Can We Trust God? Understanding His Character & Faith

Hello and welcome to Through the Bible with Les Feldick. An Oklahoma rancher and farmer, Les Feldick has been teaching homestyle Bible classes for 20 years in Iowa, Oklahoma, and Texas. Les Feldick's unique style of Bible teaching has made the books of the Bible come to life. When Les is teaching, it's so interesting that people say time just seems to fly by. And now, here is Les Feldick. Okay, good to have everybody. I don't think anybody's left and we're ready to go on our third program today and going to have you come right back with me again to Genesis chapter 1. And once more, we'll spend some time in verse 1, especially on that word God, G -O-D. Again for those of you joining us on television, we just ask that you study with us, make notes, underline your Bible. And we also like to make folk aware that all our programs are available on tape, on video tape as well as the audio tapes, and they are all transcribed word for word into little booklets. And if you're interested in any of that, you call us and we'll either send you the table of contents or we'll help you whatever way you want. So many of these are being used in Sunday schools across the land. And I had one gentleman using these in a huge church, I think it was up in Minnesota, and I mean it's a huge one. They've used it in their Sunday school now for over a year, and he said they've not had one word of complaint. And now that's pretty unusual when you move into a denominational area and realize that people may not always agree with you. But we trust that as we open the Word, we don't try to precipitate argument for the sake of arguing, but if we can just get people to study the Word, read it on their own. All right, now let's come back, if you will, then. Oh, I guess I should remind you that our Internet address is up here. We've got our own now, it's just www .lesfeldick.org, I guess that's the way it is. So those of you on the Internet, you can pick up our material. It's all up there. I think all 28 books are up there, as well as our television schedule. All right, back to Genesis, chapter 1. The word God, again. You know, so many people have, what shall I say, they've got all kinds of ideas about God. How many of you have heard the expression, or maybe you've even used it, the man upstairs, somebody up there looking after me? Well, listen, this is bringing God down so far beneath of what He really is. And I think we have to constantly remind ourselves that, yes, He is the friend of sinners. He is the one who has promised never to leave us nor forsake us. He's the God, and we're going to look at some of His attributes this half hour. He is the God that is, in spite of His sovereignty, He's a God of grace and love and all these things that we're going to look at. And consequently, and this is what I want to wind up this program on, since He's that kind of a God, we can be perfectly comfortable in placing all of our faith in what He has said. And this is what I think people are missing. They cannot seem to get the idea that what God has said, we can believe it. This is not a book of myths. This is not a book that was put together as the Jews sat around their ancient campfires, as some like to put it. But as Peter says in his little epistle, holy men of God wrote as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. And that wasn't just the Old Testament, that's the New as well. The Apostle Paul, over and over, makes it so understood that everything he wrote was by revelation from the ascended Christ, it was by inspiration. When the Apostle John wrote the book of Revelation, it was all by Holy Spirit inspiration. Every word of this book, from cover to cover, is the Word of God, and we can believe it because it has proven itself over and over. Well now, the first thing I'd like to point out in this program is that God has these certain attributes, and I think it behooves us to just constantly remind ourselves of these from time to time. Number one, He is sovereign. He is absolutely sovereign. There is no one above Him. He never has to go to someone else for advice or for questioning. He is absolute in His sovereignty. Secondly, we can say that God is immutable, and I think the best verse that most of us know concerning that is in Hebrews, and Jesus Christ, the same what? Yesterday, today, and forever. He has never changed in the past. He has not changed as of today. He will never change in the eternity future. He is immutable. Now, some of the school teachers that I have in my classes like to tell me that the kids will rewind them once in a while. Well, after all, we're living in the 90s, as if that makes all the difference in the world. No, concerning God, the things that God laid down at the beginning are still applicable today. God hasn't changed His attitude towards sin simply because it's a later time in human history. He is immutable, and the things that He declared anathema back there in the Old Testament, they are still the same thing in His sight today, and they will be in the future if He tarries, because He is immutable. He changeth not. He is always the same. Now, you know, those of you who have dealt with human beings a lot more years even than I have, you know that you've had people in your experience that maybe at one time you could trust them explicitly, but maybe sometimes years later you found out you couldn't trust them. What's happened? Well, they've had a change in their attitudes, and they are not immutable, but God is. He never changes, all right? So number one, He's sovereign. Number two, He is immutable. Number three, they don't necessarily have to be in this order. He is omniscient. Now, the only way I can spell that word is put omni and then science. It's the same word as science, knowledge. So He is all knowledge. He is omniscient. There is nothing, there is nothing that God doesn't know, and He doesn't have to go look it up in a textbook. I've got some lawyers in my classes, and I've got some MDs in my classes, and they all agree that to be a good professional man, you don't have to know everything, but what do you have to know, Merlin? Where to look it up, see? And that's our human weakness. We can't know everything. Fortunately, we can go to our libraries, and men like this can go and search things out, but God doesn't have to do that. God doesn't have to go to His library. God is omniscient. He knows the end from the beginning. I think I gave an illustration in one of my classes or maybe even on television at an earlier time, and the first time I read it, I had a hard time swallowing it, but you know, the more I got into this book, the more I could agree and believe it, and He made this illustration. Now, this is mind-boggling, believe me, it is, that in the life of a woman or female of any of the species, there are thousands upon thousands of ovum, eggs. In the male of the species, there are billions upon billions of sperm, microscopic. You have to put them under the microscope to see them. There are billions of them. But God in His omniscience has put every human being that's ever been born together according to His will. Now, that's hard to swallow. I know it is. The billions in China, yes. The millions here in America, yes. The millions that have been aborted, yes. God in His omniscience and in His sovereignty has put together every sperm and every egg that has ever been fertilized. Now, if that doesn't boggle your mind, I don't know what would. But on the other hand, the first beautiful starry night that you can go look at a starlit sky, just step out and try to comprehend how many billions upon billions of stars. Now, you know, it isn't just billions of stars. Now it's billions of galaxies in which there are billions of stars. So now we're talking about trillions and trillions of stars. Has God lost sight of any one of them? Not a one. And so He is omniscient. He is all-knowing. All right. The next word that you can put down on your list is He's omnipresent. In other words, you cannot go anywhere and God is there. David in the Psalms even puts it to the place that's really hard to swallow. And he said, Lo, I go to the deepest hell. Who's there? God is. Lo, I go to the highest of the heavens. Who's there? God is. And I've read that astronomers feel that our universe is expanding, always expanding outwards. Does it ever go beyond God? Never. All right. That brings up my next word of attributes. He is infinite. You cannot comprehend a place that is beyond the God of this book. He is infinite. Now, that's beyond me. But I believe it. And we're going to come back to why I can believe it and why God expects me to believe it and you to believe it. All right. Let's look at another attribute. He is just. He's righteous. God has never treated anyone or anything unfairly. Now, a lot of times when things come up and terrible things happen, even to believers, and I know we as humans are often tempted to question, well, is God fair? You know, I even told my wife the other day, we had gotten news of a very sweet lady who had just been diagnosed with a breast cancer. And I told Iris, I said, isn't it amazing? It just seems as though the dearest and the sweetest people on earth are the ones that get stricken the most often. And we do. We say, well, now, God, why? David asks the question. Back there in the Psalms, what did David say? Why do the wicked prosper? And it is a valid question from the human standpoint. But does God make a mistake? No. He never makes a mistake because of his attributes. He's righteous. He's just. I don't know, I was mentioning this one day to a seminary president that I talk to quite often on the phone, and I had made the expression that grace was an attribute. And he said, Leslie, I never thought of it as that before. Well, you know, when you talk to a highly educated man, I'm more apt to think he's right and I'm wrong. But no, I still feel that the grace of God is an attribute. Because, again, very few people, even believers, understand the grace of God. Why? Because it's an attribute that is so far above and beyond the human intellect that it's hard for us to comprehend. I've had people tell me, or they've heard me teach, that they never had a grasp of grace until they heard me teach it. I read a book every once in a while by a dear old theologian from England, and I don't recommend the book because I showed it to Andre, and he says, oh my goodness, here you've got a book that thick, and it's a commentary on just six verses. And he says, how could he write a book that thick on six verses? Because he's wordy. But I love to read the dear old gentleman. He's dead