‘Behold, the Lamb of God’
ide o amnos tou
theou
College Study
3rd teaching
7.5.2012
“the Revelations of God”
Prolegomena:
Part III
Continuing on with our Prolegomena,
our introduction, to systematic theology, we’ve established two things:
1. A theistic, supernatural,
infinite and personal God exists and was the Uncaused Cause of the universe and
everything in it.
a. What were the arguments for the
existence of God?
2. Because a theistic God exists
and has acted to create the world, this theistic God is able to act and can
act. Miracles can happen, because one did happen.
We’ve established
that God exists and that He can act, but how do we know anything else about
this God? If God is beyond the universe and infinite and unlimited, whereas we
are finite and limited, how are we to know anything about what He is like?
In the documentary
film Expelled, Ben Stein interviews
atheist Richard Dawkins, author of the
God Delusion. Watch the interview. It ties in with a lot of what we have
been talking about: the beginning of the universe, the existence of God,
intelligent design… and it leads us to our next subject:
Play
youtube video: Ben
Stein vs. Richard Dawkins Interview.
Did you catch what Richard Dawkins said at the end of the
interview? When asked what he would say to God should he die and find out that
God was real the whole time. Dawkins said he would ask God: “Sir, why did you
take such pains to hide yourself?”
This single question
leads us to our next topic: that of how God is to be known. For if God is
beyond our reach and if God has not made Himself known to us, then how are we
to know anything about Him at all?
The method through which God makes Himself known is called revelation. The word revelation means an unveiling, a revealing,
a disclosing, the act of making known. How is this possible? Three pre-conditions must be in place
in order of revelation to be possible:
1. There needs to be a Being
that’s capable of giving the revelation.
2. There needs to be a being
capable of receiving the revelation.
3. There needs to be a medium, or
platform, a basis through which a revelation can be given.
Imagine
it this way: I
could not talk to my friend in Japan unless I was capable of dialing a phone
and talking. That’s the first pre-condition. But then, my Japanese friend needs
to be capable of answering my call and hearing my voice. That’s the second
pre-condition. And thirdly, the phone line itself serves as the medium through
which the call takes place.
So in the reality
of revelations: the first pre-condition we already know to be true. There is an
Uncause Causer we call God, who is beyond the universe, who is infinitely
intelligent and who is capable of amazing things. Thus, we have a Being capable
of giving the revelation. God is able to make the call.
Secondly, we need
beings capable of receiving the revelation. These we call human beings. Human
beings have a few things in common with God. The Bible puts it this way in Genesis 1:27, “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created
him; male and female He created them.”
We share the likeness of God as human
beings. One way in which we are made in the image of God is our ability to
reason, since God possesses ultimate reason, perfect logic and pure truth in
His nature. We have rational
intelligence and we are therefore capable of receiving a rational and
intelligent message, or the rational and intelligent revelations of God.
So, the second
pre-condition is in place. We can pick up the receiver.
Thirdly, there must
be a basis, a medium through which revelation takes place. On what basis does
the revelation of God take place? Well, there are two.
There are two revelations of God: both given on two
different mediums and in two different methods. The two revelations of God are:
1. The General Revelation
2. The Special Revelation
For the past few
weeks, we’ve already looked at General Revelation. The General Revelation is
God’s method of revealing truth about Himself through Nature, through the
obvious designs of intricate life-forms, biology, geology, astronomy, botany
and so on. The General Revelation is physical
nature.
Remember the
teleological argument: a design implies a designer, there is design in the
universe, therefore there is a designer for the universe. This argument
communicates to us how God reveals Himself. Really the arguments for the
existence of God find their home in God’s General Revelation.
And, the Bible
clearly outlines the General Revelation of God in a few verses:
Acts
14:17, Paul
again speaking says of God “Nevertheless
He did not leave Himself without witness, in that He did good, gave us rain
from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.”
Paul says that God shows goodness and kindness in the fruitful seasons and the
rain that allows for harvests.
Psalm
19:1. The
heaven don’t verbally speak, but their existence and beauty point to a Creator.
Psalm
104:10-15. God
is also a sustainer of all things, actively continuing the natural order of
things in making the grass to grow and the springs to flow.
Romans
1:19-20, “…what may be known of God is manifest in
them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His
invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are
made, even His eternal power and Godhead (meaning, His divine nature)…”
So Paul the apostle throws down the
biggest oxymoron of history: that God’s
invisible attributes are clearly seen.
How can you see the invisible? That’s a contradiction! But not with the General
Revelation, which reveals a Designer, a God of intelligence, beauty, complexity
and order.
