Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one! (Deuteronomy 6:4)
God is one. There is one God. He alone is eternal, immortal, and invisible. God is He who alone is wise. He alone is self-sufficient, and that infinitely so, and He dwells in unapproachable light. No man has seen or can see Him in the full brightness of His eternally divine glory.
There is one God, who is the God of Holy Scripture. The Lord, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, who is the God not of the philosophers but of the Jewish fisherman—the God of Peter, and James, and John—is the only God. There are no other gods. To Him alone belong honor and everlasting power. Amen.
How, then, shall we know God? This is the only true gain in all of life. The knowledge of God is the only true gain of the human soul. All other questions and pursuits are nothing—they are surely empty and meaningless—when compared with the beyond-surpassing excellence of the question of knowing God Himself. This, then, is how we know God:
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one! (Deuteronomy 6:4)
We know God by knowing His exclusive oneness. That is to say, the oneness of God necessarily excludes all other gods. He is not to be included with the gods of the idolatrous nations. Those gods are false gods, even lifeless gods. He is known, then, in part, by the infinite contrast between His holy, living glory and the evil, dead deceptions of the idols of the nations:
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me. (Exodus 20:2–3)
And,
Now see that I, even I, am He, and there is no God besides Me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; nor is there any who can deliver from My hand. (Deuteronomy 32:39)
There may be an abundance of trees amongst the nations that promise, deceptively, to offer life, but the Gospel of God is the only true tree of eternal life. Also, there are many cisterns amongst the peoples and cultures of the world that deceive the multitudes with their offers of living water, but they are all broken cisterns that can hold no living water. It is Jesus Christ alone who can offer the wellspring of the Holy Spirit, and thus the true living waters from which a man may drink and never thirst again. God is one, and thus the false gods of the nations are imposter gods. As the Prophet Isaiah records the Words of the Lord God of Israel:
I, even I, am the Lord, and besides Me there is no savior. (Isaiah 43:11)
And,
Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel, and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts: “I am the First and I am the Last; besides Me there is no God.” (Isaiah 44:6)
And again,
I am the Lord, and there is no other; there is no God besides Me. (Isaiah 45:5)
The Prophet Elijah summoned the prophets of Baal to the contest. Their altar, the one they made for Baal, was dry, and the wood was thus easily ignitable. Yet as they danced frantically and cut themselves wickedly, calling upon the false god Baal to hear them, the wood remained unlit, and they received no answer to their cries. Yet before Elijah prayed to the Lord, he soaked the wood on his altar with twelve large pots of water, such that the altar and the trench around it were saturated and filled with water, and thus the prospect of a fire on Elijah’s altar to the Lord was, humanly speaking, quite impossible. Then Elijah prayed to the one God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the Lord God sent fire from Heaven that consumed the sacrifice, wood, stones, dust, and all, and licked up the water that was in the trench, and all of the people cried, “The Lord, He is God! The Lord, He is God!” (1 Kings 18:39).
The Lord is the one God. He alone created the heavens and the earth. He, and no other, demonstrated His glory by bringing His people Israel out from under Pharaoh’s cruel tyranny, even fighting for His people, and thus destroying the power of Egypt and casting Pharaoh and his army into the depths of the sea, and all of this with the divine power of His mighty hand and His outstretched arm:
Yet I am the Lord your God ever since the land of Egypt, and you shall know no God but Me; for there is no savior besides Me. (Hosea 13:4)
O how we long to know the one God! And yet He shall not be known apart from the knowledge of His Son Jesus Christ. For, His exclusive glory is revealed only through the Lord Jesus:
All things have been delivered to Me by My Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father. Nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and the one to whom the Son wills to reveal Him. (Matthew 11:27)
And, as the Apostle Peter preached the Gospel of God:
“Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12)
The children of this present, evil generation have been taught, in their school systems, to prize multicultural awareness. With regard to other gods, they have been indoctrinated in a vision of the world that sees the gods of the nations through various social and cultural lenses of deep respect, and treats them with great deference. Thus the proliferation of Buddhist temples, Muslim mosques, and Mormon church buildings in America is now viewed as a multicultural beautification of American freedoms. Few today have the prophetic boldness to denounce the idols as abominable in the sight of God.
What, then, shall we say of the churches of America in their friendship with false gods? When the church members bring the gods of the nations and the ways of the unbelievers into the churches, we shall say that they are practicing their worship in a way that is in outright rebellion against the one God. They may worship in the name of Jesus Christ, but their friendship with the world and participation in the cup of demons betrays their rebellion against the one God.
