Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – 1 Timothy 6:13-21

1 Timothy 6 beginning at verse 13. I give thee charge in the sight of God who quickeneth all things and before Christ Jesus who before Pontius Pilate witnessed a good confession that thou keep this commandment without spot unbreakable until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ which in his times he shall show who is the blessed and only potentate, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light, which no man can approach unto, whom no man hath seen nor can see, to whom be honor and power everlasting.

Amen. Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not high-minded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy, that they do good, that they be rich in good works, ready to distribute, willing to communicate, laying up in store for themselves a good foundation against the time to come, that they may lay hold on eternal life. Oh, Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so-called, which some professing have erred concerning the faith.

Grace be with thee. Amen.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you, Lord God, that you have chosen to condescend and reveal yourself to us in this word. And we pray now that your spirit might take this book, which is unlike every other book, written by you, inspired by you, spiritually discerned. Lord God, we pray that the spirit would do his work that is absolutely necessary if we’re to comprehend at all what we have just read.

May your spirit bless our time together then, and may he open our ears and our hearts to receive this word deep into our souls to trust in it and to commit the rest of our lives to operate in the truths that are found therein. In Christ’s name we pray and for the sake of his kingdom, not ours. Amen.

This isn’t some kind of magical incantation. Not that the word is God’s chosen vehicle to communicate himself to us in part to quicken us to enliven us. That of course is made possible by the historic work of our savior 2,000 years ago.

I preached last week at Christ the Sovereign Covenant Church’s family camp on the presence of Christ in the sacraments and I intend to do that here in a few weeks in the providence of God. This will be our next to last sermon in the book of First Timothy. Next week I’ll be gone again down at Grant’s Pass, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, preaching there and Chris W. will continue with this series on Ruth.

And then the following week we’ll conclude at these last few verses 17 and following. But in any event what I say about the word now is the same that can be said about the sacraments. There’s no magic. There’s no incantation when we read the words of institution. Sometimes we’d rather have that. We’d rather have something that we could see physically with our eyes that is somehow more glorious to us than the written pages of the word or the simple bread and wine that’s placed before us at communion.

And the passage I want to deal particularly with today, verses 15 and 16, puts a tremendous corrective to this temptation we always have to try to reduce God or make him visible in terms of what we want to see, make him comprehendable to us in our flesh. The passage of scripture in verses 15 and 16 that Paul launches into in this consideration of the final coming of our Lord Jesus Christ is a tremendous song of praise as it were to our God and Savior.

Paul having given Timothy this charge in verses 13 and 14 speaks of this charge being kept unbreakable in verse 14 until the appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ. And he then on consideration of the appearance, the epiphany of the Lord Jesus Christ, launches into verses 15 and 16 which in his times—in his times not in our times, not in times determined by us, in his time times he shall show, reveal who is the blessed and only potentate, the king of kings and lord of lords, who only hath immortality dwelling in the light, which no man can approach unto, whom no man hath seen nor can see, to whom be honor and power everlasting.

Amen.

I have to tell you that I want to begin today where I concluded my sermon at Seattle or up in Woodby Island actually last day. My eighth point was that the mystery of the sacrament is one that Calvin wrote that his mind can neither think well enough about nor can his tongue express what is provided to us in the sacrament of communion. It’s a mystery. We know in part and I need to tell you that at the beginning of this consideration of these two verses I feel totally inadequate to do justice to these verses.

May the Holy Spirit himself take these verses and drive them deep into our being. These verses have to do with the essence of the God we worship today who’s called us forward to worship him and give him praise and these are the things for which we are to give him praise and honor and glory. These things are tremendous truths. They are in a context, however. They’re in the context, the Apostle Paul telling Timothy that there were things he has to do.

He’s got to put off certain things and he’s got to put on certain things. The whole book of First Timothy is about behavior in the house of God. And he’s telling Timothy to specifically refute these false teachers, to deal with them. In the context of that, he says how the church should be ordered, how its worship should flow out, what its officers should do and be like, what are the qualifications for officers to be gatekeepers in the house of the Lord.

