God Is Eternal

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  God Is Eternal

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  Well, please turn in your Bibles to Psalm 8. It's time to play ball. I love the Psalms. We're not in a series in the Psalms this summer; we're doing a series on the attributes of God. But, in Psalm 8, it's my summer jam. Psalms are songs. Psalm 1 is my favorite. Psalm 103 is my favorite gospel Psalm. Psalm 119 is my favorite Bible Psalm. But Psalm 8 is my summer Psalm. It's a fitting psalm to read, maybe on the East coast if you get up early to watch the sunrise, if you're on the West coast, to watch a sunset or just here in Hickory looking up at the stars. Why, I want to start in Psalm 8 and we'll go a bunch of other places is Psalm 8 is about, as it is couched in praise, pure praise directed to God in verse 1 and verse 9. It's about what we want this summer series on the attributes of God to be, about knowing God and praising God. That is the high point for us as his creation. It's to know him. It's to know who he is. And then in knowing who he is and what he has done to give him the praise and honor and glory due his name, as we just did in the doxology. That's what our lives...at their greatest expression lead up to is to praising God, for he alone is worthy of all praise. And so this summer in this series, we want to look at God in all of his Godness to know him more and to praise him. Our theology will always feed and precede our doxology. Our theology is our study of God, our knowledge of God. Our doxology is our worship and praise to him in theology. What you know about him is what feeds that doxology. Psalm 8 pictures King David, the warrior poet of Israel, strumming his gittith. If it means harp, it could. It might not. And he looks at the heavens above, and he is moved to worship the magnificence of God. His physical eyes looked up at creation, and that prompted his spiritual eyes to cry out in praise. And that's what I pray this series on the attributes of God will do. Looking at a different attribute of God each week this summer for the next ten weeks, maybe, something like that into August. That we as one congregation would marry such rich theology that are in front of us in the scriptures, with wonderful doxology. Not just that we would express each time we would come with one voice to gather and sing to God the praises due his name. But our lives would be doxologies. We would leave as we would go out from here, that our lives would be lives full of praise, not just heads full of knowledge, but that knowledge would make the long distance between the head and the heart. And then from the heart we would live out hands and feet, loving those around us, serving those around us, and pointing back to the great God with whom we know. So let's look at the eternality of God. First attribute we're going to look at this summer and Psalm 8 being our starting point for that.
  "O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth who have displayed your splendor above the heavens. From the mouth of infants and nursing babes, you have established strength because of your adversaries to make the enemy and the revengeful cease. When I consider your heavens the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have ordained. What is man that you take thought of him, and the Son of man that you care for him. Yet you have made him a little lower than God, and you crown him with glory and majesty. You make him to rule over the works of your hands. You have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes through the paths of the seas. O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.”
  Father, great are your works. Studied by all who delight in you. So help us we ask to see who you are in all of your glorious works throughout your scriptures today. For us to delight in them. Nothing less than delight...certainly more. We pray there would be duty that would follow from this obedience service to you. But may the starting point be our joy in you. Amen.
  So let's start this series thinking about the eternality of God. Start by trying to empty your mind. Think about nothing which some of you have a greater advantage than others in this department. Way ahead of you, pastor...blank slate. Now that you're awake and offended. Just try to have a starting point this morning, as we again venture into the series on the attributes of God, of knowing nothing about God. You hear the word God and nothing comes into your mind except this. That you are thinking, hopefully by this point, maybe just the letters G, O, D are in your mind, but you are thinking and that's the starting point in this endeavor...your mind, your ability to think about anything or anyone, let alone a god, is a first step in the argument for knowing God. What do I mean by that? Well, there's a philosophical argument. It's very deep. It goes back to third grade. You often used it. You would say to someone else, it takes one to know one. Sally runs up to you, says you are a smelly dog. And you said in response, it takes one to know one. It's deep stuff, isn't it? But you can start with that idea. And again, your ability to think right now, use your intelligence rational thought to take out...it takes one to know one and put in...it takes a mind to know a mind. It takes rational thought to even fathom rational thought. He's just sitting there thinking. I am thinking I don't know anything else, I don't have whatever on me to. Well, here we are in 2025 where half of you have on your phones. It's telling you your heartbeat. It's telling you your brainwaves, how much