through Jesus Christ.

Have this privilege of telling other men and women that our God has an intimate relationship with us. A relationship that he will share, that he will pass on to other people. They too can come to know God through Jesus Christ.

Can God be known? Yes. How is God known? By traveling along the avenue called faith. What sort of God is discovered at the end? A God who is personal.

A God who can relate to you and to me. A God whose friendship you and I can enjoy. God, our Savior, is personal.

Next week we shall go on to think about the character of God. The character of God. We will take two studies on this and next week's study is called God as Holy.

And the following week's study, I think we've got a week's break in between, is entitled God as Love. Well, I hope we'll see you all next week and that this study has been of help to you. Don't forget the coffee that's available in the lounge before the discussion group if you're able to stay.

But before that, let's sing a couple of verses.