“Show Me Your Glory” by Steve Lawson
God shows His glory in incredible ways. Our finite minds grasp some of His revelation, while others stretch beyond our mental capacity at times. The doctrine of the Trinity poses a unique problem. As noted last time, the term appears no where in the Bible, yet the sacred pages clearly teach it.
Steve Lawson stresses that the ‘most fundamental teaching of the Scripture is this cornerstone truth, that there is only one God.” Simply reading the first verse of the Bible informs that God created all things. “This one God spoke into being everything out of nothing.” When Moses writes down the ‘Shema’ in Deuteronomy 6:4, he states, “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” In eleven words all can see “this simple statement of faith strongly declares a monotheistic view of God. The true God is the one and only God revealed in the Bible.” This sets the God of the Bible apart from the ‘gods’ of other religions.
Steve cites three more verses in Deuteronomy (4:35; 4:39; 32:39) that drive home the point that there is only one true God and none other. “The God of the Bible is the one and only true God.” Of course, “Jesus quotes the Shema when asked about the greatest commandment…This resolutely reaffirms what was taught earlier by the prophets.” It must be noted that the Holy Spirit authored the Bible, so all persons of the Trinity agree there is only one true God.
Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 8:6, “There is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we exist for Him” and in 1 Timothy 2:5, “For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” To drive home this doctrine in a pointed way James 2:19 avows, “You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder. Even hell knows this truth.”
This doctrine must be believed and also lived out. Our Statements of Faith the past two Lord’s Days have come from what the Shorter Catechism says about the first commandment. We are to have no other gods in our lives besides the true God of the Bible. He alone deserves our worship. We must not “worship or give glory to any other which is due to God alone.”
May we worship the one God alone as He directs in His revealed word. Pastor Gillikin