God deserves ultimate glory because he is the Creator – Bruce Ware (Essential Reading)

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God is exclusively God and incomparably God who deserves ultimate glory because he is the Creator of the heavens and the earth. God, as Creator, is independent of all that he has made, whereas we, his creatures, are dependent upon him for everything, and therefore we cannot take credit for anything we have.

Bruce Ware at Mars Hill Church Seattle last week:

Isaiah 46:5 To whom would you liken Me, and make Me equal and compare Me that we would be alike?

Isaiah 46:9-10 „Remember the former things long past, for I am God and there is no other; I am God and there is no one like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things which have not been done, saying, „My purpose will be established, and I will accomplish all My good pleasure.”

My, isn’t it clear that the God of the Bible wants us to know He alone is God and there is no one that is like Him. He alone is deserving of ultimate praise and honor and glory. Now, why is that the case? Why should we be a people who want with all of our hearts, to give to God the glory that alone belongs to Him? And there are many answers in the Bible, but, I picked 3 that I think are very central reasons for understanding the greatness of the glory of God, the exclusivity of His glory, that far surpasses any glory that we would give to anything else or anyone else. Three reasons in particular the Bible upholds.

God is exclusively God and incomparably God who deserves ultimate glory because:

1. He is the Creator of the heavens and the earth

Isaiah 40:21-26

21Do you not know? Do you not hear? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?
²² It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in;
²³ who brings princes to nothing, and makes the rulers of the earth as emptiness.
²⁴ Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown, scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, when he blows on them, and they wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble.
²⁵ To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? says the Holy One.
²⁶ Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these? He who brings out their host by number, calling them all by name, by the greatness of his might, and because he is strong in power not one is missing.

My, what an amazing passage that highlights the supremacy of God, and puts an emphasis here on God as Creator. There are 2 things I’d like us to see in relation to God as Creator, that helps us understand why He alone deserves ultimate praise and honor and glory.

1. God, as Creator, is then independent  of everything that He has made, while we, the creatures are dependent upon Him for everything. God’s independent of everything He has made: It’s so very clear, because God is eternal and existed prior to the universe, that the universe is not necessary for God to be God. He was God, just fine- thank you- before the universe. So when He creates the universe, that does not indicate that somehow God receives something He needs , because He didn’t need the universe to be God prior. In fact, God is self existent, nothing brings him into existence. He is His own basis for existing eternally, and He is self sufficient. That doctrine affirms of God that God possesses within Himself, intrinsically  and eternally everything that is qualitatively good and He does so in infinite measure. Anything that you thing that is qualitatively good, any perfection, any attribute we might think of, that is a good thing, things like righteousness and holiness, wisdom and knowledge, power and goodness, these are possessed within God intrinsically. Nobody gives anything to God that He doesn’t already possess, because He is the possessor of everything that is good. And He possesses it eternally. So, then, when He creates the world, this is not then a world that He needs. He doesn’t need the world He made. But, rather is creating a world that displays  in physical, visible form certain aspects of His own character. It is His wisdom, His knowledge, His power, His beauty put on display in creation in a physical, visible form. This is why the heavens declare the glory, not of the heavens, cause they don’t account for why they are there, rather the heavens declare the glory of God. Why? Because it’s God’s wisdom, God’s beauty, God’s power manifest in the created order. So, God does not depend on the creation He has made. He existed as God, fully, prior to creation, is independent of that created order…
2. It is also then true, the other side of the coin is this: That the creature, we included in that,  are dependent upon Him for everything. The way Paul puts it in Acts 17:25 „God is not served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He himself gives to all people life, and breath, and all things.” Well, my goodness, if He gives all things to us, how much are we dependent upon Him for? All things! For life and breath, I mean, every breath you have taken just while sitting here, everyone, no exception, is a gift of God to you. He grants us breath by which we live. He grants us everything that we have. THEREFORE, WE CANNOT TAKE CREDIT FOR ANYTHING WE HAVE!

