Month: January 2016

Then Moses said, “Now show me your glory.”

And the Lord said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.” Then the Lord said, “There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.” (Ex 33:18-23)

 …God the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. To him be honor and might forever. Amen. (I Tim 6:15-16)

Oh God all glorious, let us humbly adore. Let us join the prophets and the angels and the litany of saints in falling face down before you. Open the eyes of our hearts to see even a glimpse of the Unseeable, and in seeing, let us worship. Let our minds and hearts be enraptured with your overwhelming beauty and glory beyond description, beyond classification, beyond all capacity to see and know. Blessed be Your glorious Name.

Ezekiel describes his vision into heaven — the throne, the great expanse, the brilliant light, the figure like the appearance of a man radiant with light, the likeness of a rainbow. He then responds to what he saw: “This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. When I saw it, I fell face down, and I heard the voice of one speaking” (Ez 1:28).

For us now to see God as He is would be instant death, like traveling to the center of the sun but infinitely more consuming. We are sinful, frail creatures, easily broken, easily killed. We have difficulty looking across a snowscape on a sunny day; we cannot look into an eclipse. Do we think we can gaze on the full glory of God? His is a glory that would penetrate through us and consume us entirely, for as He said to Moses, “No one may see me and live” (Ex 33:20).

The visions which the prophets and John the Revelator had were by necessity veiled images. God had to hide glory from them in order to show them the glory He did. They saw a fraction of a drop of glory and fell on their faces. Their little peeks of God unknit them inside out. Such is the nature of God. He dwells in unapproachable light. Who can see Him? Who can know the fullness of the Almighty?

Lord, I want to know You.  I want to know what You are like.  I want to live in You, but I can’t live in You if I know nothing about You.  Reveal to me the glory of Yourself.  Then will I be able to live  right.

A man wanted to talk to me about a book he had read. In the book, the author, a well-known lawyer, claims that God has learned over time how to handle the human race. This lawyer apparently states that in the early days of Genesis, God did not know how to deal well with the human race. He condemned the world to the flood and destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. In time, however, he learned to be more merciful, and when we reach the New Testament, he had gotten it right. Today, of course, God thinks as we do.

I’m not surprised at such a portrayal of God. Modern culture often has a small God, and this God is no different. I am sure that this lawyer is a fine lawyer, but he does not know God. His god is too small. The lawyer has made himself God’s judge. Unfortunately, that is not how God sees things.

The idea that we can think of God in any way we please is nonsense. It assumes that God has not revealed Himself. And it hurts us.

Our thoughts of God determine the quality of our faith. Tozer was right when he said that “the low view of God entertained almost universally among Christians is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us” (p. viii. Knowledge of the Holy). We will not be morally pure if we worship a simplistic God. We will have no power to transform our world and no depth in our souls if our view of God is average. If our god is less than God, our lives will be less than Christian. Unfortunately, the Western church today suffers from this problem. Our view of God is too small. We are slow to attempt great things because we forget the greatness of the One we serve. We avoid risky steps of faith because we do not believe God is faithful. We are prone to make comfort our driving force because we subconsciously think that we are the center of life. We dabble with heresy because we ignore what is revealed. We play with moral impurity because we forget that God is a consuming fire. In each case above, you may say other factors also contribute, and I will not squabble with you, but our view of God is a foundational factor. If we really saw God for who He is, we would take more steps of faith, attempt greater things for Christ, and be morally purer and doctrinally truer.

Now our view of God must not be solely an endeavor of the head. Many people could technically tell you all the right answers about God if they were asked, but they don’t live as if those answers were true. They say they know God, but they don’t live as if they know God. They merely have correct answers. If we are to know well the Christian faith as it appears in the Bible, we must think often, with devotion, right thoughts of God. Any understanding of Christian beliefs begins with an understanding of God. When we begin to think of God aright, and do so from the heart, we will have the foundation laid for all other thinking about the Christian faith.

We must have before our hearts and minds a certain God. God is not any god, and we are not free to think of the Holy One in any way we please. The follower of Jesus believes that God has revealed Himself through the Scriptures and that we must thus base our thoughts of God on those Scriptures.  And since God is the foundation of theology, we shall begin our discussion of Christian beliefs with God.  Beginning next week, for the next few months I shall briefly highlight certain attributes of God as He reveals Himself in Scripture.

Now we see but a poor reflection, as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. (I Cor 13:12)

You can know God. That is the whole point of the Bible. Yet you will never really know God, for He is God.

I do not contradict myself, and I believe that life gives ample examples for why I don’t. Consider. Imagine a neurologist talking about her knowledge of the brain — neurons firing, the functions for different parts, how it will behave to certain medications, etc. Imagine then that same neurologist saying that we really do not understand the brain. It is a mystery. You know what she means each time. Or imagine a husband saying that he knows that his wife will order the catfish platter at a restaurant or that she will chew out that manager who would not let her return the dress. You can picture the husband saying, “I know Marianne.” Now imagine that same husband later saying, “Marianne is a mystery. I don’t understand her.” No sensible person accuses him of contradicting himself. You know what he means each time.

Neurologists can understand much about brains without understanding everything, and husbands can know much about their wives without knowing fully what makes them tick. We can know without knowing everything. We can know brains and wives because they provide us with data that we can comprehend. We find them to be mysteries because the data is complex, and not all of the data can be seen. That is how knowing God is.

God has chosen to reveal Himself through the Bible. Because He has done so, we have data on God. We can, thus, understand some things about God and even know Him personally as a wife does a husband. But God has also chosen not to reveal the full picture. The Bible is self-confessedly an incomplete revelation of God. For our purposes, it is more than adequate, but God is bigger than what you see in the pages of the Bible. When you think about it, this is common sense. God is infinite. How can you cram everything about Him into a book? Yet we do have the book, so we have something; and when we look at that something, we find it to be complex. The data we do have on God is not always neatly categorized, but this, too, should be no surprise. If brains and wives are complex, how much more ought their Creator be?

Therefore, we can know God but never fully, and only where He reveals. This means that we are right to try to make sense of God through prayer, through reading the Scriptures, or through a systematic approach to theology like The Summa or The Institutes. God invites us to put the pieces of Him together in some coherent fashion. We are wrong, however, if in our efforts to understand God, we figure Him out. Do your best to understand Him, but remember…you are often going to fail. You are dealing with God.

We are also wrong if we never get to know Him personally, for personal, relational knowledge of God is the reason why God gives the intellectual. He wants us, not just our heads. If God had to choose between a three-year-old girl with little understanding but a simple love for Jesus and a college professor with books on the New Testament but a cold heart, he would take the child a million times over. The intellectual is good and important, but it must serve the relationship. It is to be fuel for the engine of the heart. If it is not, it is merely a lump of coal.