now. And I showed Andre the quote that I have highlighted in the book. And I'll paraphrase it because it brings out this very attribute of grace that I'm talking about. And he makes this statement, unless we teach and preach the grace of God, as Paul delineated it back there in Romans chapter 3, when he said he was slanderously accused of promoting sinful living just to prove that the grace of God was greater. Well, now, he says, unless we teach and preach grace at the possibility of being accused of that, then we're not teaching grace as this book lays it out. And so we have to understand that this is so far beyond our human understanding is that a righteous God, holy, far above sinners, Hebrews says, and yet His grace is always greater and will always go further than man's greatest sin. Now, what I always put with that, that's not license. Grace is not license, but grace is that attribute of God that He is capable of absolutely forgiving and cleansing and calling righteous the most vile sinner that will believe the gospel. Now, I always like to use the example here in Oklahoma. You remember quite a few years ago, we had the steakhouse murders in Oklahoma City. They were terrible. And I would have been among the first to say, put that guy to death, and the quicker the better because of the horrible crime he had committed. But God doesn't look at it that way. God looks at that murderer as a man that is still capable of His grace. Now, that's beyond us. That is totally beyond us because it's an attribute of God. All right. Another one of the great attributes, of course, is next door to grace, and that would be His love. What an attribute that God can love the unlovely. Now, I've been to Haiti, and we ministered with Andre down there for a whole week. And a lot of those people naturally are not easy to love. They're poor. They're poverty stricken. But you see, there isn't anybody that God can't love. You go into the ghettos of our huge cities, and crime and drugs run rampant. Is anybody so far down the tube in those areas that God can't love? No. We can't always comprehend it, but God loves them. And He has already purchased their salvation if they will just cash in on it. They're already pardoned. A lot of people don't realize that. But the most vile sinner already has his pardon done, but he has to believe it in order to appropriate it. And so on and on we could go. All right. These are all attributes of this same God who created everything, created man, and as we will see in coming lessons, put him in the garden knowing what he would do. And yet the moment he sinned, the very next thing God does is puts in gear the whole plan of redemption where He is promising the coming of the seed of the woman in Genesis 3.15. And the beginning, as some Bible scholars have put it, that's that red scarlet cord of redemption that goes all the way through this book. All right. Now then showing all the attributes of God. And that's not all of them. I guess I could go for another half hour, but that's enough for this time. Now I want to have you come back with me to the book of Hebrews. Come back into the New Testament now, the book of Hebrews, chapter 11 and verse 6. And again, I think this is a verse that we have to classify as one of the absolutes, one of the absolutes of this book and of the God who we've just been talking about. Now we know we're living in a culture where people don't want absolutes. They want all restraint removed. But listen, there are absolutes, and a sovereign God is the one who has declared them. All right. In Hebrews 11, verse 6, we have one of at least two absolutes that I'm always trumpeting on the most. There are more than that, but I usually use the two here in Hebrews, and this is the first one. Hebrews 11, verse 6, but without faith it is impossible to please Him, which of course is God up in verse 5. Without faith it is impossible to please God, for he that cometh to God must repent. No, what's the word? Believe. See? And that's what I'm always almost screaming at people. Today, God's whole requirement for salvation is believe the gospel, all right? And how do we believe the gospel? It's in this area of faith, without which it is impossible to please Him, for he that cometh to God must believe. Now remember, there are three words in Scripture that all basically mean the same thing. To believe, and trust, and faith. They all mean the same thing. When you trust the Word of God, you're believing it. When you believe the Word of God, you're exercising faith. When you exercise faith, you're trusting and you're believing. See that? All right? So you have to believe that He is, and in that area of believing, understand that He is a rewarder of them that seek Him. In other words, will God ever fail an individual? Never. Now, you know, I think my Oklahoma classes know that I like to use illustrations of the most simplistic, because those are the ones that stick the hardest. As you came into the studio this afternoon, I could have just sat here and watched every one of you come in. And I would have not seen a single one of you examine that chair. Did you? Not a one of you examined your chair to see if when you sat on it, it would hold you. Now you know, if we were in an area where these chairs were kind of weak and you couldn't depend on them, that's what you'd