03. Man Needs a Direct Word from God

Man Needs a Direct Word from God In what way, then, can we logically look for the knowledge of God to come to us which we need? Must we discover it for ourselves by our own effort, without any Being who has a right to be called God doing anything to make Himself known to us? Indeed, would a Being who could be discovered solely by the efforts of such ignorant and limited creatures as we are be worth discovering? No such God as that could satisfy even the passing needs of our natural hearts, let alone the deep eternal longings of our souls. Any God who by man’s natural wisdom could be fully discovered, is not the God to meet the needs of a race wrecked and overwhelmed by humanly incurable misery, blindness and despair in sin (see 1 Corinthians 1:21).

We need a God who is beyond and above our utmost natural efforts to discover Him, else we could not believe Him to be worthy of our trust and confidence. We must therefore have a God whom we cannot adequately know, especially in view of our condition in sin, unless He is pleased to make Himself known to us in some way incapable of being misunderstood, by all who want honestly to receive that knowledge.

Reason compels us to assume, therefore, that He not only has revealed Himself, but that any revelation which we need to know, and which cannot come to mind and reason through the beauties and marvels of creation about us and the voice of conscience within us, He may be expected to give to us by direct supernatural revelation, since that is the one other means left by which we can become infallibly sure of the truth which will show us our way out of sin. Of another thing also we can be sure. If God has made Himself known through both a natural and a supernatural revelation, we can be certain that the conclusions which reason arrives at from the indirect natural revelation, if they are correct, must make such a complete and consistent whole with the truths made known to faith by direct supernatural revelation, that there cannot be the slightest excuse for failure to follow the light thus given.

One of the just and necessary criticisms made of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo has been that he purposely discusses God’s method with man in sin as though no revelation had come from Him on the reason why, inherent in the cross. Trying thus to resolve a problem that unaided reason has never been able to cope with, he naturally becomes so rationalistic and speculative as to take a view which in important essentials is wholly unfamiliar to the inspired writers of the Scriptures. But logic will not permit us to ignore the inescapable need of a direct revelation, especially when we see heathen philosophers, reasoning in total ignorance that there is such a revelation, come up against an impassable barrier when they search for the ground of a just forgiveness of sin.

Here is therefore at least one place where man must have a direct supernaturally given word from God. And in it there must be found what philosophy can never find—the way to reconcile God’s necessary attitude toward both sin on one hand, and the sinner on the other, in view both of the demands of His holiness in His attitude of justice towards sin, and of His love in His treatment in mercy of the sinner. Here is the problem before which the greatest minds of all time have quailed and quit, for there appear to be contradictions that no philosophy can untangle. There is here a truth, therefore, which reason may expect God to give us by direct revelation.

Advancing now to think upon His nature, whatever the truth about God is, out of an adequate grasp and acceptance of that truth must grow whatever attitude His creatures would be expected to take toward Him. For whatever He is in Himself, that He would be toward His creatures, and whatever He is toward them would inevitably determine their attitude toward Him.

There is thus a demand that the truth about the fundamental attributes of God’s character should be so simple and luminous to those who are honestly willing to know it, that it will not only be axiomatic and self-evident, but that it will also shut out all possibility of any misconceptions of God from the minds of those who want honestly to know the things necessary for a sinner to know about His character. For the attributes of God are after all simply God Himself behaving in a particular way, in all the unity of His Being, in the manner His essential nature requires Him to behave in any given situation.

We have every encouragement to believe, therefore, that if we are sincerely willing to receive them, we can come to know the fundamental facts in the Being of God, and that when we have believed them, the reasonableness, consistency and logic of them will be seen to do no violence to the reasons with which we are endowed, because we will find ourselves facing truths that are, because that which contradicts them cannot rationally be conceived.