In this sermon, Scott Brown discusses the importance of having a proper view of God's immensity, holiness, and self-sufficiency for the well-being of individuals and families. He explains how losing sight of God's greatness can lead to fear, pride, and discontentment. Brown also discusses the dangers of self-righteousness and how understanding God's nature can help combat it. The doctrine of the Trinity is explained as the foundation of our communion with God and our dependence on Him. Acknowledging God's attributes and seeking His glory is emphasized as the key to happiness and contentment in life.

Thank you. Hello, my name is Scott Brown and we're here to discuss the second section of the Baptist Confession of 1689 on the doctrine of God, a subject so wonderful that I pray that God will help us to really grasp the greatness of the subject matter here. And I'm here with my fellow elders. Hello again. Hello again, Jason Do and Dan Horan, and we're all here with our families.

And our desire is to work through the confession and try to assist one another in understanding it with some level of clarity. And section two is, Of God and of the Holy Trinity. And paragraph one starts out this way. The Lord our God is but one only living and true God. So that's our contemplation.

You know one of the joys that I've had this year is to begin reading with my daughter, Claudia, Knowing God by J.I. Packer. And we were just totally thrilled together to read some of the early chapters. And Packer quotes Charles Spurgeon on God. I just want to read a couple of things from Spurgeon's statement in a sermon.

The highest science, the loftiest speculation, the mightiest philosophy which can ever engage the attention of a child of God, is the name, the nature, the person, the work, the doings, and the existence of the great God whom He calls His Father, there is something exceedingly improving to the mind in a contemplation of the divinity. It is a subject so vast that all our thoughts are lost in its immensity, so deep that our pride is drowned in its infinity. Other subjects we can compass and grapple with. In them we feel a kind of self-content and go our way with the thought, Behold, I'm wise. But when we come to this master science, finding that our plumb line cannot sound the depth and that our eagle eye cannot see its height, we turn away with the thought that that vain man would be wise and that he's like a wild ass's colt and with a solemn explanation, I am but of yesterday, I know nothing.

No subject of contemplation will tend more to humble the mind than thoughts of God. But while the subject humbles the mind, it also expands it. He who often thinks of God will have a larger mind than the man who simply plods around this narrow globe. The most excellent study for expanding the soul is the science of Christ and Him crucified and the knowledge of the Godhead in the glorious Trinity. 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.

And while humbling and expanding, this subject is eminently consolatory. O, there is in contemplating Christ a balm for every wound, amusing on the Father. In musing on the Father, there is a quietus for every grief, and in the influence of the Holy Ghost, there is a balsam for every sore. Would you lose your sorrow? Would you drown your cares?

Then go, plunge yourself in the Godhead's deepest sea. Be lost in His immensity, And you shall come forth as from a couch of rest, refreshed and invigorated. I know nothing which can so comfort the soul, so calm the swelling billows of sorrow and grief, so speak to the winds of trial as a devout musing upon the subject of the Godhead. It is to that subject that I invite you this morning." So that's Spurgeon speaking of the doctrine of God. So I pray that all these things will somehow be fulfilled in us and in our families as we become a people who know their God.

So let's begin here. I've read the first sentence here that God is the only living and true God whose substance is in of Himself infinite in being and perfection, whose essence cannot be comprehended by anybody himself. And I love this part. And again, I would just recommend that families consider memorizing this part. That He is a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts or passions, who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light in which no man can approach unto, who is immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, every way infinite, most holy, most wise, most free, most absolute, working all things according to the counsel of His own immutable and most righteous will, for His own glory, most loving, gracious, merciful, longsuffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin, the rewarder of those that diligently seek Him, and withal, most just and terrible in His judgments, hating all sin, who will by no means clear the guilty.

The vastness, the depth of God is as it says here, immense, immeasurable. So how do we begin to think about applying what I've just read in family life? What does this mean for your family? So theology is simply the study of God. And so, theology has largely gone out of favor.

People don't study God, and as churches have begun to major in self-help, instead of knowing the God of the Bible. The implication of that is that man starts to be much bigger than he ought to be and God starts to be much much much smaller than he ought to be. And the implication of that is we end up not worshiping the God of the Bible at all, but the God that's some sort of our some sort of our invention and we end up actually with idolatry in the middle of our churches. Right. And One of the phrases that really strikes me at the beginning of this is, whose subsistence is in and of himself.

