God makes himself known

Known because he comes to us

How could anyone know God? We can measure the stars and map the brain, but God is not one more thing inside the world, waiting to be found by a better telescope. He is the Creator of all of it, infinite and holy, and a creature cannot climb up to him by its own effort. If we are to know him at all, he must come to us. Christians call this revelation: God making himself known.

The New Testament word is apokalupsis (ἀποκάλυψις), an uncovering, like a veil drawn back. The weight falls on God's initiative. He is not a puzzle we solve but a person who chooses to show himself. The church has usually spoken of two ways he does this. General revelation is given to every human being through the created world and the conscience; special revelation is God's speaking in history, through the prophets and at last in his Son.

The witness of the heavens and the heart

The psalmist looked up at the sky and heard it preaching.

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.

Psalm 19:1-2

There are no words, the psalm goes on, and yet "their voice has gone out into all the earth" (Psalm 19:4). Paul makes the same point more sharply.

For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship, so that men are without excuse.

Romans 1:20

Creation tells us that there is a Maker, and something of what he is like: eternal, mighty, greater than all he has made. It also speaks of his kindness. In Lystra Paul told a crowd who had never heard of Israel's God that "He has not left Himself without testimony to His goodness" (Acts 14:17): rain, harvests, food and gladness are his gifts.

And there is a witness within. People who never received the law of Moses still show "that the work of the law is written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness" (Romans 2:15). Every pang of conscience is a sign that we answer to Someone.

Yet this witness has limits. The sky tells of God's glory but not of his mercy to sinners, and conscience can accuse but cannot forgive. Worse, Paul says that people who knew God did not honour him and so became "darkened in their foolish hearts" (Romans 1:21). Matthew Henry, writing on this chapter, says of the ancient world: "They wandered from God, till all traces of true religion must have been lost, had not the revelation of the gospel prevented it" Matthew Henry. General revelation leaves us without excuse. By itself it does not bring us home.

Through the prophets and the Son

So God spoke more plainly. He called Abraham, brought Israel out of Egypt, gave the law at Sinai and sent prophets to explain what he had done and what he would yet do. His deeds and his words went together. Then came the one all those words had been pointing to.

On many past occasions and in many different ways, God spoke to our fathers through the prophets. But in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, and through whom He made the universe.

Hebrews 1:1-2

No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is Himself God and is at the Father's side, has made Him known.

John 1:18

Jesus does not only bring news about God; he shows us God. "Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father," he told Philip (John 14:9). Chrysostom, commenting on the Son's place in the Father's bosom, as older translations put it, remarks: "To dwell in the bosom is much more than simply to see" Chrysostom. The one who knows the Father from the inside has made him known.

That revelation was handed on by the apostles and written down, and so it reaches us now in Scripture. The next lesson asks what it means to call Scripture the word of God.

The Reformed churches confessed the two kinds of revelation together. The Belgic Confession of 1561 says that we know God by two means. The first is the creation, preservation and government of the universe, which is before our eyes "as a most elegant book", in which every creature, great and small, is like a letter leading us to contemplate the invisible things of God. The second is his holy and divine Word, by which he makes himself known more clearly and fully, as far as we need for his glory and our salvation Belgic Confession, Art. 2. John Calvin taught that God has planted a sense of the divine (sensus divinitatis) in every human heart, so that no one can plead complete ignorance of him Calvin, Institutes 1.3.

How far can reason reach?

Here Christians have answered a real question in different ways: how much can human reason know of God without Scripture?

The Catholic tradition holds reason in high regard. Thomas Aquinas argued that the mind, starting from the world, can show that God exists. Yet he also said that if such truths were left to reason alone, only a few would reach them, after a long time and mixed with many errors, so it was necessary for God to reveal even these; and the mysteries at the heart of salvation, such as the Trinity and the incarnation, can be known only because God reveals them Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae. The First Vatican Council (1870), appealing to Romans 1:20, taught that God can be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason from the things he has made First Vatican Council, Dei Filius.

Many Reformed and Lutheran theologians read the same chapter and lean on the verses that follow. Creation's witness is real and clear, they say, but sin has darkened the heart that receives it, so that left to ourselves we exchange the knowledge of God for idols (Romans 1:21-23). Calvin compared Scripture to spectacles: as someone with weak eyes can make out a book only with glasses, so we see God rightly in his works only when Scripture clears our sight Calvin, Institutes 1.6. Luther distinguished a general knowledge that God exists and is just from the true knowledge of what God thinks of us and wills for us, which is found in Christ alone Luther, Lectures on Galatians.

Some modern Protestants go further. The Swiss theologian Karl Barth rejected natural theology altogether. God, he held, is known only where he himself speaks, in Jesus Christ as Scripture bears witness to him Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. Barth pressed the point hardest in the 1930s, when voices in Germany claimed to find God's revelation in nation and history, and he warned that a god discovered in nature soon turns out to look like ourselves.

These views differ, but they share more than may first appear. None of them says that the gospel can be reached by reasoning. All agree that creation is God's work and that saving knowledge of God comes through his Word and his Son. For the hard question of people who have never heard, see What about those who never heard?, and for why God does not show himself more plainly, Why can't we see God?.

Revelation is a gift. To know God is not our achievement but his grace in coming to find us. So we can look at the sky and give thanks, bring a troubled conscience to Christ instead of hiding, and open the Bible expecting to be spoken to. For how God speaks to us today, see How does God speak?.

Practice