Experiencing God No.2 Theophany and Theology

In chapter 1 and beginning at verse 1, Paul an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God to the saints in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus, grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ for he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ in accordance with his pleasure and will to the praise of his glorious grace which he has freely given us in the one he loves.

In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding and he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure which he purposed in Christ to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head even Christ. In him we were also chosen having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will in order that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be for the praise of his glory and you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth the gospel of your salvation having believed you were marked with a seal the promised Holy Spirit who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession to the praise of his glory. For this reason ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints I have not stopped giving thanks for you remembering you in my prayers.

I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ the glorious father may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that you may know him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints and his incomparably great power for us who believe that power is like the working of his mighty strength which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms for far above all rule and authority power and dominion and every title that can be given not only in the present age but also in the one to come and God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church which is his body the fullness of him who fills everything in every way. Now may God add his blessing to that reading from God's Holy Word.

You might like to have your Bibles open at Ephesians in chapter 1. It cannot but be a major tragedy in the life of any man to live in a church from childhood to old age and know nothing more than a synthetic God compounded of some theology or logic but having no eyes to see no ears to hear and no heart to love. If your memory is good you will recall that that was my opening comment a quotation from Dr. A. W. Toza last week when I commenced the subject that we're looking at again today of experiencing God. Apart from the essential of the gospel Jesus Christ and him crucified I would argue that there is no greater subject that I have dared to speak on from this pulpit than this particular topic of experiencing God.

That's not just a subject that I bring before you it's a target which I would like us more and more by the grace of God to realize. The Apostle Paul has a pastoral heart. He speaks of himself in Philippians when he says that his greatest aim in life is to know Christ and when he writes to the Ephesians he brings together that aim that's personal and shares it plurally with all the folk there that he has won to the Lord Jesus and so he says in the in the 17th verse of Ephesians 1 I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ the glorious Father may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that you might know him better.

I can think of nothing more wonderful than being a member of the congregation at Ephesus and knowing that the pastor away from them for long periods has them at the forefront of his mind and he dares to make this prayer and indicate that it's a deeply felt prayer that they will come to an increasing knowledge of someone he refers to as the glorious Father. He wants them to experience God and I want you to realize that the composition of the congregation at Ephesus was largely taken up with slave people. Folk who perhaps were not particularly erudite.

There may have been some nobles but they would have been in the minority. It was the despised categories of people who first responded to the gospel says Paul when he writes to the Corinthians and we have no reason to believe that Ephesus was any different at all. These people who have no respect as far as the Roman judiciary is concerned.

These folks who have come in from paganism they are on the role of the church. If Paul had been ministering in India then possibly he would have been speaking of the untouchables. If he had been ministering in the 18th century in our country then he would be addressing his remarks to the working class who then were very much despised and it's this category of people who made their way into the early Christian church and Paul says I want you to know the glorious Father even more and more and I say that that very comment is most revealing.

In what sense? Well we owe the notion to the historic Catholic Church that there is some distinction within the Christian community between the clergy and the laity. Those who are of the former have a religious vocation. It might well be that they'll find themselves behind the cloistered confines of a monastery or they may be in one of the female orders in terms of nuns and somehow or other because you have this special vocational call you may come to a realization of God that is greater than that of ordinary people.

Monasticism was a good idea but it spoke more of the ingenuity of man than rather of the declared permission of God. There is no distinction made in Scripture at all as though one class of people within the church shall know God more than another class. The slaves could come to know God increasingly as much as those who were members of Caesar's household and I underline this to emphasize a point that I made last Sunday morning.

There is no reason why you, why I, why ordinary people here in this church shall not know or should not know God increasingly provided we have this goal as one of the targets indeed the main target that directs and controls our lives and lifestyle. Says the Apostle Paul this isn't a flash in the pan when I think of you at Ephesus I keep asking. I ask and I ask with importunity.

I knock on the door of heaven and I come again and again and I pray to the glorious God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ that he might grant to the slaves at Ephesus a greater understanding of who he is and a greater appreciation of his power within their lives. A.W. Tozer has a book called Divine Conquest and in the preface he he dedicates the volume to all those pilgrims of eternity whose distrust with earth has constrained them to seek in God a more enduring substance and that could well have been the preface to the letter to the Ephesians here were people away from the world in which they had been reared who'd come into a saving relationship with Jesus Christ and they found in God a more enduring substance and says Paul I congratulate you and may you go on and know God more and more and more. May you have that same desire for God I speak with respect as the alcoholic has for spirits but that desire for God will serve you infinitely better than any other desire that you might have within your frail bodies.

