Sunday School | Attributes of God the Father

Last week, I let you guys know we're beginning a new series here. It's gonna take a long time. I don't know exactly how long, but it literally could be a year or two years. We're gonna walk through every major doctrine of Christianity over ten different topics.

We're gonna talk about theology proper—the first person of the Godhead—and Christology, and pneumatology: God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. We'll talk about anthropology, the doctrine of man. We'll talk about sin and salvation and the church. Angels, demons, last things. We're gonna be comprehensive. We're gonna talk about soteriology—the doctrine of salvation. We're gonna talk about everything in an organized way, and I think it's gonna be really fun.

If you want to be in this room and get updates about things or resources or handouts, I'd ask that you email this address instead of emailing Tim directly:

chsdoctrine@gmail.com

Just send a note to that address and you'll automatically get added to the mailing list so we can communicate things back to you. Anybody up here, remind me to say this again at the end of class for folks that missed the beginning.

You can also use that address to ask any doctrinal question you want. I won't answer it immediately—I'll just file it away until we get to that particular topic. So if you have a question about angelology, I'll save it for when we reach that section. A question about Calvinism? That goes under soteriology. A question about the return of Christ? We'll save that for eschatology. Any passage that's unclear to you or anything that's vexed you about a topic—just send it anytime. Don't expect an immediate response. We'll just file it and address it when it's pertinent to where we are in the series.

Alright, a couple of general notes on the class. This microphone has no amplification value—it's simply to record you. If you want to be heard on the recording, speak up loud and I'll try to recap what you said. We love your participation. If you'd like to be heard and understood in the recording, sit closer to the mic. We'd love it if everybody sat closer to the mic. Cole Massey's allowed to sit as far away as humanly possible, but if you'd crunch up, we could all participate in the conversation because it's way more fun when we're all doing this together.

God as Personal Spirit

Okay, here we go. First person of the Godhead—theology proper, the doctrine of God.

When we talk about who God is, the big word we tend to use is the attributes of God. When we're asking the question, "What is God like?" we talk about his attributes. I'm gonna give them to you in a particular organized fashion, looking at his attributes through a couple different lenses. This will probably take us at least a month to get through some of this.

But I wanna begin at the most fundamental level. When we ask, "What is God? Who is God?" I think a pretty good answer is that God is a personal spirit. He's personal. This is very distinct from other world religions and systems that see God as an impersonal force. We understand from Scripture that God is a personal spirit, and because he is personal, you can have intimate fellowship with him.

I begin there for this reason: when we talk about the attributes of God, this could all be ivory tower, academic stuff—you feel smarter than other people because you learned something. But that's of no actual value. Everything we learn about him has an implication.

And in particular, it has an implication that's relational in nature. God is personal and therefore you can, and in fact you should—the whole point is that you would have intimate fellowship with him. Everything that we're gonna talk about, you could file away as interesting trivia, but really what it is is we're trying to build a relationship. We want to have intimate fellowship with him, and so we're gonna organize it through giving ourselves a better way to understand who he is that will all foster to that thing. God's a personal spirit, so we really can have intimate fellowship with him.

Now when we do talk about him and we use the term attributes or whatever terminology we use, there's a risk when we talk about God's attributes. Because our minds are simple and we can really only think about one thing at a time, we will say that God is—pick an attribute of God. Shout out an attribute of God.

Holy.

Okay. So God is holy. Okay. So we'll talk about God being holy. While we're talking about the fact that God is holy, we might be forgetting the 500 other things that he is. But the general principle you want to bear in mind when we study the attributes of God is that God is all that he is at all times. He is not sometimes merciful and other times just. He is just in his mercy and he's merciful in his justice. He is sovereign in his holiness. He is gracious in his creative power. He's all that he is at all times. We talk about them one at a time because we're stupid, not because he's simple. You with me? Okay. So he's all that he is at all times. When he's omniscient, he's omniscient in the exercise of his mercy. Right? He knows even the very moment of him showing grace and kindness to you, he knows everything. And it's not like, "I might be merciful because I don't really know how awful you actually are." Right? That is not the case with him. He's all that he is at all times. But it's just hard for us to think about it, so we organize this. But just bear in mind, he is not phasing through these different things like a man changing hats. He wears all his hats all the time. You with me? Okay.

