I Am Worthy

How many of you had a kaleidoscope growing up? We all at least know what a kaleidoscope is, right? It’s usually a tube that you hold up to the light and see a beautiful picture made up of colorful pieces of glass or stones or paper. You turn the end of the tube and the mirrors rotate and the picture changes. There are potentially millions of patterns.

And to me, that is a tiny snapshot of what God is like. You look at Him and you see this incredible, amazing, indescribable mosaic of love and power … and the you look again and it’s the same love and power but you see Him in a whole new way. And no matter how long you look … no matter how long you study Him … you never see the same picture twice. We can study Him for the rest of time … if we are Christians, we will get to gaze upon Him for all eternity … and guess what? His name … Yahweh … “I AM” … means that He is the constant, ever-changing, heart and soul of the universe. And, though we may gaze upon Him for all eternity … we will never get to know the height, the depth, and the breadth of our Creator and who He is. That may sound daunting and pointless to some, but to me it sounds … well … there are no words in the human language that could describe the joy that that thought, that idea, that truth gives me. So … if God is unknowable, why do we try to know Him?

Theologian and author J.L. Packer explains it beautifully in his book, “Knowing God.” “What makes life worthwhile is having a big enough objective … something that catches our imagination and lays hold of our allegiance … and this the Christian has in a way that no other person has … for what higher, more exalted, and more compelling goal can there be than to know God?” He asks. Amen!

Learning more about God is the greatest intellectual pursuit of the human mind. As I said, the subject of God is transcendent … as vast as infinity. But studying God, to me, is the most satisfying, uplifting, edifying, expanding, and glorious task we could ever undertake. Psalm 100:3 expresses it so beautifully: “Know that the Lord, He is God; it is He who made us, and not ourselves.”

If we simply evolved from primordial ooze through random mutations caused by improbable biological, climatic, and geological accident, we are as good as dead in a pointless universe devoid of hope. How do I know this is not the case? It’s pretty amazing and pretty unfathomable to me that a ball of slime would one day climb out of the ooze, sit on a rock, and begin to question its existence … how it came to be … and begin thinking, seeking, desiring to know, to understand, and have a relationship with that which created it. Since we do have an eternal Creator who made us in His image, nothing could be more important than learning all that we can about the One in whose image we are formed, amen? The more we learn about God, the more we’re awestruck with the majesty of His being.

“What were we made for?” Packer asks. “To know God. What aim should we set for ourselves? To know God. What is the best thing in life … bringing more joy, delight, and contentment than anything else? Knowledge of God. Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God,” says Packer, “most of life’s problems fall into place of their own accord.”

Yes … God is transcendent …. vast as infinity … but He is knowable. According to the Bible, He has revealed aspects of Himself in both nature and in Scripture. And we can know Him Who is Unsearchable through Jesus Christ … who, by His death and resurrection has given us access into His Presence.

In this series, we will be taking a look at 12 of God’s attributes as He has revealed them to us through His Word and through His Son, Jesus Christ. While this series will clearly not be exhaustive, it is my prayer that it will be inspirational and will motivate you to engage in a life-long pursuit of knowing and growing in our love for God. May God stir us, inspire us, and strengthen us during this series. This series will help us not only know about God but will hopefully inspire you to get to know Him more intimately and personally than you ever have before. As Charles Spurgeon puts it: “Nothing will so enlarge the intellect, nothing so magnify the whole soul of man, as a devout, earnest, continued investigation of the great subject of deity.”