Amelia Church of Christ - Christian Church in Amelia, OH near Cincinnati in Clermont County

There are some things in life that I just can’t understand. No matter how hard I try, I simply cannot wrap my mind around them.

I don’t understand this year’s Reds. I don’t understand how a team that showed so much promise in spring training could absolutely tank in the regular season. I don’t understand how a team that leads the world in home runs can also have the worst record in Major League Baseball. I just don’t get it.

I don’t understand NASCAR. I know that some of you are huge fans, and that’s cool. But personally, I don’t get it. I mean, what do these guys actually do? Drive fast and turn left. I don’t get it.

I don’t understand Andrew Fischer. Have you heard about this guy? He is a 22-year-old guy from Omaha, Nebraska. Back in 2005, he began selling advertising space on his forehead to the highest bidder on eBay. He is wiling to have a non-permanent logo or brand name tattooed on his forehead for 30 days. I don’t get it. And you know what else I don’t get? People are bidding thousands of dollars! Since 2005, Andrew Fisher has made $50,000 selling ad space on his noggin.

There are a lot of things in life that I can’t fully understand. These are just a few of them. I could go on and on about stuff that I just can’t wrap my mind around. I do want to give you one more… God.

You and I can’t fully understand God. He is beyond understanding. We can’t fully know God. He is beyond fully knowing. To put it in theological terms, this is the doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God.

RC Sproul wrote, “No human being has the ability to understand God exhaustively. There is a built-in barrier that prohibits a total, comprehensive understanding of God.”

The problem is that we have limited, human understanding. So it makes sense that our small brains cannot fully grasp God. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t know anything about God. God has revealed things about Himself that we can learn. While we can never fully understand or comprehend God, He has revealed enough. He has given us enough that we can learn some of what He is like. He has given us enough that we can have a relationship with Him.

The Bible says that, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever…” (Deuteronomy 29:29, NIV)

According to this verse, there are two sides of God. The hidden side and the revealed side. There’s not much we can do about the hidden side of God except to experience wonder and amazement. It should cause us to realize that there is so much about God that we do not know, and that we can never know. He is indescribable and incomprehensible.

But what about the other side of God? The revealed side. Karl Barth, a great theologian and scholar, was once asked by one of his students, “Dr. Barth, what is the most profound thing you have ever learned in your study of theology?”

Dr. Barth thought for a moment, and then he told his students the most profound theological truth he had ever learned. He said, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

You see, even the greatest theologian really never rises above a child’s level of understanding of the depth and riches of God. There is so much that we can never know.

Our job is to work with the small amount of knowledge that God has given us about Himself…the things that He has revealed to us. This is why we’re starting this brand new series.

What’s God Really Like? This is the question that we’re going to try to answer over the next couple of months. This is a huge question, so this is a huge series. Normally a series of sermons might last 3 or 4 weeks. This is a monster series. This beast is going to roll on for the next 8 weeks, taking us all the way through the summer.

Each week we’re going to tackle a different characteristic of God. Some of them you may already know about; others may surprise you. Obviously from what we’ve already learned this morning, we can never know God fully, but there is a lot that we can know. That’s what we’re going to focus on in this series.

Today, we’re going to start where we have to start. God is supreme.

In one of his letters to Erasmus, Martin Luther wrote, “Your thoughts of God are too human.” Your thoughts of God are too human.

He was basically reiterating the truth of Psalm 50. “…you thought, "God is just like us!"” (Psalm 50:21, CEV)

Aren’t we guilty of doing that? Somehow bringing God to our level? There is a paradox in our faith journey with God. The paradox is that God is our friend, but he is also our God. The only way to make any sense of this paradox is to get it in the right order. And the truth is that God has to be our God first. He cannot be your friend unless he is your God first.

A lot of us have this idea that when our life here is over and we get to the other side of eternity, we’re going to go up, slap Jesus a high five, and just party on. Don’t get me wrong. Heaven is a party, but the first thing you will do is not slap Jesus a high five. The first thing you will do is fall on your face in worship because he is God.

