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09.07.08

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

SERMON SERIES: QUESTIONS FOR GOD

SERIES 1: THE NATURE OF GOD

PART 1: WHO IS GOD?

EXODUS 3:1-15; JOHN 8:31-59

• Asking Questions
• The Questions of Children
• If you ever had children or had a close relationship with someone else’s children, you know that one thing children love to do is ask questions
• In the 1989 movie, Uncle Buck, starring John Candy and Macaulay Caulkin, one of the funniest scenes involves a rapid-fire exchange of questions
• Buck, who is a bachelor slob, is called upon by his brother and sister-in-law to babysit their rebellious teenage daughter and her cute younger brother and sister while they go out of town to visit her father who had a heart attack
• Buck arrives in the middle of the night, and the two smaller children have never met their uncle before
• The next morning, Miles (played by Caulkin) encounters his uncle in the kitchen
• Sitting at the kitchen table together, the rapid-fire exchange of questions begins
• “Where do you live?  In the city.  You have a house?  Apartment.  Own or rent?  Rent.  What do you do for a living?  Lots of things.  Where’s your office?  I don’t have one.  How come?  I don’t need one.  Where’s your wife?  Don’t have one.  How come?  It’s a long story.  You have kids?  No I don’t.  How come?  It’s an even longer story.  Are you my dad’s brother?  What’s your record for consecutive questions asked?  Thirty-eight.  I’m your dad’s brother alright.  You have much more hair in your nose than my Dad.  How nice of you to notice.  I’m a kid—that’s my job.”
• Many of us have been barraged by the questions children ask, and some of them and difficult to answer
• Questions like, “Why is the sky blue?” “Where do babies come from?” and “Are you ever going to die?”
• Along with these basic questions, children tend to be asking a lot more questions about the origin of God, life after death, and the creation of the universe
• The Times Online website contains a brief article from July of last year entitled The 20 questions Children Ask About Life and God
• These questions were generated from research done among 1,,500 parents and children aged eight to twelve carried out by publishers Dorling Kindersley for its Eyewitness Guides for Youngsters series
• Our Questions for God
• These questions are many of the same questions you asked when you completed the “Questions for God” survey a couple months ago
• I have organized your questions into several different categories
• We begin today with the series of questions related to the Nature of God, and I’ll try to deal with these questions as honestly as I can during the course of this month with biblically-based answers
• Our focus this morning is on three related questions:
• Who is God?
• Is God real?
• If everything needs a Creator, then who created God?
• Before we can deal with the question about who God is we must first answer the questions “Is God real?” and “If everything needs a Creator, then who created God?
• The place to begin this discussion is “In the beginning”
• The first four words of the Bible set the framework for any discussion about the nature of God
• Those four words in Genesis 1:1 are “In the beginning God…”
• The writers of the Bible never doubted or questioned the reality of God, and at no time did they ever set out to prove that God doesn’t exist
• God’s existence was accepted as fact through faith, just as many of our scientific principles and theories are today
• There were too many questions that human logic and reasoning couldn’t answer, too many dilemmas that just couldn’t be figured out, and far too much order to the cycles of life that couldn’t have occurred by accident
• By taking a good look at the world around us and the universe of which we are a part, the only logical conclusion is that this is all part  of a master design, and since we live here, we too are part of that master design
• If there is a master design, there must also be a Master Designer, One who put all of this in place and set it in motion
• Simply because we can’t see God doesn’t mean that God doesn’t exist
• To refuse to believe in God because we can’t see God would require us also not to believe that the air we breathe exists, that wind exists, and that gravity exists since these are all forces we believe are present even though we can’t see them
• Yet, each of them are important parts of the world, and without them life would be impossible
• The same is true for God
• Although we can’t see God, we can know for certain that God exists
• Certainly, we know this to be true because we believe it through faith, yet it takes the same kind of faith to believe that air and wind and gravity exist
• As to the question about who created God, we can say that God does not need a creator because God is not a physical being
• God doesn’t need a physical body to exist because God is a Spirit, a spiritual force that has a life of its own
• God is that all-powerful life-force that gives life to all things
• To every living thing God gives a part of God’s Spirit, and it’s that Spirit that causes us to live
• If God needed a creator, then God would not be God
• If God had a creator, then that power or spirit or entity would be more powerful than God
• Finding Answers
• Experiencing the Holiness of God
• If, indeed, God is real and God existed before the beginning of time and will continue to exist beyond the end of time, then who is this God?
• By asking the question “Who is God?” what we really want to know is “How do I know God is present in the world and in my life?  How can I have a relationship with God?”
