The Revelation Of God

We're picking up the reading at verse 8, and I remind you that Paul and Barnabas are on their missionary journey, and they've come to a place called Lystra, Acts 14, 8. And there sat a certain man at Lystra, impotent in his feet, being a cripple from his mother's womb, who never had walked. The same heard Paul speak, who steadfastly beholding him, and perceiving that he had faith to be healed, said with a loud voice, Stand upright on thy feet. And he leapt and walked.

And when the people saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices, saying in the speech of Lysaonia, The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men. And they called Barnabas Jupiter, and Paul Mercurius, because he was the chief speaker. Then the priest of Jupiter, which was before their city, brought oxen and garlands unto the gates, and would have done sacrifice with the people, which when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard of, they rent their clothes, and ran in among the people, crying out and saying, Sirs, why do ye these things? We also are men of like passions with you, and preach unto you that ye should turn from these vanities unto the living God, which made heaven and earth and the sea, and all things that are therein, who in times past suffered all nations to walk in their own ways.

Nevertheless, he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness. And with these sayings, scarce restrained thee they, the people, that they had not done sacrifice unto them. Now we turn to Hebrews chapter one.

And just the first four verses. God who at sunry times, and in divers manners, spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds, who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the majesty on high, being made so much better than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they. Amen.

This is the first series of studies, indeed I think the first sermon that I've ever preached from this pulpit, when I've not been able to say, I'd be glad if you'd have your Bibles open at such a reference, because our subject is a general one, and there's evidence to be sifted for it throughout the whole of the Bible. And all I can trust is that because you have these notes in front of you, later on you might like to go through the scripture references, and perhaps think through at your leisure some of the things that I have been saying in relation to what the various scriptures teach. This evening, as you're aware, we're commencing our series on the doctrine of God, the doctrine of God, and our first study is entitled, The Revelation of God.

But a few more remarks by way of introduction. There is, I think you must agree, something of an attention in modern evangelical circles between what is called devotional preaching and what is called doctrinal preaching. And the popularity marks go for the former and not for the latter.

I heard someone say not so long ago about a particular youth group and one leader that he isn't so popular, because he only gives them doctrine, and you know how boring doctrine is. Well that remark was said in my presence, and it was almost like red rag to a bull that I bit my tongue and I didn't reply. Though I suppose that one could perhaps level criticism at certain preachers, and myself included, if the presentation of our message isn't living, if it's not enthusiastic, if it's not alive.

But on the other hand, you know, doctrine doesn't need to be boring, and the Christian person who is really in love with the Lord Jesus Christ manifests his love and his concern for the Savior by wanting to know more about him and wanting to know more about his gospel. And the Christian who's really enthusiastic and dedicated to the Lord will spend time going through this book, like the early Christians did, with the objective of being able to give an answer for the hope that is within them. Paul writes to a young man, possibly in his late teens or early twenties, and he says to this young Christian, study, study to show yourself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.

And when he writes to Timothy on another occasion, he says, take heed to thyself, that is the way he was living his life, and also take heed to doctrine. You see, it was so important for the young Timothy to be aware of the teachings of the Christian faith, so that he in turn could teach others. And today it's just the same.

We need to be informed about the doctrines of the faith. Early on in the history of the Christian church, the believers were forced, I use that word purposely, they were forced to draw up a statement of what they believed. There were people in those days who peddled heresy, as they still do today.

There were the attacks on the Christian church by philosophers and academics who were pagans, and each Christian had to know what exactly it was he really believed about God, about God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, about salvation, about the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so they prepared statements of belief that they used to learn off. The Apostles' Creed is an example of this.

There was also a creed drawn up at a council at a place called Nicaea in the third or fourth centuries. Do you know that very word creed is interesting? It comes from a Greek word, credo, which means I believe. And I reckon it would be a good thing for more Christians to know the Apostles' Creed.

Does that surprise you that I should say this from a free church pulpit? I have no objections to the Apostles' Creed. My only objection is that a lot of ministers who say it Sunday by Sunday don't really believe it. But I have no objection to it at all.

It's good for us to know what we believe and to be able to give an answer to those who would question us. Now as far as Christianity is concerned, what is the major doctrine? What is that objective that all roads of Christian truth lead from and return back to? It is of course the doctrine of God. That is the nerve center of the Christian revelation.