The Impartation of God's Attributes

So think about that with your attributes. Second—this is a little bit controversial, and it's fine if you disagree with me—but nothing, there is nothing that is true of himself that he has not in some sense imparted to you. He is the original, and we are the derivatives. We are his image bearers. There is nothing that is true of himself that he does not impart in some sense to us, but there is nothing that is true of him that he has imparted to us entirely. We are, to limited degrees and to varying limited degrees, like he is. We are made in his image utterly. And so whatever is true of him is true of you to a lesser extent.

Now that what I just said to you violates a very common schema that people use when they describe the attributes of God. Do you know what the typical two-part division of the attributes of God is? If you've ever taken a theology class, David, what are we talking?

Incommunicable and communicable.

Very good. Okay. We tend to categorize God's attributes into two buckets. There are the incommunicable, meaning he has them but you got nothing of it. And then the communicable, like a communicable disease—the contagious attributes of God. Okay? Very common. There's these things that are true of him that are not true of you and then these other things that are true of him that are also true of you.

What I don't like about that is I think it fails to recognize that even his incommunicable attributes, we pick something of those up, albeit in a much reduced form. And his communicable attributes that we do get—frankly, we didn't get that much. Like, you could say, give me a communicable attribute. What is something that is true of God that is generally understood to be true of us?

Merciful.

Okay. Merciful. Sounds great. So God is merciful and Eric is merciful. So there's a commonality there, but not that much. Right? When you are being merciful, yes, you're imitating God, you are like him in some sense, you do bear his image, but you are not a millionth as merciful as he is. Right? So what we sometimes tend to do when we want to understand what God is like is we understand what we are like and then we just triple it. Right? I'm like this. Well, he's more like this. And I'm just suggesting to you that the gap is greater than you imagine. What you know of mercy based on interacting with a relatively gracious human being is not a particularly good approximation for what he is like. Makes sense? Okay. So communicable, sure, but not that communicable. And over here, incommunicable, he's like this and we're not like this. Can you think of something that we would categorize as an incommunicable attribute?

Omnipresent.

Okay. Great. So God is omnipresent and you're saying, "Be that."

And that would just simply say, I'm somewhere. He is present everywhere and you are present somewhere. He is all knowing and I know something. He is all powerful and I can tie my shoes. So these—even in the omnis—you see there's a fragment of it. And I would suggest to you that the relationship between my knowledge and his omniscience is not that different from my mercifulness and his mercifulness. He is all that he is at all times, and I am all that he is to a much reduced degree. So far so good?

Now, having said all that, let's talk about the things that we tend to categorize as noncommunicable. Actually, let me do this differently. When you think about all that he is, let's collect what do you think are the strangest things about him? The most wonderful things about him. When you consider his attributes, what he is like, are there any particular facets of this jewel that you find most marvelous? I'd love to hear it.

Catherine? Patience. The patience of God. Does that feel incommunicable to anyone? Patience is hard to come by. He is long-suffering. Don't you feel like you're suffering when you're being patient? It drives me insane.

What else? His forgiveness. His inclination is to be forgiving. And that's even stranger in him because we have a great motive to forgive because we've been forgiven. There's that parable of the unmerciful servant—where this guy had a small debt forgiven and then he won't forgive a bigger debt. We should be forgiving because we've been forgiven. He has no such obligation. Why in the world would he forgive anyone? He owes no one anything, and yet he is slow to anger, abounding in love. He's merciful. He's gracious.

What else astonishes you about him?

Full of grace. Creativity. The creative power of the whole universe is amazing.

Stuart is saying his creative power. When you look at the created world and think whether it's how did he dream that up or how did he execute that power—the brilliance—this is a lesser example, but I remember years ago there was a Lucent Technologies commercial. They used to be part of Bell because everything used to be a part of Bell. They did this commercial where they listed things on their resume. One of the things was that they invented the dial tone. If you're young, you're like, what's a dial tone? But I remember seeing that and being like, somebody invented a dial tone? It never crossed my mind that the dial tone was an invention. It simply was. But think of the number of things that he invented. He invented gravity. Would you have thought of that? He invents photons. His creative power, his brilliance is absolutely astonishing.

A couple more. Building on that—he's uncreated. That alone is completely a head bender because you've never experienced anything in the world, you've never come across anything that has that. If you wanted to bust me on my noncommunicable thing, that'd be a pretty good place to go after it.

What else did I hear? When did he invent it? Did he invent time? I don't know. Nobody knows. The answer is before time existed. But what does that even mean? How can your head stretch far enough to get inside the paradigm of time?

One more. Most astonishing thing about him. He never changes. His unchangeability. That also might feel rather incommunicable to us because we are varying so much.

There's a million things we could look at. I want to suggest to you we're gonna start with four things and hopefully we'll get through them all today. Here's four things that I want to suggest to you that you might file in the bucket of the nearly incomprehensible: God's self existence, his self sufficiency, the fact that he is infinite and he is eternal.

That bucket—those four things: God is self-existent, he is self-sufficient, he is infinite, and he is eternal. Every one of those is so weird and very difficult to get your head around. Although, kind of like what Sam was saying, you know, God is omniscient—how do we touch that? Well, I know something. Right? God is self-existent, but at least I exist. Right? So I get this. I would say this is one of those things that we get the least of—that I get to exist. He's a life-giving spirit. I'm alive, so that's something. Right? We get a very small touch.

This is Piper. Piper wrote a book called Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ, and I'm gonna borrow from it. Even though we're not talking about Jesus right now, we're talking about God the Father. But listen to this from Piper on self-existence. He says, "Sheer existence is perhaps the greatest mystery of all. Ponder the absoluteness of reality. There had to be something that never came into being. Back, back, back we peer into endless ages, yet there was never nothing. Someone has the honor of being there first and always. He never became or developed, he simply was. To whom belongs this singular, absolute glory?"

The answer is Christ, the person whom the world knows as Jesus of Nazareth. The apostle John, who wrote the last book of the Bible, received the decisive revelation. He quotes God. Listen to this:

I am the alpha and the omega, says the Lord God, who was, who is, and who is to come, the almighty. — Revelation 1:8

He said that. Then Piper goes on, "This is not Christ talking. This is the almighty God. He calls himself alpha and omega—the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. In the alphabet, one cannot speak of anything or nothing before alpha. There is no before alpha in the alphabet, and no one can speak of anything or nothing after omega. There is no after omega in the alphabet. So it is with God and reality. There is no before God and no after God. He is absolutely there no matter how far back or how far forward you go. He is the absolute reality. He has the honor of being there first and always. To him belongs the singular glory."

I think that's probably our bedrock—the most bizarre thing about him. He is self-existent. Name something. This pew. Somebody made the pew. That tree—whatever that is, that acorn came from another tree, which came from another tree, which came from another tree. You've never experienced anything like this. This planet used to be something. Right? But God alone is fundamentally self-existent. We exist. He never didn't. That's absolutely extraordinary.

Catherine mentioned—when my son was six, he said, "I can understand never ending, but I cannot understand never beginning." And I stood there and thought, I can't either. I mean, it's absolutely incomprehensible. It made me wonder if that infinity thing—he just has it all—but that sort of gets weak when you're trying to...

It's funny that you talk about when Matthew was six, because I have a distinct memory of walking down my road. I grew up in Southern California, lived on Hidden Farm Road. And I can remember walking down the road and thinking this exact thing. I was probably six or seven and thinking, like, how is that possible? That there was something—that he never—it's just, you can't get your head around it. Right? So I've been thinking about this for forty-five years, and I still don't know. But he is. Okay.

Grounding Self-Existence in Scripture

Now, where would you go in scripture? Could you make the case from the Bible? What we're gonna try to do all along is ground this thing in scripture. Self-existence—where would you go?

In the beginning, God... — Genesis 1:1

Very good, right? Genesis 1:1, and then John 1:1—both of those. In the beginning, God. The Bible doesn't even try to get pre-. There is no pre-. In the very beginning, he is. Right? That's just where the story starts because there was never anything outside of that. So you might root this in Genesis 1:1, you might root it in John 1:1. Where else would you guys go? The preexistence, the self-existence, the fundamental absoluteness of God.

When he says "I am"—"I am." So his revelation of his name—there's a lot of speculation about what it means that he reveals himself with the name Yahweh as "I am." And one of the ways that people understand that is he's just describing that he just is. It's a little funny when you think about it. There's a big debate: does God exist? Right? The very most fundamental thing upon which everything else is based is God's self-existence. And so then some are like, well, I'm not sure he does. No, he does. But it's like, this is the fundamental reality and it's the fundamental way to define it. Right?

