Praise
Content: Trinity
1 Peter 1:3
“Father,
what a privilege it is that we can come before your Throne of Grace because the
Lord Jesus Christ has split the veil, opened the way; and we have direct access
to You because of our relationship to You through His
High Priestly ministry. Father, we’re thankful we can come together to
fellowship around the Word, to focus on what You have
to teach us. Help us to understand the implications and the applications of the
Scripture that we’re studying this evening. We pray that we would be responsive
to the challenges that are there to understand Your Word. We pray this in
Christ’s name. Amen.”
One
of the things I continually run into as a pastor is dealing with the issue of
application. And dealing with the issue that people, especially in our culture
that is such a quick-fix culture and a drive-through window culture, that we
expect instant gratification on everything, and that this is carried over into
the Christian life. We should just go to church and be given ten points on how
to do this or how to do that, and somehow that’s going to straighten everything
out. The desire to really know the Word, just to study the Word for the sake of
just knowing the Word, is falling by the wayside because of this kind of
cultural influence that we have.
If
you just stop and think about certain things in life… I think of two areas of
analogy. One is how we eat, and the other is how we exercise. Now I don’t want
to say too much about either one because that may be too convicting for some
people, but if you go to the doctor, and you’re diagnosed with a major health
problem, it’s too late to redirect your nutrition. You already have the
problem. A lot of people, when they have problems in their life, just want to
go to church and get some kind of quick-fix solution. “I’m going to nod to God
and He’s going to give me a little shot of blessing, and I’m going to get past
this,” they think. Then you don’t see them anymore.
The
issue in nutrition is to eat well all the time over a period of years, and this
produces a healthy physical life. It helps lower your cholesterol and your
blood pressure. You don’t weigh as much. All of those different factors come
into play. It’s the same thing with exercise. If you have a problem, and you
wake up in the morning, and you have a crick in your neck or your back is out
and it’s not a problem related to something that might need surgery, then you
need to fix it. And you end up spending so much money going to a chiropractor
or going to a massage therapist to try to work on it. Eventually that gets
fixed. You may do some stretching exercises for a little bit, and then that
goes by the wayside because you’re just too busy. When you look at what you
should be doing, it’s working out on a regular basis, working out in such a way
that it builds muscle, strengthens the core and strengthens all of your
musculature, and you know it’s not just a quick-fix solution. It takes time to
develop that. It takes discipline, and then when something happens, you’ve
already provided the framework either through your nutrition or through your
regular exercise to handle whatever the challenges are that come your way.
Studying
the Word is the same thing. You don’t sit down and say you’ve got a problem
with your back up around your shoulder blades somewhere, so I just need to know
what that muscle group is and then you’ll work that muscle group. You know
that’s foolish. Those muscles are connected to other muscles. Those muscles
have tiny fibers of muscles within them. You need to work them all out, not
just one area or one muscle group. By analogy, that’s how a lot of Christians
face their spiritual life. They have a problem, and they just want to work out
one area.
When
you are building your spiritual life, you need to learn a tremendous amount
about the Scripture so you can read the Scripture more knowledgeably, for one
thing, and because all or this eventually pulls together to help you look at
and interpret the realities of life from a divine viewpoint. It takes time to
develop that. Over the course of time you will study a lot of doctrine that may
seem to have no relevance whatsoever to your life or to your thinking. Then
five years later, all of a sudden the light goes off, and you realize that this
is significant.
I’m
just trying to encourage you. Y’all are here most Tuesday and Thursday nights,
and I just wish more people would recognize this. You don’t just get there by
showing up on Sunday morning. Sometimes I want to say, “Those of you who just
show up on Sunday morning, why do you bother?” Why are you playing games with
God once a week? If you just ate once a week in your life, you might be
thinner, but you certainly wouldn’t be healthier, and you’d be starving to
death the rest of the time. You probably wouldn’t even know it.
It’s
the same way in the Christian life. We need to develop that discipline to
always be involved and to always be coming and to always be studying the Word
because when, as the writer of Proverbs says many times, when the crisis comes,
it’s too late to fortify your soul.
That
applies to memorizing Scripture as well. I often remember reading a book about
a Vietnam POW called In the Presence of Mine Enemies. He was in the Hanoi Hilton. A lot
of these men that were captured knew bits and pieces of Scripture. Some knew a
lot. But a lot of them just remembered a few promises and a few Scriptures here
and there from their Sunday School classes. They
figured out how to tap out a code and they would get to the point where they
could reconstruct large passages of Scripture just by tapping it out. They had
a lot of trouble at first because a lot of them had never memorized any
Scripture. They just knew bits and pieces of this and that and the other thing.
That’s
a great lesson. We need to fortify our soul by memorizing Scripture. I know
some little kids in this church who listen pretty regularly, or their parents
or grandparents listen, and they’ve memorized a
tremendous amount of Scripture. I know some adults here who because of my
emphasis on Bible memory over the last five or six years have memorized several
books of Scripture that they’ve committed to memory. Not books like Jude. Books like Hebrews, Romans, and 1 Corinthians. They’ve
memorized the whole book and they can recite it from chapter one unto the last
chapter and the last verse. That is the standard. That’s what we should all be
striving for.
