 Welcome to Foundations of Faith. Today we're gonna be talking about the nature of God. What we know about who God is is found in the pages of the Bible and right from the very beginning, the Bible is all about God and God revealing himself who he is and his attributes and his desires for us through his words in the scripture. Genesis chapter one tells us everything that we need to know about who God is right from the very beginning. In the beginning, God created. So what we know about God is that he was there when everything began and that he is the one who created everything from that point. The attributes of how God did those things and who God is as he's revealed himself to us are found through the rest of the 66 books of the Bible. And in the very first chapter of Genesis, we find out that God is within himself a community in relationship. Genesis chapter one, verse 26, when God is about to create mankind, he says this. He says, let us create mankind in our image and according to our likeness, let us create them. So we see God having a dialogue and a conversation within a community of the Godhead that the Christian tradition has come to know as the Trinity. Now you're not gonna find the word Trinity anywhere in the Bible, but you're going to find the reality that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all throughout the pages of scripture, progressively revealed as you read deeper and deeper into the pages of the Bible. When we come to the New Testament, we see that God fully and openly reveals himself through the Son, Jesus Christ. And what we can find very clearly about who God is in the pages of scripture is that God is eternal, is that God is the creator, that God is all-knowing, which means he's omniscient, that he's ever-present, which means he's omnipresent, and he's all-powerful, he's omnipotent. There's so many other attributes that flow out of that, such as love and justice and power and might, all those different types of things. But it's important that we understand that when we're talking about God in the proper sense that we understand that the nature of who God is is that he is triune, he is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Father being the one who from which the Son and the Spirit received direction and are sent, the Son who is eternally God, John chapter one verse one says that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The Word is the Son of the living God who was revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. He's the Word that was made flesh, but he's also eternal with the Father and with the Holy Spirit. Jesus, the Word of God, was born of a virgin, Mary. He lived a sinless and perfect life and Jesus, the Son of God, is the one who went to the cross and was our substitute, dying for the sins of the world on the cross and then being raised by the Father three days later. Philippians chapter two says that even though he was God, he did not consider equality with God, something that he needed to grasp or hold onto tightly, but he emptied himself and he laid down certain attributes of his divinity so that he could step into humanity in order to seek and to save lost men and women. That's what John three 16 says, that God so loved the world that he sent or that he gave his only begotten Son. That's Jesus. After his resurrection, he ascended into the heavens and he is right now seated at the right hand of God, the Father, reigning and ruling and one day he shall return to the earth physically, visibly and establishes kingdom on the earth and make all of his enemies his footstools. The third person of the Trinity is referred to as the Holy Spirit or the Spirit of God. We see both the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit all present in creation. The Father said, which is the word, let there be light and it says, and the Spirit of God was brooding over the waters, over the deep, calling all of creation out from the void and the emptiness. And just as we see the Father, Son and Holy Spirit working together in Genesis, we see the Father, Son and Holy Spirit working together in the book of Matthew at the very beginning of the new creation where the Father makes a declaration that he's sending the Son, the word is impregnated into Mary, this young woman and the Spirit of God overshadows her and supernaturally causes there to be a conception of the Son of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not just a force or an energy, the Holy Spirit is also the Lord. Second Corinthians says that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. The book of Acts talks about Ananias and Sapphira who lied to the Spirit of God. And when Jesus gave the baptismal formula for how his disciples should baptize new believers, he said baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit has emotions, the Holy Spirit can be grieved, the Holy Spirit releases joy, the Holy Spirit is the third member of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. One God, three distinct persons living in an eternal community together, fulfilling the purposes, the divine mystery of the Godhead of which you and I are the recipients of, working an amazing and such a great salvation that all of us are on the receiving side of. There's so much to who God is, but that's a basic understanding of the triune nature of the God that we worship.