GET
A VISION OF GOD
Charles
e Whisnant
Isaiah
6
November21,
2012
God is alive.
First, he is alive. Uzziah is dead, but God
lives on. “From everlasting to everlasting, thou art God” (Ps. 90:2). God was
the living God when this universe banged into existence. He was the living God
when Socrates drank his poison. He was the living God when William Bradford
governed Plymouth Colony. He was the living God in 1966 when Thomas Altizer
proclaimed him dead and Time magazine put it on the front cover. And
he will be living ten trillion ages from now when all the puny potshots against
his reality will have sunk into oblivion like BB’s at the bottom of the Pacific
Ocean. “In the year that king Uzziah died I saw the Lord.” There is not a
single head of state in all the world who will be there in fifty years. The
turnover in world leadership is 100%. In a brief 110 years this planet will be
populated by ten billion brand new people and all four billion of us alive
today will have vanished off the earth like Uzziah. But not God. He never had a
beginning and therefore depends on nothing for his existence. He always has been
and always will be alive.
The Lord is Alive – He is in Control
However,
the Lord is alive and controls time because He tells what He is doing in the
present, the past and our future and it happen as He predicts it would. For
example, during King David’s lifetime (the present for him) he made several
prophecies. Prophecies by nature concern the future. King David never
lived to see his prophecies fulfilled for he died before they came to pass.
However, these prophecies were fulfilled in the future.
The
future is the present for the people alive during the fulfillments of David’s
prophecies. For example, the prophet David prophesied that Jesus would ascend
into heaven but he never lived to see it happened.
However, the First Century
Church saw the ascension of Christ after his resurrection. It happened in the
present time for that church but in the future of King David. Similarly, the
ascension of Jesus happened in the present for the First Century Church, in the
future of King David but in the past for us who are alive today.
Time is not static but always
moving and humans have different descriptions for it at different intervals.
But God knows all things for there is no time with God. That is why the
Scripture says, “in the beginning” for us to have a reference to a point in
time. However, that time marker is for us for the Lord is alive before “the
beginning” for there is no time where God resides. When time will be no more
for it will cease God will still be alive. The Lord is alive and well.
- God is authoritative. You don’t give God authority in your life; He has it! You can either pretend He doesn’t and perish, or you can own it with joy. He has, in the universe, absolute authority. Sometimes, our little flaunted fist shakings need some strong words to be put in their place.
God is authority over the weather,
over government, over laws of nature, over mankind, events that have been, that are now, and what will be in the
future. God is sovereign.
Second, he is authoritative.
“I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne.” No vision of heaven has ever caught a
glimpse of God plowing a field, or cutting his grass or shining shoes or
filling out reports or loading a truck. Heaven is not coming apart at the
seams. God is never at wits’ end with his heavenly realm. He sits. And he sits
on a throne. All is at peace and he has control.
The throne is his right to rule
the world. We do not give God authority over our lives. He has it whether we
like it or not. What utter folly it is to act as though we had any rights at
all to call God into question! We need to hear now and then blunt words like
those of Virginia Stem Owens who said in last month’s Reformed Journal,
Let us get this one thing
straight. God can do anything he damn well pleases, including damn well. And if
it pleases him to damn, then it is done, ipso facto, well. God’s
activity is what it is. There isn’t anything else. Without it there would be no
being, including human beings presuming to judge the Creator of everything that
is.
Few things are more humbling,
few things give us that sense of raw majesty, as the truth that God is utterly
authoritative. He is the Supreme Court, the Legislature, and the Chief
Executive. After him, no appeal.