He moves that into consideration as we move to the concluding chapters again of these men whose motivation, standard, and environment are all wrong. Remember I spoke about that. I’d really like you to get that into your way of looking at things. A triune perspective on life based upon the Trinity, the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. And this text speaks to that because this text drives us right at what is to be our motivation to ascribe to say with the Apostle Paul, to whom be honor and power everlasting. Amen.

It’s not a prayer. Paul’s not saying, I hope this happens. I hope that God has honor, reverence, and power, strength, and manifesting his power in the context of the world. It is an ascription. It is a doxology. It is a song of praise that this is who he is. And this is the God with whom we have to do. And this is to be our motivation. That everything we do and say might be efficacious to ascribing to God. The God who is the only potentate, the blessed and only potentate, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, who have immortality, dwells in light.

No man can approach unto him. No man can see nor ever will see in its fullest sense in terms of his being. To him be honor and power everlasting. Amen. So Paul again drives us here to a proper motivation. If we don’t have that, if our motivation is the love of the things that reflect God, our motivation is gold in the context, the specific application to Timothy was there were false teachers in the church.

And some men will want to be pastors because they like that shiny metal gold stuff. That’s the motivation, a love of that. You know, the gold in a dark room, you turn on all the lights and the gold doesn’t shine. It just sits there dull because the gold is a reflection of the light of the sun. In essence, it’s made to reflect that light in a particular way. And that’s a reminder to us as we look at anything of value in this life that it gets its value from the source of all value in life, which is God himself.

And it reflects his glory. If we fail to see that, then we’re going to have the wrong standard. We’re going to say that gain is God. This in the sense of these men who like the way silver looks or gold looks. The way we’re going to measure how we’re doing is by an external standard and then we’re going to create an environment of hell on earth of discontent and struggles and problems and word wars and all that stuff.

But if we look at this piece of scripture here talking about the God with whom we have to deal with, the God whom we come today to worship, we have that motivation to glorify him and his word then directs our life and his standard, the son, the word, the law of God, which is always a grace word. Any word God speaks to us is grace because he is transcendent. That is the meaning of this text. God is transcendent.

He is the creator and we are the creatures. His standard then corrects us. We don’t put him down to our earthly standards the way the false teachers would. When we do that, the scriptures say that the end result of that is peace in the context of the environment in which we walk. Now these false teachers walked in a different way. They walked in the context of division and strife. They exhibited the fruit not of the spirit but the fruit of the flesh.

And notice very importantly here that I made this connection before but the reference to Job, the book of Job, that he came naked from the womb and will return naked to God which Paul reiterates earlier in this text that you know gain the godliness would gain, you know his godliness with contentment rather is great gain. Naked we come forth, naked will return. You know, I said that I think that the implication of the text isn’t to restrict false values to simply money, but rather all physical indicators that our eyes can see in terms of making evaluations.

Job’s comforters saw him with boils and saw him with dead kids and saw him with a nagging wife who said, “Curse God and die” and saw him with all his material prosperity taken away. And they had an external standard that said the man’s cursed. He’s done sinful things to bring this to pass, which is not true, but just wrong. It’s not why it came to pass. It was the sovereignty of God. Was a test or demonstration to Satan of the righteousness of Job.

So the point here is that Paul then as he brings this to a close, not quite because he’s going to move on in verse 17 to give it one more shot relative to riches of the world, but he points out that we serve here a god who is who dwells in light which no man can see or hath seen. He is not visible like the gold or the good health or the good skin or the number of kids or all that stuff. Apostle Paul brings this to its tremendous superlative conclusion by considering the person of God himself.

And he does that with a series of seven statements in verses 15 and 16. There are three nouns used first of all to describe God. These nouns are first of all that he is the blessed and only potentate. He is the king of kings and he is the lord of lords. He then goes on to say that there are two characteristics of god here that he only hath immortality and he dwells in light which no man can approach. And he concludes with two whom clauses: whom no man hath seen nor can see.