Okay,
we’re going to continue our study tonight in 1 Peter. Open to 1 Peter, chapter
1. We have covered the introduction; and now we’re going into the first part.
Last week we did a summary of the first part, and now we’re going to start with
verse 3, breaking it down very simply as we saw in our study of the first
couple of verses. It’s from Peter the apostle, identified as the apostle of
Jesus Christ, and he writes it to a group of Jewish-background believers. In
the early Church there was quite a high percentage of Messianic Jews, which is
what we call them today. They lived in the area of Asia Minor (or modern
Turkey) in the area of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia. He
identified them as the choice ones according to the foreknowledge of God, the
Father.
Notice
the Trinitarian emphasis there when it says “the foreknowledge or prescience of
God the Father by means of the sanctification of God the Holy Spirit for the
purpose of obedience and the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ.” Then he
says grace to you and peace be multiplied; and then we go into our opening
introduction, which goes from verse 3 down through verse 12. Summarizing it, I
said that what Peter is saying is that living in light of eternity means we can
rejoice in the midst of the present, fiery trial because our love for God
enables us to focus on the glories to come. Right in the middle of that
introduction we have the phrase “love for God”. That tells us that we have to
know something about God.
Knowledge
of God is at the core of understanding a lot of what Peter says in these
verses. We have to know God. You cannot love someone you don’t know. To come to
know God, both in an academic sense because we study the Scripture, that
academic sense always leads us into a deeper, personal relationship and this
causes us to praise God for who He is. We need to focus on identifying the
attributes of God, the character of God, and understanding how that relates to
His plan and purpose, especially for us. This is how Peter starts. He’s
introducing the main things that he’s going to cover and re-emphasize
throughout this epistle in this opening introduction.
If
you read through this section, the first three verses, verses 3, 4, and 5 of
this section, are all one sentence in the original Greek. I’m going to just
read them and point out a couple of things as we go from a large broad
perspective to drill down in the verse and understand some of the specifics and
the implications of these specifics. He begins by saying, “Blessed be the God
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who according to His abundant mercy has
begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ
from the dead to an inheritance, incorruptible and undefiled, that does not
fade away, reserved in heaven for you who are kept by the power of God through
faith for salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” That is a sentence
that is loaded with important information. In order to really understand it, we
have to take some time just to break it down and pick it apart.
What
I’ve done through the use of a few colors here is to try to bring out some of
the different relationships within this opening sentence. We have the noun here
at the beginning, which is the subject of this long sentence. This is all one
sentence. This is our subject. He says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ…” The “be” there in the original is in italics. Some of you
will have that in your Bible. You’ll see some words that are in italics. That
means there’s no word for that in the original Greek. It’s just supplied so
that it makes sense reading it in English.
I
tried to highlight in the green there the main thought: “Blessed be the God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ Who has begotten us again to a living hope.”
That’s his main thought. Everything else here feeds into that main thought, and
we have to understand what that means. Then you have a couple of prepositional
phrases that this “being born again” is “through the resurrection of Jesus
Christ from the dead.” So what is the relationship between Jesus Christ’s
resurrection and our regeneration? How does that connect? What’s the
significance there? It’s not just the fact of looking back to the reality that
you and I were born again at some point earlier in our life when we trusted
Christ as our Savior; but it also looks forward in that fourth verse that this
is “to an inheritance”.
Four
things are said about that inheritance. It’s incorruptible. Second, it’s
undefiled. Third, it will not fade away. And fourth, it is “reserved in heaven
for you.” We have something reserved in heaven that’s got our name on it.
There’s an inheritance package that is set aside with
your name stenciled on it. Then we’re told something about the fact that we
don’t have to worry about losing it totally, in terms of a loss of salvation
and losing our eternal destiny because (verse 5) we’re “kept by the power of
God”. This is a great verse for eternal security. Kept by the power of God,
how? “Through faith for salvation, ready to be revealed in the last time.”
I
ran across a video today that was kind of interesting. It was a video by Josh
McDowell. I don’t know how many of you know Josh McDowell. I’ve always had a
special appreciation for Josh McDowell. I hadn’t seen him in a while, and I
looked at him and thought, “Boy, Josh, you’ve gotten old. All white-haired and
everything.” The first time I heard of him, I didn’t get to see him; but he was
speaking at Stephen F. Austin University when I was a sophomore. I didn’t know
anything about him, but I knew a couple of people who heard him and heard about
it. His whole ministry has primarily been focused on dealing with the evidences
for Christianity. His great book that he wrote years ago is called “Evidence
that Demands a Verdict”. There’s a part one and a part two; and he has modified
it and improved it; and they’re joined together in one volume now. I think
every high school kid ought to read through those books. If you never have,
then you should. Someone who’s in college in an environment where there’s
constantly an intellectual assault on the gospel and the truth of the Bible,
they need to work their way through those books.
