Here’s how the Bible begins: Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth.” Here’s how the Bible ends: Revelation 22:21, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.” And between those two verses, what a marvelous revelation we have! It’s the only revelation that we have OF God, and the only one that we have FROM God. God is the subject of the first sentence of the Bible, and Christ is the One Who is in the last sentence of the Bible.
In Job 11:7, two very timely questions were asked about God. “Can thou by searching find out the Almighty? Can you find out the Almighty onto perfection?” And the answer to the first question is, “YES, by searching, we can find out the Almighty.” In Isaiah 55:6, we see, “Seek the Lord while He may be found of you.” In Hebrews 8:11, mention is made of knowing God. And Paul said, “I know Whom I have believed,” 2 Timothy 1:12. He knew what he believed, but he also knew WHOM he believed. He knew about God, but he also KNEW God.
God can be known, but the answer to the next question is, “NO, He cannot be found out to perfection.” This is because God is God, and man is man; He’s infinite and we are finite; He’s outside of time and space, and we’re within time and space. He knows all, but we’re limited as to what we know and what we can do. The Bible said, “His ways are past finding out,” Romans 11:33; “His peace passes all understanding,” Philippians 4:7; “His love passes all knowledge,” Ephesians 3:19. In Psalms 147:5, the Bible says, “His understanding is infinite.” Isaiah 40:28 says, “there is no searching of His understanding.” In Job 26:14, it says, “Lo, these are only a part of His ways, but how little a portion is known of Him.” Then consider Job 37:5, where he said, “He doeth great things, which we can not comprehend.” But we can know all we need to know about God, even “though the secret things belong to Him,” Deuteronomy 29:29. We can know all we need to know to love Him, to serve Him, to follow Him and to be with Him eternally in the world to come.
What can we know about the Almighty? Can we really know that He exists? “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God,’” Psalm 14:1 and Psalm 53:1. How FOOLISH, in the face of so much irrefutable evidence, to say that there is no God!
Somebody has figured out that, if you take the 26 letters in the English alphabet, and toss them into the air, and let them promiscuously [indiscriminately] fall to the earth without any intervention, then (according to the one who figured it, and I don’t know how he figured it that far) there would be one chance in 500 million, million, million, million—that’s the number “500” and twenty four zeros following—that they would fall in their proper order of A, B, C, all the way through to Z. That means that, if you allowed one and a half seconds per fall, it would take 2 million, million, million—that’s the number “2” and eighteen zeros following—years for them to fall in the order of A, B, C, all the way through to Z. Now if that’s true of the chances of orderliness with only 26 little things, like the letters of the English alphabet, how ridiculous! how out of the question! for ANYONE to think that, in back of ALL of this vast universe, there was not a Maker!!
But we can know that the Maker has always existed. Psalm 90, verse 2, says, “He’s from ever lasting to ever lasting.” Look into the distant past as far as your mind will allow you to go, and there was God. And then turn and look into the future until you are forced to collapse and are filled with exhaustion, and there is God. It doesn’t matter how far you go either way, there will be God, existing at both ends of time, and completely unaffected by either. There’s never been a time when God didn’t exist! Now, that’s a hard concept to get hold of! It is difficult for us because, so far as WE are concerned, everything HAD to have a beginning. But not God. And furthermore, the Bible tells us that, “He has Life in and of Himself,” John 5, verse 26. Everything else, everyone else depends upon something else or someone else for existence. But not God. And furthermore, ALL good came from God, James 1:17. And bad, of course, originated otherwise; but the GOOD came from God.
If you took the letters in the word “G O O D,” and, like you would in math, use a minus symbol, and take out the letters “G O D,” then draw a line under “-G O D,” what do you come up with? You come up with a sum total of “O”!!
G O O D - G O D = O
And when you take God Almighty out of what is supposed to be good, then all you have left is a ZERO. ANYTIME you take God out of anything that’s good, you don’t have anything left, because all good CAME from God! The Bible says He is the origin of life. “He giveth (present tense and continued tense—now and forever) life and breath to all things,” Acts 17:25. “In Him we live (present tense—meaning, “continue to live”), move, and have our being,” Acts 17:28. We’re said to be “His offspring,”—same passage. We are made “in His image” we’re told in Genesis 1: 26-27. We’re “made after the similitude of God,” James 3:9.