sleep you got. It's telling you everything. Your blood pressure. It's telling you what you should eat for lunch. So I was going to say the only thing you might know about yourself right now is that you're thinking. But some of you who live now are slaves to your things on your wrist to tell you everything about yourself as if you didn't exist for the past 48 years without this. And you were doing fine. But now you need to know how's my oxygen rate? Oh, it says it's dipped. I need to take a deep breath. Thank you. Phone. And then you're selling this to other people. Hey, man, you really need to know your oxygen rate, because Adam's going to get long winded and you need to breathe. Takes a mind to know a mind. That actually does go back in Western thought to Greek philosophers like Socrates and his students, Plato, Aristotle, who by power of their thinking, rational thinking, reasoned their way not necessarily to God, but what we'll abbreviate today the GCB, the greatest conceivable being. That was what, nice job, right? They sat around and did some of you love that idea. Can I get paid to sit around and try to fathom the unfathomable, the great conceivable being. But why they did this is they were looking for something beyond the physical world. And in Plato's treatise, the realm of forms, the form of the good, he searched beyond what we could see in the physical world to a source of all knowledge that gave meaning and value to truth, beauty, and goodness. When those philosophers would look around in the world and they would say, where? Where do we have this idea of truth? Where does it come from?...and goodness, morality...where does it come from. And beauty aesthetic...where does it come from? That's what they tried to reason their way with their mind alone. No text of Scripture in their hands. When you go back 500 years from Plato to David in Psalm 8, he didn't need to be one of the world's greatest philosophers. He didn't need any scientific arguments to stare at the sky, to look at the stars above, he says, and ask a question about his own existence. Why am I here? Because we think we need. I mean, it is true. Like, you give some people facts and they suddenly, oh, wow. Now that I realize that that's, you know, facts about how big the universe is, as I was reading this week with coffee cup in hand again. How big is our solar system and then galaxy and something like if we're in the Milky Way. If my coffee mug, which is always at hand in my study and if our galaxy, the Milky Way was my coffee mug, something like a grain of sugar in that would be the earth. And then that coffee mug is inside of the universe, the size of North America. Something like that. And I. Oh, wow. That's amazing. So now I can praise God, I can. I got coffee so I can praise him. And I got my Bible and I can praise him. And now I have this great thought of the majesty. But look, um, you trying to fathom light years. And the difference between whether the universe is continually expanding is trillions and trillions of light years or billions. Like, just be honest with yourself. You don't know the difference. There's one guy in here that might when it just comes to the math of it. And David didn't need all of that. He didn't need philosophy from Socrates and Plato and Aristotle in verse 4 to just contemplate the greatness of God. He simply used the mind God gave him. And he stared out into the sky. He stopped and he meditated on the greatness of God, and it brought him back to his own finitude. So what is man that you think of me? I mean, that's really the starting point, I hope, for the series this Summer of the Attributes of God. You say, why would we want to do this series? What's so great about it? Well, get lost as Spurgeon would say, get lost in the majesty of God. Go swim in an ocean of his attributes if you need to solve some of your woes. Because what that does, according to Calvin, it gives you the two most important pieces of wisdom you can get in the institutes he wrote...a true knowledge of God and a true knowledge of yourself. And if you can marry those things together, you'll be all right. Now. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Do I need to study the attributes of God to know myself better, or do I need to know myself better in order then to see God rightly? The answer is yes. But if you really need a starting point, it is the attributes of God. It is knowing God. Because what we'll see today in his Eternality does as Psalm 8 starts us down this path. Reverses on us this question of who are we in light of this amazing God who is unlike me. And there might not be a way He is more unlike you and I than in his eternality.
  So I'm about to give you the most complex outline in my six years here. It's three points and here they are in case you didn't get the handout. Point one. God. Point two Is point three Eternal. Y'all ready for that? Subject. Verb. Object. Really complex stuff today. God is eternal, and I want to go in that order. Because if we're going to study the attributes of God this summer and each other teacher that's going to come up here is going to change that last description, that last attribute. But I want to back it up to just the start with God, so nobody else has to do that. Is...whatis is? We'll get to that. Please know it's the look I get from Shannon. On long road trips, I'm like, what are you thinking about? She's like our kids. Like, where are we going? You know, I'm just humming and I'm like, but what is is. And no, she wouldn't do that to me. So some of you are going to really be excited to talk about what is is the rest of you are normal.