To whom be honor and power everlasting. Amen. A completion of seven. The perfect completion describing this God with whom we have to worship today to come before his presence and worship.

Well, these things can be explained a little bit more. They should be all explanation as I said is wanting in the context of dealing with the person of God. That’s the whole point of the recitation of these attributes is that ultimately God is ultimately totally transcendent from us.

He is the creator and we are the creature. But we’ll go through them a little bit as God has given to us in his inspired text.

First of all, he is the blessed and only potentate. Potentate is a King James word. It’s a pretty good word, too. I like the word, you know, rather than ruler or strong, whatever it is. It has the idea of potency, power, strength in the Greek. The Greek word here is the word that comes to us in the word dynamite or dynamo, a source of energy, power, strength, etc.

And so God is the potentate. He’s the potent one. He’s the one who is the noun made from the word, the verb, the adjective potent. He’s the potent one, he’s the potentate, and as such he is the blessed and only potentate there’s only one source of power in the world in the created order that is God himself. He is the only potentate and he is the blessed potentate. Now the word blessed here—there are two words translated blessed in the Greek one may speak means to speak well of somebody comprised of two words well speaking, to speak well of someone or to utter a blessing upon them. This is not that word.

This is the word indicating prosperity. He is blessed. We look at somebody with a lot of goods and we say he’s a blessed person. Well, that’s the way it is with God here. He is the blessed and only potentate. So he has all authority and might. He is the source of all strength. He is also the king of kings. And now, I mentioned this last time I spoke in the Greek. This is not king of kings. It is king of those who are kinging and lord of those who are lording.

And it’s interesting how even in this statement of transcendence, God’s imminence, you know, his transcendence, his separateness from us, his imminence, his being near to us, he is both things. His imminence is portrayed in really kind of a marked fashion here in the description of him being the king of those kinging and lord of those lording. It is the present kingship of God over all kings of the earth and the present lordship of God over all lords, all who are in a superior inferior relationship are lords relative to the workplace, the home, whatever it is. God is the lord of all those who are lording and he is the king of all those who have civil rule and authority. Okay?

So in all covenantal arrangements involving hierarchy, God is the king of those and lord of those things. And so Paul is saying this in connection to the charge to Timothy to keep the commandment without spot and unbreakable until the appearing of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now this is typical in scripture in Deuteronomy 10 for instance we read God’s charge to Israel through Moses. Deuteronomy 10 beginning in verse 12.

Now Israel, what do the Lord thy God require of thee but to fear the Lord thy God to walk in all his ways to love him and to serve the Lord with all your heart and with all your soul to keep the commandments of the Lord and his statutes which I command thee this day for thy good. Behold the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the Lord thy God. The earth also with all that therein is. Only the Lord had a delight in thy fathers to love them. And he chose their seed after them, even you above all people, as it is this day. Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiff neck. For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward.

And then in verse 21, He is thy praise. He is thy God that hath done for thee these great and terrible things which thine eyes have seen.

So in Deuteronomy 10 in many passages of scripture the charge to us is the charge to Timothy was to maintain his calling before the Lord and we can by way of application say that we all have a charge from God to maintain our calling. The vocation God has placed us in—vocation, calling from God—whether it’s being a farmer whether it’s being an electrician, whether it’s working on equipment, whether it’s driving a truck, whether it’s working in a corporate office, no matter what it is, these are callings before God. And you have the same charge, the way of application that Timothy was given to maintain that calling in an upright fashion. And as the people of God, that calling is always in the context of fearing God, walking in his ways, loving him, serving him by keeping his commandments.

And it is buttressed by the fact that God is God of God, God of all gods, rulers, powers, and authority, the word in the Old Testament for strong one. And he is the Lord of all lords, those in a superior inferior relationship. And I think that’s for two reasons. One, it’s a charge to us that God gives us this charge and he is our commander-in-chief. But, you know, it’s a very important other reason is to remember that we all have functional superiors that we report to.

