Welcome to the Next Level presentation on basic Christian doctrine. Next Level is a ministry of Ozark Christian College, and my name is Michael DeFazio, and I am a professor at Ozark Christian College. Now, most of what we do as a college is, of course, train the students who come to our campus and the students that we have in online courses. But Next Level is our attempt to do what we do, which is to train men and women for Christian service by extending beyond the classroom and providing resources for groups and individuals who may want to use it for whatever they deem profitable.
This series is a bit unique in relationship to other series of Next Level in that you're going to be hearing from a number of different communicators, a number of different professors who are going to be talking about various topics all within this heading of basic Christian doctrine. And what I'd like to do in this first session is talk a little bit about Christian doctrine and specifically we're going to look together at the doctrine of God. And so I thought it might be beneficial in setting the stage for the studies to come to just think a little bit about this word doctrine. You might also think of the word theology.
In some ways, these can be synonyms. So let's maybe just briefly talk about what we're talking about doing, why it's important, and then how to actually go about doing it well. What is Christian doctrine or what is Christian theology?
A number of different ways you could probably define this. We're not trying to necessarily be academic, but really it's just a coherent summary of biblical teaching on a given topic, a coherent summary of what the Bible says about. any number of topics.
I'm going to talk about doctrine of God today, then we're going to talk about later on, you know, doctrine of Christ, doctrine of the Spirit, doctrine of the Church, the Bible, humanity, these various things. And so what doctrine is, is essentially, it's a little bit different than just Bible study. It's because of our conviction that all of the Bible reveals the truth about things. All of the Bible reveals God's mind. What we want to do every now and then is to back up from looking at a specific text and to try to ask, how does this all work together to form a coherent composite whole?
Why would we do this? Our motivation for doing doctrine well is similar to our motivation for any engagement of God's Word. And that is we want to honor God and we want to edify the church.
We want to honor God by receiving what he's revealed to us and by being responsible with it and by understanding it so that we can live it out in our own lives, receive it as the gift that is designed to make us wise and to make us good, to transform us into the image of Jesus. And we also have a strong conviction that when we can articulate what the Bible teaches on any given topic, this is something that builds up the church. This is something that benefits others.
So we're trying to come up with coherent summaries of biblical teaching in order to honor God and also to edify the church. And this leads us to the question of how to do this well. In terms of how to do doctrine or how to do theology, there are a number of different angles that one could talk through in this regard.
And one of the most valuable ones to do is to think about the relationship between the Bible and theology, or between the Bible and doctrine. And so when we think about how to do this, really we think about it in terms of reasoned reflection on revelation. So you could break this down forward or backward.
We'll do backwards. So we're talking about revelation, not just the book of the Bible, but what God has revealed. God has revealed himself in different ways. God reveals himself through natural means in the created order. and in just paying attention to the way life works.
And then God has revealed himself in special ways by calling out to Israel, by sending his son Jesus, and by ultimately inspiring the scriptures. And so revelation is what we're dealing with when we're talking about doctrines, specifically biblical revelation. And we're trying to reflect on it.
We're trying to think about it. We're trying to ponder it. We're trying to allow it to soak into our minds.
But there are a number of ways in which you might reflect on scripture. You might just reflect on Revelation in order to figure out what God wants you to do in a particular moment. But we're doing a particular kind of reflection, and it is reasoned reflection on Revelation.
So we're trying to think logically, and we're allowing our mind's natural bent to try to order things to have some influence in terms of how we pull all of these various things together. So what we're doing is we're trying to summarize biblical teaching in order to honor God and edify the church. And we're doing that by trying to think in clear ways about what God has revealed in Scripture.
A couple more thoughts on the relationship between the Bible and theology. We're going to talk today about some terms in the doctrine of God that you won't find in Scripture, a term like the Trinity. This is not a word that you'll find in the Bible, and so why would we suggest that this is an appropriate way to summarize biblical teaching? Here's how I like to think about it. I think that theology or doctrine goes beyond what the text of the Bible says, but not beyond what the text of the Bible reveals.
I think it actually goes behind the words of the text. to the God revealed in the text. Now, let me give you a picture of what I mean. So, imagine that you're looking at the front of a large building. And this is a building with a door, but the door's locked, and you can't get through to the other side.
And you have some sense that what's on the other side is everything you want, everything you need. It's this perfect combination of beauty and goodness and truth and fulfillment and joy. And so, you want what's there. And you've received this promise that ultimately you're going to get to live on the other side of this building forever with whatever's there.
But in the meantime, you want to know. and yet the door is locked. So what do you do?
Well, you've got a number of windows on this building front. And so you can go to any of the given windows and you can look from a particular angle at whatever's on the other side. So you could look from this angle and then you could look from this angle and you could look from this angle.
And all of these different windows are giving you an angle onto seeing whatever it is behind the wall. But no single window gives you the whole. So the windows are like biblical texts, each of which provide a glimpse.
of the goodness of God, of the glory of God, of the saving mission of God. And so what we do in doctrine or what we do in theology is we want to back up and say, okay, well, what did we see from that window? And what did we see from this window?
And what did we see from this window? And let's try to pull all of what we've seen together into a way that is compact, clear, and livable. That's doctrine.
That's theology. It's not in competition with scripture because it actually submits to the authority of scripture, but it builds on what scripture says. by articulating what must be true if indeed all of the texts tell the truth. So one more time, we're trying to go maybe beyond what the textual words actually say, but in order to get at what the textual words actually reveal, going behind the text to describe the God whose heart and life and mission is revealed in it.
So with that in mind, let's turn our attention not just to doctrine in general, but to specifically we'll go the doctrine of God. This is a perfectly natural place to begin. I'm not sure if there's anything more important than you getting your thoughts about God right. You may have heard the name of a man named A.W.
Tozer, who was a believer and a writer and a preacher in the last century, and he was well known for saying, among other things, that what comes to your mind when you think about God is the most important thing about you. He writes this in a book called Knowledge of the Holy. He says, I don't care what else may be true of you. If you tell me what you actually think of God, I will tell you your future path. Now, he clarifies, and I think this is important.
Not just what you say you think about God. Not just like when you actually ask yourself a theological question, what answer do you give? But what is your natural heart level gut reaction when you think about God?
And whatever you picture him as, whatever you think of him as, your thoughts about him are going to drive everything you do. If you think of God as only and exclusively just and wrathful, then you're going to relate to God and the world in a certain way. If you think of God as only nice and sweet, then you're going to relate to God in a certain way. If you think God as...
of God as not existing, then you're going to relate to the world in a certain way. And so, positive and negative, how you relate to God and reality is actually going to be determined in large part by what you think of God. At the end of the day, I'm grateful for A.W. Tozer, but the Bible itself is what drives me to want to know God well.
I think about John 17, when Jesus himself tells us the content of eternal life. He's praying to the Father, and he asks that eternal life would be granted. And he says, now this is eternal life, that they may know you.
the one true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. So here he's describing the essence of eternal life as knowing God intimately and accurately. That's what that word knowing means.
It's not just about, but it is accurate, but it's also close, relationship, fellowship, friendship. And I think Jesus isn't just going out on a limb here. Man, this is a consistent witness in all of scripture.
I think about Psalm 27 where David says, my heart says of you, seek his face, your face, O Lord, I will seek. One thing I ask, this only do I seek. to dwell in the house of the Lord forever, and to gaze on the beauty of the Lord. I think about Psalm 42. As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, God. My soul longs for you.
I think about Psalm 63. O God, earnestly I seek you. My soul thirsts for you as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. It's not just poetry.
I think about Jeremiah 9, where the prophet Jeremiah says, Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom, nor the strong man boast of his strength, nor the rich man boast of his riches. But let the one who boasts boast about this, that he understands and knows me, that I am Yahweh, the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. I think about Philippians 3, where the Apostle Paul says, When I think about all of my accomplishments by birth and by achievement, I consider them all as rubbish, as dung, as waste, compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. When it comes to knowing God, I'm not sure anything is more important because the foundation for life with God in the world God has made is to know God intimately and accurately.
That's our goal. So when it comes to the study of the doctrine of God, literally, there's no bigger subject than God. I'm not even sure it's appropriate to call God a subject because he's just beyond all of our categories.
So all I really want to do for the rest of this particular video is to give you kind of some targets on the wall or a framework for thinking about God. And historically, the doctrine of God tends to draw our attention to two particular themes. One is the word Trinity. And so we'll talk about...
God's triune nature. And then the second piece of this is divine attributes, different words that describe God in different ways. And so I just want to make a few brief comments about both of these, hopefully in ways that are beneficial to us as we try to think well about God. When it comes to the Trinity, the clearest way to say what we mean when we call God triune is to say that he is indeed three in one. Now that is easier to say than it is to understand.
And it may be beneficial to talk about what we mean by that by clarifying what we don't mean by that. As in other things, so certainly with God, sometimes the best thing you can say is what it's not. Sometimes you say the most by making a negative statement in order to define the positive. Here's what I mean. When we say that God is triune, three in one, or one essence, three persons, one being, three persons, what we're not saying is that God is just one solitary thing.
in three different modes or forms. That there's just this one irreducible one, and that's all that God is. And then the Father, Son, and Spirit are just sort of different angles on God or God appearing to us in different ways.
That's not triune theology. That's not what we believe the scriptures reveal about God. It's not just one solitary being appearing in different modes. But neither is it three separate beings living together in community.
Sometimes you might've heard people say, you know, it's sort of like, I'm... three people who are separate individuals but they're all humans. No, that's actually not how it works.
God is not, divinity is not like a genus or something of which there are various species or vice versa. Like, no, you can't map it onto that sort of a thing. We're not talking about three separate things that just happen to think really similarly.
No, we really are talking about one. God is fundamentally one and yet God is also three. And theologians have for centuries been trying to articulate the distinctions between these various things.
I would suggest that you do some research on your own and you look up things like the Nicene Creed. Maybe you love creeds and you grew up with them. Maybe you're suspicious of creeds. I'm just saying give it a read and see what the church determined about the language they could use to describe this.
Look up the Athanasian Creed. Again, I'm not saying I affirm everything about all the creeds, but look at what the Athanasian Creed tries to articulate in defining the distinctions. Look up a phrase. relations of origin and see where that rabbit hole takes you. And you can explore different ways that the church has tried to articulate the dissimilarity and the sameness on the one hand and the distinctions of the Godhead.
Historically, what the church has said is that the Father is neither begotten nor made, that the Son is not made but begotten, and that the Spirit is neither made nor begotten but proceeding from the Father, and some would say, and the Son or through the Son. Now, those language may not mean a bunch to you, but my point is I want you to believe. to understand that for centuries, Christians have been believing the Bible and trying to articulate that God revealed in it.
And consistently, one of the unmistakable biblical teachings is that God is in fact triune. It is one thing, though, to start to wrap your heads around that. It is a mystery that we can't fully comprehend, and yet we can understand it. And, however, if you are, you know, from a particular tradition that emphasizes, man, like our tradition, we want to use Bible words to describe Bible things. And Trinity is not a Bible word, so is it really biblical to describe God as triune?
And the answer is fully and fundamentally, yes, absolutely. Now, you could approach this in a couple of different ways. You could look at the data of Scripture.
Scripture teaches that God is one. So you think about Deuteronomy 6. The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. The Lord is one.
There's a oneness to God that is clearly revealed in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. Scripture also reveals, certainly, that the Father is God, naturally. but that also that the Son is God, in the beginning it was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, John chapter 1, and that the Spirit is God. In Acts chapter 5, Ananias and Sapphira lie to the apostles, and when Luke was reporting this, he says they lied to the Spirit. They lied to God.
So here we have one of many examples where the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God, but the Father is not the Son or the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Son. So how do you pull this together? Trinity.
If the fathers of the church did not invent the doctrine of the Trinity, you and I would have to if we were trying to be consistent in terms of all of what the Bible reveals about God. You have other key passages that tend to pull it together. 2 Corinthians 13, 14 is a worthy verse to look up. And I'll throw some of these verses in the handout.
Matthew chapter 28, you have the Great Commission where Jesus says, I want you to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name, singular, of Father, Son, and Spirit. Three in one. None of these passages give us great detail and, you know, once for all language, but they indicate that indeed God is three in one.
But even apart from the specific data, if you back up and look at the biblical story as a whole, what you'll see is that Trinity is the only way to understand the God who reveals himself in it. So in the Old Testament, you have a context where people are worshiping all different sorts of gods. And so God comes to Abraham and then to Moses and says, I am the one God of all and over all and the only one who really deserves to be called God at the end of the day. And I am one.
And biblical faith in the Old Testament was very much emphasizing the oneness of God, because in a context where you're worshiping different gods for different things, that's what they needed as an anchor point. And then you get to the New Testament, and you find this surprising discovery that when God sent the Messiah, he wasn't just sending something separate, but he was, in a sense, sending his own second self, his son, as we say. And the son, Jesus of Nazareth, is fully human, but he also, at one and the same time, is fully God. That's a topic for another video that you'll watch in this series. And so you've got this unfolding revelation where you're saying God is still one.
