The Ever-Present God

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We finished our study on Gideon, so we’re going to look at Hebrews tonight. I don’t know that it’s going to be a series, but this is what I was studying on this week that I wanted to share with you. Hebrews chapter 1.

You may feel at times like God is distant. Even as somebody with a relationship with God, you may at times feel like God is not as near to you as He once was. I think we all go through times like that.

We know in our minds God is always with us, but at times we feel like he’s distant. And part of the answer to that is that your feelings will lie to you. The Bible says that the heart is deceitful above all things.

And if you’ve ever been a teenager, and with the exception of my two children, or my three children, I forget, we’ve got an extra one now, with the exception of my three children back there, we’ve all been teenagers, you realize that feelings are very confusing things and very conflicting things, and that your heart will lie to you. So part of the answer to that is where the Bible says don’t trust your feelings. Certainly not trust your feelings alone because they will deceive you.

But the other is a reminder from God’s word that he is always with us. He’s always there. He’s always involved in our lives and he’s always involved in human history.

As I’ve been reading and studying for a class that I’m taking, One of the things that they’ve been talking about is early on at the time of our country’s founding, and before that and since then, but really it hit its peak around that time, there was a movement called deism. And deism basically looks at God like a watchmaker. The way the watchmaker sits there and he painstakingly creates and puts the gears there and puts the springs there in the hands, and I don’t even know what all goes into watchmaking because I’m not a watchmaker.

But he does this intricate work, especially in places where watches are still made by hand, and then he winds it up, and then he lets it go. It does its thing according to the laws that he’s set up, but he doesn’t make it run, and he doesn’t interfere with it from then on. Deism kind of looks at creation, kind of looks at the universe as a watch, and God is a watchmaker.

that God created it, that he set it in motion, that he wound it up, and that he lets it go according to the way he’s designed it to go without his interference. And some of our founding fathers were deists, not as many as the media would lead you to believe, though. But there were some deists among our founding fathers.

There were some deists among the Enlightenment philosophers. And there are some deists in our world today, whether they realize that they fall under that heading or not. There are some people who believe that God created the world, but he doesn’t really interfere in it.

He just sits back and watches it run. And sometimes we can even fall into the trap of thinking, well, because I haven’t seen God at work, maybe he’s not. And we’ve talked about this some with our series on Gideon, that God can be at work whether we see it or not.

Just because we don’t see it doesn’t mean that he isn’t at work. And as I was reading and studying for this class, the big question for the deist was why they would think if God can’t or doesn’t supernaturally intervene in human history, if he’s not involved in our lives today, why is that impossible, but it’s not impossible that God supernaturally created the universe? Why is that line drawn there that he could only do one supernatural, miraculous thing, but not these others?

And as I said, some of us fall into that trap, even if we don’t believe that. You may think, well, I know God intervenes. God is involved.

But sometimes we fall into the trap momentarily of feeling like, well, God must not be involved in my life. God must not be doing anything. God feels like he’s millions of miles away.

When the book of Acts says that he created, and I talked about this after Charlottesville, he created all of mankind from one blood. He created all but what we would call the races of the world from one blood. We’re all created from Adam and Eve.

He created all the races of the world and set the boundaries of their habitation. He’s intervened in human affairs and human history. As empires ebb and flow, he’s done all of these things and he’s been intimately involved in it.

And it says at the end of that passage that we might seek him though he be not far from any of us. God is never far away from us. God is intimately involved in human affairs because he loves us.

And writing to the Hebrew background people, the Jewish background, some of them being believers, some of them not being believers, the writer of Hebrews, and I say it that way because we’re not absolutely certain who it was. For long periods of Christian history, there have been people who thought it was Paul, there have been people who thought it was Apollos, some thought Aquila, maybe Barnabas, I wondered if it might be Barnabas, we don’t know, it was one of the apostles or a close associate of the apostles, and it was somebody with an intimate knowledge of Jewish culture. And so this writer of Hebrews, whoever it might have been, presents this, and it doesn’t sound like the other letters in the New Testament.