And God reminds us to stay under. Remember the last few things that Timothy was supposed to run after was patience and meekness. Okay? He was supposed to start with justice. Flee to justice or righteousness. Flee to godliness. Flee to faith and love. Patience and meekness. And if we’re going to keep the charge of doing what God has called us to do, we have to do it with patience under the trials and tribulations, the adversities that God brings into our life.

And we must do it with meekness in the context of our horizontal relationships and that meekness is not supposed to be some kind of stoic resignation to the fact that people are kind of weird sometimes. That’s not the idea. This is the idea that the people that were supposed to be meek in the context of are themselves ruled by the only and blessed potentate the king of kings and the lord of lords. We can trust that in submitting as Jesus did to the point of death he is submitting ultimately to the father.

Wives, you know this probably a lot better than men do because you’re always studying that those passages in First Peter about submission to your husband. You always remember and it’s a very important thing to remember. You tell yourselves over and over. I know you do in this church and it’s good that what you’re doing is submitting to God. Ultimately, you’ve got to trust God. And as good Calvinists, that point is driven home again in the scriptures.

Not just, in other words, it’s not just a command by God to keep the charge because he’s the commander-in-chief. It’s an assuring gracious word to God from God to you that he’s in control of those whom you are fearful of submitting to. Okay? So, it’s a cure to rebellion and it’s a cure to fear as well.

Paul goes on to say though that so God is described here as he is in many other places of scripture preeminently in the book of Revelation that he is king of kings and lord of lords. One other point before I move on from that and that is that throughout Timothy we’ve seen several places here where this kind of terminology is used and one of the reasons I believe for this kind of terminology here and throughout the epistles is that there were false pretenders to the throne. You know the Caesars had called themselves lord of lords and king of kings and they were the savior of the world and this particularly in stressing that he is the blessed and only potentate the king of kings and lord of lords puts the Lord Jesus Christ and God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost in contrast to the Caesars who claim to be that ultimate source of power and authority and value in the world.

So there is a polemical use to this as well that continues by the way in the book of Revelation when we read about Jesus being described as king of kings and lord of lords in the book of Revelation chapter 17 and again in chapter 19 the context is warfare the context is those who would come against the church so the terminology always is in relationship to those who would assert their own kingship and lordship the way the Caesars had done by the time of their declension as an empire.

One other reference to God being the king of kings and lord of lords is found in Psalm 136.

Psalm 136: Give thanks to the Lord for he is good for his loving kindness is everlasting. Give thanks to the God of gods for his loving kindness is everlasting. Give thanks to the Lord of lords for his loving kindness is everlasting. To whom alone doeth great—to him who alone doeth great wonders. And it goes on and repeats that this theme is thrown throughout both the Old Testament and the New Testament.

Now, I want to read a quote here that’s going to be a little bit difficult for you to listen to, but in the context of this first these first three nouns that describe God as Paul breaks forth in this hymn of praise to him on a consideration of the epiphany of the Lord Jesus Christ. Let me I want to read something here in relationship to the fact that God is king over kings, and this is from Calvin’s Institutes and he quotes here as well from Augustine.

And to set this up, what Augustine is considering and Calvin is considering is how God works even through evil men. How what Doug Kelly talked to us last year about how God uses sin sinlessly. And there’s a contemplation of that in this quote from the Institutes and from Augustine that I want you to listen to. Calvin said this speaking of God’s transcendence. Now, this is what this these verses speak to and his sovereignty which is the first description of his transcendence is his sovereignty.

Calvin said, “Nay, when we cannot comprehend how God will—how God will that to I’ll start over. Nay, when we cannot comprehend how God can will that to be done which he forbids us to do.” Okay, so God wills certain things to be done that he forbids us to do, let us call to mind our imbecility and remember that the light in which he dwells is not without cause termed inaccessible. Hence all pious and modest men will readily acquiesce in the sentiment of Augustine.

And now he’s quoting Augustine. Man sometimes at the good will wishes something which God does not will as when a good son wishes his father to live when God wills him to die. Again, it may happen that man with a bad will wishes what God wills righteously. As when a bad son wishes his father to die, and God also wills it. Okay. The former wishes that God what God wills not. The latter wishes what God also wills.

