Running To Win

Narrator: Let us run with endurance, the race that is set before us. Looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. For believers in the race of life, a good question might be, just where did this track begin? What was it like before the Earth was created? If you've ever wondered about things like these, stay with us.

From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running To Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, the series that starts today asks a big question. What is God up to? Today, you'll take us back to the very beginning, a time when God was alone.

Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer: You know, Dave, I know very well that it's not possible for us to get our minds around the fact that God existed from all of eternity, but I think we should try. From everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God.

And of course, as we contemplate God being alone, we have to ask the question, what was He doing? Who was He? Well, of course, we know that He was who He is today because He doesn't change, but imagine the immensity of God.

Narrator: For a gift of any amount, we're making a book available entitled, God's Hidden Agenda: Uncovering His Good Plan in an Evil World. This series of messages has been a blessing to a great number of people, and we now have it in booklet form. For a gift of any amount, it can be yours. Here's what you do: go to RTWOffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337.

Let's think together, as deeply as we can. What was it like when God was alone?

Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer: Now, at the beginning of this series of messages, I would like to ask you to bow with me in prayer.

Our Father, anything that we say about You is inadequate. And yet, Lord, we pray that Your blessed Holy Spirit would do a miracle. Take human words with all of their limitations, and a servant of God who is unworthy and transform this hour into a confrontation with the living and the true God. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.

I want you to know that the most important thing about you is what you think of God. That's the most important thing about you. As you know, I've just returned from Japan and I visited a Shinto shrine. I didn't go inside of it, but as I stood outside, I saw people lining up, coming to clap their hands, to ring a bell, to awaken the gods, and then to give some money.

The people that I was with said that in Japan, there are 8 million gods. 8 million gods. But because there are so many, there is not one God who really commands the allegiance of anyone or who is worthy of the allegiance of anyone.

And so we live in a day and age when paganism is alive and well in different parts of the world. Of course, as Christians, we believe that there is only one God and that He has revealed Himself through the Bible and the evidence that God has indeed revealed Himself through this book is overwhelming. That we see through a glass darkly, but thankfully we do see and we get glimmers of what God is like and what His purposes are in this world.

Of course, the fact that God has revealed Himself to us in the Bible does not mean thereby that we have all the answers. We are deeply perplexed over problems such as the difficulty of evil. When you stop to think of it, you realize that when God chose to create, He already knew ahead of time that that creation would include within it the fact that young children would be abused by their parents, that there would be wars, that there would be problems and earthquakes and alienation and divorce and distress and ill health and the list could go on and on.

In the 18th century, there was a huge earthquake in Lisbon. And when that earthquake took place, the people ran into a church for sanctuary, for refuge, and then the church collapsed. That was the beginning in that area of a tremendous amount of skepticism and anger and hostility toward God.

What is it that God is up to in the world? Why is it that God, the creator of the sun and the moon and the stars, chose to create man and angels and angels that eventually became demons? Why is all this human suffering worth it? What is His hidden agenda in the universe?

Now, there was a time, of course, when God was alone. The Bible says, in the beginning, God created, but before He created, He existed as God, and God alone. We don't know how long that period of time was, but we do know, of course, that there was a period in which God existed and nothing else existed beside Him because He is the Creator, and before He created, there was only God.

What I'd like to do today is to give you five attributes of God, five attributes and some verses of scripture to go with them. And because our time is limited, we will not necessarily turn to all these verses, but you can write them down so that you can read them later.

What is God like? First of all, I wish to say a word about the eternity of God, the fact that He is indeed eternal. It says in Psalm 90, verse 2, that before the mountains were formed, or the Earth was brought forth, catch this expression now, "From everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God."

Now, we are eternal also. Having been created, we are going to live forever. Stop and think that one through. Visualize a bird coming to this Earth every million years and taking one grain of sand. And then in a million years' time, he comes and takes another grain of sand.

Do you realize that by the time all the mountain ranges and all of the sand of the Earth, all of the molecules that make up this existence that we call planet Earth, it would have been moved to another planet. By the time that has happened, eternity has not yet begun. Because it is incorrect to speak of the beginning of an infinite series, because a beginning implies an end.

Think of how awesome eternity is, and you're going to be around that long. But the Bible says that from everlasting to everlasting, God is the Lord. That is to say that God is not only eternal in the sense that He has an eternal future, but He has an eternal past. He existed from all time. He never had a beginning. God always was.

