The God of the Bible

Our subject this morning is The God of the Bible: A Personal God. I have three texts. You will find the first in Jno. 17:3:

“This is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.”

You will find the second in I Jno. 5:20, 21:

“And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life. My little children, guard yourselves from idols.”

You will find the third in Jno. 20:28:

“Thomas answered and said unto Him, My
Lord and my GodT

It is of immeasurable importance that men know God, that they know “the true God.” To know “the true God” is, as the first of our texts declares, “eternal life.” Not to know “the true God” is eternal death and darkness. No other knowledge is of such importance as the knowledge of God. We are having

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our children taught to-day in our schools, and col¬ leges, and universities a little of pretty much every form of knowledge except the one all-important knowledge, the knowledge of God. It is not permitted in our public schools in California that we teach the Bible, which is the only book in which God has fully revealed Himself, or that we teach them the divine origin and infallibility and matchless value of the Bible. But the teachers in our public schools are permitted to teach our children, and do teach them, a crass and ill-digested evolutionism, that as a matter of demonstrated fact undermines their faith in the Bible, and they are also permitted to teach them in Biblical Criticism what are called “the assured results of modern Scholarship” but what in actual fact are nothing of the kind, but are rather the wild and exploded theories of Wellhausen and Grafe and Kuenen, the very views of the Bible that robbed the civil rulers and army officers of Germany, of their faith in the God of the Bible and resulted in the late war with all its “frightfulness” and the awful havoc that it wrought throughout the whole world. And already the exclusion of the Bible from our schools, and these views of the Bible taught in our schools and the views of God to which the ill-digested evolutionism taught in our schools has led the child, are undermining the morals of our boys and girls in our schools and work¬ ing such a carnival of youthful lust, and impurity, and recklessness, and falsehood, and dishonesty, and Bol¬ shevism among the rising generation as is appalling, and the more appalling the more one knows the facts regarding some of our schools.

Very little of a definite and thorough character is taught about God even in many of our churches. In¬ deed in certain silly circles there is a great outcry against all doctrinal preaching. By many our churches are simply regarded as convenient places in which to exploit the various issues of the day and to raise funds for schools, hospitals, the destitute, and all manner of other objects, good, bad, and indifferent. No! This is the important thing for us all to know and for our preachers to preach, the full truth about God, as He has revealed Himself in the Bible and in His Son Jesus Christ.

This address is the first of a series of addresses on “The God of the Bible.’^ The God of the Bible is not the God of much of our so-called “Modern Thinking,*^ which is not modern at all but a revamping of the old and discarded pantheism of centuries gone by. The “God of the Bible” is not the god of “Christian Science” or of “New Thought” or of “Theosophy” or of “Spiritualism” or of “Unitarianism” or of “The New Theology” or of “Modern Philosophy” or of “Modernism” in general, or of any of the many and ever-multiplying unbiblical cults of the day in which we live. So the full title of the series of sermons is. The God of the Bible as distinguished from the God of “Theosophy,” the God of “Christian Science,” the God of “New Thought,” the God of “Spiritualism,” the God of “Unitarianism,” the God of “The New Theology,” the God of “Modern Philosophy,” and the God of “Modernism” in general, and of the many ever-multiplying unbiblical cults of the day.

The particular subject of our first sermon, the sermon of this morning, is The God of the Bible: A Personal God. We shall see as we proceed that the god of Christian Science and some of these other cults and the god that is taught in some of our supposedly orthodox theological seminaries, is not a personal God.

/. What Does the Word “Personal” Mean When Applied to God?

In the first place then let us find what the word “Personal” means when applied to God, or when accurately used in other connections. What is a per¬ son? The marks of personality are knowledge, feel¬ ing and will. Any being who knows and feels and wills is a person, whether he is visible or invisible, whether he has a body or has not a body. Many people think when you say “God is a Person” that you mean God has hands and feet and eyes and ears and so on. But having hands and feet and eyes and ears and so on, or in general having a body, is not the mark of Personality but of Corporeity, which is an entirely different matter. Whether or not God has a body or a visible form we will consider at some later day, but that has nothing to do with God’s being or not being a Person.

If the Lord tarries and you and I pass through the experience of what men call death before He comes, we will pass out of this present dwelling place, i. e., this present body, and “depart to be with Christ,” and we shall not get our resurrection bodies until He comes again; but we shall not cease to be persons, we shall ‘depart to be with Christ,” and we shall think and feel, and we shall know great joy, for ‘‘it is very far better” (Phil. 1:23) to leave the body and be with Him. We shall, as Paul puts it in another place, be “‘absent from the body, and at home with the Lord” (II Cor. 5:8). It is clear then that personality is one thing, and that having a body is an entirely different thing.

It is one of the most common errors of our day to confuse Personality with Corporeity. I am inclined to think that when Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy denied so emphatically as she did the Personality of God, she was thinking of Corporeity. In fact in the immediately preceding paragraph of “Science and Health,” she says: “Christian Science strongly designates the thought that God is not corporeal but incorporeal, — that is bodiless. Mortals are corporeal but God is incorporeal” (italics Mrs. Eddy’s). It would not be a thing to be wondered at or surprised at if Mrs. Eddy had been thus confused in her thought; for in her writings, especially her earlier writings, before some person or persons who had a more accurate knowledge of the meaning of English words than she possessed corrected them, she displayed an amazing ignorance, not only of the facts of science and religion but also of the meaning of words, except as she had caught some glimpses of things from her study of Dr. Quimby’s writings, which she so unblushingly borrowed and failed to return, and of which she ultimately refused to acknowledge the ownership. It is true that she writes in this connection, “As the words Person and Personal are commonly and ignorantly employed, they often lead, when applied to Deity, to confused and erroneous conceptions of divinity, and its distinction from humanity,’’ but she goes on with words that seem to indicate confusion in her own mind as to the distinction between corporeity and personality. But however that may be, she certainly did obscure the great truth of ‘‘the Personality of God” all through her writings. She constantly taught that God was a mere abstraction. She taught not only that God is love (which is true, if we properly understand the meaning of the words, which she did not), but she also taught that “Love is God,” which is not true. Her teachings, carried out to their logical conclusion, lead to the radically false and utterly damnable and hopelessly damning thought that “God is us (all of us)” and “we are God” (not gods but God). Mrs. Eddy says in this very connection, speaking of the Personality of God, “If the term personality, as applied to God, means infinite personality, then God is personal Being — in this sense but not in the lower sense) “Science and Health,” 69th Edition, p. 10). You will notice that she says, “God is personal Being,” that is, of course, only an abstract Being in general. She does not say, “God is a Personal Being,” that is, a definite Person, separate and distinct from other persons, all of whom He has created. In the next sentence she says “An Infinite mind and a finite form do not, cannot coalesce.” Here is another illustration of her dense ignorance of the meaning of words. No one, even though he believes most strongly that God has a form, thinks that He and His form ‘’coalesce,” he thinks they co-exist. It is unfortunate that Mrs. Eddy did not have a good dictionary and study it more assiduously. The correct definition of “coalesce, ’’ given in one of the most recently published dictionaries, and one of the most re¬ liable, The Desk Standard Dictionary, is, “to grow or come together into one; fuse, blend.” Now, no one who believes that God has an outward form in which He manifests Himself, thinks that He Himself, an intelligent, thinking, willing, determining Personality, “grows together into one” with the form He inhabits, or “fuses” with it, or “blends” with it.

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