Anchor My Faith

God

Scripture: John 3:16

In the previous lesson, eight key words were introduced. They are God, loved, world, gave, Son, whoever, believes, and life. We will cover God in this lesson.

In our context, this God who loves and gives is the God of the Old Testament. In his sermon series on the Gospel of John, John Piper describes him as “the all-powerful Creator and Sustainer of the universe. He is personal and not a mere force, meaning he thinks and wills and feels. He loves, and he hates. And as personal, he is moral—that is, he deals with us in terms of right and wrong and good and bad. And as moral, he is unwaveringly righteous. He only does what is right. And the infinite worth of what he is defines what is right. To do right is to think and feel and act in a way that accords with (is in harmony with) God’s infinite worth.”

If you Google “define God of the Bible,” you will be presented with: “God in Christianity is the eternal being who created and preserves all things. Christians believe God to be both transcendent (wholly independent of, and removed from, the material universe) and immanent (involved in the world).”

In my search I found a link to an interesting comment on God: “Defining God is not easy to do. We can offer definitions, but these definitions usually describe attributes. We can say that God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, holy, perfect, pure, wise, etc. We understand these concepts, but that does not mean we are accurately describing the essence of what God is. But this is to be expected because God is completely different from what we are. He is “wholly other.” This means he is not physical like we are. He is not limited to space and time as we are. He’s different–not the same as us. So, when we describe him, we can only describe him in ways with which we are familiar even if these descriptions can never be totally sufficient.

As we approach John 3:16 and the God who loves and gives, how should we respond. I think Paul makes this very clear in Romans 1:21 by saying, “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.” As we come to John 3:16 out of desperate need, we are to honor God as the God of infinite worth that he is and we are to thank him for the sacrifice he is making for us, for if we don’t then we will remain futile in our thinking and our foolish hearts will remain darkened.

Prayer

Oh, my Father, you are all powerful and of infinite worth. Your capacity to love and to provide for is beyond comprehension and to think that you want to restore us as your children to enjoy forever. How can we, who were dead in our sin and headed for eternal destruction, ever thank you enough? There is one debt we can never hope to repay and that is the debt of love.