In this insightful episode, Bible teacher David Hawking takes us on a transformative journey through the attributes of God, emphasizing their foundational importance in a world filled with chaos and confusion. Delving deep into passages from the Psalms and Isaiah, Hawking challenges our conventional focus on self-discovery, urging listeners to shift their attention to understanding the true nature of God. As we explore these divine attributes, from God’s boundless knowledge to His incomprehensible nature, we gain a profound understanding of our own identity and purpose in the process.
not one single person who has been created by God has ever been given the capacity of God himself. We are all limited in our knowledge, but he is not. He knows all things. From beginning to end, anything that’s ever happened in your life or in mine, the Bible says that God knows it all. He knows our weaknesses better than we do. He knows what sins have been in our life or will be. He knows what tragedies will come. He knows what sorrows we bear, what pains and hurts are ours.
SPEAKER 02 :
It’s a blessing to have you with us for today’s broadcast of Hope for Today. The world has never been short on opinions about God. Men repackage Him. Culture reinvents Him. Religion, well, so often it softens God. And before long, people are bowing to a version of God they made up themselves. But hope for today, we’re not here to trade in human opinion. We’re going straight to the Bible. Today, Bible teacher David Hawking begins a new series called The Attributes of God, taken from various portions of Scripture. Stay tuned. We open up the Word in just a moment. First, as we start a new series on the attributes of God, we want to remind you that if you miss any of these broadcasts in the series, you can always go to DavidHawking.org and listen to Hope for Today online at your convenience. We post the programs there for a limited time, so don’t wait too long to catch up if you need to. It’s David Hawking, David, H-O-C-K-I-N-G.org. Well, here’s David with today’s study.
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Turn to Psalm chapter 8, our theme, The Greatness of God. Our series, to me, is so crucial. I don’t know how many times I say it, but I know it’s often, that the root of our problem is a misunderstanding or misapplication of who God is and what He can do. The focus for a long time, folks, you know it, it’s everywhere, is on man. It’s everywhere. What we’re going to say in this series is in direct conflict with what our society believes. Our society believes the most important question to answer is who we are. They’re dedicated to it. There are seminars, there are books on it everywhere. Not just a few hundred. Thousands upon thousands of titles in our bookstores are dedicated to one thing. Helping man find out who he is. God tells us you will never find out. God tells us you’re going to get confused and messed up the more you search into the depths of who you are. Why do we keep doing it? Why is it our obsession? Why is it our priority to find out something that God says we cannot discover? The need in our generation is not to find out who we are. The question is not who am I? The question is who is God? Once we find out who God is, then we can understand who we are. And there’s a sense in which all of us in our series are going to pale into insignificance in some way. That might seem initially to be hurtful, because today you want to know who you are and find out self-esteem and worth, and that’s important, but only from God’s point of view. What we’re going to teach in this series is that when you focus on God and who He is, all of a sudden self-esteem has a new foundation, a new root system. It’s entirely different. It changes your life, your perspective. I don’t know what your relationship with God is all about, but no matter how long you’ve been a Christian, you and I both know that the most fundamental thing to Christianity is a living and vital relationship with a God we say we believe. It’s a personal relationship. It’s not a group of facts and dogmas that we preach from the pulpit. Even though we must teach truth, but we need to apply that truth. We need to have a living, vital, personal relationship with a God who made us. There’s nothing as important as that. Psalm chapter 8, I bring several verses out of the Psalms. Psalm chapter 8, O Lord, our Lord, how excellent, majestic, awesome is your name in all the earth. You who set your glory above the heavens. Talk about greatness. Verse 3, when I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have ordained. What is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you visit him? Verse 9 again, O Lord, our Lord, how excellent or great or majestic or awesome is your name in all the earth. Turn to chapter 83, please. The Bible is replete with statements about God’s greatness. In Psalm 83, verse 18. That men may know that you, whose name alone is the Lord, are the most high over all the earth. There is no one higher than God. You talk about the greatness of God. He is described as the most high over all the earth. Look at chapter 96, please. Chapter 96. The opening verses, which exhorts us to praise him in our worship by singing and proclamation. It says, Why? For the Lord is great and greatly to be praised. He is to be feared above all gods, for all the gods of the peoples are idols. But the Lord made the heavens. Honor and majesty are before him. Strength and beauty are in his sanctuary. The Lord is great, greatly to be praised. Psalm 145, please. Good verses to memorize. Psalm 145, the opening three verses. I will extol you or praise you, my God, O King. I’ll praise you, my God, O King. I will bless your name forever and ever. Every day, every day, no exceptions, every day. I will bless you and I will praise your name forever and ever. Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised and his greatness is unsearchable. The New International says his greatness no one can fathom. One last verse, Psalm 150, verse 2. Psalm 150, verse 2. In the last culminating psalm of this beautiful worship and praise book of the nation of Israel and of all of God’s people, there is a symphony of praise to the Lord. Praise the Lord. Praise God in His sanctuary. Praise Him in His mighty firmament or the expanse of the heavens. Praise Him for His mighty acts. And here’s the line. Praise Him according to His excellent greatness. Great is the Lord. There are three things, basically, that comprise the greatness of God. One is rather surprising in that our whole series is dedicated to knowing about God, but it’s the fact that He is incomprehensible. And maybe you want to write that down because we’re going to focus on it a little bit, that God is incomprehensible. That is, it is impossible to know Him, and yet we’re going to try to. All we have at our disposal is the written revelation of God, facts that God has chosen under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to allow us to see about himself and his greatness. But within those facts, God reveals that we will never discover all that he is, ever. He is the incomprehensible God. He’s beyond knowing. Turn to the book of Judges, please, chapter 13. After the opening five books of the law, you have Joshua, Judges, and Ruth. The book of Judges is a terrible period in Israel’s history. Every man did that which is right in his own eyes. But there were some notable exceptions of people who really called on the Lord and saw great and mighty things. No matter how rotten society can become, there is always that power of the living God, the greatness of God that can change any person’s life, any person’s situation. The parents of Samson, the judge who was mightily used of God. What a wonderful story it is, Samson. The parents, a man named Manoah and his wife, they lived through many years childless. They had no child. They prayed. They asked God to give them a child. And the angel of the Lord paid Manoah a visit. Not any old angel, but a particular messenger of the Lord, a title that usually refers to the Messiah. It is my belief that our own Lord Jesus Christ is appearing, the eternal Son of God, to Manoah and his wife. But it’s interesting that in verse 17, Manoah said to the angel of the Lord, What is your name, that when your words come to pass, we may honor you? And the angel of the Lord said to him, Why do you ask my name, seeing it as what? What does it say? Wonderful. Wonderful. In English, the word wonderful, meaning fantastic, terrific, really great, that is not the meaning of the Hebrew word. The meaning of the Hebrew word, the best English word I know, is incomprehensible. It is too difficult to understand. When Manoah wanted to know what the name of the angel of the Lord was, he said, it’s too wonderful for you. The greatness of our God is seen in that one word, wonderful. Incomprehensible. Do you remember the verses that we often see at Christmas time on plaques and posters? And we use the verses a lot at that particular time from Isaiah chapter 9. It says, unto us a child is born, verse 6, Isaiah 9, 6. Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulders, and his name shall be called what? Wonderful. Wonderful. We read in Psalm 145, verse 3, that His greatness is unsearchable, that no one can fathom it. We’re talking of the greatness of God, and what do we mean? He is incomprehensible. It refers to three things, what He knows, what He does, and who He is. Let’s start with what He knows. Why is God so great that it’s impossible to know? Why? And the answer is that not one single person who has been created by God has ever been given the capacity of God himself. We are all limited in our knowledge, but he is not. He knows all things. From beginning to end, anything that’s ever happened in your life or in mine, the Bible says that God knows it all. He knows our weaknesses better than we do. He knows what sins have been in our life or will be. He knows what tragedies will come. He knows what sorrows we bear, what pains and hurts are ours. And because we don’t understand that doctrine, we quickly move to one that somehow God doesn’t care. And yet over and over again, he says he cares. He knows that he cares. He will not do it like you think, but he will do what is right. And he will do it for his glory and his honor. And he asks us to trust him, but we want to be in charge. We want to be the captain of our own fate and the master of our own destiny. We want to grab a hold of it and make the decision. And God says, you’ll never know what I know. Ever. Let me give you an example. Turn to Psalm 139. Wonderful, beautiful Psalm, whose opening six verses deal with the omniscience of God that he knows everything and the fact that we cannot know it. So he is indeed incomprehensible to the human mind. He knows what no one else knows. You know, after Job tried to find out why he was suffering so much, have you ever tried to find that out? I think if we had a testimony time right now and asked people to share what they’re going through, man, we could spend hours here just hearing your incredible story. It would almost be like one-upsmanship. It’s like the guy who said, I complained I had no shoes until I saw a man who had no feet. Each one of us could go on and on and say, and then tragedy struck. And it would get worse and worse and worse. Every one of us has an incredible set of problems in our life from past, present, and I’m sure in the future. And we could continue to pour out those problems and those difficulties and those hurts. Job went through a lot. Everybody who reads the Job passage who’s going through suffering gets a measure of comfort because you see in life what Job went through. Job tried to understand, why, Lord, is all this happening to me? God never gave him any answers. God made him suffer through the wisdom of friends who really tried to give him correct Bible doctrine. They pointed out that maybe one of the reasons is your sin. They pointed out that maybe one of the reasons is God just showing you how fragile is human nature and that you’re really, well, actually it was the worm syndrome they gave him. God gave to Job a lot of friends who didn’t give him correct information. And the God who knows all things, you