When
I was a junior in college, although I had spent a lot of time studying the Word
and learning a lot of doctrine when I was in junior high and high school, I
didn’t have a foundation for understanding the veracity of what I believed. Why
do you believe what you believe? What is the evidence that it’s true? This was
many years ago, and it’s much, much worse now. You go into a college or
university classroom, and there are numerous professors who make it their very
objective to identify who the evangelicals are and to see if they can totally
destroy their faith within the first six weeks of school. They are largely
successful. We don’t send our kids off intellectually prepared to answer these
kinds of assaults.
You
always have some kids who just say, “Whatever. I’m not going to think about
what he says. I’m just going to move on and put down whatever he says on the
tests.” That’s fine, but if you’ve got someone who’s really thinking and
they’re hearing questions they never heard before, they’re going to say, “How
do I know that’s true? This is a man who’s teaching
this class, or a woman, and they have their PhD, and they’re saying things I’ve
never heard before. How do I know what those answers are?”
A
lot of times, if high school kids and college kids just know that they’ve heard
an answer, it helps. That was one of the things I held on to when I was in
school – was that I knew that I had heard people address the issues, and
I knew that there was an answer to those things being raised in the classroom.
So that gave me a measure of stability. I was still fairly rocked by a lot of
things intellectually. How do I really know the Bible is true? How do I know
that things didn’t change over the years?
I
was up at a weekend camp at Camp Peniel at the end of
my junior year, and it was a high school camp. Randy Price, who was finishing
up at U.T., had a copy of “Evidence That Demands a Verdict,” and we were
talking about these things. He said, “Here, you take my copy and read that.” I
read it during the next week. I never had an intellectual concern about the
Scripture again. It’s just a tremendous resource. Anyway, that’s who Josh is. I
saw this thing today that was a YouTube video. He stated things rather
inflammatorily. He was saying, “The biggest heresy in Christianity is that a
person is saved by faith. You can’t go anywhere if you just have faith.” Of
course, what he was saying [although I think he was overstating it just to get
people’s attention], is that the Bible doesn’t say
we’re saved by faith. The Bible says we’re saved by grace through faith, which is the same phraseology we have down here in 1
Peter 1:5. We’re saved through faith.
Now
this is playing a little word game, a little semantics in English, because we
use the word “by” often as a synonym for “through” in English. So when we say
we’re saved by faith, what we’re saying in normal usage is that faith is the
means by which we are saved, but the object is Jesus Christ’s death on the cross.
You’ll hear this from a lot of people. Maybe you’ll be tuned to this now.
People say, “Oh, you just have to believe.” Right. Believe what? It’s not that
you believe. Everyone can believe. Everyone believes something. Some people
believe it very fervently. You have people in the White House who believe what
they believe very fervently, but it’s not going to get them anywhere close to
Heaven. You have other people who believe very firmly in their religious
convictions. It’s not going to get them anywhere. Faith won’t get you anywhere.
It’s faith in Jesus Christ. It’s got to have the right object in order to be
saved. That’s what has to be made clear in evangelism. That’s why I appreciate
people like Franklin Graham and others who do make the issue very, very clear.
Anyway,
this was an interesting little three or four minutes YouTube video that was
going around today. I thought Josh did a great job bringing out that particular
point. Let’s go back and look at this just a minute. As we look at this
particular passage, we need to just start breaking it down. We are going to
start with the first part of this sentence in verse 3. “Blessed be the God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who according to His abundant mercy has
begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection from the dead.” Now
it’s interesting to look at this. The first word we run into here is that word
“blessed”. There are a couple of different words that can be translated
“blessed”. One of them is MAKARIOS. MAKARIOS borders on a sense of happiness. It’s not
just a personal exhilaration over things going well in life. MAKARIOS
is something that is much deeper than that.
This,
though, is the word EULOGETOS, and if you like words and you like to
trace out the meaning of words, this is the word from which we get our English
word, eulogy. It is a compound word. The “eu” at the
beginning is a prefix, or if you want to get technical, it’s a morpheme. A
morpheme is the smallest letter or combination of letters that convey meaning.
For example, “s” is a morpheme that indicates plurality. “Ed” is a morpheme
that indicates past tense. There’s all kind of prefixes and suffixes. “Un” is a
prefix that indicates negation. “Eu” at the beginning
of a word indicates something that is good, or something that is pleasing. If
we feel good and we’re in sort of a manic state, we might say that we’re
euphoric. That “eu” at the beginning comes from
Greek, and it means we feel good. That’s the idea here. “Eu”
means something good or well, and the word LEGATOS comes from LOGOS and means a word. So it is a word of
good, a word of praise, and a word that means to speak favorably about someone.
It has the idea of praising them. Why it is translated “blessed be God” is a
little beyond me. The main idea in a eulogy is to do what? You’re going to
forget about all the nasty things that person did in their life, and you’re
just going to talk about the good things they did, even if you have to make
them up. You’re going to give that eulogy and praise them for the things that
they did in life; and that’s what this means.
One
of the things we should remember is that creatures can’t bless God, which is
blessing God in the sense of providing something that God doesn’t have. But we
can praise God, and if you read through the Psalms, you have numerous
statements like “blessed be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,”
“blessed be the Lord our God,” over and over again you have that
statement in the Old Testament.
How
do we as creatures bless God? You can’t do that. The idea really isn’t to
bless. The idea is to praise. Now some of you will find the Hebrew counterpart
to this interesting. That’s the word that’s in the right panel on the screen.
It’s the word BARAK. It means to kneel; that’s the core sematic meaning of the word, but out of several hundred
uses in the Old Testament, 415 times, it’s only used with the meaning to kneel
three times. It’s usually used to indicate the idea of blessing someone. In 214
times in what is called the piel stem, which
intensifies the meaning, it means to bless. It means to praise. It means to
salute someone; and in some cases it’s used euphemistically as a curse.
The
noun form of this word is blessing. The Hebrew is pronounced BERAKAH,
which would be the correct spelling because it doesn’t have a “ch” or an “hth” in there. It has
a “k.” So those people who spell it berachah have
misspelled and mistransliterated the word. Just
thought you’d want to know that. It’s pronounced b’raka.
In Israel, you will find that this is a woman’s name. In fact, the recent
Consul General here is married to a woman whose name is Braka.
It’s a woman’s name. And it means blessing. In the Hebrew it means the same
thing. It means to praise someone. It has a rich background coming out of the
Old Testament.
Now
who is Peter writing to? He’s writing to Jewish-background
believers. Paul writes to a lot of Jewish-background believers in 1 Corinthians
and Ephesians. He uses the exact same expression there as we have here. It’s
also used in 2 Corinthians 1:3. There were some Jews there in Corinth, but not
many. It’s more of a group of Gentiles there, but in both of those passages, 1
Corinthians 1:3 and Ephesians 1:3, we have this same opening statement,
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ…” To me, this is a
significant statement. It’s one we need to spend a little time thinking about
because it’s real easy to just read past this and not catch the significance of
the thoughts that underlie this particular phrase. It should be translated
“Praise be to the God and Father of Lord Jesus Christ.” Now what is significant
about the phrase, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? Actually that
phrase is used also in a number of other passages in the New Testament. In 2
Corinthians 11:31 we read, “The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who is
blessed forever.” That’s almost the same kind of language we read in 1 Peter
1:3. Romans 15:6 says, “that with one mind and one
mouth glorify [very close idea to praise] the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ.”
We
might scratch our heads a little bit and say, “What’s the relationship between
God and the Father? Where does the idea of the Fatherhood of God come from?
What is its source of information? What is it trying to emphasize?” Before we
get there, we have to look a little bit at the Old Testament and see how this
is used in the Old Testament. In Genesis 14:19 we also see this same kind of
blessing statement, this b’raka, “And he blessed him
and said blessed be Abraham of God most high, possessor of heaven and earth.”
The person who is speaking here is Melchizedek who is the King of Salem,
otherwise known as Jerusalem. This is after the event where Abraham has gone
north and defeated the armies of the kings of the east and captured Lot and all
the people of Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities of the plains; and they made
sure they hooked around the southern end of the Dead Sea and headed north.
Somewhere
up toward Tel Dan, a place where some of you have been in the northern part of
Israel and the ancient Canaanite city is Lachish, Abraham had a battle. There’s
a wonderful archeological discovery there of the gates to the city of Lachish
which goes back to the time of Abraham. Think about that. That’s about 2100 BC,
so this gate is over 4,000 years old. It gives some supporting evidence or
correlation of what is taught in Scripture. After Abraham defeated that army,
he came down to Jerusalem, and he went to offer an offering of a tithe [10%] of
the booty or plunder he had taken from this foreign army. He gives this to
Melchizedek who responds by saying, “blessed be Abraham of God Most High,
possessor of heaven and earth, and blessed be God Most High…”
This
is the first reference you have to this phrase in the Old Testament. “Blessed
be God Most High who has delivered your enemies into your hand and he [Abraham]
gave him a tithe of all.” I want you to think about this verse a minute. The
first line uses the word “blessed” and says this is a verbal statement invoking
the goodness of God upon Abraham. Melchizedek is the one saying this, and so by
blessing him, he is making this kind of verbal statement.
The
other night, I don’t know if you were listening, we dealt with 1 Samuel a
little bit. We were taking about Esau and Jacob. Esau sold his birthright for
just a bowl of red lentil soup, and there was some deception that went on in
the process. Jacob had disguised himself as Esau and went in and prepared a
meal for his father to get the blessing. Afterwards, Isaac couldn’t do anything
about it because a blessing was a legal thing. When it was once given, it
couldn’t be retracted. It had to do with inheritance. It involves a verbal
statement. This statement is focused on Abraham. “May God bless or bestow his
bounty on Abraham.”