It sounds kind of like a sermon that somebody copied down. And whether he’s beginning this as a writing or whether he’s beginning this as a sermon, he starts talking to these people who were coming from a Jewish background, and he starts by reminding them that God is always with them. Because think about it, especially if you’re in the days of the apostles and you’re a Jew who does not believe that Jesus is the Messiah, then you’ve been waiting for almost 500 years for God to do something.

If you missed that whole thing about Jesus, then you’ve been waiting for 500 years for God to do something and thinking, where is God? The last prophet that they had that they recognized was Malachi almost 500 years ago, 400 years before Jesus. And then you go several decades after the life of Jesus, and you’re thinking, when is God going to show up and do something?

We know he created the universe. We know he’s always taken care of Israel, but we haven’t heard anything from him. You could be thinking as a Jewish background believer in Jesus at that point.

We’ve been watching for the return of Jesus Christ for decades. When is God going to do something? Now, this is not what the book of Hebrews is primarily about, but it’s interesting to me the way he starts off this message by reminding them that God is always with them.

He says, and starting in verse 1, God who at sundry times and in diverse manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets. Now that’s not a complete thought, but let’s just stop there at the beginning, at the end of the first verse. Excuse me, I’m a little tongue-tied tonight.

There’s something in the water tonight, brother, I guess. He says, he starts by reminding them that God has at various times all throughout the history of their nation, God has spoken to their fathers through the prophets. And it says that in diverse manners, he’s spoken in different ways.

God was not limited to just one way of speaking. He spoke to Jonah while he was in the belly of a whale. He spoke to Elijah.

He did not speak to him through the whirlwind and through the fire. he spoke to him in a still small voice. He called out to Samuel in that voice, calling out his name Samuel, Samuel.

He spoke to Moses and he spoke to that generation through miracles as well as through words. God has chosen various ways to speak to his people. At sundry times it says, and sundry just means miscellaneous.

And so at various times when it suited God, He has spoken in different ways through his servants, the prophets, to the nation of Israel. So it’s a reminder, God has always spoken to you in the past. Maybe not every day, not necessarily every day has God brought a new special revelation through the prophets, but God has always been at work through his prophets to bring his message to his people. And he said, this same God, we go into verse 2, he says, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his son.

So this same God who all throughout the history of the Jewish nation has spoken to his people through his prophets, has in the final day, in these last days, or in these latest days to them, spoken to us through his son.

And so this message of the prophets, or all these messages that God sent through the prophets, the culmination of all of them, the explanation of the whole message, is it came through Jesus Christ. And it’s sort of like when I come to my final point in a message, assuming there is one, I’ve given you all this information and sometimes I stand up here and think I’ve given them so many details and so many points and sub points how to make it make sense and how to bring it all together and tie it up with a little bow so you have one thing that you can take with you throughout this week to try to make sense of it and apply it and try to serve God and I’ll come and usually toward the end of the message say if you take one thing from this it’s that and that’s sort of what God has done with Jesus for thousands of years he’s been speaking to the Jewish people and he’s been reminding them of his presence that he’s with them, that he’s guiding them that he’s leading them, that he’s orchestrating history in a way to bring them to where they need to be and all these things that God has said to them he comes suddenly in the first century AD and says by the way if you take one this is a paraphrase obviously but if you take one thing from everything I’ve said to you and wrap it up in one person here it is.

Jesus is the conclusion to the message. Jesus is where the message, all these various points of the message where they finally make sense and where they come together. God who at sundry times and in diverse manner spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his son.

It’s no mistake that John calls Jesus the word. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.

And you go down to verse 14, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus Christ is the Word. Now we call the Bible the Word of God as well.

The apostles called the Bible, called the Scriptures the Word of God. For Jesus to be the Word of God and the Bible to be the Word of God, that’s not a contradiction there. Jesus is the point of the Bible.