Now that leads us, of course, to the boundaries of our imagination, because it's not possible for us to grasp it, but how wonderful it is to contemplate it. You realize, of course, that if God did not exist from all eternity, nothing now would be in existence. If there was ever a time when there was absolutely nothing, nothing would have ever come to be, because from nothing, nothing can arise.

And that's why there had to be something that existed from all eternity that did not have a beginning so that all of the creation could be explained. God is eternal, from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.

This, by the way, is one of the reasons why atheistic evolution is so absolutely foolish. Because there are even scientists who believe that at one time there was nothing and then suddenly from nothing, all of the galaxies of the heavens came to be. And so an evolutionist believes that nothing times nobody equals everything. That's difficult to believe. The eternity of God.

Secondly, the immensity of God. The immensity of God. How big is this being we call God? After Solomon dedicated the temple, he said in 1 Kings 8, verse 27, during the dedicatory prayer, he said, "The heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee, how much less this house that I have built."

Solomon was saying, "You can dwell in this house, but certainly not all of you can dwell in this house. Not all that there is to God can dwell there, because even the heavens of the heavens cannot contain Thee." God is bigger than the heavens. It is unthinkable that God would have created a universe that was bigger than He is. So how big is the universe?

Now I need to remind you, of course, that light travels at 186,000 miles a second. That means it goes around the world approximately six times in just one second. That's how fast light travels. Light from the sun, which has to come 93 million miles, takes 8 minutes to get here. And so the light that you see from the sun has been traveling for 8 minutes to make it here over that expanse of 93 million miles.

But I want you to be reminded that there is a star near Orion. There is a star that has light that travels to the Earth and it takes 525 years for that light to get here. Remember back in 1517 when Martin Luther on the 31st of October, nailed those theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg.

Now when I say, remember that, it's not that I think that you were there when it happened, but I'm just simply reminding you of that historical fact that you have read about. Do you realize that light from that star that began on that day that Luther tacked those theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, it has not yet arrived. It's on its way, it's hustling at 186,000 miles a second, but it's not here yet.

Give it another 25, 50 years and then it will arrive. Now here's what I want you to understand. That that star's diameter is twice the diameter of the Earth's orbit around the sun. I just read this past week that that star has a diameter between 300 and 400 million miles and it is constantly expanding and shrinking. So sometimes it's only 300 million miles and sometimes it's 400 million miles, but what an awesome star. What an awesome star it is.

And you realize, of course, that that star is only one among thousands of trillions of stars. Chicago Tribune carried an article last year that said astronomers have discovered more than a dozen evenly distributed clumps of galaxies. Galaxy has hundreds of millions of stars. And there are clumps of galaxies stretching across vast expanses of the heavens, suggesting a structure to the universe that is so regular and immense that it defies current theories of cosmic creation and evolution.

It says that this dwarfs the existence of long sheets of galaxies that were dubbed the Great Wall. I need to read only one more paragraph. Scientists were described to see so many large clumps rather than a more uniform distribution of matter, but they were astonished to find the clumps so evenly spaced, each either 400 million or 800 million light years apart, depending on assumptions of how rapidly the universe is expanding.

"The regularity is mind-boggling," said David Koo, one of the astronomers at the University of California in Santa Cruz. Mind-boggling. We're talking about hundreds of millions of light years, thousands of trillions of stars. Do you remember that spaceship that we sent up? I say we, I had no personal involvement except that some of my tax money was used.

There was a time, you know, when a trip to outer space taxed only the imagination. Now it has other implications. But that thing is traveling at 65,000 miles an hour. Now that's going rather slow in relationship to the speed of light. I mean, that's just hobbling along at 65,000 miles an hour.

You know, of course, it took 12 years to get to Triton, and now it is headed for the stellar universe, and it will have to travel 600 years before it comes to the closest star. And after that, it can go on into infinity, and it will never come to the end. And God is beyond that infinite end. The heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee, how much less this house that I have built.

Now, think of the power of God. We're still speaking of the immensity of God. Think of the power of God. You know, a carpenter may take some wood that came from a tree, and he may make a pulpit or he may make some furniture, but he always uses pre-existing materials. Scientists always use pre-existing materials.