In
verse 20 it changes. He says, “Blessed be the Most High God.” What we’ve seen
looking at the word is that what it means is “Praise be to God Most High.” We
live in an era when a lot of people think you have praised God when you do
what? When you just say Praise God. Praise God in English translates back into
English as hallelujah. Halel is the word for praise.
The u is the imperative form, second person plural, imperative form saying,
“You all praise”; and yah is the first syllable in Yahweh. So it means praise
God. A lot of people think they’ve praised God by saying praise God.
What
I want to point out as we go through this, is that
we’ll see how God is praised. Melchizedek says, “Praise to God Most High”.
There’s content there to the praise. “Who has delivered your enemies into his
hands.” He’s specifically describing a situation where
God has delivered Abraham and delivered the people. God has protected Abraham
and delivered the people into his hand and rescued Lot and his family and the
other captives. So praising God means to describe what it is God has done in as
specific a language as you can come up with. It’s not just a generic statement
of “praise God”. We’ll see this in some other passages.
Another
passage I want you to look at is in 1st Chronicles. Let’s turn to 1st
Chronicles. This is another one of those sections in your Bible where the pages
aren’t very well turned. We see David using this term. This is a really
important passage for understanding what Peter is saying. Peter is Jewish, and
he’s writing to Jewish-background believers; and he’s using the phrase that
comes out of the Old Testament and is rich with meaning. At this time, David
knows he’s not going to get to build the Temple; but he’s setting things up for
his son Solomon who will build the Temple. And in 1 Chronicles 29:10, David has
written a special Psalm to praise God. In verse 10 we read, “Therefore David
blessed the Lord before all the assembly…” David praised the Lord.
How
does he praise the Lord? Does he just go out and say, “Praise the Lord, Praise
the Lord, Praise the Lord, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah?” No. Look at the
content here. I only put the first two verses up here to focus our attention.
Let’s retranslate this so we get it correctly. “Therefore David praised Yahweh
before all the assembly; and David said, ‘Praise You, O Lord God of Israel…’ ”
See? He’s defining who God is. He doesn’t just say, “Praise God.” Well, which
God? Are we talking about the god Baal or Ashura, or
are we talking about just some generic deity, some civic god that the United
States worships, the Supreme Being, or some sort of generic non-descript
matter? No.
We
want to define who this God is to whom we are praying. He is the God of Israel.
He is the God who has entered into a special relationship with Israel. This is
not an exclusive statement saying that God is not the God of all people, but it
is exclusive in the sense that God, and God alone, has entered into a covenant
relationship with the Jewish people. So he’s praising God because of who He is.
He’s the God who is specifically focused on Israel.
By
the way, today is the anniversary of the modern state of Israel, their
Independence Day. They’re 67 years old today. This is the nation, the Israelite
people. God’s choice of the Jewish people did not end because they rejected the
Messiah. They are still God’s people because that’s grounded not in the Mosaic
covenant, but in the Abrahamic covenant. “Blessed are You, Lord God of Israel,
our Father, forever and ever.” Now what’s significant about that verse? This is
the first time in the Old Testament that God is described by the term Father.
Here we have two terms we’re finding over in 1st Peter. We’re finding the term
“blessed [or praise]” and “God the Father.” All of those terms are found here.
He is further defined by His attribute of Eternity. He is Our Father forever
and ever. It is unending.
I
think that David uses the term Father because he’s going back to Exodus 4:19
where God promises Moses that “Israel is my firstborn” indicating a special,
pre-eminent relationship with Israel. David is reminding the people that God
has this special relationship with Israel that is eternal. The Abrahamic
covenant doesn’t end. It is an eternal relationship whether they’re obedient or
disobedient. In 1 Chronicles 29:11 he says, “Yours, O Lord [directly to God]
greatness, the power and the glory, the victory and the majesty…” He uses five
different terms there to describe what he is praising about God. Then he
further explains it by saying, “For all that is in heaven and in earth is Yours.” That’s the doctrine of the sovereignty of God.
The
sovereignty of God is always connected to the fact He is the Creator. He is the
Creator God who made everything. Therefore, He has the right to rule and govern
His creation as the Creator. “All that is in heaven and in earth is Yours; Yours is the kingdom, O Lord.” God is the one who
will rule, and God is the one who will establish His kingdom. He says, “And You are exalted as head over all.” That is absolute
authority. This last part all focuses on the authority of God as the Father of
Israel, His authority over His creation. That’s important because when we get
to the statement in 1 Peter 1:3 about “The God and Father of the Lord Jesus
Christ”, whenever the Fatherhood of God the Father is emphasized, it has
something to do with His sovereign authority to rule over His creation.
