So, C.H. Spurgeon kind of took it up a notch. This is what he called it, sid calling it... he called it the contemplation of God. And Spurgeon said of this...
Spurgeon said of this... there we go, sorry about that. But he said, "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 the deity. The most excellent study for expanding the soul is the science of Christ and him crucified, a knowledge of the Godhead in the Glorious Trinity." Wow, that's a mouthful, but I think he's spot on. So that's... it's pretty important.
So, theology isn't just left, you know, to those people like me that like to study, to academics and all that. It's really important. And Matthew Barrett, in his work None, I've read through and I actually taught at our previous church, he said in Christian theological tradition, metaphysics (and that's the study of God's being or Essence) is but a prelude to worship. So you could put a bookmarker on that. It's the study of God's being our Essence is a prelude to worship, okay?
So the basic metaphysical distinction in Scripture is that between the Creator and the creature, God and his creation, that we find in Genesis 1:1. And worship really originated in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve obeyed God, lived according to his will. You'll find Genesis 2:25 is the inference there. So our aim ultimately is to know God's Perfections, and in so doing, learn what it means to actually know God in a saving way. In fact, Augustine said only then will our affections for God be kindled, and I think he was right on.
Okay, and Michael, or Matthew Barrett, continues, and I would echo this warning too and starting out: "But I must warn you from the start, I will not be interested in wasting your time with a God who is tame and domesticated, a god whose Divinity is humanized. That may be the god of popular culture, but it's not the God of the Bible." In fact, Arthur Pink, man, snow words over 100 years ago when he wrote, "The God of this century is no more resembles the Sovereign of holy writ than does this dim flickering of a candle the glory of the midday Sun. The God who is talked about in the average pulpit, spoken of in the ordinary Sunday school, mentioned in much of the religious literature of the day (and that would certainly hold true today as well), and preached in most of the so-called Bible conferences is a figment of human imagination." Amen.
So the God of biblical Revelation is the God Isaiah saw, the one who is high and lifted up, as in Isaiah 6:1, possessing all authority in heaven and on Earth, as we find in Matthew 28:18, and yet one who is simultaneously with us and for us as our savior, that we find in Matthew 1:21 through 23. Okay.
So the church has holy sought to understand what God is like by studying and meditating on his attributes. So his attributes equal his Essence. His Essence is his attributes. And we also use the term Perfections here too, just to just to let you know. So our next slide coming up here, we want to make a little distinction here so that this will be hopefully helpful to you.
But we can distinguish between the Divine attributes that have no likeness in human beings. Those are called incommunicable, right? God doesn't communicate those to us. You can see the list there: his incomprehensibility (we're going to talk about that here briefly), his self-existence (called his Aseity), his immutability (the fact he doesn't change). And we can distinguish between those again on the right there that do have a likeness to God. They're called communicable. So God in someone communicates some of those to us.
You know, we... let me give you an example. God's eternal, we're not, right? God's omniscient, we're not. Okay. On the other side, God is truthful, and people can be truthful, hopefully I'm speaking the truth and love to hear today. And God is merciful, and people can be merciful, though not to the extent as God, because these attributes are his very essence. So he's all of these without compromise, without degradation, without anything. But you get the idea. Incommunicable attributes, we don't possess, right? We're not omnipresent. We're not invisible. We're not a spirit. But we can show grace, mercy, love, etc. Okay, so hopefully that is helpful for you there.
So the second question is, what is the end goal of our theology? Right? As we talked about, theology has to have an end goal, right? We would look at the pyramid here, and I'm gonna I'm gonna share here real quick. I want to I want to take a brief excursis here if you will. At the bottom, we've got Scriptures, right? We all, you know, we're reading the Bible. What does the text say? And then we get in the next block up is exegesis, interpretation. What does the text mean? And this is where Pastor Scott does a phenomenal job. He's one of the best interpreters of the Greek text that I do. I've heard my share of them, and I don't say this just to be flattering, but because it's the truth. So we really focus and going through John here on acts of Jesus.
And then we've got biblical theology. That's going to ask, "What truths and Doctrine does it teach?" And that will typically relate to books of the Bible. So we could say, for instance, the Gospel of John that we're going through really kind of showcases at least a couple things but the deity of Christ and then what does it take or how are we safe.