We’ve got to recapture the view of God expressed in Hebrews 12. The Bible says, “…let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.” (Hebrews 12:28b-29, ESV)

Look at the truth expressed here. Worship that is acceptable to God is worship that is offered “with reverence and awe.” If that’s true, then the flip side must be true. Worship that isn’t reverent and filled with awe is not going to be accepted by God. He rejects that offering of worship.

Do you just waltz into God’s presence? Do you approach him as flippantly as you would approach one of your buddies? When you come here to worship, do you come with reverence and awe, knowing that you’re coming to worship the King of kings and the Lord of lords?

One of the most reverent, awe-inspiring things I’ve ever witnessed is the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery. I haven’t been there since I was in high school, but I can still vividly remember the experience. The clacking of the soldiers shoes, the commander barking out orders, the pageantry of the whole experience. But the thing I remember the most is the absolute silence of the crowd. I’ve never seen a group of people so reverently silent. Everyone knew they were in the presence of something greater than themselves. They approached the time with great honor and great reverence.

When is the last time we approached God like that? With reverence and awe, knowing that we’re in the presence of the majesty and supremacy of God? For some of us, we need a higher view of God. A view that fill us with wonder and awe of God’s supremacy.

The prophet Isaiah wrote, “Look up into the heavens. Who created all the stars? He brings them out like an army, one after another, calling each by its name. Because of his great power and incomparable strength, not a single one is missing. (Isaiah 40:26, NIV)

You may remember from high school physics that light travels about 5.87 trillion miles a year. The Milky Way galaxy, of which our solar system is a part, is about a hundred thousand light years across. That means our galaxy is about 587 thousand trillion miles in diameter. And it is just one of a million such galaxies within optical range of our stronger telescopes.

In our galaxy alone there are about 100 billion stars. Our sun is a modest-sized star with a temperature around 6,000 degrees centigrade. It travels at about 155 miles per second.

And our God is bigger than all that. He created the stars, put them in place, and knows them by name. He is supreme over his creation.

In the book of Colossians, Paul writes, “Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. He existed before God made anything at all and is supreme over all creation. Christ is the one through whom God created everything in heaven and earth. He made the things we can see and the things we can't see—

kings, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities. Everything has been created through him and for him. He existed before everything else began, and he holds all creation together.” (Colossians 1:15-17, NLT)

Our God, Jesus Christ, is the Creator God. He has always existed and he has created everything that exists. And not only has he created everything, but he is engaged in creation. God rules over all of His creation.

This is what we mean when we say that God is supreme. He is before all, over all, and in all. Outside of God, there is nothing because everything in creation is held together in Him.

For some of you, these lessons are nothing new to you. You know that God has always existed and you know that God created everything and that He rules over His creation. So you may be ready to check out on me because you feel like you’ve heard this before. But hang with me…This is powerful stuff that affects our lives in several key ways.

In each message in this series, we’re going to talk about several impact points. These impact points give us practical application of what we’re seeing in the Bible. These are the points where what we’re learning about God from the Scripture impacts our daily lives.

First of all, if God is supreme, then I need to see my life differently.

This is a pretty lengthy quote from John Piper, but it’s worth it. John Piper said:

“We live in an unbelievably naive and superficial age. Something is superficial when the treatment of it involves everything except the main things. As a scholar you can say much intelligently about a great many things. Yet if you leave out the main connections, you're treating them superficially.

Therefore, I conclude that the communication media in America is superficial. I conclude that the educational enterprises in our universities are superficial. I conclude virtually all history books are superficial, virtually all public education is superficial, and virtually all editorial news commentary is superficial for one simple reason: the incredible, unimaginable disregard for God in it all.

God is the main reality in the universe; the sustaining power of everything that is. Therefore, any time you treat anything without relation to God, you are being superficial.”

How many of us are guilty of living our lives on a superficial level? Do you see God? Everyday? In everything?

