John 1:18 One God

We're going to talk about one God today. If we were to walk down the street and ask everybody we encountered, "Do you believe in God?" most people would say yes. The problem is, what are we defining as God? Who are we defining as God? How are we defining God? When we talk about this idea of God, there's a technical term we're going to use called theism. By the way, I'm going to apologize if there are 87 slides. This is not really a sermon-kind-of-sermon; this is teaching. So, those of you who graduated school and thought, "I hope I never sit in a classroom again," today is not your day. However, if I see you nodding off, we'll stand up and shake it out.

The term is theism—the belief in God or the existence of a god or gods. There are four basic theisms that exist in our world today. The first one is atheism, and if it has an "a" in front of it, it just simply means "I don't believe in it." So an atheist says there is no god or gods. What's interesting with most atheists is they actually reject a certain definition of God. There's monotheism, the doctrine or belief that there is only one God. Judaism, Islam, and Christianity would all be monotheist religions. This is going to bring up another question: Well then, aren't they all essentially the same? This is something we hear: all religions are essentially the same; they lead to the same place. But what we're going to find is they really aren't.

There is a distinguishing feature in Christianity: polytheism, the belief in and worship of more than one god. Behind me is a picture of the Meenakshi Temple in Madurai, India. A few of us have been there on mission trips because Pastor Paul has his church there. Every one of those little carved features represents a god. There are four of those towers that surround the square of the city, each one depicting a deity. Hinduism has approximately 300 million deities within the religion. So when we talk about a polytheist or polytheism, Hinduism would be a great example of that.

Then finally, you have what's called pantheism. Pantheism says God is everywhere, kind of like the Force. You can feel it; it's in the trees; it's in the rocks. Pantheists say everything's acceptable, everything can be God. What you find is this is sometimes found in Buddhist philosophy and New Age philosophy.

But where we have to define God is from Scripture. So before I dive into this, I want you to finish this sentence in your mind: "God is…" and think about what terms you come up with. Then we're going to dive into why we come up with those terms and, more importantly, we're going to dive into what does God say about Himself. Because here's the real issue when it comes to viewing God: Our knowledge of God comes only by the means of, and must be derived out of, His own self-revelation. What we know about God is what God reveals about Himself. We must allow God to determine our understanding of who He is.

Here's why this is so important: "I don't like your God; my God is all love." Really? Where'd you get that from? What context does that come from? What do you have to validate that? One of the things we find in people's viewpoints of God, much like Scripture, often they reject God because "I would have to change." What God has revealed about Himself… I don't know if I want to embrace that because I might have to live differently.

So let's take a look here. A couple of flawed things when we try to create our own idea of who God is: Number one, we have limitations in our human understanding, meaning the finite cannot define the infinite. The temporal can't define the eternal. And so when I come along and say, "You know what, this is who God is," how am I going to define that? I don't have those character qualities. So, God can only be known to the extent that He reveals Himself.

Now, here's where the page turning comes in. If you haven't opened this this week, you're going to spend a lot of time here. I will tell you that we probably will not get through every passage. If you have a mobile device or an app, you are 10 miles ahead of me today because you're going to get there quicker than I am. But we're going to go into the Word of God and see what does God say about Himself, how does God reveal Himself to mankind, and how do we need to adjust accordingly.