And yet the filial affection of the former is more consonant to the good will of God, the willing differently, than the unnatural affection of the latter, though willing the same thing. So much does approbation or condemnation depend on what it is befitting in man and what in God to will and to what end the will of each has receive respect. So he’s saying the first child is motivated by a correct love for the father and yet he wills something that God does not will.

The second son is motivated by an unnatural affection against God’s word and against God’s character and yet he wills something the father to die that the father also wills. So Augustine is talking about these correlations for the things which God rightly wills he accomplishes by the evil wills of bad men. Okay. The thing God rightly wills, he accomplishes through the evil wills of bad men. You know, Joseph, my brothers intended it for evil.

God intended it for good. Or God says that himself. And so Kelly, God uses sin sinlessly because he is the only and blessed potency. He had said a little before that is Augustine that the apostate angels by their revolt and all the reprobate as far as they themselves were concerned did what God willed not. But in regard to his it was impossible for them to do so. For while they act against the will of God, his will is accomplished in them.

While they act against the will of God, his will is accomplished in them. And while your husband may act against the will of God, God’s will is accomplished in him. And while the civil ruler may act against the will of God, God’s will is accomplished in him. God’s providence, his decree is worked out in all things, including the actions of sinful men. While they act against the will of God, his will is accomplished in them.

Hence, Augustine exclaims, “Great is the work of God, exquisite in all he wills, so that in a manner wondrous and ineffable, that is not done without his will, which is done contrary to it, because it could not be done if he did not permit, nor does he permit it unwillingly, but willingly. Nor would He who is good permit evil to be done? Were he not omnipotent to bring good out of evil?”

We have the charge from God to persevere in our calling because he is the only and blessed potentate, the king of kings and lord of lords and he will bring about his will even through the deeds of sinful wicked men in the context of our life. Praise God. Praise God for that. Paul goes on—praise God that he only hath immortality dwelling in light.

He only hath immortality dwelling in light. Immortality here means no deathness to him. That’s comprised of the alpha prefix meaning not and then the word for death. And so God has immortality. And it says specifically he only as he is the only potentate he only hath immortality. We know wait a minute I thought we had the immortal soul.

Isn’t that the idea that we have a soul that can never die? Well That soul is not immortal in and of itself. And by the way, the whole idea of thinking of an immortal soul as opposed to the body is kind of a Greek one instead of a biblical one. The scriptures disembodied souls are not a good thing. Ultimately, we’re going to have a new body. Okay? It’s going to be we’re one person. We’re not like two parts, part immortal and part mortal.

The scriptures say that this mortal must put on immortality. Okay? And so us, we who we are in our beings are mortal. God alone is immortal. He is alone the fountain of all life. We have no immortality in and of ourselves. We have it as a gift from God. And he tells us to put on immortality or that we shall that is in First Corinthians. And this corruptible will put on incorruptibility. It flows from the fountain of God who is all life.

So God only have immortality in his being. That is who he is. He is life. He is the God of the living, not of the dead. He is life. He has no death connected to him. He only hath immortality. And he is he dwells in the light which no man can approach unto. We don’t have immortality in ourselves. We cannot approach the light. God’s light is such that no man can approach unto. We have a visual picture of this in the sky.

Of course, you can’t look at the sun unless you want to burn out your retinas or maculas or whatever it is back there that you want to burn out. Can’t look at it. And you look through special glass. Which is a picture. It’s a reflection of the image of the savior, the true sun of heaven. And God in his personhood here dwells in light which no man can approach unto. Now this combination here in these next two phrases of immortality and light reminds us of course of the book of John where it says that Jesus Christ is light.

In him is life and he is both light and light in the context of the Gospel of John. In James also this terminology that God is the father of lights with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow. So every good thing bestowed and every perfect gift is from above coming down from this father of lights. And so there’s a connection between light and life and there’s a connection between light and goodness as well.