  
  So let's start point one...God. Let's start by thinking about the idea of God. I mentioned Plato and friends reasoning their way to a greatest conceivable being. And when we're starting with just this point of who is God? Again, the attributes of God, you can give us a bunch of words to describe, but just to say, no God in your mind, What can you do with that blank slate and conceive of who God is? And using Western philosophy again, going back to people who sat around and tried to reason their way to a greatest conceivable being, would reason their way to this foundational idea that this God is the only necessary being. So under God point one, I want to make the argument that he is necessary. So you're like, what kind of what attribute is that? Well, we'll get there. Throughout history, notable Christian thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas to C.S. Lewis, employed rational reasoning to argue for an existence of God from three different angles...a cosmological argument which usually went something like if you see a bunch of effects, there needs to be a first cause, and then you might have a teleological argument Telos, the end game. Meaning, well, if we see the results of something, not necessarily effects, but this idea of complexity, a big universe or intricacy, a watch, there's a watchmaker who's responsible for it. And so that could be an argument for there has to be something greater, a greatest conceivable being. We just don't get this stuff. And then lastly, there could be the moral argument, the one that says, why should we care about truth and goodness? Well, what kind of universe are we in that says, Lewis uses this in the beginning of Mere Christianity, if you're on the train with me and you walk up and stamp on my foot that you did something wrong, versus if, I walk by you and I accidentally trip over your foot, I don't view those two things as the same. One could be accidental. Another one of those could be intentional. And, um, if there's no moral goodness in the universe, then who cares which reason I had for doing it? So that would be in Christian philosophical history, I guess, if you want to call it that. Different arguments for a starting point that all they were trying to do was establish that there is a greatest conceivable being. There's a cause, there's a mover, there's a watchmaker. They're not saying who gets to name him yet. They're just establishing can we establish the necessity of a higher power? And once you can establish that again by saying, what's the explanation for everything we see around us? Once you can establish that, then classical theism would move into what? Now I want to narrow it down and say, out of all the options, the most logical option, and we would add using our Bible with the biblical option is only the God of the Bible revealed in Scripture and through His Son Jesus Christ. So the idea of God being necessary, it takes a mind to know a mind. If I can think up the idea of God as necessary, that's a first step in the direction of God's existence. I know as far as I know myself, that I exist. But and this is that first step, I'm not responsible for my own existence. Now, dads, sometimes we go too far with our responsibility when we say, I brought you into this world and I can. Well, you're almost right about that one. Yeah, you did bring them into this world. But yeah, you didn't bring yourself into this world. Meaning you're not a necessary being. In the same way God is. What we would say is you are a contingent being. As in, you aren't responsible for you. You're not the explanation for you. Something far more impressive than you explains you and David understood that, and he took no classes of Western philosophy. David understood when he looked at the heavens the work of God's hands. And then he considered himself that he wasn't the explanation for himself. But he asked, what is man that you are mindful of him? And the answer is...not much. It's true. We're contingent. What's the difference between a necessary and a contingent being?...independence and dependence. Now all the dads are shaking their head when they think about how long they had dependents on their tax forms and when they finally got them off. Or a conditional versus an unconditional being. You and I are all conditional beings. God isn't. You and I are all dependent beings and God isn't. We have needs and God has no needs. He's the only necessary being, as in, he is necessary for what?...everyone else who is contingent or dependent on him. You can see the difference between this necessary God and needy man in psychology. Some of you know of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It was a psychological theory proposed by Abraham Maslow, one of the most cited psychologists in the 20th century, who categorized human needs into five levels...physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. And the hierarchy as a pyramid implies that we humans advance from basic survival needs to more complex. Ultimately, the greatest one being, self-actualization. I found my purpose here on Earth. Interestingly enough, that's usually where you arrive with people who seem to be, questioning their existence. What am I here for? They may have everything else solved. They may have moved in that hierarchy idea from. Yeah, I got my basic needs met and I'm doing okay. But why do I exist for...self-actualization...what's my purpose? Contrast that with God's hierarchy of needs. He has how many? None. God just is...in the Trinity God is completely satisfied in himself needs nothing else for his existence. If I would have taken that same triangle pyramid and put it up there, it would have been empty. Because God is the only necessary being with no needs. And that's not God being mulish...obstinate. I don't want anybody's help. It's actually an extension of what? His Godness. It's just who he is. It's God being God. It's not that God disdains being helped. His needlessness is an extension of his nature. He needs not because he exists necessarily, not dependent on or determined by anyone else's existence. Now, we just got to where we've arrived at this point by just using our what?...our minds to know a mind. Now let's look at Scripture to actually give us a firm foundation that our feet aren't planted firmly in the air. We might have reasoned, but our reasoning could have been incorrect. So let's listen to Paul's reasoning in Acts 17. Turn there. Paul talks about God being necessary amidst talking to some of the smartest cats in his day, as he was in Athens. He makes this point very clear, in his words, to these Greek sophists who were always who were always trying to figure out these philosophers back in verse 18, Epicurean and Stoic philosophers conversing who are always trying to figure out the, as we talked about earlier, the greatest conceivable being. But because they couldn't narrow it down to like, who really is like at the top of this chart of greatest conceivable beings, they would just leave it wide open to a lot of options, sort of relativism, maybe even a pragmatism. You do you...whatever God works for you, that's fine. And Paul comes along and says, can I have a word with you? Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects. For while I was passing through and examining the objects, note many gods. It was the Roman cynic, Petronius, who worked for the emperor, who said the phrase, it's easier to find a god in Athens than it is a man. That's how pluralistic this society was at that time. So when Paul says, uh, examining the objects of your worship. Everywhere he looked, there was false gods, false worship. Yet people looking for truth, goodness and beauty to some degree or another. And he finds an altar with an inscription to an unknown god. So he seizes the opportunity. Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you the God who made the world. Notice where he starts. Creation. Creation. Friends, that's not a throwaway category for us. And all the things in it. Since he is Lord of heaven and earth, he does not dwell in temples made with hands, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything. God is necessary, yet has no needs. We have the needs, not him. Since he himself, why does he have no needs? He himself gives. He's the life giver. He's the one who has it all for those who have nothing and are dependent. He himself gives to all people life and breath and all things. There friends is the argument for God's necessity. Paul says in the abundance of idols in ancient Athens and false worship dedicated to many gods and goddesses. Fellas, you missed one. Yahweh is the highest God of all. He is the uncreated creator and the quality that sets him apart. He starts with his necessity. That's what sets him apart. He needs nothing of what any of you. All this foolishness. You guys bringing different things to your false gods as if they need you to survive. This god...this unknown god on one of your idol inscriptions. He has no needs, verse 25. He is necessary. He used their own philosophical reasoning to his advantage to show that a true God that has the power to exist in and of himself, and not depending on anything outside of itself and everyone is dependent on him, is a being that must, must necessarily exist. Not because you want him to. He must if he is actually the one true God. So that's what you start with when we start with God, he's pure necessity. So parents, next time you get...who made God, you just say he's necessary. Next question. Just move right along from there. Sure, your kid will get it.