I mean, when we consider ourselves, we think of that, and if we forget this, what we start to think is that we're an independent people. And most children look at adults and they consider adults to be independent. But no adult is independent. The only thing that's independent in this whole world, in this whole creation, is God. His subsistence is in and of himself.

And so that means when we want to, If we want our children to understand how to interact with God, they have to see that we're a people that Recognize our need for God and our dependency on God and that God is so separate and so different He doesn't need us to worship him. He lets us worship him He calls us to worship him, but he has no need of us at all. His subsistence is in and of himself. He is glorious without us glorifying him. He is worthy of worship without us worshipping him.

All these things. He is God, and we are the people that are dependent upon him. And when we start to forget who God is, everybody starts to think that they're independent and everybody starts to think they can do whatever they want. We have to understand this is the, you know, the theory of evolution too, right? The theory of evolution is it's all based on chaos.

It's just random. It's not dependent on what went before. The theory of God is we're all dependent upon God and all things flow from God and all things are for his glory and all things are for his majesty and all things are for God. And so when we even just this simple concept that his subsistence is in and of himself is just so different than us that it should cause us to recognize our dependence upon him. Right.

You know, I've often thought, you know, what would happen to my family, what would happen to me, if God was not almighty or immense or eternal or infinite in His power? What are the implications of that? So I'd like to just talk that through a little bit here. When God is that to you, what effect does that have on you? So I think one of the often recurring themes from Genesis Revelation is the fear of the Lord.

And we're to have it. It produces all manner of good things in us and in our families and in our churches and in our society. And you begin to lack it when you lose this compelling vision that's spelled out in the confession, but the confession just draws it from the Bible. And so there's this compelling vision of God, but also a terrifying vision of God. I mean, this God has claws and He's not tame.

And when you lose that, you lose the fear of the Lord. And when we look around in our churches, we should say, why don't we have the fear of the Lord? It's because we don't know the God of the Bible. And if you don't fear God, you'll fear everything. And so what you do is you run with, we're a society that thinks, hey, if you just wear your seat belt, you can't die.

If you just do this, if you just have the right insurance, nothing can happen to your family. All these things, and we start to fear everything around us, which is vain superstition, right? I mean, it's the vain superstition that the reformers talked about. We're not supposed to fear all these things around us. This is what pagans do when they walk out in the woods.

They have no idea what will happen because they don't think there's a God of order. We believe in the God who is, so we don't have to fear all the things around us. There's only one thing we should ever fear and that is God. Right. So we're not against seatbelts and insurance, but what we are against is unfounded fear.

And fear of this and that, when in fact you have this immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty God who is on the throne. The practical matters of family life really revolve around this principle. Who is God? Who is your God? And the emotional life, the thought life revolves around this issue.

And If you have a big God, then you have little problems. You have big problems, you have a little God. That's just a reality of life. What are some of the expressions of losing a sense of God and His immensity, the way that's described here in this first paragraph of the Confession. You begin to claim credit for things that are going right in your life.

And you begin to, for the things that aren't going right, begin to think that the universe is spinning out of control as if God doesn't hold all these things in His hand. So I'm a hotshot because I'm so smart, I'm so gifted, I'm so insightful, and my pride rises. And I think actually wrongly about myself because I've thought wrongly about God. Because He's been redefined, I become self-defined, kind of. And I become a prideful person because I don't understand how immense and Almighty an independent God is.

Men of God in the Bible who are more righteous, more pious, and devoted to God than we will ever be in our lives, when they came into the presence of God, they were undone, and they fell down, and they were aware of their sinfulness. And that's what's lost when we lose the vision of God. So fear, you talked about that first. You kind of fear everything. You become prideful.

You lose contentment. And you lose contentment. Right, this is the one thing that Paul talks about, right? Contentment is what you get from having the right view of God. You say God has me in exactly the circumstances He wants me in.

You say I can be satisfied, I can count it all joy when I fall into diverse trials, when things are going well and you're abundant you can be content, when you have little you can be content, and when you have the right view of God it means that you can have the peace that surpasses understanding. Otherwise the prideful person is always saying, Why am I getting more recognition for what I do? Even when things are going well, he won't have contentment. When things are going badly, he'll even have less contentment. But he won't have contentment.

It requires a proper view of God to have contentment in your life. So Here's something that I want us to understand as a family. And that is our vision of the majesty of God, it's the most important asset that we have. There is nothing more valuable than that. You can take everything away, but if you don't have a vision of the majesty of God, you have no strength, you're full of fear, you're full of pride, you think really wrongly about yourself.

