Sermon Tone Analysis

A few years ago, I head a Pastor at an Missouri Baptist Convention annual meeting say, /“God created us so that He could love us and that we might return love to Him.

Reverently speaking, God was lonely.

He wanted someone to love and someone who would love Him.”/

He received applause and a goodly number of ‘Amens’.

I thought, “Oh my.” Oh my that he would say such a thing and Oh my that so many Baptists would enthusiastically respond the way they did.

It sounded so, so ... well, so biblical.

After all, God is love and He loves His creation.

It’s a sentiment that preaches well.

However, the man was just flat-out wrong!

Sermons like this may preach well, but they do not represent a biblical understanding of the character of the One true and Triune-God.

God is not lonely.

God has never been lonely.

God will never be lonely.

The Triune Godhead—God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit—three Persons, co-equal; co-eternal; co-existing—are never found wanting, inadequate, or in need, in any manner whatsoever.

We were not created to satisfy God's "lonely" feelings.

To suggest so, is to suggest that God is less than God; it is to suggest that God was, without His creation, somehow incomplete, or lacking, or deficient in some way until He made us.

This sentimentalism unwittingly redefines God in a way that God has not defined Himself through the Scriptures.

When any of us try to redefine God according to our emotional perceptions, we end up distorting a right view of who He is.

It is tantamount to taking His name in vain.

Of this we must be very careful.

How can anyone really think that the omnipotent, omniscient, and sovereign God who is sitting above the vault of the earth, with the universe full of His glory, existing from all eternity past, is pining away for our fellowship.

Surely not.

God is lacking nothing in His person; He is complete and did not make us because He needed us.

We are made for His pleasure, according to His purpose, for His glory, which He determines after the council of His own will--not ours (Eph.

1:4-14).

As we will see from our text, we were made for His glory; not to satisfy His unmet need of loneliness.

The passage teaches us about a solitary God, who calls a solitary people, with a solitary message, for a solitary purpose.

!

I.

A SOLITARY GOD

* /“You are my witnesses,” declares the LORD, “and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he.

Before me no god was formed, nor will there be one after me.”/ (Isaiah 43:10, NIV84)

* /“Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.”/

(Psalm 90:2, NIV84)

#. throughout this passage we see the solitariness of God on display

#. solitariness is an attribute of God that teaches us that God is self-existing and self-sufficient

#.

He needs no one and He needs nothing

#.

He is complete in Himself

#. in v. 10 God says of Himself /“I am He,”/ and /“Before me no god was formed, nor will there be one after me”/

#. this declaration harkens back to God’s introduction of Himself to Moses as /“I Am who I Am”/

#. the triune Godhead asserts that there were no gods before Him and there will be no gods after Him

#. every time God says /I Am/ He’s asserting that /they ain’t/ referring to other gods

*ILLUS.

Most of you here tonight know the story of Naaman.

He was the commander of the army of the king of Syria in the time of Elisha.

Having learned of the miracle-performing reputation of the prophet from a captured Israelite girl who waited on his wife, Naaman resolved to go to Israel to seek a cure for his leprosy.

He obtained permission from his king, who gave him a letter for the king of Israel asking that Naaman be healed.

When Elisha heard of Naaman’s plight, he summoned Naaman to his house.

When he arrived, Elisha didn’t even come to the door himself, but sent instructions through a servant that Naaman should go and dip himself in the Jordan seven times.

At first Naaman, who had expected the prophet to heal him in person, was angry and disappointed, retorting that Damascus had its own rivers that were better than any in Israel.

Finally, however, his servants persuaded him to follow Elisha’s instructions.

He washed in the Jordan and was healed, whereupon he returned to Elisha and vowed to sacrifice to no god but Yahweh.

The experience brings Naaman to the realization that there really are no other gods then the God who had revealed Himself to Hebrews.

* /“Then Naaman and all his attendants went back to the man of God.

He stood before him and said, “Now I know that there is no God in all the world except in Israel.

Please accept now a gift from your servant.”/

(2 Kings 5:15, NIV84)

#. the God of the Bible is not just one god among many gods vying for the attention of mortal men

#. the great truth of the Scriptures is that the God who revealed Himself to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who spoke through Israel’s prophets is the true God of the universe, because He is the only God of the universe

#.

God has repeatedly expressed Himself through the mouth of Isaiah and of other faithful prophets, that He who speaks to them is the I AM, the one who is, the existing, true, actual God

#. v. 8 begins God’s challenge to His people to acclaim Yahweh alone as their true God

* /“Lead out those who have eyes but are blind, who have ears but are deaf.”/

(Isaiah 43:8, NIV84)

#. in their recent history, Israel has been blind to the blessings of God and deaf to the voice of God as He has spoken through the Prophets

#. their hearts had turned to idols and false gods which always leads to spiritual blindness and spiritual deafness

#. now God challenges them to come forward and testify that only He, the Lord, could have accomplished the things in Israel’s history that have taken place

#. in particular their great deliverance from the hands of the Egyptians so many generations before

#.

their miraculous preservation during their wandering years

#.

their conquest of the Promised Land

#. idols and false gods could not have done such great works on behalf of Israel

#.

Yahweh is the solitary God who chose to reveal himself to a special people

!! A. GOD IS SOLITARY IN HIS EXCELLENCY

* /"Who among the gods is like you, O LORD? Who is like you— majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders?”/ (Exodus 15:11, NIV84)

#. the Book of Genesis begins succinctly /“In the beginning, God ... “

#. there was a time—for lack of a better way to express it—when the Triune Godhead dwelt all alone

#. in the beginning there were no heavens to declare His wonders

#. in the beginning there was no earth to engage His attention

#. in the beginning there were no angels to herald His glory

#. in the beginning there was no universe to be upheld by the word of His power

#.

there was nothing, no one, but God who is from everlasting to everlasting

#. in eternity past, God was alone: self-contained, self-sufficient, self-satisfied; in need of nothing

#.

He was not lonely in His solitariness

#. this is, I admit, a hard concept for us to grapple with

#. everything that we see, smell, hear, taste or touch has origins

#. we can hardly think in any other way

#.

everything we observe must have a cause adequate to explain it

#.

for many, this is even the basis for their belief in God—Everything comes from something; consequently, there must be a ‘great something’ that stands behind everything

#. cause and effect point men to God—this is Paul’s argument in Romans 1:18-25—however cause and effect is not enough since God cannot be known and evaluated like other things can

* ILLUS.

This is one reason why science and philosophy have not always been friendly toward the idea of God.

These disciplines are dedicated to the task of accounting for things as we know them and are therefore impatient with anything that refuses to give an account of itself.

If it cannot be scrutinized by rational thought or investigated through experimentation it must not be real.

#. this is nothing new

* /“The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.”/

(1 Corinthians 2:14, NIV84)

#. who is like you the Psalmist muses—you who is majestic in His holiness, who is awesome in His glory, and who works wonders of unimaginable power

#.

it’s a rhetorical question with an obvious answer—no one is like the Lord

#. had a universe, had angels, had human beings been necessary to Him in any way, He would not and could not be God

#.

God was under no constraint, no obligation, no necessity to create

#. that He chose to do so was purely a sovereign act on His part, determined by nothing but His own mere good pleasure

#. the Apostle Paul reminds us in his letter to the Ephesians that God /“... works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will,”/ (Ephesians 1:11, NIV84)

#. that He did create was simply for the manifestation of His own glory /“everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.”/