‘Behold, the Lamb of God’
ide
o amnos tou theou
College Study
37th teaching
5.13.2013
“God’s Necessity”
Tonight, we come to the end of a long road.
We’ve reached the conclusion of God’s list of metaphysical
qualities. So to commemorate the occasion, I have a gift for you. My wife and I
put together these handy bookmarks: keep them in your bible to help you
remember God’s metaphysical attributes, so you can remember what God actually
is. Each of these attributes we’ve covered in weeks past and there’s a little
blurb to help you grasp the gist of what each doctrine means, as well as two
verses that contain the doctrine in Scripture, one from the Old Testament and
one from the New Testament. I hope that these help you to retain the knowledge
of the Holy One and aid you in serving this knowledge to others. I’d encourage
you to commit these to memory.
I found a picture today that I think sums up what we’re
trying to accomplish with info like this: it’s a portrait of Augustine.
Probably not what he looked like, but that’s okay. A nifty detail of this
picture is the action happening in it: veritas,
that is truth, is coming from heaven and passing through the brain and
enflaming the heart. That’s exactly our goal. We’ve looked at divine truth as
revealed from God through His own self-revelation, we’ve passed the truth
through our brains in thinking about it and then the truth is realized and
acted upon and held by our hearts. I do hope that you’ve learned much in
studying God’s metaphysical attributes. Maybe you’ve discovered things that you
didn’t know about God before. You have only to meditate and think on those
things that you might hide that truth in your heart and allow the truth to set
it aflame. Cool painting.
Anyway, though, we have one final metaphysical attribute to
cover tonight. Tonight’s study is entitled: “God’s Necessity”.
We begin with the Scripture, so turn to Colossians 1:15-18.
In summary, this passage points to God as the Uncaused
Causer, the First Being. In the words of Aristotle, the Prime Mover, the being
who causes all the movement in the universe but is Himself unmoved. This is the
sense of the phrase: “Firstborn over all
creation.” That does not mean to say that God or Jesus Christ was ever born
and that He was simply born first. Rather it refers to eminence. He is
firstborn, meaning chief, the most important Being over all created things.
So we know that God was here first, He made everything else
and He sustains everything. In Him all things consist, currently.
In several ways, this points to God existing necessarily,
in other words, it is necessary that God exists, God’s existence is a
necessity.
Now two keywords are going to help us tonight. The first
keyword is necessity, our topic. We
know what that means. Simple definition: Necessity means God must exist, in
fact that it is impossible for God not to exist. Necessity means He cannot not exist. As the First Being, as
the Uncaused Causer, as the Prime Mover, as the Firstborn over all Creation,
God’s existence is necessary, or we would say this refers to God’s Necessity.
The other keyword is the word: contingent. Contingent means the opposite of Necessity. Contingent
means something could not exist or can not exist. Contingent refers to
something which could have possible nonexistence, whereas Necessity means
something must exist necessarily.
To illustrate, I’m excited to be able to refer to one of my
favorite Christmas films. It’s definitely nowhere near Christmas and today’s
weather proves it, but I’ll take any opportunity to talk about It’s a Wonderful Life. I love this movie
so much. And more so now that it’s helpful in clarifying a doctrine!
In It’s a Wonderful
Life, the protagonist George Bailey finds himself in serious trouble on
Christmas Eve and contemplates taking his own life. However, an angel named
Clarence is sent from heaven to save George from suicide, and he does so by
pulling him out of his depression by showing George what it would be like if
George Baily had never existed. And George finds out about all the many ways in
which he had, in his own humble way, touched so many lives of those around him,
and how the world would be a far different and far more terrible place if he
had never lived. His hometown of Bedford Falls is radically changed, full of
casinos and sleazy nightclubs and amoral people and drunks. Even his wife is
seen to have become an old maid without his existence.
Now the fact that George sees a possible world in which
George Baily never existed tells us about the keyword contingent. George Baily’s existence was contingent, meaning it is
possible that he could not exist. Sure the world might be different without
George Baily, but the world would still be there, reality would still be there
without his contingent existence.
The same thing is true for you and I. What would Earth be
like if you and I had never been born? We don’t know. Nobody gets as clear of a
vision as George Baily got. But, truth be told, there was a time when you
didn’t exist in this world, and there will be a time when you no longer exist
in this world again. Your existence is therefore contingent. Your nonexistence
is quite possible. You were certainly nonexistent once! It is not essential or
necessary that you exist at all. Had you died in the womb, or had your parents
never met, or had God never created the universe, you would never have existed.
Reality can just as well do without you and I because we are contingent
creatures.
But on the flip side, the other keyword, necessity.
Necessity is a God-word. It’s a theological term for a reason. Only God’s
metaphysical existence is necessary. Only God needs to exist. Everything and
everyone else is contingent but God alone could never not exist.
To clarify and detail the statement of this doctrine of
God’s Necessity, we shall have three brief points tonight:
1.
Necessity and the Divine
2.
Necessity and the Cosmos
3.
Necessity and the Cross
1.
Necessity and the Divine
First off, what is the biblical basis for this doctrine?
Sure, we quoted one passage in Colossians. Is there anything else? Did anyone
discover any verses for Project Scriptura?
Necessity, as I said, is a God-word. He is unique in this
respect. A world without you and me is perfectly possible, but a world without
God is not possible at all. What God has that we don’t is the property of
necessary existence. Now what we’ll come to find in a minute, is why this is
necessary. Necessary existence is essential to being God. God cannot be God if
He fails to exist.
There’s a figure of church history becoming increasingly
familiar to us is Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury, who we’ve referred to a few
times now. He was a monk and philosopher who died in the year 1109AD. Anselm
believed that God cannot even be thought not to exist. He believed that God
possesses existence “to the highest degree”. He believed that if God were to exist, that God would not
be capable of not-existing.
Anselm was influential in much of the development of
Christian theology, but one major contribution he gave to the church took the
form of what was later called the Ontological Argument. What is that? It is an
argument for the existence of God.
Do you remember three other classic arguments for the
existence of God? There is the Cosmological argument, arguing from a Universe
that was caused to a First Uncaused Causer. There is the Teleological argument,
arguing from a Universe that possesses design to a Designer of the Universe.
And there is the Moral argument, arguing from the existence of morals and laws
in human nature to the existence of a Moral Lawgiver who put those morals and
laws there.
Now the Ontological argument is still an argument for the
existence of God. Oddly enough, Immanuel Kant was the one who defined Anselm’s
argument as an Ontological argument. Ontology means “that which is”, so an
argument that is Ontological is concerned with God’s Being or “that which is”.
But the Ontological argument is very different from the other arguments for
God’s existence.
Whereas the Cosmological and the Teleological and the Moral
arguments each argue from existing evidence and observation (for example: you
know there’s a universe that once began, therefore you can argue to a Beginner,
or you can see that there is design in nature, therefore you can argue to a
Designer), quite differently, the Ontological argument uses mostly a priori reasoning, that basically means
it uses knowledge independent of experience. With a priori reasoning, you don’t have to discover any evidence to come
to your conclusion.
British philosopher Galen Strawson says that an a priori statement is one in which “you
can see that it is true just lying on your couch. You don’t have to get up off
your couch and go outside and examine the way things are in the physical world.
You don’t have to do any science”.
A good example of an a
priori statement is the statement
“All bachelors are unmarried”. Now do you have to know all the bachelors in the
world to know that this statement is true? Nope. Well, what if there is one
bachelor in the world who is married?
Well, then he’d no longer be a bachelor. By definition, all bachelors are
unmarried. That’s an a priori truth.
You can see it’s true all on its own, regardless of gathering any experience or
data or evidence.
Now if I were to say “All bachelors are happy”, that would
not be an a priori statement, see?
Because then, I would have to know all the bachelors to know whether they are
all happy or not. The truth of the statement would lie with the gathering of
evidence, the truth wouldn’t lie within the statement itself.
So that immediately sets apart our Ontological argument.
Other arguments for God’s existence start with data and argue to God. The
Ontological argument seeks to make a statement that is necessarily true of God
by definition.
Now the Ontological argument can take several forms, but each
of them typically begin with the definition of God and conclude with His
necessary existence.
Anselm’s original explanation of the argument went
something like this: “By definition, God is a being over which no greater being
can be conceived. The idea of God exists in the mind. A being which exists both
in the mind and in reality is greater than a being that exists only in the
mind. If God only exists in the mind, then we can conceive of a greater being—that
which exists in reality as well. We cannot imagine something that is greater
than God, by definition. Therefore, God exists both in the mind and in
reality.”