have to do. You'd have to examine your chair to make sure you don't suddenly be embarrassed and fall flat on the floor. But all right, why did you not bother to even check the chair you're sitting on? You have utmost faith in it that it's going to hold you. See? You believe before you sit down that that chair is going to hold you. All right, now you bring this right into the spiritual realm. God expects the human race to put that same kind of faith in what He has said as you place in these material things that you take for granted. And it's the same application, that when God has said something, we can believe it. And when we believe it, God is going to reward us with the greatest experience in all human history. And what's that? Salvation. To have that blessed assurance, not only of eternal life for that which is to come, but for the here and now. You know, I tell my classes again in Oklahoma over and over, too many Christians have got the idea that salvation is just simply a fire escape. They get saved so they won't go to hell. Well, that's all well and good. That's certainly part of it. But listen, there's a lot more to it than that. Salvation and the knowledge that you're a child of God is that day-by-day assurance that you're His and He is yours. And how do we know it? Because the book says so. Over and over, I'll show people verses. Do you feel this? Can you see this? No. How do you know it's true? The book says so. It's what God's Word says. And when you take God at His Word, what is that? Faith. Now I've got my board. Now I've got room enough. I'm going to put that definition on the board because I know for those that I have taught in years past, they all know this forwards and backwards, that faith is taking God at His Word. Taking God at His Word. Now that is faith, and I have never found a better definition for it. When you can read something in here, and even though you can't understand it, we believe it. Why? Because it's God that said it. Even you go back to Genesis 1-1, where we've been studying, when it says that in the beginning God created, called out of nothing, the universe, the world, heaven and earth. I can't prove it. Science still can't prove it. I always like to refer my classes to an article that I read quite a few years ago, written in one of the scientific magazines that I was subscribing to at that time. And he was discussing the origin of the universe. And of course with all of his big scientific terminology and all that, what it boiled down to was that he was now convinced that the whole universe at one time had come from a single source of light. Boy, I read that to my little wife and I said, Honey, do you hear what he's saying? Because who is light? Well, God is. And so where did everything come when Christ spoke the word? From himself. But here was the kicker. He ended up his article, and after expounding on all the tremendous outbursts of the creation of the universe or whatever, he came to this conclusion. He says, I can foresee the day. Of course, he was talking in terms of billions of years, I suppose. But he says, I can foresee the day when that whole thing will come back to that original source of light. Well, what does Peter say? This old world, this universe, I think, is going to be melted down. It's going to dissolve, see? And everything as we now see it is going to totally disappear. Is that the end of it? No. Because what does Peter say? New heavens and a new earth. And then you jump over to the book of Revelation, chapter 21, and what does John say? And I, John, saw a new heaven and a new earth. Oh, it all fits, see? But all right, this is just to prove, and this is all I try to get people to understand. Take God at his word, and it makes everything turn right side up. If we simply believe what he has said. Now we've got the timeline up there. We can already look at a good portion of that timeline that was foretold clear back in the Old Testament, and it's already come to pass. I think there's 360-some prophecies concerning Christ's first coming. Every one of them were fulfilled to the last detail. Well, listen, if God has already fulfilled the first half of the prophetic proclamation, then why in the world can't people believe he will fulfill the last? Well, he will, because his word has said so. So, just for a quick recap, with all the attributes of God that the Scripture has declared and has proven, how in the world can someone say, but I can't believe it? Well, it isn't that they can't believe it. It's they don't want to. You know, when people decry the habit of smoking, and all they'll say, oh, if I could only get rid of this habit, I can't quit. And I said, oh, do you want to quit? No, not really, see? Well, if you don't want to, then I'll guarantee you one thing, you're not going to, because the one has to come before the other. Thank you for watching Through the Bible with Les Feldick, a weekly Bible study. If you would like more information about the Les Feldick Ministries, a Bible study in your area or about this program, write to Les Feldick Ministries, Route 1, Box 760, Kinta, Oklahoma, 74552. That's Route 1, Box 760, Kinta, Oklahoma, 74552. Through the Bible with Les Feldick is viewer supported, and your gift is appreciated. Thank you, and be sure to tune in next time for Through the Bible with Les Feldick.