Jesus is the culmination. He’s the conclusion of the whole message. He’s where everything else points.

And the writer of Hebrews says he’s spoken to us by his son. So to those Jews who were wondering, where is God? We haven’t heard from God since Malachi 500 years ago.

Where is God? Why is he not speaking to us? What does he have to say?

The writer of Hebrews reminds them, hey, God is with you and has been with you all along. And by the way, he fulfilled the message just a little bit ago. Just a while back, he spoke to us through his son.

And by the way, the book of Hebrews does spend its entire text making the case that Jesus is the Messiah and everything that means. I never get tired of reading Hebrews. Sometimes I get exhausted of reading Hebrews.

There’s a difference because there’s so much depth to it. And you can see Jesus as the high priest of the Old Testament. You can see Jesus as the sacrifice of the Old Testament.

You can see Jesus as the fulfillment of the law. There’s just always something else that I see when I come to Hebrews. I never get tired of reading it, but because of its depth, sometimes I do get a little worn out, just because my brain can only process so much at a time.

But when I say I never get tired of it, it’s because it never gets old. It never gets worn out. There’s always something to learn in here.

But he starts out by saying, by the way, Jesus, Jesus is the reason for this whole message that God’s been giving to us. And that’s the message I want us to, here’s your conclusion, halfway through the message. That’s the point I want us to take from this tonight.

That Jesus is the evidence that God is always with us. Jesus is the proof that God is always with us, that God always cares about us, that God has not forgotten us. In those moments where we feel like, well, God doesn’t care enough about me because this didn’t happen, X, Y, or Z didn’t pan out the way that I wanted it to.

You know what? God cared enough about you that he sent Jesus Christ, his only begotten son, to die in your place. Don’t ever tell me that God doesn’t care about you.

Now that may sound a little sharper and a little more harsh than I intend it to be, because I could say the same thing to myself. Don’t ever say that God doesn’t care about you. Don’t ever think that God doesn’t care about you when he sent his only son.

And not only that, God didn’t send his son for you on a whim. God had been preparing the Jews for his coming for thousands and thousands of years. This was God’s plan all along.

And I’ve often said that in the garden when Adam and Eve sinned, God didn’t wake up that morning. God doesn’t wake up in the morning, by the way. Do you understand that?

That’s just a figure of speech. But God didn’t wake up that morning and say, wow, I didn’t see that coming. God knew that was going to happen.

And Jesus coming to die for sinful men was the plan A all along. God knew we were going to fall before he ever created us. And he loved you enough that he went through the trouble to create you anyway, knowing what a handful you were going to be.

Think about that. God knew what a handful, what a pain in the neck I was going to be, and he created me anyway. He could have saved himself a lot of trouble by not dealing with me, but such is the love that he has for you.

And it says, as he’s spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds. So lest we think that Jesus Christ, who God has sent to us, who God the Father has sent to us, lest we think that he’s any less God, we have this point that the Father has appointed him to be the heir of all things. That everything that belongs to the Father belongs to the Son.

Now this is not the only place in scripture that’s taught this, otherwise we could possibly take the idea that he’s somehow less, but the Bible as a whole teaches, overall the Bible teaches that Jesus Christ is co-eternal, co-equal with God the Father. That everywhere God the Father has been, Jesus Christ has been right At every time God the Father has existed, Jesus Christ has existed too. Maybe not in his human earthly form, but he has existed.

In the time before there was time, and yes, I realize that’s a contradiction to say that, but I don’t know how else to describe what there was and when there was before time. But before that was there, even the term before is a contradiction. But when there wasn’t time, there’s no way, see, there’s no way in our language to get around it.

But before there was time, because that’s the only way I know how to say it. When God the Father was there, God the Son was also there with him. And if you read back to those earliest chapters of Genesis, and God said, let us make man in our own image.