We can also know that God is EVERYWHERE. This concept, too, is mysterious. How can He be everywhere? Well, being as we are, we couldn’t be everywhere. But being as HE is, He could and IS everywhere. HE is that circle, that center, which is everywhere, and the circumference of which is no where. He’s outside of all, but not excluded within all, and not confined. In 2 Chronicles, chapter 2, and verse 6, the Bible says; “the heaven and the heaven of heavens can not contain Him.” Or consider Psalm 139, verse 7 and following, “If I ascend up into heaven, You are there.” This Scripture continues to say that if I make my bed in Sheol [the waiting place of all of the dead, i.e., “Hades”], He’s there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea…well, there just isn’t ANYWHERE we can go that God isn’t there.
We can know that God is not only omnipresent [all-present], but also He’s omniscient [all-knowing]. He KNOWS all things. Has anybody ever informed Him? No, Job 40:2 and 1 Corinthians 2:16. He knows all about us! There isn’t anything He DOESN’T know about us, Hebrews 4:12.
We can also know that God is all-powerful—omnipotent. Is He really? The critic, the atheist, the skeptic asks such questions as these: If God can do everything, can He make a rock so big that He can’t lift it? Can He make two mountains without a valley between? Can He make unfrozen ice? Can He make a four-sided triangle? Can He make a thing to be, and not be, at the same time?
Power has to do with what is possible. God can do anything that is possible, but it was God HIMSELF Who made some things IMPOSSIBLE! It was God Who made a triangle with three sides and, in doing so, it was God Who made it IMPOSSIBLE to have a four-sided triangle, because it would no longer be a triangle! That’s the way God made it! And God so made it so that you couldn’t have two mountains without a valley between them. That’s the way He made it! And He made it so you can’t have a thing to be, and not to be, at the same time. And He made it so that you can’t have unfrozen ice. That’s the way He made it! So Jeremiah 32:27 asks the question, “Is there anything too hard for God?” Well, the question was answered 10 verses before in Jeremiah 32:17, when he said, “With God, nothing is too hard.”
When God announced to Mary, that peasant girl from Nazareth, probably in her late teens, that, of all women in the world, SHE had been chosen to become the mother of the Messiah, you can imagine what must have run through that young girl’s mind! She KNEW there had never been anything like this before. But in her puzzlement, here was the angel’s answer, Luke 1:37: “With God nothing is impossible.” How could God SPEAK a world into existence? There’s the answer—“With God nothing is impossible.” How could the Christ be born of a virgin—an earthly child with a heavenly Father, a heavenly child with the earthly mother? There’s the answer—“With God nothing is impossible.” How can He “make all things work together for good to them that love God,” Romans 8:28? The answer? “With God nothing is impossible!”
In Isaiah 28:21, we’re told that God has some strange instruments, and you just think about some of the strange instruments that God has used. He could cause an iron head to swim, 2 Kings 6:6. We can’t do that. He could cause the sun to stand still, Joshua 10:12-13. We can’t do that. He could cause a donkey to speak, Numbers 22:28. He could cause Aaron’s rod to bud, Numbers 17:8. He could cause several hundred thousand people to go across the mighty sea on dry ground, Exodus 14:22. He called Moab, “My washpot,” and yet Moab was His enemy, Psalms 60:8. He said He raised up Pharaoh, another enemy, to show off all His power, Exodus 9:16. Three times, old Nebuchadnezzar, one of the most wicked tyrants that ever lived, but THREE TIMES He called him, “My servant,” Jeremiah 25:9, 27:6, and 43:10. God called that wicked tyrant, “My servant,” not, “My follower,” but, “My servant.” He called Babylon an “enemy”—and remember the Babylonian captivity that followed—but, He also called Babylon, “a golden cup in the Lord’s hand,” Jeremiah 51:7. And in Jeremiah 51:20, He called Babylon, “My battle-ax,” and He made use of it!