Look again at what Colossians says. “Everything has been created through him and for him. He existed before everything else began, and he holds all creation together.” (Colossians 1:16b-17, NLT)

What has been created through him? Everything. He holds what together? All creation. God is supreme over everything.

We get that when we’re thinking in context of the cosmos. You know, all those stars we were talking about earlier. The great expanse of the universe. The wonder of creation. We see God’s supremacy on display in those things. But here’s the problem.

We often see God’s supremacy in light years, but not in life’s moments. We see a supreme God creating the heavens and the earth, but we don’t connect that supremacy to our commute to work, our cooking dinner, and our rocking our kids to sleep at night.

If God is not supreme over life’s details, then he is not supreme.

I’ve already quoted from John Piper. He is so passionate about teaching and preaching the supremacy of God. Listen to what he had to say in one of his messages.

John said that he prays this prayer for his children.

“God, in all of their learning grant that they would see you. May they see you in geometry, history, philosophy and English. May they see you in spelling."

He said, “I can hear the cynics. "Right…Christian spelling. Give me a break!" But that's the way a superficial, God-neglecting cynic responds to talk about God-centered spelling.

I remember the day when my non-academic, dyslexic son said to me, "Why should I care about spelling the way everybody else spells?" I countered, "Well, you won't be able to communicate as well if you don't learn how to spell the way everybody else spells." "I don't care about communicating well,” he replied. “Why should I care about communicating well?"

The blasphemous, standard answer to this question is, "If you don't learn how to spell and communicate, you won't succeed in business and make as much money." What a Godless answer.

Here's another answer; the one I gave my son. "Ben, you should care about communicating and learning how to spell because you were created in the image of God. And God's a great communicator. You should want to communicate because you’ve got something infinitely important to communicate. You’ve got God to communicate. You’ve got salvation to communicate. You’ve got Jesus to communicate. You can't be indifferent, Ben, to communication. God is love, and we scorn his love when we are indifferent about communicating good news to our neighbors, when they desperately need to hear these things. You need to care about communicating because language was God's idea from the beginning. It was God's idea. He is not a God of chaos and confusion. He's a God of beauty and order. He's not a God of anarchy, even spelling anarchy.”

And then John challenges us as God’s people, “If you don't care about the supremacy of God in spelling, then you won't get my plea. If we…don't lift up the supremacy of God week in and week out, showing a passion for it in all things, such as spelling, voting, sex, eating, and the stock market, who's going to do it?"

Do you see the supremacy of God everywhere you look in your life? Are you training your kids to see God in everything? In homework? In sports? In food? In fun? Are you teaching them that everything they do and everything they are is a reflection of the supremacy of God?

Or have we become conditioned to keep things in our lives in different compartments? God belongs in the church compartment. And because God is in the church compartment, we don’t see him when we’re mowing the yard. We don’t notice him when we’re planning our vacation. We’re not aware of him when we’re standing in line at Wal-Mart.

The Bible is clear that God is supreme over all his creation, the big and the small. He is supreme over the universe, he is supreme over the molecule. And our lives should be a reflection of that. The supremacy of God fills light years, and it should also fill our life’s moments.

Another impact point that we need to realize is that, if God is supreme, then He doesn’t have to check with me about His decisions.

I remember a conversation I had a few years ago with a buddy of mine who was a youth minister at the time. He had recently been married, and as we were talking on the phone, I asked him how things were going for him and his new bride. He hesitated, and I knew something was wrong, so I asked what was going on. He told me that he had scheduled an overnight youth event without checking with his wife first. Turns out she had a family gathering that same day. There was trouble in paradise! He learned very quickly that, before he makes these kind of decisions, he needs to check with his wife first. Ain’t it the truth, guys?

All of us have people who we need to consult before making certain decisions. Your spouse, your boss, your parents, etc. You’ve got to consult with these people before you move on a certain decision.