  
  Point two God Is. When we say God is eternal, we've covered that he's necessary. Now we're going to cover what is...is. Glad you asked. It was actually asked by a philosopher named Parmenides before the time of Plato. That was his great contribution to Greek philosophy, he asked the question, what is, is? Well, we can look up the word and find out that it's a verb of being. Right? You look it up in a dictionary. It's the third person singular of be. And that's just all we need to really establish for establishing God is he's not just necessary, but he is existence itself. He is being. The word for that that philosophers came up with, theological philosophers is God's Aseity...a say it with me, aseity. Um, it's actually the correct pronunciation of the thing. A lot of you butcher when you go to get that acai bowl down at the old copper bean. Hey, let's go get some acai bowls. aa.saa.ee It's aa.saa.ee. I only know that because I used to say akea. When I was living on the West Coast, I mispronounced everything I could mispronounce in Los Angeles. And some of these notes, aa,saa.ee, Friend. So aseity and aseity is a word that comes from the Latin 'se' meaning from or by himself, as in God is whoever he is by his own. And here's what aseity is...self existence. Sohe's a necessary being, the one that we could conceive of, that he must be the God of all gods, and then he is a self-existent, necessary being. He doesn't need anything else but himself. And in fact, if you put those two together, his aseity flows from his necessity. So God necessary IS. And if is means to be or pure existence, then out of that necessity. God is self existent. Uh, to remember that I came up with an acronym. It's a really complicated one for the word is. Aseity is contained in the idea that God is, and that is in my mind, I remember it by  thinkingabout...He's infinitely sovereign. So when you think about his self existence, can we land that? And I was thinking about it and thought of the phrase God is infinitely sovereign. His aseity is seen in his infinite sovereignty over everything else, that we are subject to...time, space, and matter. He's infinitely sovereign over time. He's omni temporal. He is outside, and over time. He is infinitely sovereign over space. He is over all places at all times. We know that from Psalm 139. We say it often where can you flee from God's presence?...nowhere, because of his omnipresence. And then he's infinitely sovereign over matter. He's sovereign over all powers, seen and unseen. So that is his infinite sovereignty as the self-existent, necessary God. All things created; time, space and matter are under the infinite sovereignty of the God who is. He's pure existence. He's the foundation of all being. He exists only in himself. Now back to Psalm 8. All that contained then, in considering the heavens and the work of his hands, this God who is magnificent in all the earth and majestic. And yet we think about ourselves and say, and we are completely opposite of that. We, on the other hand, are not necessary as he is, and we are dependent as he is not. We are not self-existent, we are dependent and we change. We age and die. In our imperfect beingness, we still age. We're constantly becoming. I think at 40 you become less. Prior to 40 you're becoming more. And then you hit this thing called your 40s and everything is, uh, it's on the downhill. But God is unchanging in his perfect being. He is the same. What? Yesterday, today, and forever. And sometimes I think we localize that in God's actions. You know, I can depend on him, you know, yesterday, today, forever. His love, his mercy, his grace. But also it's just also who he is. He is never changed at all in all eternity...anything about him because he's perfect in his self-existence. Or to say it the way God said about himself. Go to Exodus 3. When he wanted to reveal: himself and his identity in Exodus 3:14, speaking to Moses from a burning bush. When Moses said to God, Exodus 3:13, behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I will say to them the God of your fathers has sent me to you. Now they may say to me, what is his name? Because earlier in this interaction, when the angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush, the Lord says, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So he says, you should know me, Moses. Um, your history, all of your people go back to me. But just saying, I'm the God of Abraham. Isaac and your forefathers didn't say anything about his name, did it? Just told him that. Hey, man, the god that you heard about growing up. But again, remember Moses was raised in the courts of Pharaoh, so he heard about a lot of gods. So he has to remind him, no, there was one god in particular, the God that you know. That's me. But I've never actually told youmy name. So Moses says, well, what am I going to say your name is? God said to Moses, and here is aseity. Here is Self-existence. I am who I am. And again, that Hebrew...I am...is a verb for to be, I'm being, which is the best name God could give to himself. I say that not because my opinion means anything, it's in the Bible. But when you think about it, all the names in the Bible that have significance, we have talked about that in our first Samuel series. Samuel's name had significance. God is my name. God hears. Names mattered in the Bible. Eve...mother of all the living. Adam...dirt. I'm talking about aseity. I'm losing some of you. I could see it. But God's name is just being...existence...aseity. I just am. The phrase I am who I am implies an assertion of what? Absolutes. Autonomy. I just AM. That's it. Now, because we humans, you know, we could hear something like that. It's like, ah, but what is it like? How awesome is God in that when he reveals his name to Moses...how's he doing it again? He's doing it with a burning bush. A bush that it says back in verse two, it's burning with fire, yet it's not consumed. It's almost as if that bush is Self-existent. It should have been...down to the ground. You ever walked around in a wilderness, especially a desert like area. You set something on fire. It's kaput. It's gone. It would burn itself up. And here is this bush that Moses is looking at. And the one true God is talking to him, and he's giving him a physical example of a spiritual thing. Here is this bush that has this seeming appearance of self-existence. It's blazing in fire, and yet none of it is being consumed. It just is...a burning bush. But it's not nothing. Nothing is. It's violating the