Any other passage of scripture you'd root this in?

Proverbs 8? Proverbs 8. And that's the personification of wisdom, yeah, in Christ.

Yeah, just read it really loud. Okay.

The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works before his deeds of old. I was appointed from eternity from the beginning before the world began. — Proverbs 8:22-23

This is the personification of wisdom which many understand to be actually represented in the second person of the trinity, but before time began, right? A couple more that might be accessible to you—Psalm 90.

Before the mountains were born, where you brought forth the earth and the world from everlasting to everlasting. You are God. — Psalm 90:2

That is alpha and omega language. He is infinitely this direction and infinitely that direction, right?

And the one that you might be more familiar with is, I think we read it more often than we read Psalm 90—Colossians one. You guys familiar with Colossians one?

For by him, all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities, all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him, all things hold together. — Colossians 1:16-17

So God is self-existent, and that's the kind that you'd lay in bed at night and should be like, "How does that work?" Right? He just is. Okay? Self-existent. He's also self-sufficient. And this might be less bizarre, but maybe even more troubling. What would be troubling about the fact that God is self-sufficient?

Because we need him but he doesn't.

Exactly. Evan, that is bullseye. Every relationship that you've ever had, you take reassurance from the fact that they need you too. Do you know this? Like your spouse married you because they thought you were gonna do something beneficial for them. Do you know that? At the very least, that's why you married them. Okay? The glue that tends to hold our relationships together is mutual need. I need you, you need me, it's an exchange of services and we can find some value in that, particularly if we're willing to put up on our side of the bargain. Right? But God does not need anything, which means he doesn't need you. And that can be rather distressing, right?

Where would you go to make the case that God is self-sufficient, that he needs nothing? Do we know none of these? We don't like these ones. Where would you go, Kelly?

Acts 17.

Acts 17, that's a great example. Okay, so Acts 17—Paul is in, this is all part of that whole Areopagus conversation. Paul's doing his whole deal and he says, what's the language you wanna cite?

He does not live in symbols built by human hands. As if he needed anything. — Acts 17

Right? You can look it up in Acts 17. God does not live in symbols built by human hands as if he needed anything. He doesn't need like, when we make our offerings to him, when we share the gospel so that, you know, he can get himself out of the predicament that he's in, when we do all these things that we do, it's like, he needs nothing. Nothing at all.

Catherine?

Everything is for us. Even giving. Even giving him something. It's all for us.

Yes. Everything about him is—and I was gonna say, aren't we glad that we there is something, some things that we cannot comprehend? Because that really gives me security.

Raving God.

Yeah, if we didn't, if there were not things about God that make your head twist—self-sufficiency, self-existence and other things—then it would be so obvious that we were making ourselves a little cartoon crayon God, right? He's clearly gonna be beyond your capacity. Okay?

Here's probably the cheekiest expression that I'm aware of about God's self-sufficiency. Go to Psalm 50. Acts 17 is a great New Testament example. God needs nothing. Look at Psalm 50. It's a kind of long psalm. Pick it up. Pick up the argument in verse seven.

Hear, O my people, and I will speak, O Israel, and I will testify against you. I am God, your God. I do not rebuke you for your sacrifices or your burnt offerings which are ever before me. But listen to this, I have no need of a bull from your stall or of goats from your pens. For every animal of the forest is mine and the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird in the mountains and the creatures of the field are mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell you. For the world is mine and all that is in it. Do I eat the flesh of the bulls or drink the blood of the goats? Sacrifice thank offerings to God, fulfill your vows to the most high and call upon me in the day of trouble. I will deliver you and you will honor me. — Psalm 50:7-15

That is a very big indication that we are not offering sacrifices. Okay, we're not offering sacrifices at all, as it turns out. But that they were not offering sacrifices because God needed the meat. That's what he's saying.

Say, did you think this was about me? Did you think I needed this? He doesn't need any of these things, which means that all of that—that whole apparatus—was because it's something that we needed. Make sense?

Robin said, "When we made he doesn't need anything, we're made for fellowship." Yes. But he didn't need that. Exactly.