That’s not God playing fast and loose with the rules of grammar. That’s not a mistranslation. That’s not aliens, as the experts on the History Channel will try to tell you for some inexplicable reason.

That is the Trinity. That is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit speaking within themselves. And yes, I realize I’m playing fast and loose with the rules of grammar there, but you can’t help it when you’re talking about a God who refuses to be fully defined and fully explained by our limited human speech.

That was God speaking amongst himself and discussing creating man in his image. And Jesus Christ was there right from the beginning. Colossians describes him as the image of the invisible God.

the Bible describes how all things were made by him and for him. Jesus Christ was there at creation and now and it says and by whom also he made the worlds. All things that were made were created by Jesus Christ. If God had a hand in the creation then Jesus Christ was involved and you may be wondering at the phrase if God had a hand in the creation.

Obviously God created everything. God isn’t necessarily the one that put it into its final form. Okay.

Benjamin asks these questions all the time, as I think all kids do. I think I ask these questions. Did God create that door?

Well, not necessarily. God created the tree that created the seed that led to that tree that was harvested for that wood. God created the man who cut down the tree.

God created the people with the knowledge for the sawmill and everything that’s involved there. So, yes, God was involved in everything that was created. And then he’s given us the ability to craft things from those.

But all those things that were created by God were created by Jesus Christ. And it says that he’s the heir of all things. There’s no power. There’s no authority.

There’s no wisdom. There’s no goodness. There’s no holiness.

You think of any of the attributes that God has, there’s none of it that has been held back from Jesus Christ. There is nothing that Jesus Christ is not the Lord and master of, whether we acknowledge it or not. And that’s one of the great ironies of our world, is that Jesus Christ is Lord whether people acknowledge it or not. Whether I ever acknowledge him as Lord or not, he’s still Lord.

You know, there are people out there who don’t acknowledge the authority of the IRS. I would love to be one of them. I think income tax is immoral. That’s just my opinion.

Don’t take that as the position of the church. I think income tax is immoral. Okay? I’d rather see other forms of taxation if we have to have them.

But there are some people out there who say, well, income tax is immoral, so the IRS doesn’t have authority over me. I stop at the first half of that. The IRS definitely does have some authority.

Okay? And there are some people who, for that reason, don’t pay their taxes. But you know what they usually find out?

Is that the IRS does have some authority to audit them, get their nose in every bit of their personal business, and send them to prison. Whether you acknowledge the IRS or not, it has some authority, as people find out. I’ve heard people say about Barack Obama, and I’ve heard people say about Donald Trump on both sides.

He’s not my president. He was elected in a constitutional process. He’s the president, whether you acknowledge him or not.

And your refusal to acknowledge it doesn’t change reality. I’ve been thinking that for eight years as I’ve heard it about Obama, and I’ve heard it about Trump, and probably about the last two guys, too. I don’t know.

Refusing to acknowledge reality doesn’t change reality. And there are people in our world today who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord. You know what?

That doesn’t mean that he’s not. And as I started down this thought a moment ago, one of the great ironies of our world is that everybody will at one point acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord. It’s just unfortunate that for so many it will be too late to actually matter, to actually have anything to do with their eternity.

And see, he’s Lord of everything. There is nothing that Jesus Christ is not Lord of, even the unbeliever. Because you see, God has appointed him heir of all things.

All things that belong to God, just like all things that were created by God were created by Jesus Christ, all things that belong to God belong to Jesus Christ, who being the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person. We see this in verse 3, that all the glory of God is revealed in Jesus Christ. And the express image of his person, this is where I was talking about Colossians calls him the image of the invisible God. You know why God was so against idolatry?

