Mark Batterson - The Wonder of Christmas, Everlasting Father
The Bible is a big book. Written in three languages on three continents over 1,500 years, it’s actually a collection of 66 books written by 40 human authors, farmers and fishermen, poets and prophets. There were tax collectors and prime ministers. It was written in prison cells, palace courts, wilderness caves. Covers the gamut of human experience. It’s comedy and tragedy. There’s romance and action, adventure. There are musicals called the Psalms. There are documentaries, Kings and Chronicles. There’s a soap opera called Song of Solomon. The Bible is a big book. So what’s the big idea of this big book? Hold that thought. A picture is worth a thousand words. Now, truth be told, the brain processes print on a page at 50 bits per second, and it processes pictures at at least 20 million bits per second.
So a picture’s really not worth a thousand words. Is it worth 40 million words? But who’s counting? I think Instagram, in a sense, has turned a lot of us into amateur photographers. Is that fair? Photography is something that all of us do to one degree or another. There’s a pretty legendary photographer, Stephen Wilkes, who said, «Photography can be described as the recording of a single moment frozen within a fraction of time. But what if you could capture more than one moment in a photograph? What if a photograph could actually collapse time, compressing the best moments of the day into a single image»? And that’s what Stephen Wilkes has done in a series of photographs called Day to Night. He has captured cityscapes like the canals in Venice and landscapes like El Capitan in Yosemite, epic events like the Tour De France and holy places like the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
Now, it takes many months in the darkroom, where Wilkes stitches together literally thousands of photographs to form a singular composite image. Now, I’ll show you one. In 2021, some of you remember this art installation on the National Mall, 695,000 flags planted, commemorating those who lost their lives to COVID. Wilkes selected, and you can kind of see where this shot’s taken from, he selected a perch about 45 feet above the ground, and it gave him a bird’s-eye view of the 20-acre installation, but it was also low enough to capture what he called «little moments, little vignettes». 4,882 snapshots knit together like a cross-stitch from the rising of the sun to the setting of the same. Now, I’m gonna show you what is maybe my favorite. Okay? Einstein described time as a fabric, right? Wilkes said, «I take that fabric and flatten it and compress it into a single plane».
And so my favorite picture may be the watering hole in the Serengeti National Park. He crawled into a crocodile blind, 18 feet above the ground. And in Wilkes' words, he said, «It was biblical. We saw, for 26 hours, all these competitive species share a single resource called water». I don’t know. Can I just riff for a second? Like one of my favorite moments in all of Scripture is when God gives Adam the incredible privilege of naming the animals. And there’s almost an anticipation to it that it literally says, «He brought them to the man to see what he would name them». Like it’s so playful. It’s so fun. And I’m sure there were moments. Pink fairy armadillo? Are you sure? Well, let’s go with it. Hippopotamus with two Ps?
All right, well, that’s kinda, that’s like Francisco. That’s fun to say. Just slipping that in there. I can hear Tarzan’s jungle call, right? Like what a composite picture. Where were we? The Bible is a big book, but what’s the big idea? I would argue that it’s thousands of snapshots that form a composite picture that give us almost this time lapse image of who God is. Now, you have to be careful 'cause if you aren’t, you’ll cut one snapshot and paste another and you won’t really have an accurate perspective on who God really is. I would argue that the plot line of Scripture is progressive revelation. It’s not that complicated. It’s a God, and by the way, Elie Wiesel said that God made humans 'cause He loves stories. But I also think that there’s a sense in which God cannot be deficient in any way.
So I want to say that upfront, but I don’t know. I found that marriage does more than multiply my joy times two and kids do more than multiply my joy times three. I think God wanted to create image bearers who would co-create with Him. And part of that is naming, and part of that is stewarding. And what a fun game we’ve been invited into. By the way, Francis Bacon said that we are God’s playfellows, which I think is a fun perspective. So God progressively reveals more and more of Himself through time and space, from Genesis to Revelation. How does He do it? Well, one way He does it is through His names. There are more than 400 names for God in Scripture, each one a different dimension of who God is.
We’re gonna kind of live quite a bit of this weekend in that 45-foot perch above the National Mall, or that 18-foot crocodile blind above the watering hole 'cause I want to talk some big picture things. I think, and this will sound really metaphysical and epistemological, and it is, it is, but I think as meaning-making machines, there are two questions that we cannot not ask and answer. Who am I and who is God? And I think life is a quest to answer these two questions. And the truth is that there is no finish line. You will never arrive. Tozer said that eternity won’t be long enough to praise God for all that He has done or learn all that He is. But these two questions, and here’s the thing.
The second question I think is more important than the first, because that second question will dictate the answer to the first question. Who you are is not as important as who you are. And taking our identity from what God has revealed of Himself and about us is the key to the right identity. So who you are as a function of who you are, which means who you are is more important than who you are. Well, how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? One more observation upfront and then we’re gonna kind of crash course in some of the names of God. There is a concept in physiology that has helped me theologically in ways it’s hard to put into words. It just, and it’s kind of crazy how it happened.
I was training for a bike century, had some hip pain. Pastor Marion, campus pastor at NoVA, shout out, ran track, University of Virginia, you know, pretty amazing athlete. And then he introduced me to this concept from physiology called reciprocal inhibition or reflexive antagonism. I talked about it maybe twice or thrice. But it’s this idea, this phenomenon where different muscle groups inhibit each other, or there’s a yin and yang, they correspond to each other. Give me one of these. Give me one of these. Come on. Even online, give me one of these. As you flex that bicep, as you contract it, the tricep relaxes. And then kind of give me one of these. Work it. As you flex your tricep, your bicep relaxes.
Well, Pastor Mark, what in the world could that have to do with theology? Well, can you begin to explain to me the justice of God and the mercy of God? Or what about the grace of God and the truth of God? There are things, I mean, while we’re on the subject, can you explain the trinity, one God, three persons? Well, which is it? Yes, it messes with the binary brain. But there’s this beautiful reciprocal inhibition in Scripture. God is just and merciful. Now, how that composite picture comes together, be careful when you take that Polaroid picture and shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it. All right. Here we go. Here we go. Some character traits of God that we see as contradictory are complementary. And that’s hugely important.
So in the darkroom like Stephen Wilkes, stitching together this composite picture, here we go. Bereshit Elohim Bara. First three words of the Hebrew Scripture. In the beginning, God created. God said, «Let there be light». And those four words still creating galaxies at the outer edge of the universe. How does He do it with His voice? What is His name? Elohim. Genesis 2, He is now Yahweh, a name that is so sacred in Judaism that it cannot be pronounced or spelled. Vowels remove from it to leave the consonant. And that’s where it gets interesting 'cause according to some Hebrew scholars, that name without the vowels is the sound of breathing. So there are those who would maybe only use God’s name in vain. Is that fair? And there are those who would even deny the existence of God in whom they live and move and have their being. But the truth is, it’s our first word, it’s our last word, and it’s every word in between. Elohim. Yahweh. And the progressive revelation begins.
Now, we’re skipping right over the book of Genesis where these incredible names of God, but you get to Exodus 6:3 and it says, «I appear to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai». I’m hearing an old Amy Grant song in my head. «El Shaddai, God Almighty». And this is so curious to me. «But I did not reveal my name, Yahweh, to them». Now, that’s so interesting to me because how fortunate are we to live when and where we do? Because we have the fullest revelation of who God is, an old covenant and a new covenant, and it paints this incredible picture. And I would say that until you get to Jesus, you don’t even have a complete picture of who God is. «Jesus is the dictionary,» said Eugene Peterson, «in which we look up the meaning of words».
So it’s like every name is pointing to the person of Jesus. So Abraham knew God in ways that Noah did not. And Moses knew God in ways that Abraham did not. Well, what does God do? He appears to Moses in a burning bush. And Moses poses what I think is a pretty natural question. Who am I? Who am I? There’s the question, right? It’s one of those two questions. «Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt»? Now, the truth is, Moses asks the wrong question, who am I? 'Cause that is not the issue. The issue is who is God? Because He’s gonna be the one who does the delivering. If God is for us, who can be against us? And so I love what God does, and He has a habit of doing this. He answers the question, not the question that we asked, but the one that we should have asked. And He reveals His name. God said, «I will be with you».
By the way, that’s all I need to know. If God is with me and God is for me, let’s go. «Now, suppose I go to the Israelites and they ask me, 'What is His name? ' Then what shall I tell them»? And even this is curious because Moses knows some of the names of God, but it’s almost like, oh, I need another name. I need another revelation. I need to know more of who You are if I’m gonna do something as crazy as lead the Israelites out of slavery. And that’s when God gives the greatest gift. The gift of God is revealing Himself to us. What a gift. And He says, God said to Moses, «I am who I am,» which most of us have heard and read and perhaps even studied. Ain’t no one ever introduced themselves to me this way. Like it is kind of curious. Like, what? What is this about? It’s a Hebrew word, Ehyeh.
A crash course in biblical Hebrew. In English, we generally say things subject-verb-object. Jack and Jill ran down the hill. In Hebrew, object-verb-subject. Down the hill ran Jack and Jill. Sounds like Yoda. Patience you must have. Careful you must be. Do or do not. There is no try. May the force be with you. Now, one more little nuance. In English, there are three tenses related to time, right? Past, present, future. Biblical Hebrew has two tenses, perfect and imperfect. And they relate to action. Hebrew is an action-oriented language. In fact, there is no distinction between knowing and doing. Don’t tell me you know it if you don’t do it, because knowing is doing and doing is knowing. Now, two verb tenses. A perfect verb is completed action. Are we doing okay? Are we all right? An imperfect verb is incomplete action.
Now, the significance of that is this. This name, Ehyeh, is an imperfect verb. If I’m reading it right, God is not a completed action. Now, He’s the same yesterday, today, and forever. His character and nature do not change. But the imperfect verb means that really, a better translation than I am who I am is I will be who I will be. Whoo. Give me some of that. I will be who I will be. I don’t care what situation we face, what challenge, what problem, what miracle we need. There is a God who is bigger than that situation. There is a God who is better than the mistakes that we have made. He is alpha and omega, first and last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It’s almost like God is saying, «I’m the alphabet».
Now, barely scratched the surface. Again, more than 400 names, Jehovah Rapha, God our healer, Jehovah Jireh, God our provider, Jehovah Shalom, God our peace, Jehovah Tsidkenu, God our righteousness, Jehovah Nissi, God our banner. In a sense, and this is where the composite picture comes into play, I think spiritual growth is getting to know the names of God, getting to know the character of God, getting to know the heartbeat of God so that our hearts begin to sync. Did you know that when couples cuddle, their heartbeats start to sync? By the way, the same thing happens in herds of horses. It’s a phenomenon throughout nature that, and so I think the idea is we discover the true nature and character of God until our hearts break for the things that break the heart of God, until our hearts beat for the things that God’s heart skips a beat.
And so God reveals His name and in the process reveals our name, and we just aren’t gonna have time to talk about that side of the equation. But I will say this, and this is to take a little bit of pressure off of any expecting parents. I remember the pressure. We gotta choose the right name, the right name, right? Like this is pretty critical. I felt so much pressure. Whatever your name is, it’s a placeholder. It’s not your true name. Read Revelation 2:17. The day is going to come. God has a name written on a white stone, only known to Him who reads it. So I stop and think about this. Not only is your birth name tattooed on the palm of His hand, knows the number of hairs on your head, orders your footsteps, collects your tears in His bottle, what I’m trying to say is loves you, loves you, but also knows who you are. These are large thoughts, but they’re important. I have this theory that if you don’t love God, it’s because you don’t know God.
And that almost sounds like circular reasoning. But the truth is, in the beginning, God created us in His image. We’ve been creating God in our image ever since. It’s the ancient mistake we make. By the way, if you filter your theology through your personality, it’s a form of idolatry. And what you end up with is a God who looks like, thinks like, talks like, might even vote like you. And what we have to do is take God on His terms, take God as His name. And in that process, oh, what a moment that’s gonna be. By the way, when God reveals your name, I think it’s gonna make sense. What’s gonna make sense? Everything. That’s my identity. That’s my destiny. That’s who I am. And so we have that to look forward to. But, whoo, where were we? So spiritual growth is getting to know the names of God, but I want to push that envelope, okay?
And by the way, by the time, as you learn the names of God, this progressive revelation, by the time you get to the Lord’s Prayer, it’s legit. Hallowed be Thy name. It’s we pray in Jesus' name. We pray to our Heavenly Father. And it’s okay to use different names. I think God knows all of His names, but I would argue that we’re also praying to all of those names. We’re praying to the Great I AM. But it’s not just about knowing the names. Okay? Numbers 6:23. Remember the priestly blessing? We pronounce it at the end of a lot of our gatherings. I like doing it like this. Spock did this, right? Do you know why? Because he was Jewish and he was doing what the ancient priests would do. They would form the letter shin with their hands. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make His face shine on you and be gracious to you. May the Lord turn His countenance towards you and give you peace.