In Proverbs 21:1, the Bible said, “The heart of a king is in the hand of the Lord; He directs it like a watercourse wherever He pleases.” If you’re familiar with irrigation, not the sprinkler kind of the modern day, but of the trench kind, you could just dam up an irrigation trench, let it fill up, then open up a channel where you wanted, wherever you wanted, and for however long you wanted. You could just move, or direct, that channel wherever you wanted; and the heart of a king is like that in the hand of the Lord. And yet, He never did THINK for a King. He didn’t do Nebuchadnezzar’s thinking. He didn’t do Belshazzar’s thinking. He let old Hitler do his own thinking. But somehow, some way—and its marvelous to us, we don’t understand it— He can take the thinking of a King, that was diametrically opposed to His Will, and somehow, some way, make it work for His Own good.
In fact, He can even take the works of the devil and make them work for His Own good. For instance, Joseph (one of the 12 sons of Jacob) was the object of envy, and yet envy is from the devil. Solomon said, “Envy is the rottenness of the bones,” Proverbs 14:30. He also said that envy is “as cruel as the grave,” Song of Solomon [Song of Songs] 8:6. And, “where envy is there is evil work,” James 3:16. Paul says envy is “carnality,” 1 Corinthians 3, verses 1 and 4. Envy is of the devil? The devil BROUGHT envy! And yet, had Joseph not been the object of envy, the story would have been different. God didn’t bring that envy. The devil did! But God could take even the works of the devil and make them links in the chain of Divine Providence. Isn’t that marvelous?!? And then again, Joseph was mistreated by his brothers, and that is the work of the devil. He was sold by his own brothers! That’s certainly the work of the devil. He was thrown into prison, he was envied, he was falsely accused, and he was forgotten. All of those are the works of the devil. But in Romans 8:28 (which if I had a favorite passage, this would be it), Paul said, “We KNOW,”—not “we think,”— the Bible doesn’t deal in guesswork, it doesn’t deal in speculation; it deals in certainties—“we know ALL”—not some things, but ALL things! bad things! the worst things! ALL things, even the work of the devil—“ALL THINGS”—no exceptions— “work together.” He didn’t say all things are good. All things AREN’T good. Envy isn’t good, mistreatment isn’t good, lying isn’t good; but He could make all things, regardless of their nature, work together FOR good. Now, the Lord took 22 long years in Joseph’s case, but sure enough, all of those things, even the worst of things, even the most trying times—He made them all “work together for good to them that love God.” In Psalms 119:71, the Psalmist [David] said, “It’s been good that I’ve been afflicted that I may learn Thy testimonies.”
When you miss a fortune, it might not be a misfortune. It might be the salvation of your soul. You didn’t get that raise that you so much wanted. It might have ruined you. You didn’t get that promotion; you didn’t get that job. Though a misfortune, it might not be a misfortune. It might be the blessing of—it might be the salvation of—your soul. The apostle Paul recognized this. Three times he prayed about that “thorn in the flesh,” whatever it was, 2 Corinthians 12:7-10. And it doesn’t matter what it was; you can speculate all you want. That’s not the point. Everybody has a thorn. (Now, don’t tell me it’s your wife that’s your thorn, or your husband.) But everybody has a “thorn in the flesh.” It might not be what Paul’s thorn was, but that’s not the question. A thorn pricks, a thorn is a bothersome thing. He prayed three times that it be removed, and, finally, the Lord said to him, in effect, “Paul, can’t you accept ‘NO’ as an answer? I answered your question, I answered your pride, and I said, ‘NO.’” Now, you don’t have to answer in the affirmative to answer. And sometimes God’s answer is, “NO.” And that’s just as emphatic as saying, “Yes.” Paul could take that. Some people can’t take that. But Paul said, “Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities…for when I am weak, then am I strong.”
My, what power God has! Power that is unbelievable! He’s called “the Almighty.” When we pray unto Him, He has power we never dreamed of. But as somebody said, “I have to thank God that not all of my prayers have been answered!” Sometimes, we really don’t know what is best for us. In Romans 8:26, when He said, “We don’t know what to pray for,” well, don’t we really? Didn’t He say to pray for the kingdom, Matthew 6:9-13? Didn’t He say to pray one for another, James 5:16?