So it is absolutely the greatest treasure that we can have, and that is a vision of the majesty of God. That's what we need as a family more than anything else you know, well one of the things is communicated by the Confession here through phrases like he is great beyond all our conceptions. He's incomprehensible is that is that the newest convert and the most sanctified seasoned believer share this in common that they have an inadequate view of God, that they can't capture Him in their days no matter how long they've been walking with the Lord because he's beyond them. Yeah. And God has never said he's even revealed all of himself to us, right?

I mean he is infinite and the word, the revelation of the word is it's sufficient for every good work for us. It's not sufficient for us to understand the immensity of God. It's not sufficient for us to understand all of who God is. God is so vast that he wouldn't even consider doing that because we're not big enough to hold it. And so God has put us in that position where He tells us what to do and we recognize that we're dependent upon Him.

And through this, the thought of arriving is blown up. And the best we can hope for is to make progress and that our progress would be evident. But there is no arriving at the destination because God is beyond that. Yeah, and one of the ways that He is so clearly beyond that is in His holiness, right? When we read God's ways and realize how far different they are from our ways, we recognize that sanctification always has plenty of room up front, plenty of room to go through because we're not holy like God.

And this is what, we all fall short of the glory of God. We're supposed to be as holy as God. That's our responsibility, this is his creature, but yet in the end we can never reach it, so it always says that there's something to strive for. And so we need to have a proper view of the holiness of God. We can look around and not even recognize how sin has tainted everything that we see, but it hasn't tainted God.

God is truly holy. There is no sin in him. There is nothing that's imperfect in him. And so he's also very separate from us. And like you're saying, there's that target that's way down there that you know you'll never reach.

And the closer you get to it, the more you realize how far away you are from it. I love the language here. Most holy, most wise, most free, most absolute, working all things according to the counsel of His own will. We're using a companion guide with this, Kietch's Catechism, and the first question of the Catechism is, who is the first and chiefest being? And the answer, of course, is God is the first and chiefest being, and that's really what's being taught here.

He's preeminent in every category and he precedes it all in time as well. And the catechism, you know, the authors go, He's first in this, he's first in that, he's first in this, he's first in that, and it's kind of like this as well. And even in his freedom we have to understand the immensity of God, that he is so free that he decides what righteousness is. But in the end when we're free in Christ, we're free now that we can actually do the righteousness of God. But God is so free that He decides what righteousness is.

He is the ultimate. He truly has freedom. In the end, we're always slaves, and he's never a slave. He's always perfectly free. Right.

You know, he's immutable here. In other words, he's not given to change. In Malachi 3.6, I do not change. I do not change. What a comfort that is.

God says something, He doesn't change it. Now we understand the difference between the Old and the New Covenant. God did not change, but he just continued to progressively reveal himself to man. And it's really important for us to learn how to think logically too, right? If he changed, that meant he was either not perfect before or he's not perfect now.

A perfect being cannot change or they will no longer be a perfect being. So God is perfect and so therefore He can't change. I mean, we know it from scripture but we also know that because that He says that He's immutable, it's also a testimony to His perfection. To his perfection. It says no one can hide from him.

You know, in Jeremiah 23, He's immense. His eyes see everything. He's almighty. He's holy. All these passages of Scripture just bear witness to all these various terms that are used in the confession that just speak of his absolute authority over absolutely everything.

So that's the first deposit here. And then The tone kind of changes in paragraph 2. Paragraph 2, God, having all life, glory, goodness, blessedness in and of Himself, is alone in and unto Himself all sufficient, not standing in need of any creature which He hath made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting His own glory in, by, unto, and upon them. He is the fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to Him, to whom are all things. So here In the second paragraph, there's more detail given about His nature, life, glory, goodness, blessedness.

In other words, the authors begin to cast a vision, really, of the goodness of God, the beauty of God. So how does that inform us as people and as families? I think what really strikes me is just the centrality of God, right? Of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things. And this is what we need to get right.

This is what we need if we want our families to be happy, if we want to see them be blessed in the next generation, if we want to see the blessings of God on our children and on our grandchildren, what we have to do is we need to be reorganizing our lives so our lives are not about our glory, that our lives are centered on the glory of God because all things are for Him, and they're by Him, and they're through him. All things in the end do all things for the glory of God and this is what we need to be focusing on. This is, I mean even our own happiness, this is how you're happy. You're not happy by chasing happiness. With Christianity, If you want to gain your life, you lose it.