Now we might say but didn't these people know him? Did they not know God? After all what had Paul been doing? He was at Ephesus for three years and Paul incidentally preached very long sermons. I'm a very brief preacher by comparison with the Apostle Paul. There are many other deficiencies in my ministry in comparison with his too.

Let me quickly admit. What had he been doing in these three years? Well he had been informing them about the doctrine of the atonement in the earlier verses of this chapter it's pretty obvious that they knew what he was referring to or else he would have gone into greater explanation when he talks about the adoption through Christ Jesus which they had which they had experienced. He talks about God and the ultimate way in which Jesus will come back to this world and the final consummation of all things will be through him.

He talks about the great doctrine of predestination and the sealing of the Holy Spirit and so forth. These men were not illiterate. They had not been uninformed about the nature of God and yet Paul with all that in mind says yes brothers and sisters but nonetheless though you know this I keep asking that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that you might know him better.

They knew him in degree and many of them knew him academically but they did not know him in depth or what depths they had acquired. Paul informed them there were fathoms more to go. Great amounts of experience for them to have before they could possibly come to be satisfied in their spiritual pilgrimage.

Yes he knew they were known already to the Lord and the Lord knew them but nonetheless says the Apostle Paul there's there's more more in store for you. I want you to know him and when the Apostle uses that verb to know he does it in a way that often we don't. The Greek word is much more descriptive more descriptive the Greek language is more descriptive than the English.

It has several words for the verb to know. We use that verb sometimes in terms of just an ordinary relationship. I know him and what we really mean is well we met him once or twice.

We may have listened to him speak. He may have been a neighbor for a while but we perhaps met up with this individual on the holiday five years ago. I know him but it's superficial.

It's not in depth. It's cursory. It's fleeting but when the Apostle selects the Greek verb for to know he uses the most intimate.

This is knowledge in depth. I thank God for Christian relationships. Praise God for brothers and sisters who mean more to me than my own flesh and blood and perchance it might be the case on their part as far as I am concerned.

I know them but I didn't get to know them just like that. One does not woo just like that. Love at first sight may be a poetic concept but most of us work at our love and then discover as the weeks and the months go by that yes it's real and as it leads to marriage it's passionate but there is a period there is a process that is involved and so when the Apostle uses this word to know he selects I say the most intimate Greek term that there is.

You remember how when Amos is speaking on behalf of God to the Hebrew people in his day he says of the Hebrews you only have I known of all the families of the earth. Now God obviously knew the Chaldeans. He obviously knew the Egyptians.

He knew the people who were then in Turkey and the rest of Asia Minor but there was a special knowledge which God had of the Hebrew people. Now that's the concept that you've got here. It's the special knowledge that Paul is endeavoring to identify and say to the Ephesians my I wish you knew God the Father like that and of course he has got the way to the teaching of Jesus Christ behind him.

It was the Blessed Lord you recall who who in his high priestly prayer in John 17 says that he wants his children to know him. This is life eternal that they might know thee the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent. But wait a minute Lord the Jews know you.

They certainly know God in the sense that they've got the Old Testament scriptures. They've got all the historical benefits of being your people. The Pharisees, the Sadducees, they know but not in the way that Jesus is referring to knowledge.

Not purely knowledge about God but knowledge in depth of God. You sometimes feel out of sorts here on Mother Earth that no one understands that you have a sense of lack of fulfillment. May I lovingly suggest to you that if that is the case that your problem is this.

You have not satisfied what is a basic desire within the breast of mankind and that is to know God. My heart is restless says Augustine in words that have almost become immortalized until it finds rest in thee and that is true. We have an inbuilt craving for God.

We can squeeze it out. We can substitute other things and push them in its place but we have in our hearts a vacuum that is God-shaped and it is never fully satisfied until we have an I-you encounter with the Living God and if there's one thing that is a matter with evangelicalism it seems to me in the 20th century is that we're substituting an I-it relationship for God instead of an I-you. A personal encounter is something that's been pushed aside and we're thinking that provided we've got right doctrine, we come into the church, we sing our hymns, we're on a membership role of a Bible-believing community, then we know God.

We don't. It's a delusion. Knowledge of God is more than pure theology.

Let me try and demonstrate what I mean. It was A.W. Tozu who says this, we think of ourselves as inhabiting a parenthetic interval between the God who was and the God who will be and we are lonely with an ancient cosmic loneliness. What does he mean? We are caught up between the first coming of Christ and the second coming of Christ and some two thousand years have been lost in history during the interval for our Lord has yet to return and somehow we refer to a God who was and a God who will be but here we are in between in no man's land and as Tozu so eloquently puts it, we're lost in a cosmic loneliness.

I need to know this God. Not because he was the God of my forefathers, not because he was the God of the patriarchs and the prophets and of the New Testament apostles, but I need to know this God now. Not because he's the God and Father of Jesus Christ who shall personally return to this world and if I'm around then it's going to be a most exciting time for me and for those who confess him, Jesus Christ as Lord, but I need to know him right now, today.

Today is the time to know God and if I don't know him then I'm lonely and I'm not being poetic, I'm being literal. I've never preached with such utter sincerity on a Sunday morning. If I do not know God, if I slump across my evangelical pew, then as I mentioned last Sunday morning, I'm akin to the skeletons in the vision of Ezekiel in the valley of death.

We need more than theology, more than theology. Moses was one of the greatest theologians of all time. He went to the Academy where God was the tutor and you remember it was on Mount Sinai that Moses received the law.

God wrote it, inscripturated on two tablets, his thou shouts. You remember the story at the beginning of Exodus. Here is Moses then, primed with theology, this man who has a great understanding of the Word of the Living God.

Is that enough for Moses? No, it's not. Later on you'll find him in the 33rd chapter of Exodus and he has been walking with the Lord for a long time and the Lord has been telling him, verse 12, Exodus 33, if you're looking for it, you have been telling me lead these people but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. You have said I know you by name and you have found favor with me.

If I have found favor in your eyes, teach me your ways so I may know you and continue to find favor with you. Remember that this nation is your people and God tries to satisfy this academic Moses. Alright, you want to know me, says God, not only my word but my presence will go with you and I will give you rest.

And Moses is so greatly desirous of God that he's not even satisfied then. And he goes on to say if your presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth? And then Moses, rising to a pinnacle of faith, puts in the request, now Lord, show me your glory.

I'll trade all the books that I've got and they're considerable if you've been in my office, to know something of the glory of God, as Moses knew God's glory. Theology is a subject to which I've given months if not years of my life, but theology can leave me barren, sterile, like the Sahara Desert. It's not theology alone I'll buy.

It's a theophany, an understanding of God. Theology means God's Word. Theophany means God's appearance.

And theology takes us through to theophany or else theology is inadequate. The Word of God takes us through to express it differently to the God of the Word or else we're no better off than the cultists who come to scripture and completely misunderstand it. You see the point? I can substantiate what I'm saying time and time again.

Maybe I haven't satisfied you or I turn to Job. Here in the 23rd chapter of Job is a man, illustrated, who knows a great deal about God to the extent that he's engaged in theological discussion, speculation, argumentation, but he's in a very sorry condition physically. He has an outcrop of boils that he's trying to cope with.

He has had tragedy after tragedy in his family life. There's not much about the evidences for the existence of God that you can inform Job and find that you're trading in novelties. He's got it all.

One of the earliest men to whom scripture makes any reference who lived on the face of the earth and during pressure with all the knowledge he has of this great God. He says in the third verse of Job 23, if only, if only I knew where to find him. If only I could go to his dwelling.

Knowledge about was utterly insufficient. But you move on don't you to the last chapter of the book that bears his name and now his heart cry has been, has been fulfilled. He's had this theophany, this I you, this divine encounter with the Living God and he tells us, he tells us in few words but they're full, they're full of meaning.

He says in the, in the fifth verse, my eyes had heard of you but now my, my ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes. Barren theology can't keep a man going when his body is wracked with pain, when he's alone on this earth, when he's lost his sons, when his wife tends to ridicule him, when his friends despise him.

He wants more than the Word. He needs the God of the Word. He wants more than theology.

He needs a theophany. I could spend an hour or so giving you examples of this and show you by the very frequency in which such examples present themselves on the page of Scripture that what I'm sharing with you is basic biblical truth. Let's take another one.

Let's go to the book of Psalms. Here is David and in the 42nd Psalm he is telling us something about his experience of God and his desire to know the Lord in a very real way. Psalm 42.

Many of you who look into the authorized version would know this by heart, I'm sure, of my older friends in the congregation. As the deer or as the heart pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

Notice the adjective there. Not just God. The living God.

