For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins. (I Pet 1:5-9)
Lord, like Moses, I can see only a sliver of your glory even when I am holy. How much less can I see when I sin.
God is constantly communicating knowledge of Himself: “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps 19:1). The human race was built to process and respond to this communication. We are made in His image and for His glory. To a modern man, however, God’s communications sometimes seem vague. We were built for God, but somehow many of us do not see God. Why not, if He is what we were made for?
Think about radio for a minute. Right now radio waves inhabit your room, and people are communicating on those waves. But you don’t hear anything. You may be tempted to say that no communication is going on, but you would be wrong. Now if you consider God’s communications as coming over spiritual frequencies, you would have a picture of the communication between God and earth. His communication is always there all around us just as the radio waves are in your room right now. But to pick up the communication, we need a proper receiver in good working condition tuned to the right frequency.
The different capacities for knowledge mentioned in the previous blog partly make up our spiritual radio receiver. We understand what moral goodness is. We can think abstractly. We comprehend beauty. We have a spiritual sense. We have desires for purpose and for relationship. We are created in God’s image, and, thus, have the wiring to pick up many frequencies that God communicates on. If we fail to see God, there must be another reason.
Again, if you think of a radio, you will be on target. Why doesn’t a radio pick up specific radio waves? Of course, the first thing to check is whether we have turned the radio on. Obviously, if you don’t turn the radio on, you can’t expect to discover any communication. It would be a bit silly to say, “I don’t sense any communications from God,” when you aren’t trying. If you are too busy with earth to worry about God, then don’t expect to find Him.
But let’s say you have turned the radio on, and you still receive no sound. Or maybe you receive sound, but it’s garbled. You might check the receiver itself to see if it is in proper working condition. A broken receiver picks up nothing, and we must understand that you and I are broken. We may be created in the image of God, but that image has been marred. Sin has tainted the human race. Lust has warped our moral sense, pride has corrupted our reason, greed has stained our sense of beauty, self-centeredness has spoiled our spiritual antennae, and so on. This means that the apparatus God has equipped us with needs repair. We need to fix our sin problem. Or, to be more precise, we need God to fix our sin problem. Until Christ cleanses our hearts, our discernment of God will be blinded. Even God’s two clearest examples of communication — the Scriptures and the Incarnation — require men and women with a certain kind of heart. Not everyone who reads the Bible thinks it is of God, and not everyone who encountered Jesus thought Him to be Messiah. In fact, sometimes people witnessed miracles and still did not respond. (Matt 11:20-4) In order to see, you need more than good eyes. You need a right heart.
But a radio in good working condition and turned on must still tune in to the right frequency. If I tune in to AM 710, but no one is broadcasting there, I will hear static. Consequently, we must learn the frequencies of the Spirit. This takes time and much work, for God’s people must learn to be with Him, to immerse themselves in Scripture and prayer, to know God’s ways and be obedient in what they know, and to tune out earthly static. All of this is part of finding the frequencies of God.
To hear from God, then, we must tune in to Him, let Him rebuild our hearts, and maintain a certain level of spiritual health.
But even then, we are still limited creatures. We can know only so much. We can pick up communications only within the range of our abilities. A radio not equipped for short wave will not detect it. No doubt, God could communicate to us much more about Himself if only we could handle it. In heaven, I suspect, we shall handle quite a bit more, but we are not there yet, so we must make do with the handful of modulations and frequencies we can tune in to. Every one of the abilities that make the human race unique has limits.
Consider reason, queen of our abilities. With reason we can understand only so much. No one can reason his way to God; and conversely, no one can reason his way from God. Both positions require something beyond reason. Jesus said, “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth” (Jn 4:24). Reason can help with the truth part, but the spirit part is beyond reason. Do not misunderstand; I am not saying that theism is irrational. I personally think it more rational than its alternative. But I am saying that theism is suprarational. Reason, by itself, cannot comprehend even something as basic to human experience as love. Love lies beyond the domain of reason. This does not make it irrational. It simply means that if you want to understand love, you must tune in to a different frequency. Love requires something beyond logic. Spock never could quite get it.
All of our other capacities for knowledge are likewise limited. We are finite creatures trying to understand an infinite God. The apparatus God has equipped us with enables us to pick up information in only certain frequencies. When we are balanced and healthy in our approach to God, we understand Him in multiple ways, but we are still humans, not gods. Our humanness is one of the greatest liabilities we have in knowing God. People who tout the infinite capacity of the human race do not understand what they are saying. Holy people are still people, and they are limited.