You're not happy by seeking happiness. You're happy by seeking the glory of God. And if you seek the glory of God, you'll be filled with joy. One of the biggest problems in every family is self-righteousness. And these two paragraphs are self-righteousness killers.

They really are. We didn't really talk about this at the end of the first paragraph. Almost all the first paragraph is about God, but then man is introduced unceremoniously at the end of the first paragraph when it says that God hates sin and he won't overlook guilt and he's perfectly righteous in his judgments. Uh oh. Not a good look.

What was so beautiful has turned sour for mankind because we can't stand in his presence and he hates sin. And then in two, it talks about just what Dan said, that God is all sufficient, he's self-sufficient, and as the psalmist says, if he was hungry, he would not tell us, because he doesn't need food for us. And so any thought that we might have merit before him is completely exploded. What a refreshing thing that is for a family to have one of the things that plague us the most really addressed head on by the scriptures so that we wouldn't have any thought that we were righteous before God. We just need to, I mean, the whole thought, because it always comes back to us that, you know, when we talk about the Lord's Prayer, give us this day our daily bread, The whole thought always comes back to us is the way that I feed my family is I went out and earned money.

Everybody in your family is going to think this way. Everybody in your family is going to think that they did it by the strength of their own right arm. We just need to teach them and talk to them and remember in our own lives and in the own way that we behave is, no, God gave it to us to manifest His glory. When we go and do that work and we get that paycheck, we got that paycheck because God wanted to manifest His glory. And all these things are from the hand of God and it's so easy for us to start to cut those things out and say that it's from our own hands.

It's never from our own hands. It's always from God's hand. The authors say, in His sight all things are open and manifest. His knowledge is infinite, infallible, and independent upon the creature, so as nothing is to him contingent or uncertain. And then there's this line.

He is most holy in all His counsels, and in all His works, and in all His commands. And to Him is due from angels and men, whatsoever worship, service, and obedience, as creatures they owe unto the Creator and whatever He is further pleased to require of them. I want to just camp on this idea that God's counsels are perfect. They're not uncertain nor are they contingent, but they are infinite and infallible. What I'd like us to just consider as families here tonight is the whole principle of his counsels, especially when the counsel of God seems to run contrary to your own sense of justice, or your own sense of love, you might read the Bible and say, that doesn't sound very loving to me, how could God do this?

How could He say that? Whenever that happens to us, when we're reading the Scriptures, where we think God is unfair, what we have to understand is that it's not that God is unfair, it's that we are so corrupt that we don't understand fairness when we look at it. We don't understand love when we see it. We are so fallen. And so, at the same time, though, God shows us His glory, His holiness, His goodness.

And it's for us to conform to Him. It's not for Him to conform to our feelings about what's justice or righteousness or love. Scott, I think Dan said this in the audio introduction last week, but many things in a confession are always born out of controversies at the time. And so men of God get really precise about defining what the Bible really teaches so that they can defend sound doctrine. And these challenges to sound doctrine come around every hundred years or so, and you can see them kind of looping through history.

One of the things I noticed in here is how this contradicts open theism, which is making the rounds today, that God is somehow taking risks, that he doesn't know the end from the beginning, and of course the Bible has nothing to do with this doctrine. If you come up with that idea, you haven't come up with it from the Bible and it's nice to see it so clearly stated here and it's sobering to think that it's an old heresy that it's making the rounds again in our day. Infinite, infallible, independent upon the creature. That's kind of not that much like open theism. And again, this is an area where there will always be attacks.

People always want to make God smaller. And the one thing that Christians can do is, regardless of how big you paint God you're always really tiny compared to the true God and we need to be about the business of never belittling God and so we need to be ascribing greatness to our God and we'll never be too high it's impossible Because God is greater than that. Paragraph 3. In this divine and infinite being, there are three subsistencees, the Father, the Word, or the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Of one substance, power, and eternity, each having the whole divine essence, yet the essence undivided, the Father is of none, neither begotten, not preceding, the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son, all infinite, without beginning, therefore but one God, who is not to be divided in nature and being, but distinguished by several particular relative properties and personal relations, which doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of all our communion with God and comfortable dependence on Him.

So this is an explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity. So let's talk about what happens when religious people get this wrong? Well, you know, most of the, most of the cults get this wrong. So the deviations on the point of the Trinity take you way, way far away. The cults that are most active in the United States of America, their problems start with the doctrine of who Jesus Christ was, and they have a flawed view of the Trinity that has taken them way off the past.

