Post Series
0—Introduction
1—Revelation
2—The Creator and Creation
3—Humanity
4—Nature of Sin
5—Spread of Sin
6—Person of Jesus
7—Work of Jesus
8—The Church and Holy Spirit
9—Last Things
For the next few weeks I am going to post 9 separate posts outlining what I believe are the essentials to the Christian faith. Each post will basically walk through the main ideas of the particular doctrine of the day with questions and scripture to read. It could be a way for you or your community to dig a little deeper into the core pieces of the Christian faith, to the major acts of God’s Story of Rescue.
Is there a God? If so, can we know Him? How is it possible that we can know God? Why are we able to know Him at all? What is He trying to say to us about Himself, His creation, and even ourselves? What is He trying to say about how we are to relate to Him, each other, and the world?
Most people have asked these questions throughout their life. If someone were to ask you these questions, what would you say?
The first building block to the foundation of the Christian faith answers these questions: revelation. While few people believe there is no God, others find it difficult to believe that we can know anything about Him even if He does exist. Christians, though, have long believed that God the Creator has chosen to purposefully unveil Himself to humanity. A Swiss church leader by the name of Karl Barth once said, “God encounters man in such a way that man can know Him. He encounters him in such a way that in this encounter He still remains God, but also raises man up to be a real, genuine knower of Himself.”
Barth is saying that God has chosen to make Himself known in such a way that we can understand Him. For Barth, we are really able to know God because God has chosen to reveal Himself to us. Through His own choice and purpose, God made the decision to encounter man. God sets Himself before humanity in such away so that we can speak about Him and describe Him. Though Barth does acknowledge that God is in some ways hidden and very mysterious even in His revelation, God has made Himself “clear and certain to us.”
God sees to it that He not only does not remain absolutely hidden. In fact, we already have this knowledge from God Himself. We can really and genuinely know God because He has chosen to show Himself to us in such a way we can think about and understand Him. Deuteronomy 29:29 says this very thing, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.”
Think about this verse. How should it impact your answer to the question, “Can we really know anything about God?”
We must remember that this knowledge of God does not come from ourselves and our own ability to reason and think. “The things revealed” as Deuteronomy says, come from God. Barth says, when we talk about “knowing God,” this knowledge “cannot at any moment or in any respect try to understand itself other than as the knowledge made possible, realized and ordered by God alone.” While God is ready to be known, we must realize that it is by His grace that we can know Him.
From the very beginning God desired that we know Him. He walked in the cool of the day in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve face to face. Even after they sinned God did not flee from them, but instead pursued them. God continued encountering people, like Abraham and Moses. He also revealed Himself in such a way that we could understand Him for generations: God graciously spoke to us in our own language so we could read about who He is and how we were intended to be. He first did this on Mount Sinai when He inscribed on tablets of stone the covenant law (Ex. 31:18). Later, toward the end of His life, Moses wrote down all of the laws God spoke for the children of Israel. (Deut. 31:25). Hebrews 1:1 makes it clear that God spoke to His people (and the world) “through the prophets at many times and in various ways.”
Foundational to our Christian Faith is the reality that God has graciously revealed Himself by His own doing. Traditionally, that knowledge has been known to come in two ways: through General Revelation and Special Revelation.
General Revelation is God’s self-disclosure to all of Humanity through the Created Order in three purposeful acts of unveiling: Nature; an internal, created awareness of God; and the participation of God in History. (Rom. 1:19) First, God unveils Himself through all He created in the natural world; through creation we can both know that God exists and who He is. (Rom. 1:20) Secondly, we have access to the knowledge of and about God through an internal awareness that there is an “Other” (a God) that is beyond and above ourselves. (Rom. 1:21) Thirdly, God’s purposeful participation in History reveals a Creator who is intimately involved in the affairs of His Creation through deliberate acts of disclosure, human involvement, and redemption. (Ps. 140) Because God is involved in the world, we can know Him by his great and mighty acts.
But though God has revealed Himself to us, we struggle to properly understand God and His Works. Though Humans are crafted after the Image of God and poses a limited understanding of Him, that Created Image is broken because of Sin; because Humans have consciously chosen the Way of Self over against the Way of God, Humans misread God’s revelation through nature, human conscience, and history. (John 12:40) In order to reveal aid us in understanding Himself, God gave us what the Church calls Special Revelation, which comes through the Bible and Jesus Christ.
One of God’s primary acts of revelation is through the sacred writings of the children of Israel (Old Testament) and apostles of Jesus (New Testament). These collections of writings in their respective testaments are compiled in the Bible. While it is not God’s ultimate act of self-disclosure, the Holy Scriptures are the standard by which we measure our understanding of God and His Works. (II Tim. 3:16)
The written revelation found in the Holy Scriptures is well preserved, proves and authenticates itself, and truthfully contains everything God desired to communicate to humans about Himself and His Works.