The General
Revelation is so clear that Paul says there in Romans 1 that men are without
excuse. They deny God, but the evidence for God is all around them. The General
Revelation is so clear that you must go out of your way to deny the design of
the universe. The General Revelation is so clear that the psalmist writes in Psalm 14:1 “The fool has said in his heart ‘There is no God’.”
Why
call a man foolish if he says there is no God? Because the evidence is all
around him. Attributes of God and the nature of God can be clearly seen and
understood through His creation, because a creation reflects its Creator.
For this reason, the General Revelation is enough to condemn
a man according to Romans 1.
And God has not
hidden Himself. On the contrary, plenty of information and truth is given
through the natural realm all around us. Mankind ought to know about God simply
because of nature. And thus Paul said man is without excuse. He says in Romans 1 “because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor
were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts and their foolish hearts
were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory
of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and
four-footed animals and creeping things.”
And there’s an
explanation for every other religion in the world: man denied the true God and worshiped
the creature rather than the Creator. And thus the whole pantheon of
mythological deities from Hindu to Japanese to Roman to Greek to Norse, all of
them in the forms of men or women or trees or animals. And men worshiped rivers
and mountains and beasts rather than the One who made all those things, as they
should have known to do all along.
SO General Revelation also is a means
of condemnation. Man is without excuse with all the evidence around him.
(REALLY
interesting, study physics and chemistry and atoms in light of the General
Revelation)
But the General
Revelation we often think of as trees and animals and physical nature. It’s
also human nature.
As I already mentioned, human beings are made in the image
of God. Reverse it all and you get a glimpse of what God is like from what man
is like. You look at the creature to see a glimpse of the Creator.
Now I say a glimpse
because you must remember that man is a fallen race that is now inclined toward
sin and evil rather than righteousness and good. But even in the fact that man
has a moral nature can you see than God is a moral God. Also, the intellectual
nature of humanity and the rational nature of humanity and our ability to
understand truth reflect God’s intellect and rationality and truth. No matter
that man is fallen, the image of God cannot be completely erased.
Psalm94:9, “He who planted the ear, shall He not hear?
He who formed the eye, shall He not see?”
Another a part of
human nature, which we discussed before, is his capacity for morality. This
is called the moral law. It’s the idea expressed by the words we often use that
‘you ought to’ or ‘you ought not to’. And every human being ever born somehow
holds this view, that there are actions that should be done and actions which
should not be done. There is some kind of law, which has nothing to do with
physical nature, but everything to do with our behavior, which is believed but
not obeyed. And this results in the human feeling of guilt. Why do we always
feel guilt?
Remember, that God said He wrote the law in our hearts.
This moral law, this tendency of man to know what he ought to do, even though
he doesn’t do as he ought, points to a moral Lawgiver, or God.
Another part of
human nature is our capacity to feel awe and dread. An animal can feel fear
from physical harm. An animal can fear fire once it understands that it burns.
An animal can fear discipline from its master once it knows a good spank or
swat.
But a human being can feel a kind of fear that is totally
unrelated to danger or physical harm. It’s not a fear that you get from someone
raising a knife above you or someone breaking into your house. It’s a different
kind of fear.
C.S. Lewis in his
book the Problem of Pain describes
this feeling. He says:
“Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room:
you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you
were told ‘There is a ghost in the next room’, and believed it, you would feel,
indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be
based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a
ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is uncanny
rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called
Dread… Now suppose that you were told simply ‘There is a mighty spirit in the
room’, and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere
fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder
and a certain shrinking—a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and
of prostration before it…”
This kind of awe
and dread we human beings feel when we consider our own deaths, or when we look
into darkness, or when we gaze into the vast emptiness of space. It’s the kind
of dread that horror films are great at producing. A ghost, even one with good
intentions, can produce a sense of awe and dread if you believed it. It’s that
creepy, strange, unsettling feeling of something that has nothing to do with
physical harm. It is the fear of the unnatural, the unknown and the
supernatural.
And this is precisely the feeling we get when we truly
consider God. That there exists a Being who is all-knowing and all-seeing, who
is almost utterly alien from humanity in His infinitude, who possesses more
power than any human can imagine, is pretty terrifying, but in the sense of the
human feeling of awe or dread.
We often think of God in terms of a cuddly, rosy-picture of
a man with long white hair and a beard, or as a guy with a perfect smile
holding a lamb tenderly. And while God is love, God is not a teddy bear.
Whenever the characters of the Bible encountered visions of the Eternal
Presence of God as a Spirit, not as the revealed Son of God, it was always with
awe and dread and terror.
Consider when the Presence of Almighty God descended upon
Mount Sinai, where Moses received the Ten Commandments. Exodus 19:16, “Then it came
to pass on the third day, in the morning, that there were thunderings and
lightnings, and a thick cloud on the mountain; and the sound of the trumpet was
very loud, so that all the people who were in the camp trembled. And Moses
brought the people out of the camp to meet with God, and they stood at the foot
of the mountain. Now Mount Sinai was completely in smoke, because the LORD
descended upon it in fire. Its smoke ascended like the smoke of a furnace, and
the whole mountain quaked greatly.”
But that’s Old Testament God-stuff. The God of the New
Testament is different. Oh? Check out Revelation
1, in which the apostle John, a guy who knew Jesus, receives a vision of
Christ in glory. John wrote “And when I
saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead. But He laid His right hand on me, saying
to me, ‘Do not be afraid; I am the First and the Last.”
God is frightening, because infinity is frightening,
tremendous power is frightening and the supernatural is frightening. The
feeling of awe that we feel as human beings points to a Being who truly
deserves our awe.
The General Revelation also includes human history. Daniel 4:7,
“The Most High is sovereign over the
kingdoms of men and gives them to whomever He will…” Acts 17:26 says God “has
determined the pre-appointed times of the nations and the boundaries of their
dwellings.”
That the rise and fall of entire nations throughout history
has been the work and plan of God is a part of the General Revelation. History
then is truly His-story and God is
the greatest story-teller who ever lived. God’s dealing with humanity through
history shows how He has revealed Himself in the past.
Finally, the General
Revelation includes human art and music. Given that we are fallen creatures
and now have a twisted sense of what is beautiful, we still have a sense to
appreciate beauty. When God made the world, He called it good. He appreciated
His work.
We as human beings have a capacity for creation, obviously
on a much smaller scale than God, and we also have a capacity for the
appreciation of beauty, which no doubt God Himself also possesses.
As for music, do you know that God appreciates music?
There’s music in heaven. There was music in the temple. There are musical
lyrics in the Bible. There’s poetry in the Bible.
We are the products of a God who is Himself beautiful and
has the capacity to appreciate beauty.
That’s General
Revelation. It’s based on physical nature and reveals some attributes of God’s
nature. In General Revelation we see God as a designer and a creator.
An excellent book on the subject of the General Revelation
is Eternity in their Hearts by Don
Richardson. This book details some historical accounts of missionaries headed
out into remote areas to bring the gospel to tribes that had never seen a
missionary before, only to find out that God through nature had already
revealed much about Himself to these lost tribes and the people themselves were
already waiting for the white-man and his book to tell them about the Son of
God.
So with General
Revelation we leave behind really the first part of our studies in systematic
theology. A lot of what we’ve been studying has been based on our world around
us and our own God-given ability to reason. Now we get into specifics. We move
on from the generality of God’s revelation through Nature to the specificity of
God’s revelation through Scripture.
So now that we know
that there is a God that acts and that reveals Himself, we will come to our
subject for several weeks: special revelation in the Bible.
Recap: the
General Revelation reveals truths about God through:
1. Physical Nature. 2. Human
Nature. 3. History. 4. Human Arts.
I’m sure there are
many more means through which God has revealed Himself through Nature, that we
just don’t understand yet or have discovered yet.
Special Revelation
Special Revelation is found in the Holy Bible, the perfect,
infallible, indestructible Scriptures. The Bible is the only book of its kind.
It is God’s specific message to mankind. It is a book of antiquity that remains
incredible relevant today. It is God-inspired and God-exhaled. II Timothy 3:16-17, “All Scripture is given by inspiration of
God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for
instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly
equipped for every good work.”
This Special
Revelation forms the basis of Christianity, for Christian living and for the
Church. Special Revelation details instructions for God’s people as opposed to
God’s creation. Special Revelation is all the more narrow and specific in
comparison to General Revelation, but Special Revelation tells us more about
God than General Revelation does and it tells us what General Revelation, what
Nature alone, cannot tell us.
For example, the Bible tells us that God has a begotten
Son, that is a Son with the same nature as Himself: Jesus Christ. We could not
know this fact outside of specific revelation.
Also, the Bible details God’s future plans for the ages and
for humanity. We could not know this from Nature. The Bible also tells us about
heaven and hell. We couldn’t know a thing about them outside of Scripture.
And, perhaps most importantly, the Bible reveals God not
just as a Creator but also as a Redeemer and Savior. For we were condemned
under the General Revelation but with the Special Revelation comes saving
grace. John 3:17 says “For God did not send His Son into the world
to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.”
The heavens declared the glory of God but the Son of God
came to declare salvation.
Norman Geisler, author and Christian apologist writes: “In view of God’s general revelation, all men
are ‘without excuse’, for ‘all who sin apart from the written law will also
perish apart from the law. General revelation is sufficient ground for man’s
condemnation; however, it is not sufficient for his salvation. One can tell how
the heavens go by studying general revelation, but he cannot discover from it
how to go to heaven, for ‘there is no other name under heaven except Christ’s
given to men by which we must be saved’. In order to be saved people must confess,
‘Jesus is Lord’ and believe in their hearts ‘that God has raised him from the
dead’. But they cannot call upon someone of whom they have no heard, ‘and how
can they hear without someone preaching to them?’. Thus preaching the gospel in
all the world is the Christian’s Great Commission.”
And thus the Bible is the most unique book in the world. If
this book has the greatest and most needed information on the planet, if it
alone details God as the Savior and salvation from sin, then of course its
message must be preached.
Let’s
compare these two revelations:
General Special
Psalm 19:1 John 5:39
Broad Specific
Found in Nature Found in Scripture
Reveals God’s nature Reveals God’s will
God as Creator God as Redeemer
God as Designer God as Savior
Plans of biological life Plans of eternal life
Deals with the physical Deals with the spiritual
Means of condemnation Means of salvation
Moral law for mankind Moral conduct for the
church
Both revelations
are needed. Without General Revelation, there would be no way to argue for the
existence of God outside of the Bible: as an Uncaused Cause, as a Designer. And
the Bible doesn’t really argue for the existence of God. In the Bible, God is
simply a fact.
But without the Special Revelation, there could be no
Christianity, no Church, no message of salvation, no gospel and no way to know
about God specifically.
To conclude
let’s think for a moment about the interaction between the General and Special
Revelations. We admit that both revelations come from the same God and reveal
truths about the same Being. Therefore, they must agree.
But what happens if
they don’t agree? What happens when we see something in nature that seems
contradictory to God’s Scripture? Which revelation takes priority?
What we have to
understand is that the Bible is inerrant, without fault or error, perfect. But
our interpretations are not always so.
In order for our
interpretation of the Bible to be correct, it must correspond to the facts of
reality. We cannot say the Bible says the world is flat because it uses the
phrase ‘the four corners of the earth’. We have to understand that as a figure
of speech.
Or our
interpretation of the Bible cannot violate logic. The Bible cannot say theism
and polytheism at the same time: there cannot be both only one God and many
gods all at the same time. So an interpretation of the Bible must follow suit.
However, the best
interpretation of any message is always literal. If I called you up in the
middle of the night to tell you in a loud voice that my house was burning down
and I was trapped within it, what do you think I would mean? I would mean that
my house was burning down and I was trapped within it. I did not mean that
America’s political climate pushed our nation into danger and we’re trapped
within it. I did not mean that I happen to like classic rock and I couldn’t
seem to kick the habit of listening to it in the nighttime hours. No, you would
know what I meant because unless you have good reason to, you take messages
literally.
Therefore, we take
God’s message literally, and when a literal interpretation of Scripture
conflicts with modern thought about the world around us, then the literal Bible
is correct.
A prime example
again is macroevolution, that we came from primates, that primates came from
some pre-primate ancestor, which came from an amphibian, which came from a
fish, which came from an invertebrate, which came from a microorganism, which
came from a cell, which came from a rock, which came from an explosion which
came from nothing.
The literal Bible
is incompatible with such a theory, as I mentioned last week.
Conversely, when
the Bible is taken literally, greater understanding of nature comes about. We
know why Californian drivers drive like maniacs, because they are inherently
fallen and sinfully selfish human beings. We know why the universe has
complexity, because it had a complex Creator. We know why there are so many
religions, because man traded worshiping the Creator for the creature.
Did you know the
Bible also says the earth hangs on nothing, that it’s suspended in space? Job 26:7 says of God that “He hangs the earth on nothing.” That
sentence was spoken by an ancient man during a time when the earth was thought
to be resting on the back of a muscular man named Atlas or a cosmic turtle.
The
literal statements in the Bible will always line up with the facts of nature, whereas faulty
interpretations or misunderstandings of nature are the problem whenever General
and Special revelation seem to conflict. No one revelation takes priority over
the other when a dispute seems to occur, although the Bible has the greater information.
Summary
So tonight’s study
of the Special Revelation ends the Prolegomena and it will lead us into the
next section of systematic theology, which is the study of the Bible known as
Bibliology. Next week: the origin of God’s Word.
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