Not one degree, but many, many degrees. Like in Mormonism, man becomes God. There's no distinction. I'll never forget a conversation I had with a Mormon friend where we talked for a long time about different points of doctrine. And at the end of it, he finally said, Scott, really, the only difference between us substantially is our view of God.

That's it? He thought that was kind of a small deal. I said, exactly, that's right. You don't believe in the God of the Bible. You don't believe in the God that's explained by this terminology here.

You believe in a God. You believe in a man that can become God. And there's kind of this, you know, the Tower of Babel just keeps getting replayed over and over and over again through history. And the Tower of Babel is man thought he could be God. And man wants to be God.

And you look at Roman Catholicism, the reason they pray to saints, they basically are treating those saints as God. They're saying that those saints are able to control things. The reason they pray to Mary, well, Jesus has to obey her. Well, who's actually God in that case, Jesus Christ or Mary? And so almost all the cults come back to the idea of the Tower of Babel, which is man should be God.

Boy, we make terrible gods. We're really horrible at it. I mean, that's the last thing that anybody should ever desire. Boy, I do not want to be God. It would be a bad thing for me, along with everybody else.

And these are the kind of concepts, so yeah, you see the wrong view of God ends up, but in our hearts, in our unregenerate hearts, our desire is to be God. You see it in a baby that's one day old when he's screaming and he's red in his face because his mother won't feed him at the moment that he wants to feed. He's saying I should be in control of the world. So this just manifests itself in different ways. But yeah, in the end we want to be God and so if you change who Jesus Christ is, so he was a man who became God, all of a sudden you know Arianism sounded really good because maybe I can become a god.

So you know, the doctrine of the Trinity, the authors say that this is the foundation of all of our communion with God and comfortable dependence on Him, the doctrine of the Trinity. So, you know, the importance of the doctrine of the Trinity can't be under-emphasized in our family life. I think, you know, one of the reasons that marriages aren't according to the divine pattern is because people don't understand the doctrine of God. A husband and a wife don't understand the doctrine of the Trinity. They can't have a marriage because they don't understand submission and they don't understand love.

They don't understand that the Father loves the Son and the Son submits to the Father and that there's order and authority in the context of love and equality. And that can exist in marriage really only when a husband and wife understand the doctrine of the Trinity. So if you want to raise a daughter to be a good wife, she needs to understand the doctrine of the Trinity. You want to raise a son, then he has to be well founded in the doctrine of God. I mean, when there's a young man who wants to talk to me about marrying my daughter, I want to know his view of God first and foremost.

I want to know how well he understands the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. That's really my first order of conversation with him. And it's probably worth teasing that out a little bit more, because this is what the emerging church is trying to reject, right? They're trying to basically say that the wife and the husband, that because they're equal, they must be equal in role. Right.

This is fundamentally an attack on the doctrine of the Trinity. God the Father, God the Son, they're equal in substance. They have different roles and in that different role God the Father directs God the Son, but that doesn't make him less. Now the emergent church says well if a wife obeys her husband then clearly she's less. Well that's a big problem because that's rejecting the ideas of what the nature of God and all of a sudden Jesus Christ is less God than God the Father.

And so if you get the idea that eternally, from eternal past, that God the Son would submit to God the Father, all of a sudden you're also saying that a husband and wife can be completely equal, but yet the husband is the head over the wife. Sure. You know, one of my favorite books on this whole subject is written by Bruce Ware, The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit. And in this book, Dr. Ware is so helpful and practical.

He lays down the doctrine with real precision and clarity. And then he works really hard in the book to apply it to every area of life. I really recommend this book, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit by Bruce Ware. And in the book, he makes it very clear how the members of the Trinity operate together, how the Spirit has a deep willingness to sort of even be unnoticed without recognition, how the Father has authority but love for the Son, and how the son places himself You know under the authority of the father the son says I don't say anything except what I hear my father saying I don't do anything Except what I see my father doing And that relationship of love is what forms the basis of the Trinity. And really, it forms the basis of godly church life.

If you understand the Trinity, I don't know how you can have a friendship without understanding roles and various responsibilities. And fundamentally when you start to think about why they would say that this is so important to happiness and to joy and all these things is, fundamentally, this is the only way to understand the world. All religions except Christianity run to one direction or the other. They run to Allah. There is one God and nobody else is God.

Or they run to Mormonism, where everybody is God. You either have one God or you have many. And it's the problem that everywhere that we see, we see this issue where we understand that the three of us are men, but yet we're completely different. And how do you deal with the problem of the one and the many? And unless you understand the Trinity, you can't understand the world.

