God–Attributes – What Does This Mean?

God’s Masks

Encore Post: Children love to play dress-up. They walk in their parent’s shoes, try on their clothes, put on costumes in their toy chest or use other toys as masks. Adults sometimes do the same on Halloween or at a masked ball. Most often actors will go to great lengths to look the part.

God also chooses to wear masks. Because he is absolutely holy, no sinner can stand in the presence of his full glory and live. (Exodus 33:20) So, God approaches people through priests, prophets, bushes, a donkey and the person of the Son of God before he was born in the person of Jesus. Most often, the Son of God is called the Angel of the Lord in the Old Testament.

In the New Testament, God appears to us in flesh and blood in Jesus. In him we know and see God. (John 1:18) Through him, we receive the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation. Through him, we can approach God and call him father. When God sees us now, he sees his sinless Son and calls us saints — Holy Ones. (Ephesians 1:4-6)

God also chooses to give his gifts of grace, faith, the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation through his Word, read and preached to us, and through the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. In theology, we call these the Means of Grace. We have no promise that he will come to us in any other way. In these means, we know without a doubt that God loves us.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Blog Post Series

For Christ’s Sake

Encore Post: In the last post (So, Does God Hate Me?), I mentioned the mess that the sin of Adam and Eve made of the world. God intends to clean it up. But it isn’t easy. God is Holy and can’t just look the other way. Every sin must be paid for in full. Because we are all sinners from birth, (Psalm 51:5) we must die and go to Hell forever. Even worse, we cannot make up for our sins by anything we can do or say. In fact, no one else can even offer to die in our place, since everyone sins. (Romans 5:12-21) Someone without sin must die to save us.

So, because he loves us, God sent his Son to die in our place. (John 3:16) That is why the Eternal Son was born a man, conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Because Jesus is God, he never sinned, but remained faithful to His Heavenly Father. Because Jesus is a man, He could die for us. When He shed his blood on the cross, the price was paid for our sins and the sins of the whole world (Redemption). Our sins are forgiven and God gives us his grace, adopts us as His own heirs, reveals to us what He plans to do. (Ephesians 1:7-10)

One day, when the time is right, Jesus will return from heaven, raise us from the grave, restore our bodies to be like his and bring an end to sin, death and the power of the devil. On that day, he will remake Heaven and Earth and we will live with him forever.

That is why we speak of the grace of God as something he gives us, for Christ’s sake.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Blog Post Series

Formal and Material Principles

Encore Post: It sometimes happens at a wedding reception, a dinner party or other social event. You are sitting near someone you’ve never met before. During the polite small talk, you learn your new friend belongs to a church you’ve never heard of before. If you are a curious person, you might ask about it. After learning a few surface details, you move on to another topic. When you get home, you are quite confused and cannot figure out how it all fits together. You’re not alone. Unless you have some place to begin to make sense of it all, it is easy to get lost when talking about what a church believes — including your own!

The teachings of a religion are almost always connected one to another. A pastor, priest or other religious leader can begin at virtually any teaching and explain all the rest of what they believe in terms of it. If you look at several formal books of theology — especially systematic theologies — you will notice they begin at different places. Some begin with talking about God and His traits (in theological language attributes), others begin with definitions and other concepts needed to understand what Christians believe (prolegomena). Some begin with Christ, still others take up salvation first. Where they start can tell you a lot about who they are in and of itself.

When I’ve spoken to others about what Lutheran Christians believe, I’ve found it useful to begin with the Formal and Material Principles of Lutheranism. A formal principle is the source that a faith turns to as its ultimate authority on what to teach and how to live. A material principle is what a faith is made of — the central principle which explains everything else that it teaches.

For Lutherans, the only source and authority for what a Christian should believe is the Holy Scriptures, the Bible, alone. Our Material principle is all about God’s grace and how Christ earned for us salvation. The disadvantage of beginning here is it starts without explaining sin, how people got lost in the first place, who God is and what he’s like, and many other truths. The advantage is it majors in the majors.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Blog Post Series

God Can Do Anything He Wants to Do

Encore Post: When we say that God is almighty, it seems simple enough. We can even explain it to a three year old: God can do anything he wants to do. Yet the more we think about it, that God is omnipotent, παντοκράτορ — all powerful, the more we have trouble taking it all in. We get a feeling of this when some child discovers the snarky question: “can God make a rock that he can’t lift?” or some opponent of the faith asks the classic question: “what did God do before he made the world?” The questions normally get the answer they deserve: an equally silly response like: “he made hell so he has a place to send people who ask such questions!”

What such questions point out is there is a limit to how much we can understand our maker. They show what happens when we try to pit one quality (attribute) of God against another. So … For God, who is eternal, time does not exist. There is no before or after creation for him. He makes all the rules, so he doesn’t have to follow them. That’s what makes a miracle possible.