might say, why did he do that? Why does God let us be exposed to a hassle of things that never bring us the truth? Why does God even allow that? The whole book of Job has that message in addition to encouragement and suffering. Perhaps it’s the fundamental message. Job finally, after hearing all of his friends, said, miserable comforters are you all. He was getting no peace for his torn apart heart. He was not getting any satisfaction as to why he was suffering. Lost his family, his possessions, his personal health deteriorated. He’s in sackcloth and ashes and nobody is helping him. And when he finally runs out of conversation, God talks to him. Job, I don’t know how God said it, but he sure got his attention. And he brought two gigantic animals, which I believe are dinosaurs, to his attention. He says, nobody can conquer these. Job, I made those. Job sees this whole vivid illustration in front of his eyes and says, now I know you can do anything. And listen to these words. I have uttered what I did not understand. Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. The meaning of wonderful, it’s incomprehensible. God, I don’t know what you’re doing. I have been… motor mouth on this i have uttered things constantly that i didn’t understand i’ve tried to act like i could possibly understand lord i’m now going to rest in the fact that i don’t know why you have done this but i know that you have a purpose in it so i’m going to be quiet god says good now i can bless you may god teach us all to rest in him when we do not understand The greatness of our Lord, it is incomprehensible, refers to what he knows. And listen to these words in Psalm 139. O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my rising up. You understand my thought afar off. You comprehend my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. There’s not a word on my tongue. But behold, O Lord, you know it all together. You have hedged me behind and before and laid your hand on me. Now watch this verse. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. There it is again. It is high. I cannot attain it. The last phrase explains the meaning of wonderful. It’s so high. Your knowledge is so vast, so great of all things. I can never hope to understand it. I cannot attain it. Lord, you know everything. And I don’t know what you know. And I don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing. You are incomprehensible. It refers to what he knows. Isaiah 28, 29 says he’s wonderful in counsel and knowledge. It means it’s incomprehensible to us. We have to trust him. That his advice, his counsel is what we all need. Not only to what he knows, but what he does. Turn to Isaiah chapter 25. I love this verse. I think maybe, I don’t know for sure, I probably should have checked it, but I think maybe that song, How Great Thou Art, might have been built on this. There is another passage in the Psalms that it might have been built on, but this is a great one. In Isaiah 25, verse 1, it says, O Lord, you are my God. I will exalt you, I will praise your name, for you have done wonderful things. incomprehensible things you have done. You see, the fact that God is great and incomprehensible in that greatness not only refers to what he knows, but what he actually does. Let me ask you, do you understand why God does what he does? Listen, the only time we ever understand it is when it turns out that it’s in our category good. Amen? You follow me? If what God does is in our list of really super special good things this week, then we say, oh, what a wonderful God he is. Let me tell you what he did. But nobody describes the fact, you know, I had a bum week. I mean, I’m telling you, I don’t even know why it happened. Those aren’t the testimonies we thrill in. But did you know that God delights in that human frustration? God delights to hear people say, you know, I don’t know what God is doing. Let me tell you what happened to me. I don’t know why it happened. And God in heaven is saying, praise, glory, honor has just reached the heaven’s throne. Now man is in the place where he can now enjoy and understand the eternal God and what he wants to do in his life. It’s when we think we got a hold of everything and we understand what he’s doing. that we are far from the truth. We just don’t know it. You know, I’m in the business of explaining things in the Bible to people. Everybody following me? And it’s amazing how many people come in, they think you got the answer. Now, I try to whip to the word as fast as I can, but even some of the passages you quote to people, you don’t know. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You just try to sound like you do. You know, I’m not frustrated in that, but a lot of people are. They’re frustrated. Well, is this the correct view? You know, and people get irritated when I say, well, there’s three or four good views by different people, and here’s the correct one. They get irritated. Hey, folks, we need a little intellectual honesty along the way, okay? Even these wonderful things that seem simple that a child can see them and understand them, we know there’s a depth to the riches and knowledge of God that sometimes embarrasses us later. You know how God normally embarrasses speakers like me? People come up all the time and show me a tape I did 10 years ago. You now disagree with what you said on that tape. What are you going to do about it? The only thing I can say is, hey, I’m growing, okay? I think the most important thing you can do in life to demonstrate that you really understand what I’m saying is to disagree with yourself at some point.
SPEAKER 02 :
That’s Bible teacher and author David Hawking with an important reminder on the need for humility in the life of the believer. And this is hope for today. We’ll continue with this message on our next broadcast. But in a moment, David has some final thoughts, some additional teaching for us for today’s program. So stay tuned for that. First of all, Matt’s here, and we have a great Bible study resource for the month of March. It is the last day of March. This is going to no doubt enrich your time in the Word. Matt?