You know why God was so against the Israelites making idols and statues for themselves? On one hand you’ve got, because it was leading them to the worship of Baal and Asherah and all these false gods, they were worshiping other things, and God was not content with half of their devotion, just like he’s not content with half of our devotion today. But in a lot of cases, if you read carefully in the Old Testament, it looks like the conclusion I’ve come to is that it looks like a lot of times the Israelites, when they were making statues and they were making the golden calf, for example, go read that for yourself, but I believe they were using these as images for their worship of God.

but they were trying to represent God with these inanimate objects. And the reason God had such a problem with that is because God is an infinite God and cannot be adequately represented in all of His fullness, in all of His glory, in some finite image. The golden calf gives us a distorted vision of who God is.

If we were to put something else on the altar down here, Even if we directed our worship at that toward God, it would give us a distorted image of who God is. The icons in the Orthodox churches, as beautiful as they are, the Eastern Europeans have come up with some really interesting artistic methods. And I think some of their icons are just beautiful.

But they give us a distorted idea of who God is. You cannot summarize God in a picture. You cannot summarize God in a statue.

you. You cannot summarize God in a monument of any kind. Jesus Christ. God said, if you want to see what I’m like, here he is, Jesus Christ. We don’t need the carved images.

We don’t need the molded images. We don’t need the painted images. We have the spitting image of God in Jesus Christ. If you want to see what God is like, God in all his fullness dwelt in Jesus Christ. He is the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person.

The God of the universe in a package that we could see, hear and touch in Jesus Christ. So to those that feel like God is distant, God doesn’t care, God cared enough that God the Son put on human flesh and came and dwelt among us. He came and walked among us to experience all of the things good and bad that we experience throughout life and came to die for us. He wasn’t just partly God.

He was fully God and fully man at the same time. I don’t begin to understand how that works. But I accept it because God has a track record of telling the truth.

And that’s what his word says. And upholding all things by the word of his power. So even the fact that the universe is still running is because God sustains it.

Because Jesus sustains it by the word of his power. See, the watchmaker can wind up the watch and leave it alone and let it go. The really good watchmakers, I think those things can run for decades.

and they don’t lose any time. I’ve got a clock hanging in my office at the house that I love. I think we’ve got it at Hobby Lobby.

I love it. It’s a beautiful clock, but I have to wind it about once a week because it loses about an hour every day, it seems like. It may not have come from Hobby Lobby.

I don’t want to get sued by them. I don’t know where it came from, but I will say it’s not one of those clocks that you can just wind up and let go. But the really good watches and clocks that are made by these guys, You know, they can run for decades with minimal interference.

The universe, or let’s scale it down to earth, earth doesn’t seem to be able to do that. We make a mess of things down here, don’t we? And the Bible says that all things, all things are upheld by the word of his power.

He holds all of this together by his word. You see, I believe that the laws of physics and the laws of logic and all these things came from God himself. And all he would have to do was just stop willing them to be.

And the molecular bonds that hold our bodies together would stop. And we’d just spin out into nothingness. See, he’s the sustainer of everything.

The fact that my heart continues beating, it could stop at any moment if God willed it to. The fact that my heart continues to beat is a gift from God. And God continues to hold that together.

So Jesus, being the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person, holding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins. A lot of important things in there. He purged our sins.

He got rid of them. He got rid of them. And it says by himself.

He did it himself, and he did it by himself. Jesus Christ was the only one who was able to purge our sins. Thousands of years of sacrifices and rituals and obedience and legalism had not been able to purge mankind’s sin.

Only Jesus was able to do it. And he did it by himself. It doesn’t require our effort.

It doesn’t require Jesus plus me. It doesn’t require Jesus plus us. It doesn’t require Jesus plus anything.

It required Jesus to take responsibility for my sins and to take the punishment that was deserved for those sins and to shed his blood and die for them. And he accomplished in one act what could never have been accomplished through thousands of years of rituals and laws and ceremonies. He did it all by himself, and he purged those sins.

He didn’t just kind of sweep them away. You know how you sweep the floor, and there’s always that little bit of dust left over that can’t go in the dust pan? It wasn’t like that.