Through this written self-disclosure God beckons Humans to relationship and worship, calls them live according to a Way of Life, and restores them to the way He intended them to be at the beginning of creation. (II Pet. 1:23-25)
This written form of revelation God gave to us is composed of the 66 books of the Holy Scriptures. This Sacred Text includes the 27 historically recognized New Testament texts and 39 Hebrew texts of the Jewish Testament. God primarily authored these books through the full participation of human authors under the guidance of their Jewish Spiritual Traditions, Culture, and specific contexts.
Through the climax of Special Revelation, God and His reality is fully unveiled through Jesus Christ of Nazareth. While we have the Bible to guide us in understanding God, ultimately, the greatest expression of what is real about God’s nature, character, intentions, desires, and works are entirely revealed through the person of Jesus, and only properly understood by observing, understanding, and listening to Him. Though we understand God and His Works through the Holy Scriptures, even this piece of revelation must be interpreted through the teachings, way and person of Jesus Christ. (John 14:9; Heb. 1:3)
Barth makes it clear that, “it is by the grace of God and only by the grace of God that it comes about that God is knowable to us…He gives Himself to us to be known, which establishes our knowledge of Him. God’s revelation is not at our power and command, but happens as a movement ‘from God.’”
The most accessible form of revelation we have is the Holy Scriptures. It contains God’s Story of Rescue. God has told one, continuos story from beginning to end. It begins in a Garden (Gen 1-2) and end in a New Garden (Rev. 22). Everything “between the trees” is God revealing who He is, how we are to relate to Him, how we are to relate to each other and creation, and how He has rescued us.
Some, though, have understood the Bible to be more of a Manual. Some people go to it to learn how to manage their money, have a great marriage, or even please God. Others crack it open to learn the mysteries of the universe like a science textbook. Like an owner of an aging Ford might crack open the owners manual to learn how to fix ongoing problems, people sometimes treat the Bible as the “Answer Book” for what troubles their life and perplexes their mind.
How have you understood the Bible before? As a Manual or a Story?
Have you ever considered the Bible to be God’s Story of Rescue? How is that similar or different to the ways in which you have heard the Bible described before?
How might viewing the Bible in these ways (Manual vs. Story) shift how we handle and approach the Bible? How we share it?
The conviction that the Bible is a Story, rather than a Manual, suggests the notion of an Author, Plot, and Direction; someone started the Story, there is a point to it, and it is going somewhere. Like all narratives, this Story happens in Time, with a beginning and an end. God is the primary Character in this Story and He acts within our time and within our world to do something. From the beginning God pledged a “seed” that would “crush [the serpant’s head] and strike his heal.” From the beginning God called on a man (Abraham) in order to birth a nation to use them to carry this Seed, bless all the people of the earth through this man and nation by bringing to them Rescue. Eventually this Seed was born in a wooden cattle trough in a stinky stable; ultimately this Seed died on a wooden cross and was buried in a borrowed tomb.
You have to admit: This is some Story! And it is one Story, the same Story God has been telling and moving from the beginning. The early followers of Jesus knew this. While something new began with Jesus, He was part of a broader Story that God had been directing from the beginning of time. His followers knew that Jesus was the climax of one continuous Story that God had been telling from the beginning.
Read Acts 2:14-36 and 7:11-26 to see how they told this Story.
Consider how Peter preached in Acts 2 and Stephen in Acts 7. What do you notice about how they talked about Jesus? Was Jesus an isolated “act” or was he part of something larger? Why is this significant?
To summarize: God the Creator decided to reveal Himself to us, on purpose and with purpose. He has done this generally: through creation itself, an internal awareness that there is something/someone (being God) “bigger” than ourselves, and his works in history. This General Revelation tells us “There is a God. We are not alone.” But God doesn’t leave it at that, an impersonal awareness He exists. Instead He also has revealed Himself specially by speaking to us through Scripture and by becoming one of us through Jesus Christ. This Special Revelation reveals that “We are not our own” because God is intimately involved with His creation and desires to be in relationship with us, relating to us on His terms, not ours. Through the Scriptures we have a more in depth glimpse of who God is, what He is like, what He demands from us, and how we are to relate to Him and others through love. Through Jesus Christ, though, God is ultimately revealed. In Jesus we come to understand more personally who God is and what He is like, while ultimately revealing forgiveness, salvation, rescue. As Barth says, “[God] is wholly and utterly in His revelation in Jesus Christ.” To know Jesus is to know God, because “in him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”
As Deuteronomy says, “the things revealed belong to us.” The things revealed are found in the biblical narrative, a collection of ancient texts, poems, and letters inspired by God for the purpose of revealing Himself and His purpose to Man on purpose. Therefore, we can all know God with confidence, because He has chosen to unveil Himself before us in ways that are both personal and understandable.
How should this knowledge affect your walk with God? Your Christian faith?