But there are some things we don’t know. We are behind the scenes, and we can’t see what’s on the other side. God can. And many times, because we don’t know, we don’t know what’s best for ourselves. God does. IF we could, and would, only “just leave it in His hand!” But, many times we pray for something that’s “after the fact.” There was this little boy, and he was praying. He asked the Lord to bless Mom and Dad, and then he said, “Make Albuquerque the capital of New Mexico.” And his mother asked, “Honey, why did you pray for that?” And the little boy said, “ ’cause that’s what I put on my examination paper at school today.”
Many times, we come to a conclusion, and then we pray God will arrive. We’d better do our praying FIRST and THEN come to a conclusion. For instance: You just received word that some precious one, a dear loved one, has been injured in a serious car accident some miles away. And you pray, “Oh Lord, please let him still be alive.” What if he isn’t? That prayer isn’t going to change it, you see. You might pray, “Lord, if he is still alive, may he be spared, if it be Your Will.” But what if he’s was going to be a “vegetable” for the rest of his life? You never know.
Though, many times, we don’t know what’s best, God does. And so, if we could just leave it in the hand of God… In 1 John 5:14 and 15, we can have this confidence “that, if we ask any thing (ANY THING) according to His Will, He hears us.” Nothing lies beyond the reach of prayer, except that which lies beyond the Will of God. Now, tonight, all of us here could start praying, and go all night long in our prayers, that, in Albuquerque, in the morning, the sun would rise in the west and set in the east. It’s just not going to happen that way! It doesn’t matter how many people join in prayer, it doesn’t matter how sincere we are in prayer, if it’s not according to His Will. We might start praying that gravity would start pulling up, instead of down. It’s just not going to work that way. You might start praying that we’d have to dig down to harvest apples because the trees grew that way, but it’s just not going to happen that way.
A little boy told his mother he wanted to go out and play catch with God, and his mother said, “WHAT?!?” And he told her again, and she said, “How are you going to do that?” He said, “Well, I just throw the ball up and God throws it back.” He didn’t know anything about gravity. But God has, in nature, certain laws. It doesn’t matter who is involved. For instance, a little baby gets too close to the edge, say, of a balcony; and the baby falls several feet onto the hard concrete pavement below. Now, because the baby is innocent and precious and lovable, does that mean that, all of a sudden, God’s natural laws will not work like they did before that baby got too close to the edge, and then fell off? Will the body of that little baby miraculously become like a rubber ball? No.
Lets suppose that a man gets drunk and then gets into an automobile. He starts out, loses control and crashes into another vehicle, in which there is a mother and baby, and they are both killed. And then somebody says, “It must be the Will of God.” Has it EVER been God’s Will that a man gets drunk? It never has been. Has it ever been God’s Will that a man try to drive in that condition? It never has been. Has it ever been His Will that a drunk man looses control of his car, and crashes into a car wherein are two innocent people? No, it never has been God’s Will. But, you see? God’s laws of nature work, whether it involves a Christian, or someone else.
What if, on the highway, a Christian was exempt from any possible accident? Wouldn’t that be something?!? Everybody would become a Christian QUICK, wouldn’t they? (The Lord talks about those who are only after the loaves and fishes.) If you’re on the highway—even if you’re the best person ever; even if you’re the most devoted, the most consecrated of people; even if you’re just giving yourself so completely to the Lord that it’s amazing—it’s still possible for you to be in an accident, injured and maybe even killed, because God’s laws of nature are not suspended for anyone. When two vehicles come together at great speed, the laws of nature say something’s going to happen. There might not always be a death, but there could be. God’s laws work certain ways, regardless of who might be involved, whether an innocent Christian, a baby, what have you.
Is it really the Will of God that these things happen? It isn’t the INTENTIONAL Will of God. God is “not willing that any should perish,”2 Peter 3: 9. But many will perish. Many more will perish than not, as is described in Matthew 7:13-14. And yet, it’s not God’s Will. In 1 Timothy 2: 4, the Bible says God would “have all men to be saved.” That’s God’s INTENTIONAL Will. But we’re told over and over again that not all will be saved.