SPEAKER 01 :
A real boost during our school days is prepared study notes before a vital lecture or a test. the teacher or professor hands out an outline with key points, supplemental information, definitions, and illustrations. Study notes are like a roadmap capturing the beginning, end, and everything in between, right? Including insights you might otherwise miss.
SPEAKER 02 :
And this is exactly why Hope for Today, Matt, has published the original sermon outline study notes for dozens of David Hawking’s Bible teaching series. You know, and this month we are offering a fantastic resource bundle for We’re bundling together all of the study note packs for your dad’s Old Testament teaching series. 35 message series in this pack.
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Sermon note packs to help you as you listen to upcoming radio series here on Hope for Today.
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Or to help you get the most out of a teaching series for a personal or group Bible study. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Does your dad’s sermon note pack cover each message in those books? Yes. How about powerful stories in Joshua, 1 and 2 Samuel, sermon note and outlines by your dad here?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah. How about the challenging book on pain, suffering, and God’s will? Or Job? Prophecy books? All the Old Testament prophecy books? Yep, they’re all covered.
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And even more. Again, these are your dad’s original sermon notes and outlines that he used to preach the messages for all 39 message series that we have in our catalog. These are the sermon notes for those as a package bundled together, and it’s yours for just $75. Order and download today on our website. Or call to purchase and we’ll send them to you on a PDF CD. Yeah. To get your copy of this special bundle package, a complete set of message notes and sermon outlines for all of David’s teaching series in the Old Testament. You can get that for $75 as we’ve mentioned. Call us at 875-BIBLE in the U.S. or 888-75-BIBLE in Canada. Bible by the numbers 24253. If you’d like to order online, you can do that at davidhawking.org. And just before David returns to bring our time in God’s Word to a close for today, As this month draws to a close, we want to thank those of you who are praying faithfully for Hope for Today. It means so much to us, and it makes a tremendous difference in this ministry. We also want to thank those of you who have given this month to support the ministry financially. We are so grateful, so grateful for your faithfulness. Your prayers matter, your support matters, and we don’t take either one lightly. Your prayers and your giving help keep Hope for Today on the air, help us cover the cost of broadcast time, and help us continue taking the clear, straight teaching of God’s Word to people who need the truth. That’s you, that’s me, that’s everyone listening, isn’t it? In a day when so much has gone shallow and compromised, your support helps keep this broadcast strong, biblical, and unashamed of the truth. So if the Lord would lead you to stand with us here at the end of the month, we would be so very appreciative. To give or order resources, call 875-BIBLE. In the U.S., 888-75-BIBLE. In Canada, you can also visit us online at davidhawking.org. Now, if you’d like to write to us, you can do that in the U.S. Send your note to Hope for Today, Box 3927, Tustin, California, 92727. In Canada, write to Hope for Today, Box 15011, RPO, Seven Oaks, Abbotsford, BC, V2S, 8P1. Well, here’s David with his closing words.
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We are beginning one of the most exciting series I think we could ever put on the radio, The Attributes of God. These doctrines are fundamental to us in a world that’s so confused and chaotic, a world that seemingly is so badly deceived it’s coming up with all sorts of crazy stuff. You see, the Bible is the only place we can get good, straightforward answers. We’re trying to teach what the Bible actually says. And some people won’t receive it because they are so filled with a man-centeredness. They’ve left God out. We hope that doesn’t mean you. If you miss any of these messages, go to our website, davidhocking.org, and you can pick up one you may have missed and listen to it. I hope that our analysis of each of these things will open up our hearts, because some of us need to get right with the Lord right now. We need to repent of our sin. God is a God of grace and forgiveness, but don’t presume upon that grace. Turn to Him now. Here’s an opportunity right now as you’re listening to get right with the Lord. Maybe something we’ve said has put its finger right on your problem, right on your need. Well, don’t run away from it. Take a moment right now. If you’re in a car, why not drive over the side of the road if possible and take a moment to get right with God. If we confess our sins, He’s faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thank you, David. And if you’d like to know more about what the Bible says about being a Christian, let us send you David’s free booklet, What Is Christianity?, as well as a Bible study by mail. Now, both of these are very helpful and free if you don’t yet know Jesus Christ, you’re not yet a Christian, or if you’re new to the Christian faith. Call us at 800-75-BIBLE in the U.S., 888-75-BIBLE in Canada, and Bible is 242-53. And we’ll send these resources your way. Well, next time on Hope for Today, David continues our series on the attributes of God. Don’t miss day two of our look at God’s greatness right here on Hope for Today.