It is all based on this God, a revelation of this God. And therefore if you're to understand theologically the teachings of the Christian church, the best place to start is with the doctrine of God. And that's one of the reasons why from the Old Testament I've quoted at the beginning of your notes a question put to Job by a man called Zophar, in which he says, "'Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?' Well that question we're going to have at the back of our minds during the whole course of our series, our studies on this particular doctrine.

Let me make a fundamental statement at this point, and listen very carefully to what I have to say. Christianity does not attempt to prove God, but it does claim that all that can be known about God is within the orbit of the Christian faith, and this includes salvation knowledge. Now I'll be coming back to that statement and its implications from time to time this evening and later on.

But having said that, let me go on and make another point and bring out this particular emphasis in our studies, this particular recognition that we are making. To study the doctrine of God, indeed to study Christianity at all, to study the Bible, is not like any other study. You see, if we were studying mathematics, or if we were studying a branch of science or doing a particular experiment, we would be controlling our study.

We would be investigating, inquiring, exploring. This is really what philosophers do. Philosophers are not just ancient Greek men with beards.

Any child who asks a question, Dad, how does the motor car go? He's being a philosopher. He's asking a question about certain things, and Dad's going to supply, we hope, the answer. But there's all the difference in the world between you asking about a motor car and experimenting on a motor car, than asking a question about God, and inquiring about the nature of God.

What's the difference? Well you see, God has revealed the knowledge about Himself. A certain amount of knowledge God has revealed, and God controls the amount of knowledge. Not you, not me, but God.

Most human learning starts with the individual person. All philosophy starts with a philosopher. But theology is completely different.

It starts with God. God who has revealed Himself. And it's God who is working upon us, who leads us into an understanding of Himself, and what there is to know of Him that has been disclosed.

Let me put another point up for your thought just at this moment. One of the difficulties about the Bible, when it talks to us on the doctrine of God, is that we find a paradox in it. You say, what's a paradox? Well a paradox is when you get two opposing answers to a question.

That would be a paradox. And as far as the Bible's concerned, in its setting forth of the doctrine of God, there is a paradox. There seems to be a contradiction.

You say, what do you mean? Well, listen to Isaiah. He's talking about God in the 40th chapter, and in the 18th verse he says, to whom then will ye liken God, or what likeness will ye compare Him unto? When you read the Apostle Paul writing to the Ephesians, in the third chapter, I think it's the 20th verse, he goes on to talk about God being able to do more exceedingly abundantly than all we could ever ask or think. Now you see the point? Isaiah is saying that God is so great, no ordinary person can ever fully comprehend Him.

The Apostle Paul is saying exactly the same. Our God is able to do more than I can even think, more than I can even conceive of. So here the Bible is suggesting that this God can't really be known, at least.

There are certain aspects of God that can't be known. Now here's the paradox. The Lord Jesus Christ, when He was talking about eternal life, says this in John chapter 17 and verse 3, and this is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.

Now you see the problem, it's obvious. Isaiah, Paul, and there are other scriptures that take this particular line, say that God can't really be known. And yet the Lord Jesus Christ in His prayer says that for us to have salvation, we must know God.

Well how do you resolve that difficulty? I'll tell you how. Martin Luther used to talk about the revealed part of God and the hidden part of God. In other words, he was saying that God is so great a person that there's only part of Him that we can fully understand, and there's a lot about God that we don't understand.

And you know, this is what the Bible is saying. That which we need to know about God has been revealed. But when you have grasped God as best you possibly can, that is the doctrine of God, you've only just started.

It's just like Solomon's wisdom, the half has not been told. The Apostle Paul recognizes this, doesn't he? When he writes to the Corinthians, he says, now I see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then shall I know even as I also am known.

You know why we've got such difficulties these days? Such theological quibbles as the, sometimes the infighting that goes on between so-called Calvinists and so-called Arminians. We try to know a little bit more about God than He's actually revealed. My ways are not your ways.

My thoughts are not your thoughts. There are some things about God that we can't exactly make a conclusion on. We can't fully understand logically.

And where that happens, we recognize we don't understand. And we say, yes, but there is a part of God that is hidden, and one day that will be revealed to us. But as far as we are concerned, what is most important today in the 20th century is that what God has disclosed about Himself through this book, through the person of Jesus Christ, that we will know, and that knowledge we shall pass on to others.

Well then, having said that, let me make this statement. God has taken the initiative in telling the world about Himself. He has disclosed certain information about His person, and about His power.

And when you study the doctrine of God in the Bible, you soon find that the revelation of God comes in two brackets, two categories. And this evening, for convenience, we're going to call them general revelation and special revelation. As the word implies, general means to all men.

In other words, it's something about God that's been revealed that all men, if their eyes were open, could latch onto. General revelation can be further subdivided into two sections. I have called them revelation of God in nature, and revelation of God in conscience.

Let's take the first for a moment. The Scriptures sometimes tell us about the majesty of the created world. You're never impressed by the colorful sunset.

You're never impressed by the beauty of a flower. Well, says the Bible, this is the imprint that God has left in the world that He has created. It speaks of God.

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handiwork. Remember the Lord Jesus on one occasion, it was the Sermon on the Mount. He was speaking about the intricate, delicate way in which God constructs things.

He said to those who were listening to Him, consider the lily of the valley. Consider the lily. See its clothing.

See the texture of its petals. And that lily, said the Lord Jesus, speaks of a creator God. You see the point? He's revealed Himself in nature.

When the Apostle Paul was talking to the crowds who gathered at Lystra, you remember our Bible reading earlier, the, he was fearful that the crowds would make them, he and his colleague Barnabas, gods because they performed, or so the people thought, a miracle. But the Apostle, in trying to dissuade them, talks to them about the real God. And this is what he has to say about this God.

The living God has made heaven and earth and the sea and all things that are therein, who in times past suffered all nations to walk in their own ways. Nevertheless, He left not Himself without witness, in that He did good and gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness. Did you get that most important phrase? God didn't leave Himself without a witness, without a witness in the world that He'd made.

And if you have eyes to see, the glory of God is discerned even in a little droplet of rain. In the smallest snowflake you can see something of the handiwork of God. He left not Himself without witness.

And that was precisely the argument of the Apostle Paul when he was writing to the Roman Christians. The Apostle was, was criticizing the Gentiles who did not acknowledge the person of God. And the Apostle says this, the invisible things of God from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.

Says Paul, they may not have had the law of Moses, they may not have had the prophets, but these Gentiles, they had a very witness to God in the world that He'd made. The invisible things of God are illustrated by the visible things that He has created. So God reveals Himself in the world of nature.

I've given you two or three illustrations. There are many more in Scripture. But more than this, God has generally revealed Himself, says the Bible, through the consciences of men and women.

You see, we were born, every man, every woman was born in the image of God. God says at the beginning of this book when He's created, when He's creating Adam, let us make man in our own image. And there was something of God printed upon Adam.

And Adam desired for communion and fellowship with God. But that communion, that intercourse that he enjoyed day by day, you remember, it was broken by his sinfulness. And sin has marred, it shattered the image of God in man.

But the fragments, little bits of them, still remain. And you know, people basically know, I'm talking about people with their mental faculties all intact, they basically know the difference between right and wrong. Oh, there may be certain refinements of ethics that they're not so sure of, that they haven't an inbuilt knowledge of.

But between right and wrong, they have an awareness. This is precisely what the Bible says on many occasions. Let me give you a quick example from the Old Testament.

Here's Amos, a Jewish prophet, and the first chapter of the book of Amos is giving up to the prophet, criticizing all the Gentile nations around him. Why does he criticize them? Why does he condemn them? Well, take too, for example, the Edomites and the Ammonites. Amos censures them because they are guilty of genocide.

What's genocide? It's wiping out a whole nation, wiping out a whole race, or attempting to do this. This is what these evil pagan people have done. And Amos condemns them.

Not on the basis that they've broken the Jewish law of God, because they never received it, but on the basis that they had an inbuilt knowledge of the moral law of God in their own hearts, but they dulled their senses towards it, and they wouldn't recognize God in their conscience. The apostle Paul follows exactly the same argument when, again, in the first chapter of the Romans, he's criticizing the Gentile nations, and he says of them, because that which may be known of God is manifest in them. That's verse 19.

That which may be known of God is manifest in them. He goes on to show in his argument in the final verses of that chapter that though they had an inbuilt awareness of a moral God, nonetheless they didn't want to retain that awareness, that conviction. They threw it aside just like a toy may be tossed out of a pram by a baby that's being naughty.

They didn't want to retain God in their knowledge, and Paul criticizes them because God was known to them in general revelation, and yet they would not retain the knowledge of God which was available. So then that's general revelation as the Bible talks about it in both Old Testament and New Testament. But I refer to another aspect of revelation which I call special revelation.