Not the God of books. Not the God of philosophical arguments. That doesn't satisfy the soul.

It might entertain the mind, but it doesn't in any way make a man feel at one with the infinite. And that's what David wants. He wants to be at one with the living God.

Not just a theology, but I argue a theophany. And so one could go on, but time is going on also, unfortunately. So let's just hold those three examples in our mind.

Our starting point, you remember, was Paul speaking to a congregation composed mainly of untouchables and saying, holding, dangling in front of them the prospect of knowing God increasingly. And in the Old Testament you get example after example after example of men and women who knew God. What is the consequence of knowing God? What is the consequence? If Paul's prayer is to be fulfilled as I believe that it was within the early Christian community at Ephesus, then what was their initial experience when their knowledge of God became much more complete than it was at the point of Paul writing out his prayer? Well let me suggest that when you have an encounter with God, your first reaction is not jubilation.

Your first reaction is not jubilation. Don't misunderstand me. I'll come and deal and qualify that point in a moment or so.

But it needs to be said because it's not being said too often. When you have an encounter with this living God, your first reaction, far from jubilation, is contrition. It's a sense of, I'm glad to be here, but I shouldn't be here.

It's a mixed emotion that you go through when you're in his presence. That's bound to be the case because he's holy and you're unholy. He's consistent and you're utterly inconsistent.

If you feel at home immediately in the presence of God, I question your experience. Let me try to give you an illustration of what I'm getting at, if I dare bring to you and into the pulpit the wind in the willows this morning. I got my wife to bring it from her school, and she's teaching seven- or eight-year-olds, so you can see what intellectual level I'm running at.

I got her to bring it from school, and I read the story through some while ago, being prompted so to do by my reading, strangely enough, of C.S. Lewis. Do you recall, those of you who read Wind in the Willows years ago, how Rat and Mole were going to Pan Island? I can see smiles all around the gallery. Pan Island was the place where their God was, Pan, and they moved Ratty and Moley towards the island, and they had an encounter with Pan, and so we find Mole speaking.

Rat, he found breath to whisper, shaking, are you afraid? Afraid, murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. Afraid of him? Never, never. And yet, and yet, oh Mole, I am afraid.

Oh, how I fear thee, living God, with reverential fear. God appears to Abraham, and a great horror falls over Abraham's soul. God appears to Jacob, and he's terrified.

The Lord was in this place, and I knew it not. God appears to Moses, and off comes the sandal, off come the sandals from his shoes. He's on holy ground.

I have seen you now, says Job, with the eyes. I have heard you with the ears, and now I repent, I abhor myself. On the banks of the river, Daniel has a theophany, an encounter with God, and he falls down in his presence.

Saul is unhorsed as he moves crazily from Jerusalem to Damascus. He bites the dust, to quote our American friends, and he cries out to God, Lord, what would you have me to do? And here is John, the beloved John, an old man on the isle of Patmos, and Jesus appears, and John says, I fell at his feet as one dead. When you're in the presence of God, when there's a naked experience, an eye you encounter, then there is contrition.

There is a measure of fear. A special joy is in all love for objects we revere. Thus joy in God will always be proportioned to our fear.

Oh, thou art greatly to be feared. Thou art so prompt to bless. The dread to miss such love as thine makes fear but love's excess.

But fear is love, and love is fear, and in and out they move. But fear is an intenser joy than mere unfrightened love. They love thee little, if at all, who do not fear thee much.

If love is thine attraction, Lord, fear is thy very touch. We fear because thou art so good, and because we can sin. And when we make most sure of love, we are trembling most within.

Our blessedness will be to bear the sight of thee so near, and thus eternal love will be the ecstasy of fear. That's Frederick Faber. The ecstasy of fear.

Being in the presence of God, recognizing him to be all that I am not, and yet that fear is not the cringing fear of a man who's about to be devoured by some ferocious beast in the jungle. It's the fear of respect. It's the fear that one has in the presence of someone who is other than you are, and without whom you would be absolutely nothing.

And then as you get to know him more, you discover that he's not just a God of holiness. He's a God of intense love, and you're the prodigal, and you're back in your father's house. He's embraced you, and there's a party.

This is a time not just to be fearful in the contrite sense. This is a time to be rejoicing, to be jubilant in the sense of adoring the living God who has done so much for you. Contrition moves into jubilation.

The ecstasy of worship of this great, great God who I'm coming to know more and more, and without whom my life would be utterly unacceptable. This, I believe, is what the Apostle Paul is here saying to the Ephesians. This is what he has in mind.