Even
in the Godhead, where Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all equal, even in the
Godhead, where they are identical in essence, there is still an authority
structure. God the Father is the one in authority in the Godhead. He delegates
authority to the Lord Jesus Christ and to God the Holy Spirit. If we look down
and continue to read this, which I encourage you to do because I won’t go
through the whole section tonight, we see how David continues to develop his
praise of God. In verse 13 he says, “Now therefore our God, we thank You and praise Your glorious name.” That’s not just saying
that the name, the nomenclature, the label, that is given to God is what they
praise. Name, in Hebrew, always has to do with the character or essence of
someone. So you think through the essence of God, all the different attributes
of God; and the ten attributes we summarize in the Essence box are not limited.
There are many other synonyms in the Scripture that are used to identify God.
Think through that. Then David says, “But who am I and who are my people that
we should be able to offer so willingly as this, for all things come from You and of Your own, we have given You.” So he’s saying that
all of this flows out of understanding of the Fatherhood of God.
That’s
what we ought to be thinking through when we come to this opening line in 1
Peter 1:3, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” What does
it mean to be God? What does it mean to be Father, Father God, and in turn,
what does that relate to the person of the Lord Jesus Christ? We’re going to get
into all of that. Now 1 Chronicles 16:36 is another important passage where it
says again, “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel.” How should we translate that?
“Praise be the Lord God of Israel.” What are they
praising Him for? “From everlasting to everlasting.” This is His eternity.
That’s one of His attributes. “And all the people said, ‘Amen’ ” which means “I
believe it” and they “praised the Lord.” If you go on and read through that passage
you get another idea of what it means to praise God.
Another
example of this language is in Psalm 106:48, “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel
from everlasting to everlasting!” Notice how similar that is to 1 Chronicles
16:36. Psalms 41:13 says, “Blessed be the Lord God of
Israel from everlasting to everlasting! Amen and amen.” Notice the similarity
in the language focusing on the attributes of God.
One
thing that has happened after the New Testament period as the rabbis, mostly
Pharisees, came together in Israel, is they began to solidify Pharisaical
theology at the Council of Jamnia, often pronounced Yamnia, since there’s no “j” in Hebrew. Over the next two
or three centuries, Rabbinic Judaism solidified a lot of their rituals and
their prayers; and they refer to blessing prayers as one particular category
called an amidah.
If you’ve ever been to a synagogue, you will have recited an amidah in their
prayer book.
Here’s
one from one of the prayer books. “Blessed art thou…” Notice how it starts off
very similar to what we read in 1 Peter. The point that I’m making in all of
this is that this just doesn’t pop out like holy language. A lot of times in
Christian circles when people say “bless God” or
“praise God” we think this is just nice and holy sounding language. My problem
with that is that people say it in a mindless manner, and they don’t understand
the rich depth of this content and what it means. These terms should not be
used frivolously or in a superficial manner. Yet that’s how we often find it.
The
Ten Commandments say we’re not supposed to take the Lord’s name in vain. Most
people, wrongly, think that means that you don’t take the name God and stick it
in front of some curse word, or if you hit your hand with a hammer, you don’t
shout out, “Jesus Christ”. It’s not a prayer and many other things like that
where the name of God is used as an expletive. That might fit under the
category, but that’s not what the Ten Commandments is
talking about. It’s talking about not taking the name of God in a frivolous or
light manner. Don’t treat it disrespectfully. If you’re going to stand up in a
courtroom and say, “I swear on God that I will not do this”, then you take that
oath extremely seriously. You don’t take the name of God in a loose manner. We
often hear people say, “Praise God” and this and that and the other thing, and
it’s just using the name of God in a loose, frivolous, superficial manner. I
think that’s taking the Lord’s name in vain. They are using it too loosely.
They don’t even think about it. But that’s just me.
“Blessed
art thou, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac,
and God of Jacob.” See? This is a modern amidah, very similar language to
what we’ve been reading, not only in the Old Testament, but also these statements
in the New Testament. “The great, mighty and revered God, the most high God,
who bestowest loving-kindnesses, and possesses all
things; who remembers the pious deeds of the patriarchs and in love will bring
a redeemer to their children’s children for their name’s sake.” Isn’t that last
part interesting? Looking for the Messiah still and not realizing He’s already
here. The idea of the Fatherhood of God is rather limited in the Old Testament.
We just looked at one passage in 1 Chronicles 29:10.
Here
we have two other passages. The second one doesn’t count because it’s a bad
translation. Psalm 89:26, “He shall cry to Me, ‘You
are my Father, My God, and the rock of my salvation.’ ” Psalm 89 is a
meditation on the Davidic covenant. God is speaking to David, and says that He
[David] shall cry to me, “You are my Father.”
There
are two verses in the Old Testament that I’ve been able to identify. What I did
was a proximity search where Father and God are used within five words of each
other in the Old Testament. Many times it’s the God of our fathers, Abraham.
All but these two verses indicate that God is a father, so this isn’t a
well-developed idea in the Old Testament. Isaiah 9:6 says
that the Messiah, the child who is born, will be called Everlasting Father.
You’ve heard me teach on this numerous times – that this idiom in the
Hebrew should be translated “Father of eternity”, indicating that He is
eternal. The child that is born is a child who will be eternal.
When
we get into the New Testament and we get into one of the most significant
conflicts [John 8:41] between Jesus and the Pharisees, in John 8 down around
verse 37, we see that the Pharisees actually have a concept of God as Father.
This developed, apparently, during the intertestamental
period. In John 8:37, we read Jesus speaking, “I know that you are Abraham’s
descendants, but you seek to kill Me because My word
has no place in you.” He’s really slapping them in the face that they’re just
physical descendants and not spiritual descendants. He says, “I speak what I’ve
seen with my Father…” Many times, in John especially, Jesus refers to God as
His Father. He says, “I speak what I’ve seen with My Father and you do what you
have seen with your father.” Who is their father? “They answered and said to
Him, ‘Abraham is our father.’ Jesus answered and said to them, ‘If you were
Abraham’s children you would do the works of Abraham [verse 39]. But now you
seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth, which I heard from God.
Abraham did not do this. You do the deeds of your father.’ ”
Then
they said to him, “We were not born of fornication. We have one father, God.”
So obviously the Pharisaical rabbinical theology in the Second Temple period
understood God to be their father, probably in that Mosaic sense, where God
said they were His firstborn. Then of course Jesus goes on and tells them in
John 8:44, “You are of your father, the devil.” Jesus never heard of how to win
friends and influence people.
John
5:18, which comes before the event I just talked about, says, “Therefore the
Jews sought all the more to kill Him, because He not only broke the Sabbath,
[Remember Matthew 12] but also said that God was His Father, making Himself
equal with God.” By Jesus claiming that God is His Father, they understood that
He was making a.) a claim to Deity and b.) a claim to be equal to God. Now that’s important, because
when we look at the term “Son of God”, we realize we can’t talk about the
Fatherhood of God without talking about the Sonship of Christ. When we talk
about the term Son of God, this is a Hebrew idiom. It doesn’t mean God is His
daddy in the sense of somehow generating Him or giving birth to Him. There’s a
heresy called Arianism, and in the modern church, it
is called Jehovah’s Witness. They believe there was a time before creation when
Jesus began. They think He was begotten at that time and that He’s not eternal.
Jesus is the Eternal Son of God. The doctrine is the Eternal Sonship of Jesus.
The term father and son are simply terms we use to describe the relationship,
the economic or functional relationship, between the father and the son. Even
though they are equal in essence, they have distinct roles.
In
John 6:27 Jesus said, “Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the
food which endures to everlasting life, which the Son of Man will give you.”
That term Son of Man emphasizes humanity. Son of God is Deity. These terms “son
of something” describe a certain characteristic. So if you’re
a fool, you’d be called the son of a fool. If you’re a
murderer you’d be called the son of a murderer. If you’re
a thief, you’d be called the son of a thief. The noun which
is the object of the preposition “of” is really describing a
characteristic. If you are foolish, then when you take that idea of foolishness
and you’re displaying that in your life, you’re a son of a fool. If you are a
murderer, you’re described as a son of a murderer. So a son
of God would be what? That you’re God. It doesn’t
necessarily mean the idea of generation. Son of Man also indicates Jesus is
fully human. That’s what it’s saying when Jesus says He is the Son of Man. He’s
a full human being. So Son of God indicates He’s 100% Deity. Son of Man means
he’s 100% humanity.
In
John 6:46, Jesus ratchets things up a little bit and says, “Not that anyone has
seen the Father, except He who is from God; He has seen the Father.” He’s
speaking of Himself. He has seen the Father. So this intimacy between the
Father and the Son, between the second person of the Trinity and the First
Person of the Trinity is clearly emphasized.
Then
in John 8:42, “Jesus said to them, ‘If God were your Father, you would love Me,
for I proceeded forth and came from God; nor have I come of Myself, but He sent
Me’.” God the Father sent the Son, but He is one with the Son. In John 10, He
says, “I and the Father are one.” One of the most interesting verses dealing
with the Sonship of Christ and the Fatherhood of God, the relationship between
the First and Second Persons of the Trinity, is stated in a passage when Jesus
is talking to Mary Magdalene just after the resurrection. Jesus appears to Mary
Magdalene. She just wants to come over and give Him a big hug and He says, “No,
no, no. Don’t cling to Me, for I have not yet ascended
to My Father.” In other words, He’s saying He can’t stay, but that He’s got to
go home to the Father. “But go to My brethren and say
to them, ‘I am ascending to My Father and Your Father, and to My God and your
God.’ ” This is the message to the disciples – that He’s ascending to His
father and to their Father. What’s He saying? He’s saying that God the Father
is not only My Father, but He’s your Father. He’s connecting those two
relationships: that in some ways, the relationship of the 1st Person of the
Trinity to the 2nd Person of the Trinity is analogous of the 1st Person of the
Trinity to us as believers. I think that’s probably because we’re in Christ as
church age believers. Then He says, “My God and your God.” Jesus connects the
Fatherhood of God to God the Father and the authority of God the Father.