laws of physics, right? It should be disappearing. It should be falling to the ground. It should be going up in smoke. No, it's a perfect bush and it's on fire. And it's continually that way this whole conversation...pretty awesome. Not just the Aseity of God, but the Aseity of God represented in the burning bush. God as ultimate origin and cause of his own being and actions. So, as Psalm 8 has shown us, there's this point we get to this. This paradox here is this great and wondrous God, and here is me. And one of the things that we have a tendency to do, to speak of when we speak of God, is to speak of him in the same terms as we speak of all the beings. There's been a created order, if you will, from a highest form, a supreme being, angelic beings to human beings, to yinzers right above y'allers, and so on and so forth, right down to the rocks. And then of course, the influencers. And this is this is the order of society. This is the order of creation. But there's a problem with this idea of God being in the created order, isn't there, because the created order implies it had to be created and God's not created. So calling him the Supreme Being is injustice to him, isn't it? Because he is pure being. He is the Supreme Being that makes every one of us something else. So R.C. Sproul says that's not how it goes. And he articulated this well. He says, it's not the adjectives before that we get wrong. It's the what? It's the word after. As you get to the top of the ladder, you have a supreme being suggesting there's a thing as being that we're all part of. But that's the difference between God and angels and us and a box of rocks. Even when I quote Sproul, I start to get a little growly like Sproul. However, the difference between the Supreme Being and the human beings is not in the adjectives, it's in the noun...being. If there's ever been a misnomer, it's to refer to God and us as beings. None of us are being in the way God is being. That's a good Psalm 8 adjustment, isn't it, to say, you know God, you are not in the same category as the rest of us, as necessary and self-existent. Everything else in that line of creation is other. You are alone the one true God. And that's why, when you go back to Psalm 8 that's sandwiched inside of this wonderful oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth, oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. When I put together the paradox of your greatness and my me...ness. This is what I come to. I was thinking about this differentiation on Friday. The Ashoffs have become urban farmers. We've got chickens. These chickens are not the most fascinating things to watch, and they feel the same way about me. Sometimes I walk out into the garage, which stinks. They have to stay in the garage until they can be on their own. So me and my eight chicks were in a staredown on Friday. Their 16 eyes against mine. But it's hard because they can only look out of the one side. And with all these wonderful thoughts of eternality and aseity and necessity in my mind, there was me and these chickens. And I wondered what they were thinking about looking at me. What we know from Genesis 1...chickens have had a one day head start on the rest of us. But here we are. They work for me. They will produce eggs for me. And as much as I could speak of chickens with a slight disdain. Truly, who has more in common?...me and the chicken or me and God? The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History says that me and those chickens that I speak ill of, they haven't produced yet. Okay. Once they produce, come back and talk to me in October. I'll love those chickens. Um, we share a 75% similarity in our genome code. We share a 98% similarity to chimps. You know, that being thing, we share a 60% genome with fruit flies and banana trees. And now I've solved the mystery of why fruit flies love your bananas. They're the same. We humans, no matter how different all of us look in this room, share a 99.9% genome code, which on a side note makes racism a sin to repent of friends. Any of the smallest form of it in you ethnic vain glory that you have a little bit different skin tone. It's not only a sin to repent of, it's just a really dumb idea, isn't it? Scientifically, it's a very idiotic idea. Back to the sermon. All this chicken and chimp stuff to highlight that as much as I might think of myself superior to my chickens, I am part of the same created made Genesis 1 life form as them. God's aseity his absolute autonomy makes me supremely subordinate to him forever. Because, like those chickens, I had a beginning. But God didn't. And I'll have an earthly end like they will. But yet for all eternity, I will only exist because God always has and always will exist. We'll live forever. But that actually never moves us from the category of created being into what?...creators. Because even for all eternity, we will exist as dependent on who?...God. You'll stay in existence for all eternity if you really want that thing that keeps you up at night, right? When you start to either think about how, who, where did God come from? Or how long is eternity going to be. And well, as long as God. Even in the eternal state, we will still be contingent, dependent worshippers. None of us will ever stray outside of that into God's box of being necessary and being self-existent. No, you will always, and even in your glorified state, we will be so unrecognizable, even to ourselves and others, in that glorified state, in the eternal state. And yet we will be what?...dependent, contingent beings. Perfected from sin, yes, but never existent outside of him. Revelation 21 and 22 is the eternal state, the new heavens and the new earth. And all of it is wonderful. And we receive a miraculous and marvelous upgrade into a glorified state. And yet, who is the one that is keeping it all? Who is the one that is moving it forward outside of time? Revelation 21:22, I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God the Almighty and the lamb are the temple, and this city has no need of the sun or the moon to shine on it. Sun and moon don't need you anymore, God says, because the glory of God has illumined it, and the lamp is the lamb. The self-existence continues on for all eternity. Brothers and sisters, so get used to it. With any sense of autonomy perceived this morning by us the creation for all eternity...you're dependent. You're contingent on the self-existent God. It's a humbling thought and a wonderful thought, which then finally gets us to eternality.

