God Has No Origin Story

we're gonna be in Psalm chapter 90 today. Let me start with a story. When I was a child, I used to be terrified by the notion of eternity. It's a good thing Buzz Lightyear wasn't around yet because Two Infinity and Beyond would have freaked me out to no end because I would literally, I vivid memories, lying in bed, just my mind racing with the idea trying to somehow, some way, think about forever, thinking about an unending period of time. And I wanna share with you today what changed that for me. What now today gives me peace, thinking about the exact same thing. We're gonna try and ask today what amount to, for me, my perspective, the two most difficult questions that there are. First of all, where did God come from? And secondly, what was he doing before he created the world? We are in a series of messages where we're trying to face up to difficult questions. We've talked about the problem of pain. We've asked the question, what happens to someone who dies, who's never heard the gospel? What is the basis of judgment if you've never got the chance to live to or have the chance to hear someone talk to you about the only name that contains salvation,

the name of Jesus? We are going to next week, as we are in the Halloween weekend, talk about the spooky stuff. Angels and demons, what impact, if any, should they have on our day-to-day lives? And I think it's really important that we know it's not only okay, it's good for us to ask such questions. In fact, it was Cliff Connectley who said that Jesus came to take away our sins, not our brains. So it's good, we honor God by loving him, not just with heart and with soul and with strength, but to love him with our minds as well. As we ask these questions, he has not left us floundering. He's given to us his word. And if you have the scriptures Psalm chapter 90, I want to read to you some selected verses. For time's sake, we will abbreviate our reading of it. But please do read the entirety on your own time as you reflect on this week's sermon. This says a prayer of Moses. Notice the man of God. You don't often think about Moses when you think about Psalms. You think about David, you know that Solomon wrote a few, but in fact, this is a song for Moses, a prolific, I mean, talk about like a Steve Jobs kind of guy, you know, shaking up multiple industries. Moses not only known for his communication, his leadership, but also as well, singing. Lord, he says, you have been our dwelling place

in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday or when it is past and like a watch in the night. You carry them away like a flood. They are like a sleep. In the morning, they are like grass which grows up. In the morning it flourishes and grows up. In the evening, it is cut down and withers. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your countenance. The days of our lives are 70 years. And if by reason of strength, they are 80 years, yet their boast is what do you have to show for? Only labor and sorrow. For it is soon cut off, life is, and we fly away. So teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom. And I love this, this is where the Psalm ends, and let the beauty of our Lord be upon us. Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us and establish the work of our hands for us. Yes God, this is a prayer for God to bless what we do. Bless Lord, establish Lord, the work of our hands. There was a boy who was drawing a picture in his living room. Dad came in and said, "What are you drawing?" The kid barely looked up and he said, "Drawing God."

The dad said, "Nobody knows what God looks like." That did not face the child who responded, "They will when I'm done." They will when I'm done. Moses is helping us to have a correct portrait in our minds of who we're talking about And he is, believe it or not, answering the question, where did God come from with this answer? God didn't come from anywhere. Not anywhere, right? I mean, squirrels come from somewhere. The mommy squirrel and the daddy squirrel. They make a baby squirrel, right? People come from somewhere, right? Trees come from somewhere. They come from acorns. Rain comes from somewhere. It comes from clouds. No one and nothing can boast that they made God. Brought God into existence. He never arrived. He was never not here to ever be here for the first time. Moses says, "From everlasting to everlasting, he simply is. He is, and he is God." If he did, if we could find the mommy God and the daddy God, right, that they would be God. He would not be worth our time, for he wouldn't be God. If there was the acorn that led to God, that would be God. Only at the beginning can there be an uncaused cause who caused everything to come out of nothing.