In Romans 1 where it says the Godhead is on display, right? I mean, it's seen everywhere and it's seen everywhere just in the fact that there is unity and diversity in all things that we see. And this is a testimony of who God is and you can't understand anything in the world, nothing at all in the world unless you understand the Trinity. You know, one of the great sources of envy and dissatisfaction in children and all of us is misunderstanding that, misunderstanding the various roles and responsibilities that God has given. It makes a son not able to obey and honor his father and mother and destroys really his effectiveness in the world.

It doesn't go well with him. If he somehow can't be like the son, or if a daughter can't be like the son in submission, then it just won't go well with him. The consequences of not understanding this doctrine are really enormous. Let's talk about this in terms of marriage again. I mean, there's probably no relationship more viciously attacked in the world than marriage.

And it's attacked on almost every single front. It would be well enough if it was only our hearts that waged war against our marriages. But there's so many other things that wage war against our marriages. We have to understand that. So what does the doctrine of the Trinity have to do with our marriages?

It gives a picture of submission. It gives a picture of, I mean, even the idea that the Holy Spirit is directed by Christ to indwell his church. I mean, this is this is a picture of the Holy Spirit is intimately involved with the bride. And yet and so, you know, when you look at the the Philoque where where you have the split of Eastern Orthodox in The Roman Catholic Church this was the big issue and in the end it comes down to marriage Did the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father did he proceed from the Father and the Son well? I need to proceed from the father and the son if you have the right view of marriage.

And all these things tie back that it's can the groom direct the bride? Does he have that authority or not? And it's the right understanding of the Trinity that gives you this understanding. And in the end, this is how all our order in society flows. And boy, if you don't teach how authority works in your home, your children are going to be in rejection of authority all their lives, and it won't go well with them.

It comes back to understanding authority, and you really need to understand the Trinity to understand authority properly. It explains to husbands and wives both what the real nature of submission is. The submission that is to be had in the Trinity is not a heavy-handed subjugation at all. So it helps a husband understand how he ought to relate to his wife and it helps a wife understand what it means to be submitted to a husband. Yeah and even the son, right, he comes to glorify the Father and the Father comes to glorify the Son, and the Father and the Son come to glorify the Spirit.

And they're doing this, even when they're submitting, they're doing it to be a blessing to the other one. And the person leading is doing it to be a blessing to the other one. And you see the picture of mutual blessing in those relationships, that you need to understand who God is to understand how this isn't I get my way and you're just my servant. This is I come to serve so that I'm a blessing to you and I'm also blessed through being a blessing to you. So we've been talking a little bit about couch potato patriarchs, right?

The heavy-handed communist bosses who do nothing, they just point fingers and tell everybody what else to do. They're the authoritarians, but they're couch potatoes. So that kind of defies the whole doctrine of the Trinity, right? And it gives this picture in the home that their children, when they walk out of the home, the most children when they walk out of their home, the biggest picture, the clearest picture they have of God is their father. This is who God, this is the, I mean, frightening role that we've been given to play in the home as a father, is that they'll see us playing the role of God the Father, right?

That's why we're called fathers. This is the picture. We're the type, he's the anti-type, but we're the type and we're stuck with it. And if you're the patriarch, yeah, if you're the patriarch couch potato, that's the term I'm looking for, right? If you're that, then you're gonna teach your children a view of God that it's going to cause misery through their lives because this is not what God is like.

This is not who God is at all, but yet that's the picture they'll walk out of the home with. So you making sure your life models what it looks like to be like God the Father I mean it's so crucial and a son to say I should be submitting to my father so that I'm like Jesus Christ That's so crucial to happiness and joy in the home and to for the gospel to spread Because this is the good news it is possible to submit it is good to submit to a righteous authority because that authority was appointed by God. You know, the Lord Jesus says, I am working as my Heavenly Father is working. You know, What are the implications of that in terms of the doctrine of the Trinity and how we apply it in our own lives? Ask the question again.

So the father and the son are both working. They're working together. They're working collaboratively. However though, the son is looking to the father for his leadership, but the father is also working as well. In other words, there's a division of labor, but there's labor on both sides of it.

I mean, I don't know if you've ever seen families where the children are kind of just the servants. They're the only ones that really do the work around here. And I think even more typical in our society today is the parents are the servants and the children are sitting there doing nothing. And yeah, that comes back to a proper understanding of the Trinity, that every person has been given a role in this world. There's multiple parts of the body when you think of the church and we see this when you get the wrong view of the Trinity.