So let's do this. Robin just said, we were made to have fellowship with him, but if he doesn't need us, then he must not need that fellowship. And she's exactly right.

God listen. God has all the fellowship he could possibly desire within the Trinity—within the relationships that exist between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We don't add anything to that party. The three persons of the Godhead who are all self-existent, all self-sufficient, have always been—all day long—the Holy Spirit pours forth praise and adoration to the Father. All day long, the Father says, "My son, in whom I am well pleased." They're not lonely. They're not insecure. They lack nothing, and we add nothing to the equation.

What would my praise be compared to if Jesus knows everything and is perfectly capable of evaluating a thing according to his worth? If he is streaming forth adoration to the Father, and then I walk in the room and say, "Hey, good job"—like, what does that add to it? Nothing. He didn't need me to praise him. He doesn't need you to praise him.

C.S. Lewis said, "Man can no more diminish the glory of God by refusing to worship him than an insane man can blot out the sun by scrawling the word 'darkness' on the wall of his cell." He doesn't need us.

And yet. And yet. And yet. He created us. He has made us, which means—this is really important—he did not make us for his benefit, for he needs nothing. He made us for our benefit, that we who have no right to even exist, no right to behold his splendor, could be partakers of that.

I want to reference something. You can reach out to chsdoctrine@gmail.com. This is from The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis, which is absolutely, utterly worth reading—especially chapter three.

What Lewis does is affirm the self-sufficiency of God. God does not need you. He does not need me. And yet, he often says things that suggest that he does—because he's pained, he's grieved by your sin, he is grieved to miss you. And it seems like he needs us. So Lewis, believing in the self-sufficiency of God, grapples with the fact that God continually uses language. He explores it all in chapter three. Here's an excerpt from it. I've read this a thousand times. Listen to this.

If God sometimes speaks as though the impassable could suffer passion—that means the one who cannot be hurt is hurt. The one who is impassable means he cannot be injured and yet he still says ouch. If God sometimes speaks as though the impassable could suffer passion and eternal fullness could be in want—not only that, in want of those beings on whom it bestows all from their bare existence upward. Here's what he's saying: God doesn't need anything, but my goodness, it seems like he needs us.

If God sometimes speaks as though the impassable could suffer passion, eternal fullness could be in want, and in want of those beings on whom it bestows all from their bare existence upward, this can mean only—if it means anything intelligible to us—the God of mere miracle has made himself able so to hunger and created in himself that which we can satisfy. If he requires us, the requirement is of his own choosing. If the immutable heart can be grieved by the puppets of its own making, it is divine omnipotence, no other, that has so subjected it—freely and in a humility that passes understanding.

Do you understand what he is saying? If he needs you, he has scooped out a part of himself. He didn't used to need you. But if he has come to need you, he has chosen to need you.

Lewis continues:

If the immutable heart can be grieved by the puppet of his own making, it's divine omnipotence and no other that has so subjected it freely and in a humility that passes understanding. If the world exists, not chiefly that we may love God, but that God may love us—yet that fact on a deeper level is so for our sakes. If he who, in himself, can lack nothing, chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.

And then he concludes like this:

Before and behind all the relations of God to man as we now learn them from Christianity yawns the abyss of a divine act of pure giving. The election of man from nonentity to be the beloved of God.

And therefore, in some sense, the needed and desired of God. Who, but for that act, needs and desires nothing since he eternally has and is all goodness. It is good for us to know the love of God and best for us to know the love of the best object, God. That is—is that not astonishing? He needs nothing, but you need to be needed. And so he has made himself able to suffer that he might need you. Isn't that bonkers?

Alright. God is self-existent. He is self-sufficient. He's also eternal and infinite. We are not eternal at all. We have got brief time. So infinite—where would you go for the infinitude of God? The absolute massive huge whatever he is, he's all of it. He's not a little merciful. He's not a little just. He's not a little smart. He's infinite. Whatever he is, he's all of it. Where would you go in scripture to make that case? Isaiah. Isaiah where?

Your ways are higher than my ways. Your thoughts are higher than mine. — Isaiah (reference)

Isaiah's full of that kind of language. Isaiah's got a very exalted vision of God. Maybe Isaiah 40. If you guys want to really do a study on the attributes of God, Isaiah 40 would be a great place for you just to camp out. So much stuff in there for sure. The infinitude of God—where else would you go? He's all of it, all the time. Isaiah 46. What is Isaiah 46?

