Why It Matters — God Is Not a "Mystery"

Answer

Because Jesus tied it directly to salvation. When He prayed on the last night before the cross, He defined eternal life not as a reward, a ritual, or a transaction, but as knowing God:

And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.

Read that slowly. Eternal life is to know the only true God, and to know Jesus Christ whom He sent. If knowing God is the substance of eternal life, then mistaking who God is cannot be a small thing. The prophets said the same: God’s people are not ruined chiefly by weakness or persecution, but by ignorance of Him.

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge…

And the one thing God invites us to boast in is not wealth, strength, or wisdom, but understanding Him: “let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me” (Jeremiah 9:24). To know God truly is the highest aim of a human life — and the truth itself sets us free (John 8:32). The identity of God, then, is not an academic side-room. It is the doorway.

Answer

Yes — and here a careful distinction saves us from real confusion. There is a difference between God’s nature and God’s identity. His nature — the unsearchable depths of how an eternal Being exists — is beyond the reach of a finite mind, and Scripture says as much:

The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever…

We will not exhaust the infinite. But His identity — who He is, whom we are to worship, the relationship between the Father and His Son — is not a secret thing. It belongs to the “things which are revealed.” The point of this course is never to pry into what God has hidden, but to receive what He has plainly told us about Himself.

Answer

This is the most common reason people refuse the study — and it does not survive contact with the Gospel. The whole mission of Christ was to take the Father, whom no one had seen, and make Him known:

No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.

The word translated declared means to unfold, to explain, to lead out into the open. Jesus is the One who explains the Father. To insist that God’s identity must remain a mystery is, however unintentionally, to say that Christ failed at the very thing He came to do. He did not come to deepen the fog; He came to lift it: “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). The apostle John could therefore write that the Son “hath given us an understanding, that we may know him that is true” (1 John 5:20). God is not hiding from the seeking heart. He is revealing Himself to it.

Answer

Revelation draws the contrast for us in the sharpest possible terms, and it is striking. The faithful in the last days are marked by a clear knowledge of God — His name written where their thoughts live:

And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads.

They know the Father and the Lamb by name. But the apostate system that stands opposite them in the same book is marked by a single, telling word:

And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.

One company knows the name of its God; the other wears the word MYSTERY across its brow. That is not an accident of wording. A religion whose god is finally a mystery has something in common with Babylon that a religion built on the revealed Father and Son does not. The last-day line is drawn, in part, right here: between those who know whom they worship and those who confess they do not.

Answer

This is worth testing for yourself, because the answer surprises most people. The familiar phrases “God the Son” and “God the Holy Spirit” — heard in countless sermons and creeds — do not occur anywhere in Scripture. Not once. What Scripture says instead, hundreds of times, is “the Son of God” (Matthew 16:16) and “the Spirit of God” (Genesis 1:2; 1 Corinthians 2:11). The difference is not a quibble. “The Son of God” names a real relationship — a Father and the Son who came from Him. “God the Son” quietly erases that relationship and replaces it with a title. Through the rest of this course we will simply let the Bible use its own vocabulary, and follow where its own words lead, rather than reading later language back into the text.

Answer

The first of the three angels’ messages — God’s final call to the whole world — is, at its heart, a summons back to the worship of the true God as Creator:

…Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come: and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.

You cannot rightly worship a God you have misidentified. Behind every question this course will ask — who the one God is, who His Son is, who the Holy Spirit is — stands this single concern: that we worship the God who actually is, in spirit and in truth (John 4:23–24), rather than an idea of God assembled from tradition. That is why we begin here. Not to win an argument, but to come to know — and rightly love — the only true God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent.