Word of Salvation – Vol.44 No6 – February 1999

 

My Relational God (1)

(Authentic Christianity)

 

Sermon by Rev G Van Schie on Genesis 1:1-2, 26; 3:22

Scripture Reading: Matthew 3

Suggested Hymns:

R 295 / BOW 167 / BOW 153; BOW 164; Bow 155; BoW 162; R 323; R 326

 

Brothers and Sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ.

In Matthew 7:22-23 Jesus said, “Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, 1 never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!”  It is clear from this that the mere practice of Christianity, and to merely know about Jesus does not amount to a saving faith.

The ‘Covenant’ that God has made with us is of enormous importance in the divine plan to save that which was lost in the rebellion, that is, the Fall. The Covenant is essentially about God, who is a personal being, desiring by grace to be restored in fellowship with fallen humanity. The Covenant is about God’s initiative to reach out to us and restore us to Himself in personal relationship, by which, through faith in Jesus Christ, reconciliation is achieved.

This is the first in a series of sermons which traces the unfolding of God’s plan of salvation through Jesus Christ. Central to this theme is the fact that God is a relational being who seeks a personal relationship with us through Christ. Since the Covenant is God’s means to relate to

us, we will be tracing the development of that Covenant which leads to that magnificent declaration in the book of Revelation: “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away?” (Rev 21:3-4)

Let us now look to Genesis 1:1-2, 1:26 and 3:22, for these verses begin to focus things for us.

Whether we want to or not, the first question we all need to face today is: Do we really positively relate to God in a personal way? We may think we do and we may say we do, but let us lay aside confessions made by our lips. Let us get back to what our life says is true. Let us see our relationship with God as the Lord sees it, and not as we may fool ourselves or other people to see it. As God looks upon us, do we really relate to Him in a personal, living way?

Most people in the world don’t. They say they believe in God, but for most that belief is nothing more than an academic acceptance of His existence. There are some who say that they believe in God, but the God they believe in is not the God of the Bible. It may be a higher being,’ someone of their own imagination; someone they found through their own meditation; someone like Buddha, or someone else.

However, for our purposes today, let us forget about those we have just been talking about. Let us consider those who do go to church – the small minority of the nation who actually attend worship services. They and we say we believe in God, but do we really? Do we really believe in God the way the Bible talks about belief? That belief which talks about a personal, life transforming relationship with God.

Let us see from Scripture that it is possible to be a ‘believer’ and to be fully involved in the worship of God and even experience His grace in our lives and still be on the road to hell.

in Hebrews 3:12, 16-18; we read some very important things of Israel of old. We read: “2 See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God… 18 Who were they who heard and rebelled? Were they not all those Moses led out of Egypt?  And with whom was he angry for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the desert? 18 And to whom did God swear that they would never enter his rest if not to those who disobeyed?”

Now consider that for a moment. One of the hardest things for you and I in this modern world is to hold God in awe. He seems so far removed from us and it is so easy to treat him as a ‘mate’, or a common object. But not so for these Israelites mentioned in Hebrews 12!

These Israelites saw and experienced first-hand fantastic miracles of God done on their behalf. Remember the parting of the Red Sea? They had experienced the provision of manna and quail and water in the wilderness. They had repeatedly seen how God had defeated for them their enemies whom they otherwise had no way of overcoming in battle.

They had experienced all of this as eyewitnesses. They knew it all, they had experienced first-hand this saving grace of God, and yet God says that with regard to most of them they did not enter His rest! In fact, the Bible tells us that with regard to the adults who experienced the Red Sea crossing – twenty years and older – and you wouldn’t forget that would you?

Imagine being there when the Red Sea opened up and the people walked across on dry ground. And remember how the water came across and tumbled down upon Pharaoh’s army and drowned the lot and washed their bodies up on the shore. Then Israel celebrated this miracle of God’s saving grace with the song of Moses. You would never forget that! And yet, only two of those twenty years and older entered the Promised Land, entered God’s rest!

They, as God’s covenant people, knew it all and even had experienced God’s grace, but they did not have the relationship with God which was necessary for their salvation. We also find in Scripture another example which demonstrates that knowledge of God is not sufficient to save us. Let us consider Satan and his demons. In the book of James we find the author talking about faith and works. Do you think that your faith can save you? Well and good, says James. Well and good! But faith without its fruit, UNLESS it is really evident in your life, UNLESS it changes and transforms you and makes you like God in whose image you were created, is not faith at all! Faith without works…..is DEAD!!

You can believe as much as you like, but unless your life is transformed by a living relationship with Jesus, then you don’t have a saving faith at all! What’s the proof? James says, “You believe that there is one God? Well, good. But even the demons believe.” And, congregation, they believe better than you and I do! But they are not comforted in what they know and believe. James goes on to say, “Even the demons believe….. and they SHUDDER!” They shudder for they know what’s in store for them.

To know, and even to worship God, is not enough, brothers and sisters. There can be any number of people sitting here today who think they are going to heaven, but if they were to die now, would discover they would not be!

What IN REALITY is the relationship that we have with God, if any?

In Amos’ time God came to His people and he wanted them to consider their ways. And in part Amos says to the covenant people on behalf of God: “Why do you long for the day of the Lord? That day will be darkness, not light…” (Amos 5:18).

Now Amos was not talking to unbelievers. He was not talking to people who had not experienced God’s grace, His goodness and His mercy and love. He was speaking to the people of God, and he said, “Why are you longing for the day of the Lord’s coming? Why are you looking forward to it because the reality is this for you, says the Lord, when it comes you are going to get a rude shock! When it comes it will not be light for you but instead it will be darkness!”

When you go on in the book of Amos you find why the warning was being sounded. Israel professed to believe. Israel professed to belong to God and they worshipped Him. Yet in the conduct of their lives they cheated and stole, and they hurt one another and justice was not there as it should have been. Faith was not matched by its fruit.

So God finally said to the people, through Amos, “Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them. Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps.” (Amos 5:22-23)

Wouldn’t it be terrible if God were to appear before us today and said that to us?! if He said to us, “Don’t bother coming here anymore, my people! Don’t bother singing your songs, whether they be traditional or contemporary, I’ve had enough of them! They have become something to me which is offensive!” It would be tragic, it would be horrifying!

in Hebrews, we find the Old Testament people of God are given to us as an example. It says in Hebrews 4:11, “Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will fall by following their example of disobedience.”

Let us make every effort to enter eternal life by being obedient to the Lord, by heeding His call to worship from the heart, not just physically with our bodies by being present. If our worship is focussed on the time it takes to get out of church, if during the various aspects of the services I find myself counting bricks, reading the bulletin or some other material, or sleeping, then we are just like Israel! We are not really relating to God! We are here physically, but that’s as far as it goes.

Knowledge and merely physical worship do not save us from the wrath of God to come, brothers and sisters. Remember what we read in Matthew’s Gospel? John the Baptist was speaking to the Pharisees. And imagine how harsh those words sounded in their ears. These were the leaders of the old covenant who were supposed to lead God’s people in the way of truth, and it says that when John the Baptist saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptising, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?” Now listen to what John said next: “Produce fruit in keeping with repentance.” It goes back to what James said about faith and works, doesn’t it? Faith without works is dead. “Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’.”

Or, we might say today, “We have John Calvin as our father.” Or, “we’re Reformed.” “I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The axe is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” (Matthew 3:7-10)

To put it into everyday language: “Anyone who comes to worship God in a situation as we have here right now, but it does not affect our life, our everyday living with Him in all we think, say and do – if it does not affect positively the way we live with other people, if His Word goes in one ear and out the other, then the axe is already at the foot of the tree to chop us down. God will not tolerate unproductive trees. He sent His Son to transform us to bear His fruit in this world.”

Now all of this is not to say that knowledge is not important. It is! But what we need to see today is that God is a relational being. A saving relationship with God through Christ does involve knowing the Lord. The tie between knowing and relationship can be seen in our relationships with one another. For example, when people become engaged we can assume these people know each other, at least enough to know that they want to spend the rest of their lives together. Courtship is a period of getting to know one another, and engagement makes it a lot more serious and commitments are made with regard to the rest of life. Marriage seals those commitments. A knowledgeable relationship has to be there for the wedding to take place.

The trouble with you and I, brothers and sisters, is that we are prone to think of God not so much as Father through Christ but more as a school project. God is someone to know about. We tend to think that God is someone to take up in our Bible and to study as if the Bible were an encyclopaedia. In this manner of approach we do not relate to Him. He is not someone we long to see. I have no doubt that engaged couples long to see each other every day; well at least I hope they do. But do you and I long to have time with God every day? Do we long to open up his Word and read his Word like a partner who is waiting for the postman to arrive with that next letter from the one who is longed for?

Let us see, then, that God does not want to be treated like an ‘it’ or a ‘topic’ for academic study. Let us see that God desires a living relationship with each one of us.

From the very beginning of history God reveals himself as not being an ‘it’. In the very beginning of Genesis this is what God says; “Then God said “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

How did God go about creating us? What did he say? Let what? Not let me. But let US make man. Not in my image but let US make man in OUR image. Straight away we are talking about relationship. God is a person, not an ‘il’. He is a person and we already see this in the very first book of the Bible! Let US make man in OUR image!

God is speaking to himself and he is relating to himself in the trinity. How do we know that God is speaking about the trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? How do we know he is not speaking about the angels he has already created and other heavenly beings? Why isn’t the ‘us’ these other beings who aren’t God. Well, take a look at it again. God is talking about creating someone who is going to be like Him. Someone who is going to rule over the animals of the world and over the birds of the air – he is going to have complete dominion over creation.

What God was about to create in humanity was a reflection of himself, a special reflection. And from that we know he is talking about the trinity. We know he is talking about himself not the other heavenly host. In fact, Hebrews tells us that ultimately the angels are lower than us in the order of creation, they are ministering servants to us, and one day, it says in the Bible, we are going to judge them! Can you imagine that? One day we are going to judge the angels! The ‘US’ is God himself in three persons!

Likewise, when you take a look at Genesis 3 verse 22, which we also read, when Adam and Eve were to be expelled from the Garden of Eden because of their sin, God said, “the man has now become like one of US, knowing the difference between good and evil.” He has become like ‘us’ and therefore he has to be banned. Satan had said to Eve that she would become not like the spiritual creatures in the heavens if she ate of the fruit, she would become like God himself! So, as He was about to expel them from the garden, God says, “the man has become like one of US!”

Now look at Genesis 1. It says in verse 1, “God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” So you have God the Father — Creator – introduced. You have God the Spirit introduced, He who hovered over the waters. Christ the Word is there as God’s creative Word declares: “Let there be…”.

But how do we know that Jesus is there really apart from the fact that God the Word is spoken of in very vague terms? Well when you take a look at John’s gospel chapter 1, it starts exactly the same way as Genesis starts. Have you ever noticed that? John’s gospel chapter 1 starts in exactly the same way as Genesis. And it reads like this, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning, through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made that has been made.”

So, it is talking about creation. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God; nothing was created without him. Now who is the Word? Go to verse 14 in John’s gospel chapter 1 – it says, “And the Word become flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only who came from the Father full of grace and truth.” The Word who was there at creation, through whom everything was created, was Jesus.

So at creation we have the relational trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, right there in Genesis chapter 1. And this trinity speaks in terms of ‘US’ and ‘OUR’ – “Let US make man in OUR image”.

Again, to see that God is a relational being, let us take a look at Matthew 3, which we also read today. Jesus comes to john to be baptised. He came to begin his ministry to save you and me from our sins. And what happens? It says in Matthew 3 verse 16, “As soon as Jesus was baptised, he went up out of the water and at that moment heaven was opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove upon him and a voice came from heaven and said, “This is my son whom I love, with him I am well pleased.” So you have the Son in the water, you have Holy Spirit as a dove coming down upon him, and you have God the Father speaking from heaven. We know it is God the Father because he talks about his son – “This is my son’. We know this isn’t an ‘it’ speaking because an ‘it’ doesn’t love. And an ‘it’ can’t be well pleased! You and I have never seen ‘well pleased’ electricity. But we do see well pleased people. “This is my son”, the Father in the trinity says from heaven, with Jesus in the water and the Holy Spirit upon him. “This is my son and I love him and I am well pleased with him.”