Now, early enough in the sermon that I should tell you, if at any point in the sermon today you get a Charlie horse in your brain, that's okay, right? That doesn't mean something's gone wrong. If anything, it means something's gone right. You could no sooner fit the Almighty God, creator of heavens and the earth in your brain, than you could take a child's beach bucket to the beach and get the entire ocean inside it, right? We simply cannot fathom the unfathomable, but that doesn't mean we aren't meant to take what God has told us about him to heart and to mind as well. The way I see it, the fact that we have a God too big for our minds means that he's not too small for our problems, and I love having a God I can't understand, because if I could understand him, I would be him. I wouldn't need him, all right? So our second question, what was he doing before he created the world? This will melt your mind. There was no before he created the world. There was no before. There was no sense of... To use the phrase before is a way to anchor something in a fixed point in time. But before God created the universe, there was no time for there to be a before to reference. When he created the universe, he created the notion of time. Thus, he's not trapped by it like we ever notice how...

I mean, there's nothing that traps us more than the sense of time. You ever listen to the way you talk about it? Oh, wow, can you believe October is already over? Oh my goodness, Christmas is only so many days away, like it's this crazy thing. Wow, three o'clock already? It just is baffled by time. We serve time. Every minute, we're aware of it. Every hour, every day, we're at, feel behind. I feel so behind, time is constantly something we're trapped by, but God is simply not. There is no timeline where it's this is this and this is that and therefore this is when I did this. There's no sense to anchor God in something that he created. See, as Lewis said, if you imagine an infinite white paper, and then someone takes a pencil and just draws a line, that's all of human history. And God would represent encompassing eternity, all of the white paper. He looks at that line and we're like, oh my gosh, my birthday's 74 days as a child, right? We're always looking at some, God just looks at the end from the beginning. He looks at the beginning from the end. He's the Alpha and the Omega. There is no past. There is no future. There just simply is. He just is, Colossians 1, 17. He is before all things.

And in him, all things consist. The title of my message today is God has no origin story. Darth Vader has an origin story. Will he Wonka has an origin story? Even Ant-Man and Cruella de Vil have origin story. God simply put has no origin story. He is the origin that has no origin. That's what he told Moses. When he had a conversation with Moses out of a bush that was on fire, casual day, just happens all the time. But this unique bush was burning, but not burnt up. The thing that should have destroyed the bush, didn't it just rested upon it? And they had this conversation and he told Moses to take his shoes off, he's standing on a holy ground. And eventually, Moses said, I'll do this thing you want me to do, but who am I gonna say, sent me, I need to know your name. And God said to Moses, like I said, it's 3.14, I am who I am. I am who I am. And he said, thus you shall say to the children of Israel, I am has sent me to you. I normally at this point when I begin to unroll my outline for you say, tell if you get your mind around it, jot this down, but you're not going to. So let's just say this is my first point today. The first point is this idea of God having an origin story. What it means, that's our first of three categories. We want to begin to address this content.

We are dealing, when we talk about what this means, with what is referred to as one of God's attributes. God's attributes are whatever is true of him. And God never operates in one of his attributes to the exclusion of another. So he's not like Mr. Potato Head, right? He is all, all of these. He's not a little me, a little bit of this and a little bit of that, a little bit of this. No, he is all of everything he is at all times. Okay? Now theologians, just to stay with me, get some sense or idea of these attributes, like to divide them in two categories. Communicable and incommunicable, okay? God's attributes that are communicable and incommunicable. And the delineation is his communicable attributes are those that because we're made in his image, we can learn to and become and tap into as we grow with him. All right? So love would be a communicable attribute. And we're told we can love because God first loved us. So being around him, they can rub off on us and we'll never do so perfectly like he is, but we can grow in love. Short of heaven, we'll never be able to measure up, but we can continue to grow in grace. We can grow in love. Justice would be a communicable attribute, mercy. The text that we read said, teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

God is wise, God is wisdom personified, all wisdom in him, but we, as we walk with him, can grow in wisdom. So it's a communicable attribute. Then there are what's called incommunicable attributes. That is to say, no matter how much time you spend with God, omniscience just isn't gonna rub off on you. Omniscience is all knowledge, knowing all or having all knowledge, okay? Or having this one, omnipresence. It's not like you had a really good quiet time and then found yourself in Boston and Philadelphia real quick. Like, what in the world? Omnipresence, God is in all places at all times. That's an incommunicable attribute that we will never experience like he has it or like he is it, all right? So we're talking today when we say, God does not have an origin story about these two of his attributes, eternality and aseity. And I'm not telling you these just to give you some new vocab words, they are really important. Eat God's eternality and God's aseity refer to both that he has no beginning and no ending, that he doesn't have a past, he doesn't have a future. And the second word, aseity, that he is self-existent and self-sufficient, okay? The source of all existence doesn't rely on anyone, doesn't depend on anyone, has life in himself and can thus give that life and impart that life to others.

All right, so let's deal with the first one, eternality. Here's the crazy thought, God is not old. Age has no, there's no use in referring to age when talking about him. He is not ancient in days, he is the ancient of days. There's no sense trying to utilize time to talk about God. When this world began and we know this world had a beginning and will have an ending, guess what? He was already there. In fact, the first four words of the Bible tell you that. In the beginning, oh, what are you doing here? Yep, he is. And then God created the heavens and the earth. He doesn't have a beginning, he is the beginning. He doesn't move through time or experience time passing. He is the author of time. Thus, he can look down upon, like if you would, if you think about us looking at a parade, this float passes, this float passes, right? Imagine getting up into a helicopter and you would see the entire parade. That's how God looks at all of human history. Aseity, the self-sufficiency, self-existence of God means he doesn't look to anyone for anything. He needs no help from no one, right? Acts 17, that's bad grammar, we'll get theology. Acts 17, 25, nor is he worshiped with men's hands as though he needed anything. Do you realize how fragile our life is?

We have to look to God for breath and for life and for all things. I mean, in three weeks, you would die of starvation. Three days without water, you would die of dehydration. Three minutes without oxygen. Your life, I always think about this when I'm eating alone, I'm like, man, what would happen? Everything about doing the Heimlich by yourself if I was choking on something? How fragile life is, but God doesn't need or look to anyone to keep him going. God doesn't need anybody to do the Heimlich on him ever. And God didn't create us because he needed company. God is eternally full and blessed within himself. This is the doctrine of the Trinity. Someone would say, well, the Trinity's not in the Bible. Well, the word Bible's not in the Bible, silly goose, right? The Trinity is all over the Bible. God perpetually within the Trinity, within the Godhead in relationship, in joyous rapture, ecstasy, light, and life within community, three persons, one God, can't be brought low, can't really be lifted high, has no rivals, has no peers, has no equals. It's been said, if everybody on earth simultaneously poked out their eyes, the sunrise tomorrow would be no less glorious. And if every single person, all of the eight billion on this planet tomorrow declared themselves atheists, it wouldn't dim the brightness of His majesty

and of His glory, of His holiness. Not one bit. God is no less who and what He is at all times if we don't give Him our praise. But we can never become what we were born to be if we don't give it. We need to give Him praise more than He needs to receive it. Or have you not known? This is Isaiah, have you not heard? The everlasting God, the Lord, the creator of the ends of the earth, He neither feints nor He's weary. His understanding is unsearchable. He is Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, Hebrews 13a, today and the same forever. All right? So that's what it means to have no origin. Let's now contemplate what happens where it's missing, where we simply pull away the accurate view of who God is in our minds. What does it lead to in our lives if we don't have for us corrected what Moses was correcting? Why was Moses correcting the children of Israel? And by extension, us in Psalm 90 about a proper view of God because wrong believing always leads to wrong living. When we think the wrong thoughts about God, it downstream leads to pollution in our lives. We become weak and we become sickly and end up living wrong when we think wrong and believe wrong. This is what scripture tells us. A.W. Tozer in his prolific two volume series

on the attributes of God. And if this was your appetite, I would encourage you to read those two books. They changed. My life have continued to do so as I've read them. We're told this, he says the low view of God entertained almost universally among Christians is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us. Think about how true that is when you factor in Genesis three and Adam and Eve moments after creation, you have this lie about who God is. That God who is good and God who gives good things to those who believe him gave them one warning. Do not eat from this tree or you will die. Now listen, he's a really good track record of things he says coming to pass. And then he said, "Let there be animals." And there were! And then he said, "Let there be fish." And guess what? They were too. And so every thing God said came to pass, but the serpent made them doubt God's ability to speak and for it to become reality. What possible reason did they have to doubt? Nothing he had ever said had not come to pass, but they chose to think wrong thoughts about God. And as a result, look at every sin that has ever happened, followed that wrong thinking. 'Cause Satan said, "You will not really die." God really didn't say, that's not really what he meant.

He's trying to keep you back from good. Romans one in the New Testament makes the exact same argument. We read it last week, we referred to it last week, but look at verse 25. "People exchanged the truth of God." The truth of God that's clear, every time we see the glory of creation and we worship and serve the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever, amen. And so what happens is where it's missing, we end up in idolatry that leads to anxiety, that leads to a sense of scarcity and then futility and then inevitably mortality. Turning back from a creator God to deify or to worship anything that's less than him, right? And we are less than him, money is less than him, pleasure is less than him. Anything we would make the most of besides God leads to this series of events. That's the argument from Romans. We turn from a creator God and we become foolish and our hearts become darkened. And we are opened up to all manner of evil as a result. As G.K. Chesterton put it, "If you stop believing in God, you will not believe in nothing." You'll believe in anything. You will not believe in nothing. You'll believe in anything.

Why? Because you're incurably religious. There is no such thing as an atheist. Pascale is the one who coined the term God-shaped void or God-shaped vacuum. But there is an emptiness inside of a shaped like God. And if he's not inside that void, then we're gonna grab anything we can to fill it up desperately. And we become foolish any time we reject the creator. And when we turn to something else as an explanation, you've probably heard the story of the mice who lived in the piano. They were in the bottom part of the big empty vacuum, the void of it. They lived there, they lived there for generations. They were happy every day. Music filled up their entire world and they didn't know where it came from. But there was a rumor, there was a legend that somebody, an unseen player would sit down. And the reason that the music filled their whole lives up with warmth and beauty was because of this unseen player. And they love to tell stories about him and they love to celebrate him. They love to acknowledge that he was the source of the music. But then one day an adventurous little mouse went above a couple of levels and found these crazy wires. And he was disappointed at first, but then he felt enlightened to come back and say,

there's no player. The music comes from the wires. And soon as he began to talk about different lengths of wires, different sense of vibration, I see them buzzing, there's no player, it just comes from these wires. That's where the music comes from. And everyone felt very sophisticated and soon all but the most conservative mice believed that music came from wires. Everybody knows that. Until one day, another mouse went even further into the piano and found at the end of the wires every these little hammers and these hammers would strike the wires and he came back to how foolish that we ever believed the music came from wires. It's hammers and everybody began to acknowledge the hammers and anybody who believed in wires or in an unseen player. Oh, I can't believe, I remember what I used to believe, like you believe. We all deconstructed from our belief in the great player. Now it's all about, it's all about wires and it's all about hammers, you see what I'm saying. And soon only the nut that was the crackpot believed in this myth of the unseen player. And listen, even though eventually the story goes, the unseen player became to be thought of as a myth. The pianist continued to play. And so it is, day and day, whether we recognize it or not, every time our blood forms the scab, our bodies here,

every, we're living in this miracle and we can end up worshiping hammers and worshiping wires. 'Cause terror, listen, is the only inevitable outcome of a life of worship not directed at God. 'Cause anything but God that you put in God's place can never do what God wants to do in your life. Because idols can't save. What will happen in third category, when it matters to you? When you choose to believe and to live in, "I am who I am." When you believe in the one who has no origin story. Well Psalm 90, as you follow the movements of the story, what happens is far from becoming meaningless, this temporary, this short, this brief life on this planet that comes up like grass and cuts down, is cut down like grass. It takes on whole new meaning, takes on whole new purpose, takes on not less but more significance knowing how brief it is, because it all becomes bathed in his glory, bathed in the glow of his kindness. So what are we open up to when it matters to us? We're open up to humility and to awe and to meaning and to a life of faith and ultimately immortality and through it all, lives of worship. When we are no longer God, we then can have a God. We're able to do what we need to do, which is what Moses advocated for in Psalm 90, consider your secret sins and to humble yourself