It wasn’t like when I go to Brahms, and I order my hamburger without cheese, and they always put it on there, and I hate American cheese, and I don’t like to complain, so I just take it home, and I try to scrape it off, I do the best I can. I scrape it and I cover it with mustard, but there’s always some cheese left in the little pockets of the meat. It wasn’t like that.

Were there some left? He purges your sin and God chooses to remember it no more. It’s gone.

It’s utterly and completely gone in God’s eyes. It is as far away from you as the east is from the west. And I could bring you the globe that I’ve got, but you all know how this works. You can go to a point as far north as you can get, and any way you go is going to be south.

You can go as far south as you can get and any way you go is going to be north. You can never go all the way around the world to the east and stop being east. And you can never go all the way back around to the world and go west and stop being west. Our sins are put infinitely away from us. They’re gone because we’re so sinless and lovable and wonderful.

No, because Jesus by himself purged them. Don’t ever think God would abandon you and be distant from you and not care about you when he cared enough about you to send his son to purge your sins from you with his own life and with his own blood. And when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the majesty on high.

And yes, the Bible does teach that he has ascended from this planet. We see that some 40 days after his resurrection, that he ascended into the heavens and his disciples were left standing there with their mouths agape, wondering what they just saw. And the angel said, why don’t you stand there and look at him?

He’ll come back just in like manner as what you’ve seen, but there’s a reminder, you’ve got work to do. Go be busy. You see those bumper stickers that say Jesus is coming, look busy.

No offense if you have that or ever have had that, but that’s stupid. Don’t look busy, be busy. Jesus is coming, be busy.

We’ve got stuff to do. Jesus ascended to heaven, he is coming back. The Bible is clear that he is coming back for us, but even more than that, If we think, well, in this time, he doesn’t care about me.

He doesn’t care about what’s going on in my life. Jesus is seated at the right hand of God the Father, the Bible says, making intercession for you. I’m not as bold as some of my preacher friends who will go into a restaurant and they’ll ask the waitress, can we pray for you?

Now, I’m not against witnessing. I’m not against praying for the waitress. But for me, any time I’ve tried that, it always comes across, in my mind, it sounds like I’m trying to make a spectacle out of it.

I don’t know how to do it the way they do where it just sounds natural. To come out of my mouth, it sounds like, hey, we’re going to pray for you. Is there anything that we can pray for you? You know, it sounds like a big show.

That’s the last thing it needs to be. But there are some of these guys who do it, and they’ve told stories about how people have just broken down, and they’ve told them things that I couldn’t bear, that they’re dealing with sick children. I mean, seriously, sick children.

And the weight of the world on their shoulders, and they tear up because nobody ever prays for them. Nobody that they know of anyway. Nobody ever offers to pray for them.

And maybe there are times that you feel that way. Nobody prays for me. There’s nobody that cares about this problem I’m going through.

The Son of God, right now, right this very minute, the Son of God is seated at the right hand of God the Father, making intercession for you. He’s there talking to His Father about you and what you need. Not necessarily what you want.

Don’t get your hopes up about that. But he’s talking to God the Father about what you need. God cares about his people.

Whether we’re talking about the Jews and all that he did, Israel, all that he did to bring them through thousands of years. Whether we’re talking about the church today, God cares about his people. Never come to a point in your life where you think, God doesn’t care about me.

These are just three verses that indicate how involved God is with his people. That after thousands of years of preparing them, speaking to them, God sent Jesus as the fulfillment of that message. That the creator and ruler of the world, of the universe, cared enough to lay down his life, shed his blood and lay down his life for you.

That he to this very day holds everything together. Even when your world feels out of control, The only reason that there is a world for you to be in and to feel that way is because God is holding that world together. And he purged your sins.

He gave his very life for your sins. And now at this moment, he’s making intercession on your behalf to his Father and ours. There’s a lot of good theology here in the book of Hebrews and in this passage.

But theology also has practical application, I believe that. Or good theology should have practical application. If we’re just learning fac