It was God’s intentional Will in the Garden of Eden that man not sin. But man did sin. And that was also intentional will—on the part of MAN. God, at the risk of our hurting ourselves, and of hurting others (and we have, with those risks, hurt ourselves, and hurt others), but it was God’s Will that, even with the risks involved, we become free moral beings. We’re free to make choices. We’re even free to blaspheme God! We’re free to turn our back upon God. We’re free to become alcoholics and drug addicts—free to become immoral! But while we’re free to make a choice, we’re never freed from the CONSEQUENCES of the choices we make. A man, who uses this freedom to become a drug addict, he’s not free from the consequences of the drug addiction. Let’s say, though, that in the case of this highway automobile crash that we were talking about before, that the father of that baby, the husband of that wife, hadn’t really been interested in spiritual things, while his wife and baby had been. And after their deaths, he gets to thinking: “If I am ever to go heaven, if I ever want to see them again, I’m going to have to change my way of thinking, change my life, change my course.” And maybe, had it not been for that accident, he might not have thought that way. But it STILL wasn’t God’s Will for a man to get drunk. It STILL wasn’t God’s Will that a man in that condition try to drive. It STILL wasn’t God’s Will that two innocent people be killed. But, you see? Paul was thrown in prison. That wasn’t God’s Will. Paul was thrown in prison because he was preaching the Gospel and people didn’t want that Gospel. Yet, Paul said, “The things that are happening to me have fallen out unto the furtherance of the Gospel,” Philippians 1:12. What? Do you see? “It was good for me that I have been afflicted,” Psalm 119:71. Maybe the affliction was from the devil, but there are things that work out, and God’s CIRCUMSTANTIAL Will also needs to be considered. Still, it wasn’t God’s Will that a man get drunk. But, had the man NOT gotten drunk, had the man NOT tried to drive, had he NOT had the accident, and had these deaths NOT occurred, it might be that somebody would have never obeyed the Gospel. You never know.
There is a difference in God’s “intentional Will” and God’s “circumstantial Will.” Why did Christ come to earth? Why did He have to go to the cross? Well, God’s circumstantial Will was at work. It wasn’t God’s Will that man sin in the beginning! And it wasn’t God’s Will that man be thrown out of the garden, eventually. But it worked that way, because of the circumstantial Will of God. Man ran that risk, and he suffered as a result of it. But, within the circumstances, something might come of it that otherwise wouldn’t have.
For instance, when the first property this congregation sought to buy, for constructing a new church building, didn’t work out, well, it just seems to me that it was better, that it was providential. It seems that you have a much better situation now with the new building location than you did where you were trying to build earlier. Well, was that God’s intention? No. There is the circumstantial Will of God.
And then, finally, there is the “ultimate Will” of God. You can’t defy the ultimate Will of God. The righteous will go to heaven, and the unrighteous will go to torment. And nobody, but NOBODY can change that!!
And so, when we talk about the Will of God, let’s clarify it some. Let’s qualify it. Are we talking about God’s intentional Will? So many people ascribe to God so many things that shouldn’t be ascribed to God, like wars—wars that aren’t warranted. When you think of killing all of those thousands of people, like during World War II, surely that wasn’t God’s intentional Will. But within the circumstances, things might work out that might not have otherwise worked out. Life has its favorable moments, and man has his susceptible times.
Have you ever gone through one of those big steel mills? It’s interesting to see that steel in its molten form, writhing under the blast of those tremendous furnaces. And then there is what is called the “ingots”—those white-hot-but-JUST-beyond-the-molten-state-but-not-by-much, long bars of steel. Those steel workers, using rollers, manipulate, elongate, and bend those ingots, just like clay in a potter’s hand. But I was told that, if those ingots were allowed to cool to a certain temperature, they would refuse to mold. And human susceptibility is like that; human personality is like that. Life has its favorable moments; there are times when you can be reached, and other times when you can’t. And who knows? But as you prepare to go into that new church building, the Lord permitting, remember that perhaps while at THIS location, you’ve probably reached some that you wouldn’t have reached had you been elsewhere. But who knows? Maybe by going to that particular new location at this particular time, who knows but some might be reached because they are more susceptible than they have ever been before? And think about the tragedy that we talked about earlier—the drunk, the woman and child killed. Because of this tragedy, something’s happened. There is the sadness, and there is the loss. But who knows what else will come of that particular tragedy at that particular time?