And God in his person is all goodness. He is all light and he is all life. And those things flow forward into his creation on the basis of his will. And he has us attain to immortality not in the sense that he has had it however we have a beginning to ours don’t we immortality in its strictest sense means no beginning and no end and that’s the creator that’s not the creation we put you don’t another way what I’m trying to get at here is immortality should not be thought of in the context of a procession of days it’s not a big long period of time it means no death it means perpetually eternally he is God and perpetually and eternally he dwells in light which no man can approach unto and then the last two clauses whom no man has seen nor can see in his essence that is no man can see God and to whom be honor and power everlasting amen we have this tremendous description of God and it should cause our hearts to want to spring forth in song why I chose the song I did earlier immortal invisible God only wise this is the God whom we come together to today now what does all this, you know, mean to us?, well, let me point out one thing it means.

The first thing we can say that it means to us is it should bring about a great deal of humbling to us. I mean, we should see ourselves contrasted with this God, the blessed and potent, potentate, the king of kings, the lord of lords. Who are you? What do you control? What authority or power do you possess, oh man? Compare your power. Can you control your children if you’re a parent? No. Can you control your friend?

Can you control your wife? You shouldn’t want to control them in that sense. But even if you wanted to by the strength of the exertion of your will, you can’t control a single person here. They can do whatever they want to. Ultimately, yeah, you can get some sort of forced submission to certain acts perhaps, but ultimately you can’t control people and ultimately you can’t control yourself. You’ll probably use your tongue today, if not today, tomorrow, in a way you don’t intend to use it.

You can’t control it. You have no power or authority over anything in your life. You can’t determine if the sun gets up tomorrow. You can’t really even wake yourself up tomorrow. God will wake you up tomorrow. Okay? You have no power or authority. You’re not the King of Kings or Lord of Lords. You are constantly walking in submission to other authorities in the context of our world. Everybody is. He only has immortality.

We feel the consequences of the death of our body every day. At least I do. Things hurt more. Feels like I’m moving toward death. He walks in light. If I think of the holiness of God and then I think of my own life as a picture of brightness or light, the sun for instance, and then I start realizing from God’s word, the blemishes I place against that light in my life and I begin to see the obvious sins and then I move down to the less obvious sins and then I read these verses about fleeing to justice in everything that I do and godliness in everything that I do.

You and patience in everything that happens to me in life and a meekness of being broken to God’s hardness and a meekness before men as our savior was and I think of the tremendous requirements of love toward people in faith and I start to measure my holiness my light against that you know it’s like one of those rheostat switches on the dimmer you know well I guess I’m not quite so bright I keep turning it down I see and then I realize the truth with the cannons say that even the best of our works have those appendages of sinful motivation failure to perform correctly attached to it.

We’re black. We’re dark. We’re not light and approachable. We’re darkness. We’re clouded with sin. And everybody can see us. They can see these imperfections far too well. God through this assertion of who he is in verses 15 and 16 wants you to humble yourself before him. He wants you to see your vileiness, your darkness, your lack of power, your lack of strength to control anything in your life. Your lack of wisdom, if you want to throw that into the mix here, we don’t know how to do anything correct.

And God knows everything before it happens. He brings it to pass. In his wisdom, he considers all things. And in his strength, he brings all things to pass. And we complain about them day after day after day. We don’t like this outcome, God. It’s not the right outcome. Please change And we assert our own creaturedness against his create—his create against what should be our creaturliness time after time after time.

And he in this text tells us humble yourselves before me. Bow down to the living God who dwells in light and inaccessible who is the only and blessed potentate. Who are you oh man to consider yourself? To God the nations are considered as nothing. The sun that brightness that we can’t bear to look at with the naked eye is nothing to him. He holds the stars in his hand. He is beyond our thinking.

He is beyond our comprehension in his transcendence. And we should feel as nothing in the sight of such a God. We should humble ourselves and we should cry out for mercy that we ever thought to challenge anything that he’s done in our life. Whether it’s wicked men, whether it’s disobedient wives, disobedient children, disobedient husbands, we’ve complained to God about these things. Recognize who you’re complaining against.