I oftentimes think that we have really missed the mark here in our evangelical subculture, in helping us understand the basis for our humility before God when we point only to the cross of Christ. And of course, it is right to point to the cross of Christ, as a basis for our humility, I mean what can we do to get rid of our own sin? And the answer is nothing. Christ must do that for us and therefore we are humbled before Him, accepting the gift that we could not make happen on our own. And that’s altogether true, but more fundamental than God as a Redeemer is God as Creator, where our very life and every quality that we have is given to us by our Creator. So Paul will ask the question, for example, in 1 Corinthians 4:7 „What do you have that you’ve not received?” It’s a rhetorical question, but what would the answer be- ‘What do you have that you have not received? Nothing’. In other words, anything and everything we have is giftWe’ve received it, we haven’t earned it, we don’t have any right to it. It’s been given to us. And so, Paul goes on to say, „So if you’ve received it, why do you boast as if you’ve not received it?” Exactly! Right?

So, humility before God is very important, dependence upon Him, understanding  He is the one that is the source of every good thing that there is. Everything that is qualitatively good is in God and in nowhere else. No place else. No one else. So, God alone deserves ultimate glory.

God deserves ultimate glory because he is the Creator

This clip is excerpted from the sermon „The Incomparable Glory of God,” the second part of our sermon series Best Sermon Ever. It was preached by Dr. Bruce Ware out of Isaiah 40–45 at Mars Hill Downtown Bellevue and released on August 18. VIDEO by Mars Hill Church Watch the full sermon here: http://jesus.to/1cTmYRw Check out the full Best Sermon Ever series here: http://marshill.com/bestsermonever

Video of the week – Abandoned by God

John MacArthur: 1 Corinthians 1 „Men, by wisdom knew not God.” Human wisdom, just on its own doesn’t get there. Then you add that the god of this world blinded the minds of them that do not believe and you’ve got a compounding blindness. And then you add the fact that they are blinded by virtue of the sweeping, dominating elements of their culture.

It’s always about truth. Always. From the garden, it started out as a war on truth. God says, „You eat the fruit, you die”. Satan says, „No you won’t. You shall not surely die”. There it is. Adam and Eve believed Satan. They thought God was lying to them. That started the truth war, it’s going on today. It’s always about the truth. Simple, this happens when you suppress the truth.   What truth? Real truth, as Francis Schaeffer used to say, ‘The true truth”.

Biblical truth, you suppress this, it’s where you go. You take the word of God out of the place of supremacy, and you suppress the truth. Deny its truth, deny its veracity, deny its authenticity, deny it’s inerrancy, deny it’s inspiration, deny it’s sufficiency… Deny it’s clarity- that’s the latest one- that nobody really knows what the Bible means anyways, „It’s a wonderful book, God gave it to us, but, we really don’t know what it really means”. That’s convenient.

Only in the modern world do we not get it. We go back to God. The massive first cause of everything. That’s in the fabric of being human. You know you have to work hard for a couple of hundred years to convince a society that that’s nonsense (belief in the Bible) and that what makes sense is that nobody x nothing + everything. And though it doesn’t make sense, it works in a totally immoral culture because if there’s no Creator, there’s no judge.

So, reason is the first thing that shows you God. The second is morality, which is built into the fabric of all of us and has to be cultivated to the point that a society of people  reason that they don’t need God, and their sense of morality has been totally perverted.

God only wants one thing out of a nation. Listen, and believe this book (the Bible). There’s only one solution and that’s the truth. The truth by which God saves, God sanctifies. And, if this nation will respond and listen to His truth, God will open the floodgates and we might be the greatest recovery story in history. But, there’s no other way, than that „people listen to Me, and walk in my ways”.  But, it’s not gonna happen if there is famine of the word of God. Pray, that the word, as Paul said, would have free course and that it would run with all its power across this land.
Many thanks to Gabi Bogdan for this video.