So, you see, life DOES have a lot of unpleasant things, doesn’t it? Many of us know that for a fact. But who knows? Maybe even those unpleasant things will eventually “work together for good to them that love the Lord.” And maybe we will have become better as a result of it all.
My!! What a God we worship tonight!! He’s a God Who knows all, He’s everywhere, He can do all, and nothing is impossible for Him. HE has instruments we never thought about. He can move things in a way we never dreamed possible. Our going to the moon? God permitted that. It was according to God’s law of nature. It was according to certain other things that, otherwise, wouldn’t have allowed it to be done. And in life, that’s the case. God has His laws in a physical sense, and science is just watching God work. That’s all. God’s the Author of science, just as He is the Author of the Bible. It’s one thing, what people THINK science has proved; and it’s another thing, to KNOW what science has actually proved. The same way, it’s one thing, what people THINK the Bible says, and it’s another thing to KNOW what the Bible actually says. There’s never been any discrepancy or conflict in a KNOWN FACT of the Bible and a KNOWN TRUTH of the Bible, because God’s the Author of it, you see? Science can serve us, but it can’t save us. It can tell us what IS, but not what OUGHT to be. It can provide goods, but not goodness. It deals with the materials around us, but not with the morals within us. Science can make life more comfortable, but not more comforting. Only God can do that!
Paul said, “I know Whom I have believed,” 2 Timothy 1:12. Do you? I don’t mean just know ABOUT God—even the devils knows that! James 2:19. You don’t have to convince the devil there is a God. He knows that! And in Luke 4:41, some of the demons even confessed Jesus to be the Son of God. But they were still demons. It’s not enough to know ABOUT God. You need to KNOW God! And Paul did. DO you?
Do you realize that we can boldly come unto the throne of grace? Hebrews 4:16. We do this not timidly, not in a bragging way, because we have nothing to brag about; all we have was given by God. Paul said, “What do you have that you didn’t receive? You received it, why do you boast as though you didn’t?” 1 Corinthians 4:7. It was God Who advanced Moses and Aaron, 1 Samuel 12:6. It was God Who put wisdom in the heart of Solomon, 2 Chronicles 9:23. Paul said, “God made us able ministers,” 2 Corinthians 3:6. And in 1 Peter 4:11, God gives us our ability. In Deuteronomy 8:18, He said, “God gave men the ability to get riches.” Howard Hughes? Bill Gates? You name them! Whoever has had a lot of riches, God gave him the ability to do it. Everything is from God.
So, we have no reason for boasting. But with all assurance, we, as His creatures, can come boldly unto the throne of grace, and claim all that He has promised us. Isn’t it wonderful that God has shown so much love, so much interest, and so much care! And we are told to “cast all of our cares upon Him, for He cares for us,” 1 Peter 5:7. “The fool said in his heart that there is no God,” Psalm 14:1; Psalm 53:1. But some “didn’t like to retain God in their knowledge,” Romans 1:28. Some actually said to God, “Depart from us, we don’t desire knowledge of Your Ways,” Job 21:14. You and I can come unto God and call upon Him. We can expect certain things from Him, because He promised to do these certain things. We can lean heavily upon Him.
And actually, in each of us, there is a part of God. Unlike the brute, unlike the lower forms of animals, in each of us there is a part that will live as long as God lives. There is within each of you a part, which is as indestructible as God is, and that part is for eternity. In Ecclesiastes, He said that we’re born for eternity. God put eternity in the hearts of men. And so we’re going to live forever, either with the Lord, or away from the Lord. That’s why He said, “It’s a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God,” Hebrews 10:31. But it’s even more fearful to fall OUT of the hands of a living God.