Crazy bit of thinking there. But you see how he argues from
the definition of what God is to God’s actual existence. If we can think of a
being of which nothing greater can be conceived, that being must exist in
reality. This indicates that God’s existence is necessary because God exists by
definition as the greatest possible being.
French thinker Rene Descartes formed other ontological
arguments. He argued that God’s existence can be deduced from His nature.
Descartes said “Certainly, the idea of God, or a supremely perfect Being, is
one that I find within me just as surely as the idea of any shape or number.
And my understanding that it belongs to His nature that He always exists is no
less clear and distinct than is the case when I prove of any shape or number
that some property belongs to its nature”. In other words, according to the
definition of God as a supremely perfect Being, God must exist since a perfect
Being, holding all perfections, must hold the perfection of existence by
definition.
Throughout the generations, there have been several other
philosophers and thinkers who have tried their brains with varied forms of
Ontological arguments. One Ontological argument even came from a mathematician,
I was surprised to discover, named Kurt Godel.
Note this only works with God. God by definition exists as
a necessary Being. Moses Norton by definition does not mean I exist
necessarily. In fact, human by definition only means I exist contingently.
While the Ontological arguments are not the strongest
arguments for the existence of God, as they are primarily a priori and people like to dismiss it for lack of evidential
proof, it is interesting in that it starts with the definition of God and goes
on to prove His necessary existence in that way.
Ontological arguments have been challenged and restated
many times, but for the sake of time, all we need to know is that the
Ontological arguments, in their varied forms, say that God is a necessary Being
by definition and therefore He must exist. If God exists, then He by definition
cannot not exist. That’s different than just attempting to prove that God
exists. Necessity is claiming that if God exists than He exists necessarily, or
that it is impossible for Him not to exist. And to argue against that is
something else entirely.
The Christian apologist, William Lane Craig, says “Thus,
the atheist is thrust into the awkward position of having to say that God’s
existence is impossible. It is not enough to say in fact God does not exist;
the atheist must hold that it is impossible that God exists—a much more radical
claim”. Atheists often debate whether there may be or may not be a God, but to
have to argue that God’s existence is flat out impossible is a greatly
different difficulty.
2.
Necessity and the Cosmos
The Greek word cosmos
refers to an orderly system, that is the orderly system of our universe. As far
as the cosmos and God’s necessity are concerned, it is necessary that God
exists in order for us to have a cosmos. If God did not make the universe, then
there is no universe. The cosmos could not just spontaneously create itself
before it was in existence to do so. Neither could the cosmos design itself as
an orderly system, as the Greek word suggests it is. If there is order, there
of necessity must be an Orderer.
God is the beginningless Beginner. He never came into
existence, though He gave existence to everything else. It is therefore, in
this sense, necessary that God exist since the universe exists (the
Cosmological argument in a nutshell).
Now we’ve already examined this idea of God’s existence
being necessary for the existence of the universe. We’ve examined it in the
form of the Cosmological and Teleological arguments. We’ve also examined this
idea in the form of the doctrine of God’s Aseity. Remember that?
What does God’s Aseity mean? It means that He is
self-sufficient. He needs nothing and is totally independent, whereas
everything else needs God and is totally dependent upon Him for their creation
and sustenance.
Actually, Aseity and Necessity are kindred-doctrines. They
are so closely related that some theologians lump them together. But you can
see that they are really two separate metaphysical statements: Aseity meaning
self-sufficiency, Necessity meaning necessary existence.
Therefore, since these are kindred, probably most of the
verses on God’s Aseity also refer to God’s Necessity. And since Aseity is
supported by the biblical data, as we saw many weeks ago when we studied
Aseity, then Necessity is also supported by the
biblical data.
As an example, Acts
17:25, Paul says God “is not served
by human hands, as if He needed anything, because He Himself gives all men life
and breath and everything else”. That’s a reference to the doctrines of
both Aseity and Necessity.
So as far as the cosmos, this orderly universe we live in
is concerned, God is absolutely necessary. If there is no necessary God in
existence, then there is no universe in existence. That’s the entire premise of
the Bible from chapter one, verse one: “In
the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” It’s entirely
necessary that God be there at the beginning to create the universe which is
dependent upon Him.
3.