Now it's pretty obvious when you read the Bible that there is a claim for a special revelation of God in the first part of the Bible, the books that were written by Jewish people. There is evidence, there is a record of the way that God has disclosed Himself to the Jewish people. In particular, the psalmist says this, He made His ways known unto Moses, His doings unto the children of Israel.

This was something that other nations didn't enjoy on this particular basis that Jews were very privileged indeed. Amos says the same thing, Amos chapter 3 and verse 2, You only have I known of all the families of the earth. If you go through the Old Testament, you'll find that God progressively reveals Himself.

You read about Abraham's relationship with God, and you can make certain conclusions of the knowledge that Abraham had of God. When you come through centuries later to the time of Isaiah, you'll appreciate that Isaiah has caught a little bit more of the doctrine of God. He's aware that God is a holy God.

By the time you come through to the book of Amos, you will discover that Amos recognizes that God is not just a God of the Jews, He's the God of the whole world. And as we've already said, every man and every woman is responsible to that God. So in a very special way, God revealed Himself to the Jewish people, and that revelation is contained in the Old Testament.

Now coming through into the New Testament, what do we find? That God has revealed Himself finally in the person of Jesus Christ. I read to you earlier from the epistle to the Hebrews. I read that epistle particularly because there in the opening verses, we find that all the prophets had been—all what the prophets had been saying about God in Old Testament days was underlined and made even more clear by what? The advent of Jesus Christ.

Listen again. God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son, whom He hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds, who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person and upholding all things by the word of His power and so on and so forth. Jesus Christ being the brightness of His glory.

Do you know how you could translate that? Jesus Christ is the explanation of God. He is the exegesis of God. All that has been revealed to the Old Testament prophets now comes to its fulfillment in Jesus Christ.

He is God's last word to the world. God has revealed Himself, yes, in nature, a general revelation to all men and all women who, if they had eyes to see and if they were not perverted by their sinfulness, would recognize that God has eloquently left His print in the world that He has created. But beyond and above this, through a special revelation, through a magnificent revelation, God has shown Himself, God has declared Himself in the person of Jesus Christ.

You know, Zophar's question is not really an easy one to answer. Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? I say it's not easy because really, in one way the answer is yes, and perhaps in a more definite way the answer is no. Let's just leave off a little moment, please.

Question is not an easy one to answer because, as I was saying, you could put an affirmative to it and also a negative. Yes, God has left an indication of Himself in the world of nature, but because of the sinfulness in our own condition and because we are perverted people, because of our iniquity, unless God reveals Himself in a spectacular fashion to us, then it will be very, very difficult for us to come to a personal knowledge and understanding of Himself. And not only must God reveal Himself to us in a special fashion, but when He does reveal Himself, my friend, if we're going to know Him intimately, if we're going to know Him fully, God through His revelation has got to do something about that blockage that has always been stopping man having contact with God.

I refer to sin. And you know, and this is glorious, in the revelation of Jesus Christ God has not only declared Himself to be a person or God, God has not only declared Himself to be a God, part of whose nature we can understand and comprehend, but God has magnificently declared Himself to be a Savior God. And Jesus Christ, as you know, died on the cross of Calvary for your sins and for my sins.

And it's when a person confesses that Jesus Christ is their Savior, then they begin to understand in an intimate fashion something about God. We refer to conversion often in terms of a receiving of sight, and true it is that men and women are blinded. They're blinded by their sin, and it's that blindness that stops them recognizing God's imprint in the world that He has made.

But when Jesus Christ comes along, when He is preached in all His power and in all His glory, and when a man latches on to the implications of the gospel, then he's introduced to God. You remember the words of Jesus to the disciples when they'd interrogated Him about God. Have I been so long with you? And you never knew me.

When you confess Jesus Christ as Savior, you're introduced to the One who is God. And the Lord Jesus said that such knowledge He had a monopoly over. I am the way, the truth, and the life.

No man, no man comes to God the Father but by me. Paul says there is one mediator between man and God, the man Christ Jesus. Can God be known? Yes, He can be known, because He has willed that knowledge to men and women, and in Jesus Christ it is our legacy.

And when a person confesses the Lord Jesus as their Savior, then as we have been saying, their eyes are opened and they realize in what a wondrous fashion God has revealed Himself to the world. Well then, that's the first stage in our studies on the doctrine of God. God has revealed Himself to the world through His Son.

Amen.