Have you ever realized that science that sometimes brags about its ability to replace God? When you meet a scientist like that, why don't you tell him, you know, some afternoon when you have nothing to do, go into a laboratory and take nothing and make a molecule out of it. Just take nothing and make a molecule, one measly molecule. Science has never been able to take nothing and make something out of it.

Now you imagine God when He was alone, there was no matter in the universe. But it says in Psalm 33, verse 6, "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, the host of them by the breath of His mouth. He spoke and He made stars that are hundreds of thousands and millions of times bigger than the Earth." And it says in the first chapter of Genesis, "God created the sun, the moon, and then it says, and he made the stars also," as if to say, "Oh yeah, by the way, just in case we forget, He just happened to make the stars also." Thousands of trillions of them. God is immense, absolutely immense.

Thirdly, the intelligence of God. Theologians call it the omniscience of God, the fact that He knows everything. Do you realize that He knows the longitude and latitude of every single one of the atoms, the molecules that He has created? He knows their their position in the universe, which is constantly changing. You have stars that are pulsating, expanding and then shrinking, and He knows all that?

Do you realize that when a star falls from the heavens, God does not have to calculate to see how fast it's falling? He never has to remeasure the number of drops of ocean in the Pacific after a rainstorm because water has been rearranged. He's got to check the total. He already knows the total.

When the Bible says that the number of hair on your head is numbered, I mean, that's rather small potatoes, particularly for some of you as I look out here. I mean, that's nothing to God. He knows the number of cells that you have in your body. He knows the number of grains of sand that were on your shoes when you came into church today, and Jim probably is interested in that number. Our building superintendent. But God God knows all these things.

And He never learns anything. He never has to study a textbook. He never has some new thought that had never crossed His mind before. Has it ever dawned on you that nothing has ever dawned on God? Nothing. And you realize, of course, that when we speak of His intelligence, we are speaking about His wisdom.

It says in Psalm 104, verse 24, "In wisdom He created the world." Psalm 147, verse 5 says that, "His understanding is infinite." Do you know that you have billions of cells, I think something like four billion cells in your brain? And that each of these cells has as much activity in it as a city the size of Chicago or Tokyo.

And all of that has to work with horrifying accuracy so that you are able to think and you're able to function. And most of the functions that our brain does are unconscious. We're not thinking of it. You know, I had to study the balance system because of some dizziness. I say, study it, the doctors told me about it.

Do you realize that your brain is constantly receiving all kinds of information to keep you balanced when you walk? You're receiving information from your shoulders, from your legs, from your muscles. All of this is constantly being programmed and reevaluated and you're not even aware of it. God is a God of incredible intelligence and wisdom.

Number four, the personality of God. The personality of God. There's so much that could be said about this. When we speak of personality, we mean intelligence. Obviously, we mean intelligence, emotion, and will, and God has all of that. We've spoken of His intelligence. What about His emotion? Is He some being up there that is just absolutely impervious as to what is going on on Earth because He is cold and indifferent and He has no feeling to Him?

Oh, I'm glad that God isn't like that. You read the Old Testament and you find that God is a God of deep emotion. He becomes angry with His people. The Bible says that God became very angry. And even Jesus Christ became livid, the New Testament says. Anger of God. You find that God is also well pleased. We find that things can please Him. God can be grieved. It says, "The Holy Spirit of God is grieved in our hearts because of sin."

God has emotion, God has will. It says in 1 John 4:8, "God is love." He is a personal God. You realize the implications, don't you? The implications for companionship. The fact that the Lord is with us. "I will never leave thee nor forsake thee." And that isn't a computer that's talking. That's the omnipotent, omniscient, great, mighty, personal God who is speaking.

And to a woman who had had a series of bad marriages, five to be exact, and now living with a sixth man without the benefit of marriage. Jesus could say to her, "Those that worship the Father, worship in spirit and in truth, for the Father seeks such to worship Him." A personal God.

Number five, we have the consistency of God. What do I mean by consistency? His unchangeableness. Malachi chapter 3, verse 6, "I am the Lord, I do not change." It says in Hebrews chapter 1 that the Lord created the earth and the sun and the stars, and someday they will all be folded up like a garment, and they will be tucked away, but God remains the same and is unchanged.

Do you realize that there is no attribute that God has that needs development? There's nothing that God is working on to improve Himself. You realize, of course, that there is no attribute that God has that He never always had. God has not changed His mind about a single thing. I know you read the Bible,