But it’s different with God. A lot of people live their lives believing that God works for them. If God is good and loving, then He should do what I want Him to do. But this just is not the case. God is supreme. This means that He doesn’t have to check with me before He makes decisions. It also means that He doesn’t have to explain Himself, afterward.

Job was a guy that we read about in the Old Testament. Poor Job had lost everything. His family, his livestock, and even his health. And, when you couldn’t stand it anymore, he began to complain to God about his predicament. He accused God of being unjust and unfair. God listened for a while, and then He responded.

Then the LORD answered Job from the whirlwind: "Who is this that questions my wisdom with such ignorant words? Brace yourself, because I have some questions for you, and you must answer them.

"Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you know so much. Do you know how its dimensions were determined and who did the surveying?

What supports its foundations, and who laid its cornerstone as the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy? (Job 38:1-7, NLT)

God then goes on for four whole chapters asking Job question after question after question. Were you there when I did this? Can you do this? When God was finally finished, here’s what Job had to say…

Then Job replied to the LORD:

"I know that you can do anything, and no one can stop you. You asked, `Who is this that questions my wisdom with such ignorance?' It is I. And I was talking about things I did not understand, things far too wonderful for me.” (Job 42:1-3, NLT)

“I know that you can do anything, and no one can stop you.” Job is admitting that God is supreme. God didn’t have to check with Him about His decisions.

And the harsh truth is that he doesn’t have to check with us, either. A lot of times, life deals us a tough hand. It’s tempting to question God, even blame Him. And God is big enough to handle it when we pour out our true feelings and emotions to him. But we may think God owes us an explanation, and the truth is, He doesn’t. God never ever tells Job why he was suffering. He never explained why he lost his health, his livelihood, and his children. Job questioned, “Why? Why God? Why?” And God’s answer was, “I am supreme.” God is supreme, and therefore He doesn’t work for us. He doesn’t have to clear things with us.

But the thing we see in Job is that, even though he didn’t get his questions answered, he was still satisfied. And that’s because of our third impact point.

If God is supreme, then he can be trusted.

My three year old son, Ryan, likes to fight. It’s just what boys do. The other day, Ryan had his Superman pajamas on, complete with cape, and he was throwing punches at all the invisible bad guys. He really put the smack down on them!

But sometimes invisible opponents aren’t what Ryan wants. He’ll come up to me and say, “Daddy, let’s fight.” And we’ll start swinging punches at each other. Obviously, it’s pretty much a pretend bout. In a real fight, I think I could take Ryan. He’s got a wicked left hook, but I still think I could take him. I’m obviously much more powerful than he is and I could really hurt him if I wanted to.

But I don’t want to because I love him. I am infinitely more powerful than he is, but I won’t use that supremacy to hurt him because I love him. And Ryan knows this. Kids with an abusive father don’t come up to them and say, “Daddy, let’s fight.” When daddy wants to fight, they run and hide. But Ryan has no concept of this because he completely trusts me. He knows that I would never hurt him in our a little fights.

God is supreme. His power is limitless, and yet, he can be trusted. Because not only is God supremely powerful, but he is also supremely good. That doesn’t mean that bad things won’t happen in our lives. In fact, some of you have walked in here with a train wreck happening in your life. God may not answer your question about why this is happening. He is supreme, and he doesn’t have to check with us. He doesn’t have to apologize. He doesn’t owe us an explanation. But, even though he doesn’t have to answer to us, he still loves us. He can be trusted.

We learned earlier that God’s supremacy means that He is not limited by time; He has no beginning or ending. He has always existed and will always exist. And because he is eternal and because he is good, this means is that He’ll always be there for us.

The book of Hebrews tells us, “God has said, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you." So we say with confidence, "The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?" (Hebrews 13:5b-6, NIV)

God is a good God. He has supremacy in existence and he has supremacy in goodness. And because that’s true, we know that He will always be there for us, no matter what we’re going through. He can be trusted because he is supreme.

Mike Edmisten

Tags: God's nature, supremacy, What's God Really Like