• Since God doesn’t have physical attributes that we can see and touch, we can only know God by observing what God does, how God acts
• Our passage from Exodus is the starting place to turn to in order to discover the attributes of God
• In Moses’ encounter with God at the burning bush, God reveals the most complete revelation of what God is like given in the Old Testament
• The first thing God reveals to Moses is that God is holy—vs. 5
• Holy means to be perfect, to be without sin
• So God is radically different from us because we are imperfect, we are not without flaws, without sin
• While we were created in the image of God, we were still created, and while we were created to be a representation of God, we are not God
• Our attempt to be God is what brought sin into the world in the first place and it’s the reason why sin continues to exist
• The creation is never greater than the One who created it because the Creator has power over the created
• So in order to know who God is, we must first stand in a right relationship to God
• We must approach God with humility by “taking off the shoes” of our past life and recognize that the place we are standing is holy ground
• In other words, we must show God the respect that God rightly deserves, and we do that by worshipping God with a life of faithfulness, love and service
• Encountering the God of History—Past, Present, and Future
• Secondly, God reveals to Moses that God is the God of history—v. 6
• The God that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob believed in is the same God who created all things, who loves what God created, who calls people to faith (just as God called each of them), and who guides people on the journey of life
• It is the same God who forgives sin and who is working to redeem creation from sin’s bondage and restore it to its original order and design
• God directs Moses to reflect upon the past so that Moses might know how God will act in the present and the future
• God is not capricious; God is consistent
• By looking at how God has acted in the past, we can know for sure how God will act in our life today and in the future
• The next thing God reveals is that God is present
• God is not far removed from God’s creation
• God didn’t set this planet in motion then walk away from it to see if we could fend for ourselves
• God appeared in person before Moses in that burning bush
• That’s why Moses hid his face—Moses was afraid to look at God
• But God isn’t present only at one time and in one place
• God is present everywhere, all the time
• That fact is characterized in the words of verses 7-8
• Notice the series of verbs in these verses that God uses:  I have seen…I have heard…I have come down.”
• God sees the suffering of God’s people (all God’s people, not just the Israelites) and God hears their cry for help
• But seeing and hearing aren’t enough for God
• Upon seeing and hearing, God “comes down,” God steps in to help
• God is not an absentee landlord
• God is involved with us in our living
• God is here, present and active, and working in every detail of our life
• In order to see God, we must keep our eyes open for signs of God’s presence
• When Moses asks God to tell him God’s name, God responds with “I am who I am.”
• Another way of translating that is “I will be who I will be.”
• This name speaks of God’s power, God’s fidelity, and God’s promise
• In that name God reveals to Moses who God really is
• This God is the One who has the power to create, the One who causes to be
• This God is the One who will be present in faithful ways to make possible what seems to be impossible
• This God is the very power of newness that will make available new life for Israel, and for all who will believe
• Find God in Christ
• God has revealed all that we need to know about God, and yet we still struggle to believe
• Throughout the course of history, we humans have wavered between doubt and faith, between sin and faithfulness
• We have trusted God with our whole heart and we have denied the existence of God
• We have experienced God’s presence and have been convinced that God is absent
• To help us know God better, to enable us to better sense God’s presence, to show us how to live a life that is pleasing to God, to demonstrate God’s love and forgiveness, God came directly into the world in a form we can understand
• God took on the likeness of humanity in the person of Jesus Christ
• Through Jesus, we can have a direct and personal relationship with God
• Through Jesus, we can know exactly what God is like because God was pleased to have the fullness of God dwell in him
• Whatever we want to know about God we can find in the person of Jesus
• And yet, some still refuse to believe, some still reject that Jesus is the perfect revelation of God, that he is God’s Son
• Such was the case with this small group of Jews Jesus was addressing in John 8
• They had issues with who Jesus was
• That he was a great teacher they could not deny
• That he was a worker of miracles they could not refute
• They believed in him—yes—but they could not profess that he was God-in-the-flesh
• The key words in this entire passage are in verse 58: “I tell you the truth,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!”
• Jesus uses for himself the very name God gave to Moses
• It’s true that we can’t see God because God is absent of physical form
• But just because we can’t see God doesn’t mean that God doesn’t exist
• But we can know God by the way God acts, just like we can know that air exists because we breathe it, that wind exists because we can feel it and see its effects, and that gravity exists because we are firmly grounded on this planet rather than floating off into space
• Whatever else we want to know about God, we can find it by getting to know Jesus