I did not get as far as I thought I would yesterday in Sunday school regarding the question, "How do we know God?" If we continue at this rate we will have 47 parts/posts to this question. Allow me to explain what we went over yesterday. We had several folks out of town, so this post will serve its purpose in updating people.
Remember, this question has not been answered yet. I am just showing that it is a legitimate question that is answerable. We will answer the questioin soon enough. But first I really want you to understand the nature of the question. We are not talking (right now) about salvation knowledge of God. I think that has been made clear in the previous posts.
Last time we left off discussing the maintenance of a right balance between the transcendance and immanence of God. The point I want you to grasp is simply that the idea of God's transcendance should never distract us from fully trusting in God's ability to reveal Himself to us (particularly when it comes to Scripture!). This is especially true in our current context, which as I mentioned before is full of folks who stress and distort God's transcendance to mean that there is nothing that we can really know for sure about God. This results in an agnosticism that is unacceptable for Spirit indwelt believers who serve a God competent enough to reveal Himself.
Again, to say that God is competent to reveal Himself is not the same thing as saying that He fully reveals Himself. My point is simply that He is competent in what He has revealed to us. And He has indeed revealed much to us. For example, the names and attributes that God gives to us in Scripture to identify Himself truly reveal to us who He is. These are not arbitrary names that only give us an idea about God, or reveal certain limited facts about who God is whose essence we are unable to plumb the depths of. Rather, these names are an accurate, clear, precise revelation of the very essence of God!
Frame: “We should not adopt a mental picture or model of God in which his real identity or essence is hidden in darkness, while His revealed nature is a kind of periphery around that darkness. In that picture, the darkness conceals what God really and truly is; His revealed nature is something less than His real being…Such Biblical terms as holiness, goodness, and eternity express God’s essence. They tell us what He really is, for Scripture is true. They define Him, because through them God has defined Himself”.
Frame could not explain it better could he? His point is that God's names are precise indicators, revealing to man who He "really" is in essence. In other words, Scripture never assumes that our finiteness excludes us from being able to understand who God is through the language that He uses. In fact, it assumes just the opposite. It assumes that God is competent enough to communicate effectively to us who He is. And His Spirit (if we are in Christ) is competent enough to aid our understanding. To say that we cannot understand Him exhaustively is simply not the same thing as saying that we cannot know anything about Him with any real degree of assurance. The former is a demonstration of Biblical humility that is captivated by the glory and complexity of God, leaving us in holy awe. The latter is a manifestation of prideful agnosticism. As one writer I recenlty read said, "Ultimately, the bar of reaso is God's reason. Submitting propositions to the bar of God's reason, the true standard of reason, is one thing; submitting truth claims to the bar of our reason is another" (Steve West, Sound of Grace Publication). That is well said. Our reasoning capacitites are not infinite because we are not God. Thus, we can never fully grasp everything there is to know about God. Nevertheless, this truth should never lead us down the path of agnosticism.
Those who desire to emphasize God’s transcendence in this way are really not humble. They are arrogant and independent. They use their assertion, “We can’t know anything about God for sure.”, as a cloak of humility. But at their heart is a desire to autonomously make God whoever they want to make Him out to be. Rather than being humble, they create a god not of Scripture with an unmitigated pride. Furthermore, they can speculate about God in a manner that makes Him something that He is not due to their beginning presupposition that is fueled by agnosticsim.
Okay, now we are ready to answer the question and not just talk about the question- well, sort of. The short answer to the question proposed can be understood when we speak about two broad categories in which we come to know God. These two categories can be referred to as General revealtion and special revelation. Some prefer the terms natural revelation and supernatural revelation.
Next post we will define these two categories.
Dependant On Grace,
Andy
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