  
  God is eternal throughout the Bible, this necessary and self-existent God is known as eternal, everlasting, forever. Yet to get to the destination of eternality, we had to stop by necessity and aseity. Because for God to be eternal, he would have to be independent of any factors outside of himself. That's why I took the long walk for the short drink of water, so to speak. Otherwise, and again, put this all together with God's eternality if something else is responsible for God's beginning to start him, or able to cause his end, that would mean there is a greater being than God, and that greater being is the new God of God. Right? So you see how it all fits together now...necessity, aseity and eternality. Anything that could then be responsible, that we could find out, that could be the start of God or the end of God. That's the new God. So Eternality builds upon necessity and asity. So let's think on that as we close the scriptures, what they say of God's eternality. Well, of course we meet the eternal God in Genesis 1:1. In the beginning God created. That's the created order. He's outside of it. He created the heavens and the earth and everything that is there. No preface, no backstory. Do you just meet your maker before you were made God in Genesis 1 is the uncaused cause. He's the explanation for everything. He made it all himself. Job 26:7 says he stretches out the north over empty space and hangs the earth on nothing. The irony of God's necessity, aseity and eternality is it accords with science. When science wants, for the sake of rejecting God, to break its own laws. I'll say that again. The irony of God's necessity, aseity and eternality is that it accords with scientific law when science wants, for the sake of rejecting God, to go and break its own laws. I present to you my Google AIing this week. Science says according to Google AI, the idea that something cannot come from nothing is a cornerstone of the law of conservation...science, which states that neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed, only transformed. While often used in a philosophical context, it also applies to scientific understanding, particularly in relation to the origins of the universe. The Big Bang theory while a scientific model explaining the universe's expansion, doesn't directly address how the initial singularity came into being, raising questions about the fundamental origin of what?...everything. Everything. The idea that nothing comes from nothing is a fundamental principle in philosophy and physics called ex nihilo nihil fit...out of nothing, nothing is produced. Something can't be created from nothing. It aligns with the law of conservation of energy that the total energy in a closed system remains constant. For us common folk, you can't make something out of nothing. Science will tell you you can. We would say there's a need for something existing before you create or achieve something new. In short, science breaks its own laws to explain how everything started. But guess who doesn't? God doesn't because he's the one that created the scientific laws that we humans discover that have been there since the beginning. Romans 11:36 for from him and through him, and to him are what all things, all math, all physics, all philosophy, all things are his. That's just such a foundational promise to trust in whatever, whatever area of life, whatever discipline you want to go into young people, college kids, you're not going to discover something that's suddenly going to...poof God out of existence because of that. You may have your doubts. And that's understandable. But there's nothing that's going to come out of the created order of God's world that's going to make him disappear unless you, in your pride, want it to be so, which is what Romans 1 tells us, isn't it? That the knowledge of the creator is in all of us, but we lie against the truth to justify our own lustful desires. We really want to push God outside the realm of existence, not so much because we can come up with this idea that disproves him, that his existence is kind of a nag, isn't it, to some people? Because with that teleological and cosmological argument that says you can't make something out of nothing, there's the moral argument. If I grant that he's there, then he tells me what I need to do. And we don't like that, do we? The necessity of our eternal God as creator of all creation is the only logical explanation. But it's not just logic. We have the Word of God. So here's just some scriptures. When we open up the Bible in the entirety of Scripture from start to finish, that cries out God is eternal! Job 36:26 the oldest book in the Bible. Behold, God is exalted and we do not know him? The number of his years is unsearchable. What does it mean God is exalted and we do not know him. Well he has to reveal himself to us. Though it takes a mind to know a mind, he has to what? Show us through creation and His Word and His Son who he is. Because look, the number of his years, his eternality, it's unsearchable. And again, this comes from the oldest book in the Bible...Job. Old uneducated Job could look to the heavens and be amazed by this unsearchable, yet knowable God, because he revealed himself to Job. Psalm 93:1-2, the Lord reigns. He is clothed with majesty. The Lord is clothed and girded himself with strength. Indeed, the world is firmly established by the great establisher. It will not be moved. Your throne, O God, is established from old. You are from everlasting. Psalm 93:1-2. Isaiah 40:28-29. Do you not know? Have you not heard? The everlasting God, the Lord, the creator of the ends of the earth, does not become weary or tired. That's his immutability. That's his unchanging ness. He can't get weary or tired. His understanding is inscrutable. He gives