Do you see the relationship in the trinity? God is a relational being and when he created you and me, he created us to be like him. We have been created not simply for knowledge but we have been created to relate to God. God wants to love us, and he does. God wants to be well pleased with us. But he wants your love and my love in return. He wants our commitment and our loyalty and our allegiance.

As image bearers we were created to relate to God as no other part of creation. Remember how God produced the rest of creation? It was by his creative word. Let there be light… let there be land… let there be animals… let there be birds in the sky… let there be fish in the sea. We have this repetitious “Let there be… let there be… let there be… let there be… let there be!” But when it came to the creation of those whom God wanted relationship with, there was no “let there be.” God came down, and with his own hands, from the dust of the earth, he formed man. And when he had finished forming him, then God personally breathed into him his own breath, and man became the living being!

That didn’t happen to any other part of creation! It only happened to humanity. God has created us – us alone – to be like him! And that means to relate to him in a living personal way even as he has relationship with himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

How do we know that we are built for relationship? Let us take a look at the sixth day which is reviewed in Genesis 2. A lot of people get mixed up between Genesis 1 and 2. They think that Genesis 2 is another account of creation, it’s not. You get Genesis 1 and it tells you what happened in the first six days of creation. Genesis 2 goes back to the sixth day with a microscope and so we see the sixth day over again in more detail. Chapter 1 gives you the overview. Chapter 2 deals more specifically with the creation of humanity and details the creation of woman.

What does God say in chapter 2 when he looks at man? “It’s not good for man to be alone.” God made us to be like Him, for relationship. “It’s not good for him to be alone, I’ll make a helper suitable for him.” That we are created for relationship is also shown then in the need for man to have that woman there with him.

Finally, on this point that we are created for relationship, iet’s see how much God wants that relationship to be there between us and him. Take a look at the lengths that God went to, to restore his relationship with us when we broke the relationship in the garden of Eden. God was not pleased with us, he exiled us from the garden, but His love didn’t stop there. His love compelled Him to run after Adam and Eve, and run after us throughout all of the history of the world, to the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We read in 2nd Corinthians, “Therefore if anyone is in Christ he is a new creation, the old has gone, the new has come and all this is from God who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.”

Now, again, you can’t be reconciled to an ‘it’. You can’t be reconciled to electricity or some other form of power. You can only be reconciled to people. God wants this relationship so much to be a two-way relationship. He so much wants us to come to heaven to be with Him forever, that He humiliated Himself and He humiliated His Son on the cross. “He made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” That again speaks of God being a relational being, and knowing Him is not going to be enough, and just worshipping Him isn’t going to be enough.

You can worship and not relate. You can mouth the words. You can listen to the Word and yet have that Word going in one ear and out the other. It is possible to walk out of this place and not have your life touched by God and His Word. It happens every Sunday, and I know more than likely, it happens in this church every Sunday where people go out as though they had never been. No changes happen in life. No growth in Christ. No relationship with God. Just an outward practice of Christianity that does not impact the heart.

God so much wants us to relate to Him that He made that relationship possible by sending Jesus to die for us, so that reconciliation would be there for us. As we go through this book of Genesis and Exodus, brothers and sisters, we are going to be seeing this relational God at work. We’re going to be seeing people faithful in that relationship and people unfaithful in that relationship. We’re going to be seeing what happens to both streams of humanity. Those who rebel against God, who only want to know God and just go through the motions of worship. But we’re also going to see those who continually confess their sin, and by His grace sought over and over again to live with Him every day of their life.

There is a question that each one of us has to take home today, brothers and sisters. Please don’t leave the building today and think about anything else. If you have done that in other services please don’t do that today! When you walk out of the door today, go home with this question: “Do I just know God, or am I also in a living and personal relationship with Him?” The answer to that question will tell you whether you are now headed towards hell or if you are headed towards heaven.

“Do I just know Him, or am I really relating to Him?”

Amen.