These ideas are not paradoxical. They're not opposite. They're not self-contradictory.

As Paul is speaking about knowing God, it means revering him. But revering him is to love him, and to love him is to adore him, and to adore him is to rejoice before him, because in his presence is fullness of joy, and at his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. Oh, my friend, those who sometimes criticize me as being a non-experimental preacher, as being absolutely vacant of any tinge of emotion whatsoever, you do me an injustice.

I believe in theology. I believe in the Word of God, but I believe far more in theophany. I believe far more in the God of the Word, but the two are not mutually exclusive.

The one leads you through to another, and I can tell you that the test of a true religious experience is, has it got a measure of the fear of God? I'm not talking, you remember, of that cringing fear. I'm talking of the fear of awe and respect, and when you come to terms with it, if ever you do, it causes you from your heart, from the depths of your emotion, to be like a bubbling spring that causes the very praise of Almighty God to fall, to flow from your lips, so that in his presence you could almost dance in jubilation and ecstasy, because this God is your God, and you're one with him, and there's no force on earth, nor under the earth, nor in heaven, that can separate you from the love of God. That's what I mean by knowing God, and that's not just what I mean, for mine is but a fragment of information.

This is what the Bible is speaking at, but I behave as a fool, as I try to placard it in front of you. You have to come to this book and go through its pages and say, oh God, you're not just the God of the dead, you're the God of the living, and it's you that I want today. I look forward to your purposes.

I look backwards to the way that you've moved in history, but God, you're the God of the great I am. Every moment is present with you, and I want to know you. I want to know you more, and more, and more.

I was going to take you further into my text, but I've taken wing of my notes and left them a long time ago, and heaven knows where I'd start if I came back to them. So let me try to conclude by bringing you to one more text, which is parallel to that of Ephesians. Here is the anonymous writer of the Hebrew epistle, and in the eighth chapter, he is speaking of the benefits of the new covenant enacted by Jesus Christ.

This is nothing that is future, this is something that is historic, and it is also present. And Paul is working out, or rather the author, Paul if you please, is working out the implications of the covenant in Hebrews chapter eight. Let's read from verse 10.

This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time, that's the time of Jesus, declares the Lord. I will put my laws in their minds, and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.

No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, know the Lord, because they will all know me from the least of them to the greatest. For I will forgive their wickedness, and will remember their sins no more. They will all know me, not just the so-called preachers, or reverends, or clergymen, or whatever, not the nuns or the monks alone, though I do not criticize some of those very dedicated people, even though I'm not inclined towards monasticism myself.

The ordinary person in worthing tabernacle, the 14, 15 year old boy or girl, the 80 odd year old lady or man who's having to cope with the increasing infirmities of the body, from the greatest to the smallest, from the so-called important to those who are almost lost in a sea of anonymity, God says, you can know me. And that's what I want, for myself, and for everyone else here. Not slumped over the pew, going through rote in terms of worship, but a naked experience of God, so that when I'm in my 70s, or my 80s, or my 30s, or my 40s, whatever comes my way, I pin my hope and I'm buoyed along by this confidence that this God is my God.

And I can't know that purely academically, although thank God for the mind. I can't know it purely through theology. I must know it through my emotion.

I must know it by a theophany, as I spend time in the presence of the living God. And if you tell me that you've never experienced anything like that before, let me say this to you. It's not because you haven't jumped through some particular biblical hoop of teaching.

It's because you never gave him time. You never gave him time. The man who would know God must give him time.

God has infinite permutations in the way that he reveals himself to ordinary people. And a fool is that man who believes that he's got God bottled into one systematic theology. If you would know God, then go out and give him time.

Give him hours of your life. Give time to the perusal of his word, which is a living word, and have an experience of his grace. Having known the sealing of the spirit, or the baptism of the spirit, or any other terminology to describe wonderful spiritual encounters, but go on through them all to know him and to know him more and more till the day dawns when the flat shadows flee away, when all that is unclear becomes transparent, and all that is unknown becomes on view.

May you know God increasingly until that moment of naked encounter with the infinite God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. And now, great God, we commit ourselves to you and pray that during the moments of communion and during the days and weeks and months and years perhaps within your grace that are to come, we may pursue you and increasingly come to an understanding of you and of your purposes.

And great God, get through our lives the glory and honor that is due to your holy name as we live them out before you and in the company of brothers and sisters whom we love dearly. Amen.