Nobody's going around talking about two gods. But now the Father and the Son are both somehow fitting within our understanding of God. And to make matters even more complex, Jesus actually goes back up to be with the Father.
And yet they send the Spirit to come and dwell among the people. And we know that God is with us because we sense him. We hear from him.
We see him in the preached word and in the songs we sing and in the community that we experience and in the creation that he made. And so we've got this reality that is really, again, pushing us to the point where we have to say, if we want to say what the Bible says, that God is triune, three in one, Father, Son, and Spirit. I need to move on to attributes, but let me just ask the question that most people ask.
So what? Like, what in the world is the point of the Trinity? What is the point of understanding God as three in one?
And I'm one who thinks that we need to be very careful about how we articulate God. I think we need to be very cautious and precise in being faithful first and foremost to Scripture, but also properly respectful of the Greek tradition. And I think that there are a lot of guardrails that we should put in place to think about God. I'm always busting my friends and even myself to make sure that we're being very precise in how we talk about God.
Why? Why does it matter? And I'll just tell you one thing for now and then let you explore the rest.
When I say God is triune, I'm not just talking about an abstract concept. For me, that is revealed truth for one thing. But it's also narrative shorthand. What I mean by that is when I say God is triune, what I'm witnessing to is the fact that there is one God who created all things, not multiple gods.
So I don't need to worry about hedging my bets. There is one God who has called me to worship him. And I am also saying that this God has revealed himself most clearly in his son, whom he sent to die for my sins and rose again to make the new life of God's kingdom available to me and you by grace through faith. When I say Trinity, I'm saying that. And also I'm saying, that this God has not just left us at a distance, but has sent his spirit to dwell with us.
And so in some sense, when I say Trinity, I'm saying this is the story of the God who has saved us. And when I remind myself that God is triune, I'm reminding myself of a God who is both over me, for me, and in and through us as a community of faith. So as if that weren't enough, I'd like to just say a few things about attributes.
And as with the rest of these things that we'll talk about in this study. This is just kind of an introduction to encourage you to launch off into some of your own reflections. When it comes to talking about God, again, if you were to buy a book on the doctrine of God, you would probably read some things about the Trinity, I certainly hope, and you would read some things about the divine attributes. Now, some people are really, really precise and kind of, I don't know, they're kind of spunky in terms of whether or not attribute is the right word to describe these things.
I'm not trying to be particularly academic when I use the word attribute. I'm just talking about something true about God. An attribute is any word that we could use to describe God.
So in a sense, triune fits as an attribute of God. I tend to put it in a different category because it's kind of its own thing, but that works. Gracious, merciful, just, patient, eternal, omnipotent, all-knowing. All these various words are ways of describing God. And what I would like to do very briefly is to talk with you through the process of how we come to see a word as telling the truth about God.
I would say in a general sense, we only know about God because God reveals himself. And God reveals himself, I'll put a mark here and we'll draw a little bit of a different thing, by doing things. So first and foremost, you have actions whereby God does something. And sometimes his actions might be he, you know, sends plagues on Egypt in order to free the Israelites. Or other times his actions might be he speaks and he says, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
So either way, God does something. And then over time, you realize that his actions aren't like random. He's not just randomly doing stuff.
But this forms a coherent whole, a history, if you will, of God acting in a way that is not only consistent, but progressive and missional and trying to do something. And it is as we actually reflect on the things that God has done in this history that we then derive names of God, names like Rock or Shepherd or King or Father. And then from this, we then can identify attributes.
And so whenever you're thinking about God, one of the things that I would encourage you to do is to work your mind through this process. What are some of the things that I believe that God has done? How do I understand those things that fit together? And when I think about that, what does that tell me about this God?
So we believe, for instance, that God has promised Abraham that his family would be the means of saving the world. And we believe that then whenever God's people found themselves in a tough spot and they called out to him, He remembered those promises and he acted to deliver them from slavery in Egypt. And we believe that he guided them through the wilderness. And we believe that he disciplined them along the way. And we believe that he took them into the promised land.
And we believe that then because of their sin, he exiled them from the promised land. And we believe that he promised that he would send the Messiah. And we believe that he actually sent the Messiah in order to bring about the offer of salvation to all. And when you back up and look at these actions that form a history, what are some of the names that you think of? Well, I think of Savior.
I think of promise keeper. What are some of the attributes? Well, I think of wisdom. You got to be really smart to figure all this out.
I think of sovereignty. You've got to have more power than all other things in the universe in order to accomplish this mission. I think of patient, but I also think of just.
I think of faithful, maybe above all, that this is a God who makes promises and keeps them. And this is just one example of the type of thought process that I would encourage you to consider. Some of the attributes that we see revealed of God are attributes that God shares with us. Things like goodness and graciousness and mercy.
Other attributes of God are attributes that are only true of God. God is eternal. We are not.
He transcends the boundaries of time and space in a way that is not true of human beings who are located in time and space. God is characterized by, this is one of my favorite attributes to think about, it's a weird word, the word aseity. It's from a Latin term meaning that God derives his life. from himself. So in other words, God is not dependent on anything outside of himself to be God.
That may seem to you like an abstract concept, and it is very different from everything else. Everything in God's creation is dependent on something to exist, usually other created things and ultimately on God, but God depends on nothing for his existence. Do you know why I like thinking about this, even though it's a strange word that you don't often hear in normal conversation?
Because if God depends only on himself, then God does not need me. And if God does not need me, then God is free to love me without any sort of codependence or manipulation. His offer of love to me as his child, the offer of being adopted into his family is rich and deep and true.
And I can trust that God has my good. Why? Because God doesn't need me. Whenever I think of a ministry task that God is calling me to, I might feel some pressure to do this.
And it's appropriate to feel some pressure. But the last thing I should feel is that God is up in heaven twiddling his thumbs going, oh, I don't know what I'm going to do in this situation. If Michael doesn't do what I want him to do, no, God has a plan far beyond me. I remember one time I was teaching a class and I was taking prayer requests in this particular class.
And it was a young man in the class, very well-meaning young man. And he said during the prayer request time, hey, can we just pray for God? Like, I just think nobody ever asks God how he's doing. Can we just say a prayer for him? I remember thinking, well, first of all, that's sweet that you think that, you know, God needs you to take care of him.
But also that's heresy. God does not need you to worry about him. God does not need you to check up on him or to pray for him. Who would you pray to in the end?
God is fine. God is smiling. God is okay. And because God is okay, even when the world is not okay, we can be okay. So these, again, are just some examples of how to think through attributes of God.
What should you do with an attribute of God? Well, first of all, you just think about it. Think it through. Arrive at a word.
Reflect on what that word means. Turn it over in your minds. Think about it.
Meditate on it. Allow your thoughts to be drawn away from the things we can see toward the one we cannot who oversees all things. And then secondly, put them into practice.
Act as if they're true. Not because they're not. but because they are.
You see, the thing about doctrine is sometimes it can feel complicated and stuffy and abstract and disconnected, and I understand why that is the case. There is a sense in which doctrine is theory, and we are people of action. We are people of practice, but your practice is only as good as your theory.
At the end of the day, you cannot outlive your thoughts about God. One of my favorite metaphors for this series or for doctrine is, is, um, is that doctrines are like the springs of a trampoline. So you know what a trampoline is.
It's a piece of material that's been stretched across onto a frame and it's connected with springs. And you don't really think much about the springs because the point of the springs is not to draw attention to the springs. The point of the springs is to enable kids to jump, and maybe adults do. The point of the springs is to enable the trampoline to work properly.
And the point of doctrines is to enable us to live. It's not just so that we can have right answers. It's not just so that we can feel smart. It may indeed demand that we think really hard and that we study really well and that we dig in deep and have hard conversations.
But at the end of the day, the point of these conversations is that God wants to build something in us. And what he wants to build in us is the character of his son. My hope and prayer for you this series is that you study hard, is that you think as clearly as you possibly can, is that we allow ourselves to be stretched as we talk through various Christian doctrines. Not just so that you have right answers, but so that those right answers. become productive of fruitful living.
I think in this regard, this will be the last thought, and I'll let you go, about Psalm chapter 1, which characterizes the godly person who is not caught up in the things of this world, but instead who meditates on the instruction of God day and night and becomes like a tree planted by streams of water. I believe that God wants us to be like trees planted by streams of water, which yield fruit in season, and what we do prospers. And I believe that this will happen as we allow scripture to soak itself into our mind.
The texts themselves and also the truths that emerge from this text. So think hard, worship well, walk in Jesus, and I will be praying for you all along the way.