Here’s the thing. We stop right there, but the postscript is what packs a punch. In fact, if you underline it in your Bible, and I encourage you to do that, notice what it says. «So the priests will put my name on them». Wait, wait, wait. That’s different than knowing a name. That’s owning a name. The whole idea here is, in fact, in the Hebrew, it’s the same as putting a ring on it. It’s like clothing yourself at the beginning of the day, walking into the closet, choosing an outfit, and this is what I’m gonna wear. It’s I’m gonna wear the names of God. I’m gonna wear the character of God. I’m gonna be who He has called me to be. God wants to put His name on you. How does He do it? Well, the moment you put your faith in Christ, simultaneously, it’s almost like the wiring of funds. It’s like this electronic transfer, our sin forgiven and forgotten, but the righteousness of Christ credited to our account. This isn’t complicated. It’s Jehovah Tsidkenu putting His name on you.
So it’s no longer my mistakes that define me. It’s the righteousness of God that defines who I am. Listen, on July 2nd, 2016, when God healed my lungs, he put His name on me. Mark, Jehovah Rapha, I am the God who heals. And so who am I? Who is God? And it’s this process of knowing the names of God, but allowing God to put His name on us. Now, that is the introduction, which brings us to our text, and it’ll be the shortest message ever. The progressive revelation begins with a prophetic proclaiming of who the Messiah is. «For unto us a child is born, to us a son is given. The government will be upon His shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, and Prince of Peace».
Just a very simple singular thought. I love all the names of God. I love Elohim. I love Yahweh. I’m so grateful for Jehovah Nissi who goes before me, who prepares good works in advance. I’m so grateful for Jehovah Shalom, the peace that passes understanding, that guards our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. I’m so grateful for Jehovah Rapha who healed me. I’m grateful for Jehovah Jireh who provides in ways that I can’t put into words. I’m just grateful for all those names. But there’s something about Everlasting Father that as a father, makes all the difference in the world. It’s so personal. It’s so intimate. God is not just bigger than big. He doesn’t just speak universes into existence. He is our Heavenly Father.
And I’ll let you in on a little secret. You are His favorite, and so is the person that you like the least. The adoption papers have been drawn up. This is not a distant God. Don’t miss this. I think we celebrate half of the incarnation. Yes, the incarnation is Jesus revealed as the Son of God. But in the revelation of the Son of God is the revealing on the other side of the coin of God as Father, right? Let’s not miss these two things. An everlasting Father, a heavenly Father. And that may sound mystical, but it’s the most pragmatic thing you can imagine. As an earthly father, I will fall short. I don’t know a single parent that doesn’t have regrets that they can immediately call to mind, moments where said the wrong thing, did the wrong thing, should have done this, shouldn’t have done that.
And part of that is like, you know, some of us were practically kids when we had kids. Like we don’t know what we’re doing. You never totally figure it out. And if you do, your kids will get out of diapers and then they’ll go through puberty and then they’ll move out of the house. Like good luck with all of that. And so I feel so imperfect and often deficient. Oh, but there is a heavenly Father who makes up the difference. I’m telling you, this is some of the best marriage counseling I can get. If it weren’t for God in the middle of our marriage, there are moments in 31 years you don’t make it through, but there is an everlasting Father who can make up the difference. To as many as have received Him, to them, He gave the power to become children of God.
What great love the Father has lavished on us that we might be called children of God. One body, one spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. I’m so grateful today. So here’s my prayer and I’ll close with this. I love this story about the little boy who’s drawing a picture. His dad asked him, «What are you drawing a picture of»? Little boy said, «I’m drawing a picture of God». Father chuckled, said, «Son, no one knows what God looks like». Little boy said, «They will when I’m done».
All of us are drawing a picture of God all the time. And if that image is off, identity is off, our compass, our internal compass is off. Instead of letting Jesus prove it for us on the cross, in the empty tomb, we try to prove ourselves. That’s an uphill climb. It’s not worth it. Just let God do it for you. Now, psychologists call this internal representation and it’s really one of the remarkable things about humankind. We’re not just cognitive, we’re metacognitive, which means we can think about how we think, which makes repentance possible because it’s metanoia, change of mind. But one dimension of that is something that psychologists call internal representation. From the second we’re crawling around our crib, we are internalizing our external environment.
And so that, you know, we might not be able to call it to memory, but that mobile that hung over the crib, like a little baby, even when they close their eyes, eventually can begin to see what’s there. Now, you know they will map out your entire house, including the location of every outlet that isn’t childproofed. We internalize experiences and call them memories. We internalize other people. And so we have unique internal pictures of who they are. But the same is true of God. And that’s why I would argue that we need to be deconstructing and reconstructing our image of who God is all the time. I would say the reconstructing is pretty important, that it’s this composite picture of who God is. And I guess what I’m getting at, it’s pretty simple. He’s a good, good Father. Amen.