and say, "I see that they were always before you. "You know every thought in my head. "You know everything I've done. "You know the way that I've fallen short "and so with humility and with awe and with reverence. "I recognize my secret sins are before you. "I hope in your mercy. "Would you give me your grace? "Could I live with your glory upon me?" And then when you do that, every day then takes on meaning because he has purpose for it. Do you realize that God didn't have to create the word? That God didn't have to do it? But the fact that you chose to? And then you go, you don't like, "I'm a big child. "I know about the unseen player." Like, I can't believe he would let me know about it. I can't believe he would reveal himself to me that I get to look at the meteor shower and say, "I know the one who did that. "I know him. "He loves me." And then here's the wildest part of all. I get to become the burning bush and so do you. We get to have the fire of God upon our lives. That's what the New Testament says. The God who can't fit in the Milky Way galaxy? He does choose to come live inside of you. Christ in you, your hope of glory. This should destroy you, but then we become built up

for a dwelling place of God in the spirit. The point is knowing I am changes who I am. Everything about my life falls into proper place and perspective and mission when I know him. It'll change how you pray. It'll change how you live. It'll change how you serve. And it'll change how you die. To quote Toser once more, Christianity has lost its dignity and will never get it back unless we know the dignified Holy God who rides on the wings of the wind and makes the clouds his chariots. We have lost the concept of majesty and the art of worship. Nothing in your life will make sense for all our lives. We've been craving, not something we've been craving someone and we will always feel like something's missing until that snaps into place in our hearts. Once it does, I'm not suggesting for a moment that you then will have every answer. And every question will be completely solved to satisfaction, that will not happen until glory. God has not given us in his word or in revelation, everything we want to know. But he has given us everything we need to know. If he gave us everything we want to know, we would never be able to live lives of faith. For example, if God told you exactly when he was gonna come back or when you were gonna die, human nature would be to procrastinate any of the things

that we're meant to do. I remember how high school was, you remember that? Yeah, all right. Once I know the fixed date, great. I know I'll be pulling an all-nighter than I before, right? Oh, Jesus, coming back on to the excellent Monday's gonna be full of righteousness. You know what I'm saying? God doesn't give us everything we want. Nobody has given us everything we need to know. And we, at the end of the day, still have to choose faith. Either faith in something or faith in someone. It takes just as much faith to say, I don't believe in God as it does to say, I do. In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first astronaut in space, although they in Russia called them cosmonauts back then. So they weren't astronauts, but he beat us. The space race was going, it was going badly. They got Sputnik, they sent a dog up, they got, we eventually got monkeys up, a late to the party, you know, it was not cool. We did win in the end, got to the moon. This is the thing that happened, all right? the Soviet Union's premier Nikita Khrushchev made much of the fact because of the whole intrinsic, secular, anti-God, anti-belief that was at the center of communism, he made much of the fact that when Yuri Gagarin went to space, he didn't see God. We went to space and turns out there was no God out there, no old man with a white beard and white hair up in the hair making everything tick. And it was publicized, we went to space and we didn't find God, right? There's no such thing as a player, it's all wires and right, we know how it all ticks,

we're so enlightened and billions and billions of years ago and all the rest. It didn't sit right with C.S. Lewis, who did as he tended to do, he picked up his pipe and he picked up his pen and he wrote an essay. In response, his essay went like this, "You could not expect Yuri Gagarin or any astronaut for that matter, no matter how high, how far they go into space, to find and see God," as though his house were there. Anymore than you could expect Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth to jump high enough off the stage during a play in one of the productions that Shakespeare had written and if they jumped high enough off the stage, eventually they would see Shakespeare. He's not like, behind the set, behind the decorations, behind the curtain, there he is, right? He wrote it all, so the characters in it can't find him by looking really hard around the different locations of the story. He said, "If we who are in a story that has a divine author of it want to see him the only possible way that could ever happen is if the author wrote himself into the story." And ladies and gentlemen, that is Christmas. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. Bethlehem was not the beginning. He has his going forth from of old, even from everlasting. So if we are to know God, the unseen player, it's not going to be because we jump high enough or look high enough or make a big enough of a telescope. It's going to be because he, the author, wrote himself into the story, which makes God a bit like Stan Lee, who perfected the art of the cameo. He was really Alfred Hitchcock, who pioneered him, the creator of the film, being inside the film, and you never knew when you were going to find him, but really Stan Lee and his lifetime made it an art form. The inventor of all of this Marvel empire would show up in it in the most unexpected ways and places, and Tony Stark and the Hulk and Captain America could bump into him on the street and have no idea they were brushing into the one who invented all of their lives. This is what it's like to know Christ.