King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. who alone has immortality. He is the source and found of all life. And we’ve complained against him for the setting in which he’s placed us, for the car that doesn’t work right, for the things in life that don’t turn out the way we think they should. You know, the Westminster Catechism says this dealing with chapter 7 of God’s covenant with men. The first statement is the distance between God and the creature is so great that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience unto him as their creator.

Yet they could never have any fruition of him as their blessedness and reward, but by some voluntary condescension on God’s part, which he hath been pleased to express by way of covenant. God is so far removed from who we are as his creation, that the only way we’re going to have any fruition of knowledge or blessing from him is through his voluntary condescension to express himself to us. And he does that by means of covenant.

That’s the beginning of everything else. That’s the beginning of our knowledge is a knowledge of that we’re created beings. He is the creator. Tremendous unbridgeable gap between the two. We will never be creator. We will never be God. When we take the Lord’s supper, we don’t eat divinity. We eat the humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ. If you want to look at it that way. We never mingle with God somehow. Jesus has two persons, human and divine, and they’re without mingling.

Okay? Because we are never brought into a position where we’re the creator somehow at the end of all time. We’re creatures. We shall always remain so. But we know God by way of covenant. And that’s the other side of this. If the point of this text is to humble us before God, it’s to raise us back up with the knowledge that this God who is the only and bless and potentate, the King of Kings and Lord, of lords who alone is has immortality.

He’s the fountain of life dwelling in light which no man can approach. No man can see him. To him be honor and strength forever everlasting. This very God has condescended in his word to reveal himself to us in part. We must say quickly as Vos says that we do not know God exhaustively. That’s easy. He’s inexhaustible. But we must also agree with that till at this point that our knowledge of God is also a different kind of knowledge than God has.

It is true knowledge. He reveals himself in the created order. He reveals who he is in the creation. He reveals himself in the word. He reveals himself in the personal work of the Lord Jesus Christ. We have knowledge of God. Praise God. He has condescended to us to have us aware of who he is by way of covenant, by way of his word. But it is a different sort of knowledge than God’s knowledge. It’s creaturely knowledge.

It’s different, but nonetheless, it is a real and true knowledge. And that knowledge is mediated to us by the word. This truth of God’s transcendence is a correction to our pride. And it’s also a correction to thinking that somehow we can get into God and pry into who he is through our minds and intellect. And that’s why I stress the point that Vos makes about knowledge. We think somehow that God can be known by our minds.

But the text says he dwells in light inaccessible and he dwells where no man can see him. We can’t get at him with our minds. You see, if we can’t if we have to bow to the fact that he is the creator and we’re the creation, then what we want to do then is find a link to him somehow on the basis of who we are, our philosophies, our thoughts, our understanding of this text. I can intellectually understand this text and so I can pry into the being of God and understand who he is.

Wrong. Wrong. The whole point of the text is you can’t do it. Cannot know who he is apart from his self-revelation to you. He will give you knowledge and it will be a creaturely knowledge that you have of him. The link to an understanding of God is not our minds. Where is it? Where is it? How do we know these things? It’s in Christ. It’s in Christ who took upon himself humanity, who became incarnate, and who became the door to a knowledge of God. But even that knowledge always shall be a creaturely knowledge on the part of God’s people.

We think somehow that God needs us. And I remember Sunday school class that was taught in a former church I attended about how God was lonely and that’s why he created us. And you know he needs fellowship. He needs companionship. Well, this text tells us that there is nothing that God needs.

He has no need of us. And even more than that, we give him nothing. We add nothing to his light. We add nothing to his strength by our submission to it. We add nothing to his glory and honor by our singing praises to him today. Don’t think that somehow at the end of the worship service God feeling better about himself. He is totally self-contained. We can bring nothing to him. But yet in the wonderful thing about this is he brings everything to us.

I mean, look at these things. He says that he’s going to make us kings, right? Kings and priests, and we shall reign with him. He says he’s going to give us the power of the preaching of the gospel, the dynamite of the gospel. He says that he has given us immortality. He says that we are to be lights in the context of this dark world. He says that you’re supposed to do things that can be seen as the evidences of the spirit’s work in your life.