The
last thing I want to touch on tonight is understanding
the significance of this particular phrase. This phrase, the God and Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ, is a distinct grammatical construction in the Greek.
Usually if you’re talking about several things, you would say, “the ball and
the bat and the glove,” and you would repeat the article before each noun. But
in Greek in certain types of construction when you have an article “the” and
then a noun and then a conjunction “and” and then another noun without
repeating the article, that one article at the beginning is tied to both nouns,
and is an identity of those two nouns. This was discovered by
a man who was a British scholar. He wasn’t an academic, but he had
studied Greek and he continued to read his New Testament. He had such great
powers of observation that he studied and formulated this rule. It’s named
after him and it’s called the Granville Sharp Rule.
Many
of you have heard of William Wilberforce, who was a member
of Parliament and was instrumental in ending the slave trade in the British
Empire. The law was passed in the 1830s, but there was some legislation before
that which gradually ended the slave trade in the British Empire starting in
the middle of 1813–1819. Wilberforce and Granville Sharp were close
friends. Granville Sharp, though he wasn’t a member of Parliament, was
instrumental in ending the slave trade, probably more so, as a
boots-on-the-ground man, so to speak, than William Wilberforce. You never
probably heard too much about Granville Sharp, but he was instrumental, the
individual who founded the country of Sierra Leone in Africa, although he never
left Britain. Sierra Leone has been in the news recently because of the
outbreak of ebola. Granville Sharp founded Sierra
Leone as a refuge for freed African slaves in the early 1800s. He formulated
this particular rule. He says, “When the copulative KAI [the conjunction and] connects two nouns
of the same case…of personal description [talking about people, not things or
ideas] respecting office, dignity, affinity, or connection, and attributes,
properties, etc., if the article TAU [the in Greek] or any of its cases,
precedes the first of the two nouns or participles, and is not repeated before
the second noun or participle, the latter always relates to the same person
that is expressed or described by the first noun or participle.”
So
you have this construction that I’ve stated at the top: article-noun-AND-noun.
Here what we have is an article, then THEOS for God, then the conjunction, and then
the word Father. God refers to a person. Father refers to a person, so that’s
the first criteria. If either noun is impersonal, then that’s an exception, and
it doesn’t fit. So both are personal. Neither is plural. God is a singular
noun. Father is a singular noun.
Then
I’ll tell you something you’ve probably never heard before. The third case is
that neither can be a proper name. You say, “Well, God’s a proper name.” No.
Yahweh is a proper name. God is a noun. How do you know the difference between
a proper noun and a common noun? A proper noun doesn’t have a plural. You don’t
talk about “Texases”. You don’t talk about “Houstonses”. But God, THEOS, has a plural THEOI, which is gods. So you have God, which is
not a proper noun, and Father. So this fits this rule by Granville Sharp.
Another
famous passage is Ephesians 4:11, “God gave pastors and teachers”. What’s pastors? It’s a plural, and it doesn’t apply to
plurals. What’s teachers? A plural. A lot of people
have mistakenly identified that as a Granville Sharp Rule. There are a lot of
plurals joined in this kind of construction that might fit, but it’s not an
absolute. It only applies, as Granville Sharp said, to singular personal nouns.
So that fits it. And this is great, because it identifies God and Father as one
individual.
What
we’ve done is looked at the first part of this, understanding that when Peter
says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” he is saying
something that is in the stream of doctrine going all the way back to
Melchizedek saying, “Blessed be the God of Abraham” back in Genesis 14, and
developed all the way through the Old Testament. It is stated in the New
Testament by numerous passages, indicating the identity of the 1st Person of
the Trinity as God, and also the Father in a unique sense of the Lord Jesus
Christ, not in the sense that applies to humans. It’s distinctly related to the
Lord Jesus Christ. But then Jesus said that God is also His Father and our
Father. There is an analogous aspect to this that is significant.
Next
time I’m going to come back and I’m going to look at this in terms of the
Trinity. This is a foundational passage and phrase that reinforces not only the
Trinity, but also the Deity of the Lord Jesus Christ, a doctrine that continues
to come under attack by many people in our culture today. We need to be able to
say to people when they ask us why we believe Jesus is God, as we’ll see when
we get to 1 Peter 3:15 – that we need to give an answer for the hope that
is within us. It’s not good enough to say “because the
Bible says so”. That’s true. That’s our authority, but that’s not the answer.
We’ll come back and look at that next time.
“Father,
thank You for this opportunity to study these things and to reflect upon them;
and to be reminded of how great and magnificent You are, and of the tremendous
relationship, the significant relationship, between the 1st Person of the
Trinity and the 2nd Person of the Trinity. That You
are the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and how for this we should
praise You. As we’ll see, it goes beyond simply praising You
in reference to this relationship, but the impact of that relationship on each
one of us. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”