12th February 2025

12th February 2025


Pray (ACts)


Read (Deuteronomy 6:1-9)


Message (Alan Burke)


If you are building a house there is a method for setting out the foundations, it’s called the centre line method. What you do is stretch a piece of string between two pegs that mark out the longest outer wall of the building, then you mark the two ends of the wall, drive two more pegs in, then using a masons square from those pegs you do the same to mark the perpendicular walls repeating until all the walls are marked making sure that angles are correct as well as measurements. It might take a bit of time, it might have to be checked and re checked but it so important, because an error at this stage is will be replicated the whole way through the build process and can end up making a big impact on the final building. A small error might not be too significant by itself but it can cause real problems. 


You are probably thinking what has this got to do with the doctrine of God but if we have a defective view of God then the chances are that our all our theology is defective, what we believe about God matters, because all of our theology flows from our understanding of God, so our understanding of who we are, our understanding of sin, our understanding salvation, our understanding of every doctrine that we have every belief that we hold to is impacted by our Doctrine of God. Just as the foundations of the house matter, getting them right matters to the final construction, getting the foundations of our faith right matters to every part of our faith. Small errors can have a big impact, it has been said that in the Christian Faith all errors ultimately can be traced back to a defective view of God.


Here in Deuteronomy 6:1-9 the Lord through Moses was teaching his people how they were to live as they prepare to enter the promised Land. The Lord had given them the Ten Commandments in chapter 5, and here in this passage the Lord though Moses gives his people one of the greatest commandments, namely in verse 5 to love God will all your soul with all your strength, God is wanting his people to keep him at the centre of who they are and keep him at the centre of all that they do and their lives, he is giving them a fundamental teaching that should impact then who they are, if they live in light of this then their lives will be rightly orientated. Look to what verse 4 teaches us, that comes before this commandment, ‘The Lord our God the Lord is one’. Remember what we read in these verses is the direct revelation from God to his people, the directly revelation from God to us, we learnt that in verse one. 


So what is being said here to the Israelites and to us is truth that God has revealed from Himself, just as all of scripture is, and here it is God who is the one revealing his very nature to his people, and here he not only expresses his uniqueness but also his unity. The uniqueness of God but and the unity of God. 


As one God, he is also the unique God, when he spoke there was no other to contradict him nor are there today, there was no other gods to challenge him nor are there today, when he promised there was no other gods to revoke what he had promised, nor are there today, when we warned, there was no other gods to provide refuge from that warning nor are there today, he was not nor is he merely first among a number of gods as some would like to believe or as some teach, no he was and is the one and only God and as such he is omnipotent meaning that he is all powerful, it means that our God is the unique all powerful God. All other gods are wood and stone, the imaginations of man but not the Lord our God. 


We believe in one God, the bible teaches that there is one God, we are monotheists. Mono meaning one, and theist meaning God, we believe that the God we worship, the God of the bible, the God who has revealed himself to us, is one! There is one living and true God. No truth is more emphatically or persistently taught in scripture than this, that there is one God who really exists. The self-revealed creator who must be worshiped and loved exclusively.


Pray (acTS)


Sing


WSC
Q5 Are there more Gods than one?
There is but One only, the living and true God. 
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