You see this not just in the family but in the church and in society that you have those who are supposed to be provided for. And sometimes it happens that it's the rich in the past. Today it's the poor. They shouldn't have to do any work. Work fair, that would be horrible.

Instead of saying, no, everybody has a role. Everybody's supposed to be working. And in the Trinity you see that the three of them are one. And the three of them are each doing their role to accomplish what they intend to accomplish. Sure.

There's a question up here sort of on this matter, and maybe your answer has something to do with this. What is meant by several particular relative properties and personal relations. Are there examples of this? Several particular relative properties and personal relations? I think even what I said before where the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

I mean that's a different relation. The Son only does what only says what the Father has given him to say. He only does what the Father has given him to do. This would be the relation. There's also the the peculiar relative properties would be only one of them took on flesh That's the Lord Jesus Christ.

That's a peculiar property a unique a distinct property, which is what they what they mean by that So so yeah, each one God the Spirit is no one has seen the Father at any time. Right. Right, I mean there are distinct properties that each one has. The Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ doesn't indwell us, the Spirit of Christ indwells us, the Holy Spirit. So there's an indwelling nature that the Holy Spirit has.

It's different than Christ. So each one of them, in their role, they have peculiar properties. They have distinctiveness in their roles and in what they do and even the form that they take. But at the same time, they're all one. Right.

And this is where you get the whole idea of division of labor of various kinds in families, in marriage, and in all kinds of work environments. That's sort of the way God has wired the world. And even the Son being begotten of the Father. That's a particular relationship between God the Father and God the Son that affects all kinds of things. It affects the idea, like we've been talking before, that submission is a righteous thing.

Well, before time began, eternally, the son was begotten of the father. He was always the father's son. And that's a relation that's particular between the two of them. We were talking about errors where the father does all the work and the son does nothing. Or the children are expected to do all the work and the father does nothing.

I think a more common error than either one of those is just sort of a listless situation where they don't do anything that's connected at all. The father does his own thing, the son does his own thing. But in the Trinity, there is a pulling in the same direction. There's a common unified goal and a co-laboring with different roles but a clear mission. And hey, that is something that we can definitely draw from in our families is to not create a life that is listless and disconnected, where we're all doing our own thing, going in different directions, but that God has given us a mission and we're pulling together in a unified direction.

We would say that it's a father's responsibility to make sure that the family is laboring in a unified way, for a godly unified vision, rather than running in 50 different directions. And we need to understand that this is contrary to our society. Over the last 15 years, we've become a postmodern society. A postmodern society goes back to an error in the Trinity. They do not believe that the three are one.

They believe each one, right? Even the reality in postmodernism, the reality you experience is a reality to you. So yes, for you it's good to believe in Christ, but for me it's good to believe in Allah. I mean, they say these things, and it comes back to a twisted view of the nature of the Trinity. And so we have to understand that this is where our society is pulling us.

This is what will happen unless we're fighting against it, is that each person is supposed to have their own vision for their future, their own things of what brings them joy, their own things of what they should be doing instead of coming together. Even in the basic thing of marriage, one of the things that you see is more and more times that you have the husband and wife have separate checking accounts. That's post-modernism brought into the home. Instead of the two becoming one, everybody's their own separate entity, everybody's their own separate God. Right, I mean you see this you know trending in the fact that it's you almost never see sons take on the skill set and the career of the father.

Mainly because the son wasn't with the father training and giving an affection for that thing. I don't want to argue against various gifts, and fathers and sons don't have to do the exact same thing. But it is so incredibly rare today. I think that's the astonishing thing to me. And I think it does go back to the doctrine of the Trinity.

We don't see the family as a unified institution, economic unit, spiritual force in the world. We see everybody's individuals who are actually kind of doing their own thing, thank you. And even when we think of names right this is so contrary why is it why are so many people named Smith that's because their father was a Smith their grandfather was a Smith their great-grandfather was a Smith I mean they were Smith's and they worked at a forge right it was a job and God in his providence and God in his wisdom, I mean genetics do matter and this is one of the ways that, I mean one of the reasons that you should train your son in your own profession, not that they won't do something different, but Typically it's 10 degrees off, not 180 degrees off. And you train them in what you've been given to do because your gifting is frequently very associated. We see this with families, you see this in the Old Testament when the Levites are assigned different roles.