In fact, Jesus put it this way in John 17, and this is eternal life. What is eternal life? What is eternity that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent? Friends, this is not a puzzle to be solved. It's not even just a truth to be studied. It is a glory to be acknowledged and a God to be worshipped with the reverence of hearts that have taken off their sandals because we stand on Holy ground. This is what changed everything for me when I was terrorized by the notion of eternity. I had grown up in church my whole life, but as a freshman in high school, I met Jesus. I no longer just knew things about God enough to terrify me, enough to make me feel convicted. In knowing Jesus, I came to know the one who is eternal life. Eternity is not a length of time. It is a person who you can know. It is God who came down in human flesh so we could relate to him and know him so he could die for our sins. And the more I walk with Jesus, and the longer I stand. presence over 10,000 years anywhere else. But I look forward to all of eternal life, not as a length of time but as an experience in His presence. For as Ephesians 2 says in the ages to come, He wants to show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. And so I welcome, whether or not there's the sensation or the relativity that still currently exists of the space-time continuum or not, if it takes 10,000 years, I know it will take that just to scratch the surface of His infinite good, His infinite love, His infinite light, and His infinite life. And as we wonder of wonders, as we worship Him, we get invited into that wondrous rapture and delight and ecstasy, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, all delight, all life, all joy, all beauty, no darkness, no shadow, and we get to participate in that light. And so the only way to close is the way Psalm 90 closes, let the beauty of our Lord be upon us. And so God, what can be communicated we want, and there's nowhere to get it but you. And what can't be communicated we just praise you for because we're so grateful that someone has that. That we're not left looking, like Peter said, where else can we go? Who else speaks words of eternal

life and we have forever with you? What do we have to be afraid of? If you need to repent today of a low view of God, a small view of God, if like me you have oftentimes put God into a small box and you need today to say, God, I set you free. I let you shout of the box, shout of the concept, shout of the stained glass. I see you today so living in Holy God to be feared, to be in awe of and to love because you are good. If that's you I'm describing, could you just raise a hand up. You just want to say, I want to just say, God, I'm sorry for having it wrong. And that wrong thinking will lead the wrong living. Thank you, Jesus. See your church repenting God from our sin and our pride. Return from idols, we turn from lesser things. We look to you. With heads bowed and eyes closed, all of us praying, all of us considering where we're at with God. How to number our days to have a heart of wisdom. I like how Moses said, man, 70 is the best we get. Maybe 80. Wow, that's really impressive. But listen, what that what that has in common is even if it's 80, you're going to die. So am I. And when we die, we stand before God. He will not have any explaining to do, but you will. And so will I for the deeds done in the body. And it will all come down to this. Do we have Christ? Not do we know things about God. Now, where we have a political party, not do we have a Bible? Are we in Christ? Have we come to safety in his in his name? Those who know your name put their trust in you. I want to invite you to put your trust in Jesus for salvation, for power over death, for life everlasting. If that's you I'm describing, I'm going to pray a prayer. I'm going to invite you to pray it out loud after me. If you sense the Holy Spirit drawing you, you can't control that, predict that. You can't guarantee that will ever happen again. This could be your final opportunity to get right with God. Think about that. Pray this with me. Church, pray it with us. Dear God, I know I'm a sinner. I ask you to forgive me. Come into my heart. Make it your home. Thank you for new life. I give you mine in Jesus name.