Necessity and the Cross
So we’ve seen so far two
things:
1. that philosophically and
logically, God by definition as supremely perfect Being must exist necessarily,
2. that evidentially and
biblically, God as a Creator must necessarily exist since the cosmos exists.
We have four strong proofs then that God exists
necessarily: philosophy, logic, evidence and Scripture.
What then have we to say in regards to God’s necessity and
the cross? It is this: we know that God’s existence is necessary but do you and
I portray God to others as a necessity.
Now I’m not referring to the necessity of preaching the
gospel. I think we all understand that. I think we know that it is necessary to
share the gospel with others so that they may be saved. As Paul said “woe is me if I do not preach the gospel!”
Yes, it is absolutely necessary for the Christian to preach the gospel.
But I’m referring not to the necessity of preaching but to preaching
necessity.
I think that there is a very real danger of preaching the
gospel like a door-to-door salesman sells his products. We can say to the
unsaved that they ought to try Christ so He can better their lives and clean
them up in very much the same way that a salesman can say to a potential buyer
that they ought to try this or that product so it can better their lives and
clean up their carpets.
And in this way, we can come at the preaching all wrong. We
can come at the preaching of the cross in such a way that we make it ought to
be an option, that we make Christ out to be an accessory that someone ought to
try out, sort of have a sample of or try a demo out.
But let me tell you, with all that we have learned of the
great God’s metaphysical attributes, I can say that God Almighty will be an
accessory to no one. He is not merely an option for bettering someone’s life.
He is not simply a bit of entertainment or a bit of comfort on the rainy days
of life. He is not an accessory, He is a necessity.
And we should come to preach His salvation like that. We
should come to present Christ to others not as an option, but as an absolute
necessity, not presenting Him with indifference but begging and pleading that
they make this solemn decision for the sake not of their carpets getting
cleaned up but for the sake of their eternal soul that is risking eternal
damnation.
We should come, therefore, no to preach the gospel like a
salesman, but like a watchman on a watchtower, warning the people of the
impending judgment and the way of salvation.
This is precisely the biblical language for preaching.
Consider Ezekiel 3:17, the LORD says
to the prophet “Son of man, I have made
you a watchman for the house of Israel; therefore hear a word from My mouth,
and give them warning from Me…”
Christianity today has got it all wrong! We’re not to say
simply “have a little bit of Christ, try it out and you’ll get along better in
life”. No! We’re to cry out for the danger coming upon the souls of men and
warn them and proclaim the way of escape in the Cross of Christ.
So then, I believe as God so said to the prophet Ezekiel,
He says to you and I today: Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the city
of Lancaster, for the city of Palmdale, for the state of California, etc… You
see the point. Where you are at, you are to be a herald, a proclaimer, a
watchman.
We’re not selling Christ off like trinkets in a market
totally full, totally inundated with other religions. Jesus did not say “I am a way, a truth, a life”. He said
He was the way, the truth, the life!
That’s immensely different. That’s immensely radical. That’s necessity.
Therefore, we have learned that God is necessary, then
preach God as necessary. God will be no one’s accessory, but He would be
delighted to be anyone’s necessity.
To take that one personal and thereby painful step closer:
If we proclaim God as necessary for the unbeliever, do we live as if He is
necessary for our own lives.
I heard this story about Martin Luther that I think is
incredible.
Martin Luther is sitting in gloomy thought in his study when
his wife walks in dressed all in black as if in mourning. Martin looks at her
as says ‘My dear, has someone we know died?’ His wife replies, ‘Yes. God is
dead’. Luther says to her, ‘Come, come, now what a dreadful thing to say!’ To
which his wife responds, ‘Then tell me, Martin, if God is alive, why you live
the way you do’.
Now that is a challenging story. Do you and I live our
lives as if God is alive, as if God is a total necessity for our lives? Why are
we so often depressed and despondent and worried and anxious and fretful and
frightened if the Necessary God is alive?
How often we go without thinking about the Necessary God.
How often we entertain gloomy thoughts instead of thoughts of how the Necessary
God supplies, sustains and exists. Everything we are and have and receive all
depend, all are contingent upon Him.
If God is a necessity for the universe, is He a necessity
for you? How ought you to live your life in the light of this knowledge of
God’s necessity? I think it ought to change not just our preaching, but our
very thoughts and our very emotions, our every outlook upon the world, upon
others and upon ourselves.
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