This charge to Timothy that he fight the good fight indicates that he is to do this in such a way as to be seen as the participants of the games were seen. Timothy’s devotion to his charge and your devotion to your charge is to be seen in the context of the world. So God gives us all things. He humbles us as this text, but then he immediately raises us back up to assure us that he is the God who has brought us into relationship with him.

And so when we go through a week when we had tremendous disappointments, when we sat in a courtroom and cried over the loss parent loss of children to a covenant family in this church. And when we go through a time of humiliation, when the enemies seem to ride over our heads, trample us under feet or when we go through a week in which some of I know some of you have gone through this sort of week where you feel like you have really you’re all alone in this world and you’ve got some friendships but even they’re not really what you want.

You have an ache in your heart for relationship with other people or we go through a week where maybe the outflow of income was greater than the inflow of income. Maybe we’re struggling with what does all this mean? what is the end result of all these things? It seems like things are so bad. It seems like you know I must be under the curse of God. But God says don’t ever think this. God says I am the king of kings and lord of lords.

God says that I am superintending all court procedures, all financial transactions, all social relationships to bring honor and glory to me and to bring strength and power to my people. That’s what he says. And he tells Timothy, I know big troubles in the church. I know false teachers in the church. I know improper motivations in the church. And I know the envy and strife and divisions that have been occurring in the context of the community in that church.

But believe me, I’m in control. It’s going to be all right at the end of the day.

You know, Psalm 113. I heard pastor speaking on this in the radio this morning and it fits so well. He was also speaking of the attributes of God and his description of himself in Psalm 113.

Praise ye the Lord. Praise oh ye servants of the Lord. Praise the name of the Lord. Blessed be the name of the Lord from this time forth and forever more. From the rising of the sun and to the going down of the same. The Lord’s name is to be praised. The Lord is high above all nations and his glory above the heavens. Who is like unto the Lord our God who dwells on high, who humbles himself to behold the things that are in heaven and in the earth? He has to bow down to even behold the things in the heavens, nonetheless on the earth.

But here’s the other side of it. He raises up the poor out of the dust. He lifts the needy out of the dunghill that he may set him with princes, even with the princes of his people. He makes the barren woman to keep house and to be a joyful mother of children. Praise ye the Lord.

He promises at the end result of his epiphany, the appearance of the Lord Jesus Christ, whether it’s the final appearance, whether it’s the Lord’s day appearance, whether it is an appearance in your life at a particular time when God brings evaluation and judgment, that epiphany, that appearance is for the establishment of his people.

And the barren woman must cry out for long years was at times for children and God brings her to the fruition of children in her house. Here probably a reference to the gift of Samuel and the long waiting and the long humiliation have to be gone through being made fun of, being chastised, being looked upon by the eyes of men as seeing cursed by God. That sometimes goes on for a long period of time.

But this very God who is so transcendent declares his imminence in these texts as well because He is the king of those kinging. He is the lord of those lording. He knows. He’s omniscient. We’re not. We make tough decisions. We wonder, did we done the right thing? Have we said the right words to this person to achieve peace? Have we done have we striven hard enough in this particular battle, whether it’s legal or social, whatever it is, and we don’t know.

At the end of the day, God says to trust in him. He dwells in light, which is inaccessible, not us. He the king of all kings and the lord of all lords, not us. He’s the one who promises to raise those up out of the dunghill who trust in him. God says that he declares himself to be the one who is worthy of all worship and honor and glory. This is the center of our faith. Apprehension of the person of God revealed to us through his word.

Calvin said that this topic is impossible to understand and without the word it is totally impossible. But that’s why are driven to this word mediated to us by the work of the spirit on the basis of Christ’s work on the cross. This word guides and directs us even though stumbling but an apprehension of the person of God. A creaturely knowledge to be sure but a knowledge nonetheless. The Lord God condescends to know us by way of the covenant of grace established through Christ our