There's the singers, well, hopefully all the singers didn't have voices like mine, right? There's the singers you would expect genetically for them to be good singers. And this is how God worked it out. And this is God's plan. And when we reject it and say we each go our own way, we have to understand God gives us our sons because He gave them to us because we're the proper people to prepare them.

In the work of the NCFIC, one of our great concerns in churches is that godly marriages are formed in this rising generation. There's this very exciting new generation coming online now. But what we're concerned about is that that generation really understands God and what the implications are in marriage. So we're holding a major conference this year called Gospel-Centered Marriages for a Glorious Church. A lot of times you have an unloving, weak church because you have unloving, weak husbands and wives.

Why are they weak? Because they do not understand God. They are not fixed upon the Trinitarian relationship. So our big vision for this conference is to raise up a new generation of youth who understand marriage. And we want to bring them together on October 27, 28, and 29 in Asheville, North Carolina.

There are already like 420 or something people already signed up for this conference. So I'm really excited about it. But gospel-centered marriages for a glorious church. It's a really, really critical issue for the church today that we establish God-centered, gospel-centered marriages. When we think about even the idea of work, Paul uses the term yoking together.

The term yoking together, I mean, this is a term about work. You put a yoke on an animal so that they do more work. If we can get that right vision that God has been working from time past, God has always been working, that work is good, then we can do those things that God would have us to do. We can seek first the kingdom of heaven. This is what we can be about and we can have much more happy lives even and we can find more joy and more satisfaction because we'll see a fruit of our labor.

If all we're doing is watching television and not seeking after these things, when you're 80 and you're looking back at your life, it will be filled with sorrow. And if we get the idea of who God is and God is working, that we should be about the work of God, we can have great joy and we can look back at fruit instead of fruitlessness. Right. You know, in our church we're getting ready to go through the Gospel of Matthew. And one of the things that we'll see in Matthew is the way that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are working.

This is going to be really exciting. I'm expecting our daughters and our sons to acquire something from this study that will help them in their own marriages. I mean, our prayer is that their marriages will be better and stronger and more glorious than ours were because they understood God better. And if our children understand God, then they can understand how to love. It's really that simple.

And so this whole section in the Confession of God and of the Holy Trinity is so incredibly applicable and practical for us. I don't know if you have any final thoughts about this. We're just coming close to the end of our time here. So one parting shot. We shouldn't talk about God and the doctrine of the Trinity without just taking one minute to contemplate that God became incarnate.

He walked the earth. He gave us a perfect pattern. And we're so looking forward to Matthew for that very reason as we get to look at this perfect pattern and understand better how we ought to talk and think and operate in the world. Just to give praise to God for Jesus Christ, who is our high priest and has come to show us what it's like to live in a way that's righteous. In my parting shot is we need to learn to be a dependent people.

God's the only independent thing. And yes, this goes to Christ for salvation, but boy, we'll be comfortable when we recognize our dependency on God. I just like how it ends. Comfortable dependence on Him. This is what we need to learn about God.

We're dependent on Him. One way or the other, we're going to be dependent on Him. The question is, can you be comfortable in dependence or not? Boy, it's a joyful place to be comfortable in the dependence of God. Amen.

Hey, also, I want to backtrack a little bit. Way back about half an hour ago, somebody asked a really powerful question that I didn't want to take it at that moment because it was a vast question. And what I want to suggest is that, I want to read the question, and we're going to schedule an audio call-in, and the three of us will handle this question because it's a very helpful and important question that would have required so much detail when we really wanted to focus on the doctrine of God. So I'll read the question to you here. God inspired the originals and preserved His Word.

How else could He expect us to live by His commandments unless we have them in our Bible? So which translation should we use? After all, when two versions say something different, they can't both be right. Did I understand you to say that we should not just use one translation of the Bible? Example, not just the King James?

Would you comment on the rejection of quote, new revelation, unquote, and the quote, traditions of men, unquote, as sources of truth? Obviously, there are many who consider these to trump Scripture. This is a very well stated thank you for bringing that question. But we're going to handle that question at, I hope sometime next week. We'll send an email out to everyone and there will be a way to hear us in an audio format answering that question.

Thank you, brother, for asking that question. A very helpful and relevant question considering the times that we live in. So, back to the doctrine of God. My parting shot is really just to repeat something that I'd said earlier, and that is this. The most important asset that your family possesses is a vision of the majesty of God.

Thank you for listening. We pray that God blesses you and blesses us with such a mighty vision of God that we might hope in Him and in Him alone. We'll see you next time.