Why it is important that God is almighty is it means he can — and does — what he promises. To save those who rebelled against him, ruined and still ruins his perfect world. He did so by being born of a virgin, died to pay for their sins and rose again from the dead. On the day he chooses he will call his children to rise from the dust to live with him forever. It means that he saves us and will bring an end to sin, death and the devil. So we confess: “I believe in God, the Father almighty” and marvel and all he can do, wants to do and will do for us.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Concordia Theological Seminary

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Blog Post Series

Understanding an Unknowable God

“We believe in one God… And in one Lord Jesus Christ… God of God…” the Christian church confesses every Sunday. We love God, worship him, study his word and meditate on it. We want to understand God, but no matter how hard we try, one God in three Persons does not make sense to us. And that is a good thing, too.

God is our Creator, so there is always something about him we will not comprehend.( Romans 11:33-36) Because God knows this, he spoke to us in the Bible and revealed himself to us in his son.(Hebrews 1:1-2) He tells us exactly what we should know about him in our language and in ways we can understand. The trouble comes when we try to put it all together with human reason, which is limited by time and place. This will happen every time we deeply consider God’s qualities and characteristics. (His attributes) if you find you fully understand an attribute of God — worry. You are likely making over God in your image.

The way to come to peace with these limits is to believe exactly what the Bible tells us — even if it seems you can’t logically believe all of it at the same time. For example, the Bible tells us there is one God, but three persons are God, that Jesus is both God and man at the same time, that we are saved because God chose us before he made the world, but if we end up in hell, it is because we turned our axis on God and walked away from him. Because God Himself says all these things are so, we can believe them all and be at peace.

The Father and the Son: The Greatest Relationship of Them All

Encore Post: If you watch carefully, you may observe great beauty in unexpected places. An elderly couple, slowly walking hand-in-hand in the park is one such sight. Their marriage has grown through decades of life, thriving in times of great joy and unimaginable grief. If you have the privilege of speaking with them, asking about their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, you will have the sense that you are speaking to one individual, yet two persons. They complete each other’s sentences, think the same thoughts and share a lifetime of memories.

God the Father and God the Son have an eternal relationship. Their love is perfect and profound beyond our ability to understand. No one understands the Father better than the Son. They have been together since the beginning. The Father made the world through the Son. Because He loved us, the Father sent the Son to seek and save the lost. No one has seen the Father and would die if they did. But the Son has always been seen by God’s people and he makes the Father known. (John 1:18)

The Father and the Son share everything. The titles given the Father are given the Son. The Father is the only God, the First and the Last, the only Savior (Isaiah 44:6-8, Isaiah 43:11) The Son is God, (John 1:1) the First and the Last (Revelation 22:13) and the Savior (Luke 2:11). What the Father does, the Son does. (John 5:18-29) Together, and with the Holy Spirit, they are life itself.

So, the depth of his love for us is beyond our understanding. To redeem us, the Father did what he did not require of Abraham. He sacrificed his Son, his only Son, whom he loves, for our redemption. By his death on the cross, he won eternal life for us so that we might live with him forever.

The Eternal Son of the Father

Encore Post: Jesus has always been God’s Son and always will be God’s Son. “I believe that Jesus Christ, true God, begotten of the Father from eternity…” Martin Luther explains in the Small Catechism. “And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds…” we confess in the Nicene Creed. It is why we sing in the ancient hymn Te Deum Laudamus, “you are the Everlasting Son of the Father.”

We can somewhat understand how Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. But how he could be “begotten” by the Father in eternity — outside of time — without having a beginning makes no sense to us. Yet that is exactly how God describes the relationship between God the Father and God the Son.

So far, so good. The problem comes when we try to understand how this can be. As we discussed in a previous post, we cannot fully understand God because we are creatures and he is our creator. It is a mystery — a riddle human logic cannot solve. The issue has to do with the quality of God (attribute) that he is eternal — that time does not exist for God. For human beings, everything has to do with the fact that time passes. We are conceived in our mother’s womb, grow, are born, become adults, grow old and die. Even though we we live forever, it is at best difficult to imagine life without a beginning and an end.

Yet God, in his wisdom, uses this language to help us understand the closest relationship in the universe — the eternal Father begets his eternal Son. (Psalm 2, John 1:18, 3:16-18, Hebrews 1) So, we also use this way to describe the Son and be content to understand him this way.

God is Hands On

Benjamin Franklin, like many of the leading thinkers of his time, liked to compare God to a clockmaker. God was a master craftsman. He skillfully formed the many precision parts of creation. Like the clockmaker, he assembled his ingenious machine, each piece carefully assembled, balanced and put it in its proper place. He then wound it up and set it in motion. He then left it alone, only rarely touching it to clean it. God, Franklin thought, was watching us — from a distance.

While God is indeed a great craftsman, he is not distant at all. The Scripture tells us he is involved in every detail of our lives. He maintains the distance between Sun and Earth with precision. He controls the seasons, rains and all its rhythms. His providence gives us all we have and need to live and enjoy our lives. Some it he does directly, others using the people, things and creatures in this world. He even contains the evil our sins let loose in this world.

We tend not to notice all these ordinary miracles and are tempted to believe our blessings come from our own efforts. When things do not go well, we then blame God as if he doesn’t care about us. We can’t comprehend that God can permit sin and evil in the world without being its cause. This is another of the mysteries that we run into when we try to understand our creator.

This is why it is good to build thanksgiving to God into our daily lives, when we wake, when we eat, when we worship and when sleep. Most especially it is good to thank him for his mercy in Christ Jesus.