strength to the weary. And to him who lacks might, he increases power. Do you see just how naturally Isaiah connects this idea of these grandiose thoughts of this great God we serve to something so helpful as because he is limitless in his power and he is never drained of 1% battery life. You can plug into him all the time for the power that you need, but not into yourself. That would be that closed loop. It's not just that God is everlasting. So is His Word, an extension of his eternal being. Psalm 119:89. Forever, O Lord, your word is settled in heaven. Psalm 119:89. His word has always been settled in heaven. Psalm 119:160, the sum of your word is truth, and every one of your righteous ordinances is everlasting. All of it. The parts, the whole. It's truth. It's everlasting. That's what those philosophers were trying to find. What is the greatest conceivable being that gives value to truth, beauty and goodness. And it's in the Word of God. And they had it and they ignored it. Isaiah 48. We say it often. The grass withers and the flower fades. But the word of our God stands forever. And it's not just the Word of God, it's the fullness of God in bodily form who came to reveal him. John 17:3, this is eternal life, Jesus said. That they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. For any skeptic out there today, do you know what eternal life actually is? Maybe you grew up in the church and it was just always about heaven...everything after. No, Jesus says eternal life is here and now in him because he reconciles you to the eternal God. You can have a relationship with the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the one who formed you in your mother's womb, the one who knows your days. You don't know them. Eternal life is not just a then and there idea like I used to think it was. Eternal life is a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. That's eternal life. And the great thing is, you don't have to wait for it. Brother or sister in Christ, you have it right now. Whoever may not be in Christ this morning that happens to be here today, you can have eternal life. How do you get it? 1 John 5:10, the one who believes in the Son of God has the testimony. What testimony?...the testimony of God. The one who does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has given concerning his Son. And the testimony is this that God has given us eternal life, and that life is in His Son. So everything inscrutable, unsearchable that you have heard about God this morning, the testimony God gives about himself from the scriptures to have it all and to believe it all, and to know it all in its fullness. The key that opens that lock for you to eternal life is actually in Jesus Christ. And here back in Acts 17, here is the thing that you have to believe and know about Jesus that Paul preached to these lost philosophers. It's at the end of his speech that caused them to question themselves. When Paul said in Acts 17:31, God has fixed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness, that judgment is a sin and righteousness issue that is all headed towards. So listen up, unbeliever, this morning. This is where all history is headed towards. There is a day that is fixed where God will judge the world in righteousness through a man. That man is Jesus Christ, whom he has appointed, having furnished proof to all men. And how did he give the proof? By raising him from the dead. So I know that there's concepts this morning that you can't and I can't fully fathom. Uh, to believe in God's eternality and aseity and necessity. It is not necessary for the gospel in the sense I got to figure out God's necessity and asiety and eternality to become a Christian. No, you're not going to figure that out, but you do need to know this about that God. He will judge you and the rest of the world according to the righteousness of His Son, Jesus Christ. And the proof that he's given you today is that he was raised from the dead. My mind falls apart. It even did this week. When I'm thinking like..no God, but like I get I can study this stuff all week and plumb the depths of it, and I can lay awake at night and think, but really, where did you come from? Like you got a burning bush. Please. Something you know. Look outside. My tree's on fire. It's probably the neighborhood kids, but I would have taken that this week. When you start to get those doubts, like, how do I know eternity? And do you know what solves that problem for me? That Jesus came back from the dead. When I can't fathom the unfathomable parts of who God is, I end up exactly where Paul ended up here. That the proof...why all of it holds together. Why I can trust it, is because the thing I have to be able to grasp and hold on to is that there has been no one who can refute that God sent His Son to forgive sinners like me, and that by believing he died on the cross in my place and being raised from the dead, I'm forgiven, I believe that. And because I believe that I can trust everything else. Everything else that this book says. Do you believe the facts about Jesus? The Son of God, the Son of Man, sent to save perfect life, dies on the cross in your place and is raised for your justification to prove that you're forgiven. And if you can hold that together in your mind that good news of the gospel, the rest of the stuff can come. So call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ today and be saved. I knew I would run out of time. And the irony is, it's a sermon about eternality. So the joke's on you. I mean, what did you expect me to do with a sermon about the eternality of God? Believer, I want to give you three implications before we move into a time at the Lord's table. Three implications from that God is necessary. God is self-existent and God is eternal.