Remember this and show yourselves man. Recall the mind of you transgressors. Remember the former things of old for I'm God and there is no other. I am God and there is none like me. Declaring the end from the beginning. And from ancient times, things that are not yet done. I am God, there is none other. — Isaiah 46

This massive overwhelming claim. Isaiah is full of that sort of exalted language. Let me give you a couple for the sake of time. You might jot this one down.

Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised. His greatness is unsearchable. — Psalm 145:3

You know, unsearchable—the idea is like, good luck, man. Like, you'll never get to the bottom. When we say something is unfathomable, what we mean is I can't understand it. But literally, to be unfathomable means—what's a fathom? Too deep. It's too deep. I don't have a long enough anchor. It's too much.

Or how about:

Oh, the depths of the riches and the wisdom and the knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments? How inscrutable his ways. — Romans 11:33

Or how about this?

Am I a God at hand, declares the Lord, and not a God far away? Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him, declares the Lord? Do I not fill heaven and earth, declares the Lord? — Jeremiah 23:23

And then similar to this idea that he fills the heaven and the earth is that he overfills it.

Will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you. How much less this house that I have built? — 1 Kings 8:27

He's all of it. He's bigger. There's more of him. We're not just talking geospatial here. He's all of his attributes to the absolute ultimate degree. He is self-sufficient. Well, he's self-existent. He is self-sufficient. He is infinite. And then for the day at least, we'll stop with this one. He is eternal.

The Eternality of God

Where would you go? We hit this a little bit already with our self-existence, but I just want you to think not merely that aspect, but the timeline aspect. The eternality of God. Passages in your mind that anchor to this. And by the way, let me—the reason I'm asking you to ground this in scripture is because this class is ephemeral. God's word is not. I don't want you to remember this class. I want you to remember God's word. I want this thing to be anchored so that in fifteen years, when you are enduring something that is beyond your capacity to bear, you'll find it in his word. This class will never be remembered. This book will last forever.

So where do we go in the scriptures to link to his eternality? Alpha and Omega.

Alpha and Omega — Revelation 1

Excellent. He offers us eternal life. Oh, that's such a great thought. If he's giving us eternal life, he better have it. How can he impart this if he is a temporary god? How can he offer us something that will last forever? It's actually really good reasoning. The eternality of God.

Jason? Psalm 90 again, from everlasting to everlasting. Anytime you see that everlasting language, right? Let me read you a bunch so that we can get out of here.

Abraham planted a tree in Beersheba and called there on the name of the Lord, the everlasting God. — Genesis 21:33

That's the first time that name is given. He is the everlasting God.

Have you not known, have you not heard, the Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. He doesn't faint or grow weary. His understanding's unsearchable. — Isaiah 40

The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms. And he thrust out the enemy before you. — Deuteronomy 33:27

Now has been disclosed and through the prophetic writings has been made known to all the nations according to the command of the eternal God to bring about the obedience of faith. — Romans 16:26

He is the eternal God. So you might just, in your mind this week, contemplate: he is self-sufficient. He is self-existent, self-sufficient. He's eternal. He is infinite.

Where We're Headed

Let me tell you where we're gonna go the next month or so. We're gonna group his attributes. He's all that he is at all times, but it's still helpful to think about him one at a time. I want you to think about his attributes that we see most richly or maybe most obviously in his roles as creator, judge, and redeemer.

Just on your own, ponder through: If we were thinking about God as creator, what aspects of his nature are most obvious in his creation of the world? And when we think about God as a judge, what is obvious to you that he is functioning out of, in his nature and his being as judge? And then as he is our redeemer, what aspects of who he fundamentally is come to the fore as we experience him as redeemer?

He's creator, he is judge, he is redeemer, and we'll probably next week just do creator. We'll see how it goes. But we'll talk through: he's a personal spirit, and fundamentally, he's self-existent, he's self-sufficient, he's infinite, he's eternal. Next week, we'll do similar kind of sub-points under creator and then judge and then redeemer.

Good enough? Alright. Thanks for coming. That's all we got today. If you wanna sign up, send me your questions to chsdoctrine@gmail.com, and that's where we'll send you stuff. Thanks.