O dear Children of the faith (even the faith that has been delivered, once for all, to the saints), the Lord summons us to fear Him. We are called by the Spirit of Christ to repent of all friendship with the world, and to fear the one God. Return, then, to the fear of Him. Fear His divine jealousy, for Christ has a jealous, exclusive marital covenant with His Church, and His jealousy as a Husband is full of divine fire and fury. He shall not give His glory to another, nor His praise to other gods. Beloved Saints, worship the one God, even the very One who slew Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, with a wrathful fire, since they brought the worship of idols into the holy courts of His Tabernacle. Worship Him acceptably, with fear and trembling. O dear Children, keep yourselves from idols.
Summation: The One God, Even as Christ and the Father are One God
We seek to know the one God. This is the vision of our hearts, as given to us by the Holy Spirit. For, it is the very vision of the coming Kingdom of Heaven:
And in that day it shall be—that living waters shall flow from Jerusalem, half of them toward the eastern sea and half of them toward the western sea; in both summer and winter it shall occur. And the Lord shall be King over all the earth. In that day it shall be “The Lord is one,” and His name one. (Zechariah 14:8–9)
We cannot, therefore, keep ourselves from crying out for more of Christ to dwell in our hearts. For, without Christ, and without a truly repentant, submissive, and obedient worship of Christ, the knowledge of the one God is a dead knowledge. It is even a condemning knowledge:
You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe—and tremble! (James 2:19)
Our hunger, then, is for Christ. Our thirst is for Him. We ask for more of Christ, seek for more of His Word, and knock earnestly on the door of the knowledge of Him. For, the Gospel is, to be sure, the Gospel of the one God, but this must be understand as the Gospel of the one God revealed in the one Christ, and thus to know God is to know and adore His only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ:
Therefore concerning the eating of things offered to idols, we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is no other God but one. For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as there are many gods and many lords), yet for us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we for Him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and through whom we live. (1 Corinthians 8:4–6)
We were sinful men. Formerly, we were dead in our trespasses and sins. Being by nature children of wrath, we once walked just as the pagans do: in fornications, uncleanness, passions, evil desires, and the idolatry of our many covetous ways. Yet by the rebirth in the Holy Spirit, the one God has washed us and cleansed us through the one High Priest of our souls, even our one Advocate, Jesus Christ the Righteous. His one sacrifice of blood—all the way to death on the cross, for by grace we have been saved—has reconciled us to the Father:
For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time. (1 Timothy 2:5–6)
Is the one God, then, modalistic? Does He, as some so blasphemously assert, “change hats” and pretend to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in different seasons? May it never be! The one God is the Triune God of the Scriptures. There are eternal distinctions of Persons within the Triune Godhead. God eternally exists in three distinct Persons, just as the ancient creeds heralded Him. Yet does this Triune mystery nullify the oneness of the divine essence? Once again, may it never be! For, Christ is not lesser, in essence, than the Father. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. In the beginning, the Word was with God and the Word was God. For, as our Lord Jesus declared:
“I and My Father are one.” (John 10:30)
O to know the one God more by knowing the one Christ more! We meditate, then, upon the pre-creation glory of Christ, in which He shared divine glory with the Father before the foundation of the world. We ponder, with all awe and reverence, His transcendent glory. For, Christ is glorified far above the heavens and the earth, and His authority and power are infinitely far above every rule and power and authority in the heavenly realms. Our hearts sing for joy at His ineffable glory, for the one Christ is one with the eternal Father, and thus the brightness of His countenance is so eternally bright that it shall make the sun and moon obsolete in the New Jerusalem, which is the Heavenly Mount Zion. We bow, then, with tears of love and flowing tears of joy, as we remember the one Lamb who was slain for sins, and who thus is worthy of all of the divine honors and praises of all of the angels and Prophets and Apostles and saints of the Kingdom of Heaven. And there, in the everlasting Kingdom, all who fear Him, both small and great, shall adore Him, and shout the triumphal shout concerning His greatness—worshipping the one Father, through the grace of our one Lord Jesus, in the joy of the one Spirit. For, in the Kingdom, the “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” of the Gospel of Jesus (Ephesians 4:5) shall bring us into the everlasting worship of the “one God and Father of all, who is above all, through all” (verse 6), and who thus shall dwell among us all, and be glorified by us all.
And so may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God the Father, and the communion and fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
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