  First implication...how does the necessity of God humble me to seek him with greater dependence? How does thinking on the necessity of God? Well, it certainly trumps my priorities that my life fits inside of his life. He's necessary. I'm contingent. He's the only necessary being in the universe. And I exist for him. So any sense of my own indispensability...here's what R.C. Sproul says. The most crowded places for indispensable people are the cemeteries of the world. Isn't that the great equalizer? Oh, that's not the quote, by the way. You can discard that. That was something else. I kind of let hit the cutting room floor. This quote was much better. It was shorter. The most crowded places for indispensable people. People that think that everything rests on them are the people that are where?...in the cemeteries, like the rest of us will be. That's where it ends. And your indispensability and your necessity is over at that point. We must understand that everything exists for God, for his glory and majesty, and out of that comes the purpose of our being. So if it rains on your well-planned beach vacation like it did mine. God, you're necessary. I'm not. Go buy some board games and have a good time. It ended up being sunny the next day.

  Number two. How does the aseity of God, His self-existence, inspire me to worship him with greater earnestness? How does the aseity of God inspire me to worship him with greater earnestness? Remembering God is his infinite sovereignty over time, space and matter is a good way to solve some of our mental health woes. Because a lot of those the buzzword that mental health is today is you're pointed to solving it within you. Like think more about you and what you need. No, the Bible would point us like Psalm 8 did, to think about someone outside of you. Think about the great God who has no needs, who is self-existent. J.I. Packer wrote, in our life of faith, we easily impoverish ourselves by embracing an idea of God that is too limited and small, and the doctrine of God's aseity stands as a bulwark against despairing of our own finite lives. So how does the aseiety of God inspire you to worship him with greater earnestness?
  And then three. How does the eternality of God comfort me to trust him with greater assurance? I didn't plan on using Psalm 8 this week until Wednesday. That's when a friend of ours here, a brother in Christ, was hours away from eternity. Larry Ferguson, who we prayed for last Sunday. The Lord took him home Thursday night. So I was studying for a sermon and came across a footnote to a footnote that led me to R.C. Sproul's Holiness of God in a chapter called Looking Through the Shadows. And I have that book because I have all of Larry Ferguson's old R.C. Sproul books. He gave them to me. He used to be a bookstore owner and he had signed copies. I love R.C. Sproul. They were signed copies to Larry, but I'll take them anyway. Um, and it was in reading on Psalm 8, in Looking Beyond Shadows, that Sproul wrote this, what with the meager resources the psalmist had when he gazed into the night sky of Palestine, he was overwhelmed by the weighty sense of contrast between the magnificence of the heavens and the relative obscurity of his own life. By considering the stars, he was forced to ask the ultimate question about his existence what is man that you are mindful of him? And so that was that Wednesday. And I was going to go see Larry, because I just wanted to go see him at lunch, and I drop in on him unannounced. And, um, Psalm 8 was on my heart. So I shared Psalm 8 with him, and what I wanted to share with him was, um, though your outer man is decaying, your inner man is being renewed day by day, and there's an eternal weight of glory for you. That far distances the confines of your hospice bed. Now he couldn't respond. He had no strength to speak at this point. You've been with people like that. What do people like that need at that moment? They need the Word of God to remind them, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. And then I said to him, um. Who is Larry that our majestic God was mindful of him. Well, you know who God is, Larry. He sees you right here, right now. And he squeezed my hand. That's all he could do. It's all I thought he could do. And then he gets the strength and his eyes get big, and he speaks. And he says, go up to my room and get more books. I'm like. So I go up to his room. I was going to do what he was going to tell me to do. So I go up and get a couple more books. And, um. I bring them down because, like, a good accountant, librarian, whatever skills Larry had administratively, he wanted me to check them out. So I bring the books back down, and he wants to see what I took. And he points out this book on the end times, the world to come. And he's pointing, and he wants me to open it. And I'm thinking to see a signature. And it wasn't. He wanted me to flip to a page. It was a picture of eternity, of from creation to eternity. And just wanted to point at what? The return of Christ. Because when you think on the eternality of God and the magnificence of him, and you know him personally, you're ready to meet him. That's your hope in life and death. Nothing short of that, friends. And that's what's going to matter for all of us. Who is Larry that our majestic God was mindful of him. It's the same as any of his adopted children. Because God is. And because we're his. We have what? Hope.
  Let's pray. Father, we thank you this morning for your word. We thank you that now, as we come to the Lord's table, as already feasting on your word and served by your spirit, the best meal is yet to come, because it's the meal that reminds us of Christ, your life and your death and your resurrection. Which is what Paul said when it all comes down to the great Judgment Day, we will be judged by our righteousness within ourselves or the righteousness we have by faith in him, which is it going to be. I pray that everyone in here would know, without a shadow of a doubt in their soul, that their hope is in Christ alone. Their eternal life hangs on him, and that they would put all of their hope in him, all of their trust in him. And spirit, only you can do that work. So I pray you would. Amen.