Today, when you ask people who God is, you can get every answer from orthodox to weird. Most people in our culture seem to believe in a god of some sort. Most people, however, seem to make their own definition. There are some definite traits that the majority of people seem to agree upon. God is “good”—but what is good seems to change from person to person. God is love—but love is also open to interpretation. God is fair—but we don’t understand why the innocent perish or the wicked prosper. God is great and completely other—but we seem to grasp who he is and are pretty comfortable with putting him in our box. These are just the answers off the street—great men from history and philosophy have pondered this question too. According to Plato, God is the eternal mind, the cause of good in nature. Aristotle considered him to be “the first ground of all being.” Leibniz says that the final reason of things is called God. Kant defined God as a being who, by his understanding and will, is the cause of all nature; a being who has all rights and no duties; the moral author of the world. Hegel considered God the absolute spirit (giest), yet without consciousness until it becomes conscious in the reason of man. These answers, whether we agree with them or not, show that there is something unanswered about the nature of God. And it also shows that we want the answer.
Nevertheless, the only tool we have in-and-of ourselves to define God is our insight (a philosophical word meaning “best guess”). What we find is that because God is transcendent (bigger than we can understand), and because we are a fallen and frustrated people, our best guesses are just as fallen and frustrating as we are. Yet, we keep searching for a greater understanding of God and who he is. The Teacher, in the book of Ecclesiastes, tells us that God has set eternity in our hearts, yet we still cannot fathom him (3.11). What he means is this—we know that God exists, and we know that we are meant to know that he exists, but we are so small that anything we come up with sounds like a three-year-old explaining how a carburetor works. But God is good enough to reveal himself to us in such a way that we can apprehend this revelation and understand it. This is done through General Revelation (nature, conscience, providence) and Special Revelation (miracles, the Incarnation, Scripture). With these, God trumps our insight and tells us who he is; he tells us about his beauty, his love, his glory, and sometimes we recognize these things and respond as we ought to—worship and awe. But sometimes we confuse the issue like the Athenians in Acts 17.16-34. Here, Paul sees how the Athenians recognized God’s providence during a plague several years back by building alters. However, they didn’t know who they were worshiping, so they wrote, “TO AN UNKNOWN GOD”, on the formless statues. It was here that Paul uses their insight to point out the revelation of God in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He uses a tool that most of us Christians have forgotten all about. He uses the tool of context. The Athenians had a concept of God and Paul used this concept within the context of Greek culture to show them how God was revealing himself and how this revelation should be understood. He didn’t use a tract or a pizza feed. He didn’t use an outreach strategy or attractive church bulletins. He used the context of the people and spoke to them using ideas from their own culture and world-view. God has done the same for us. Jesus came down and became a man so that we could understand who God is. Paul writes about Jesus in his letter to the Colossians 1.15 that he is the image of the invisible God. A theologian by the name of John Calvin, writing about the incarnation (God becoming a man) called it “the Great Condescension”. It was where God revealed his love by lowering himself to our level and showing us who he is so that we might once again know the unknown God.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Friday, February 6, 2009
Truth
One of the more important things under attack in our culture today is the concept of Truth. Most of us live as functioning relativists. We exist in a bubble of reality in which we can hold to anything that permits our behavior and world-view. What we believe is “true for us,” because it confirms our perceptions and our interpretation of reality. When we are confronted by a contradictory truth it is validated as true for that other individual, but is still not incorporated into our own reality. The problem with this is that, by default, having individually validated truth invalidates all truth. By saying that everybody is right, you essentially prove everyone wrong. This is called the law of the excluded middle (something is either true or it is false—there is no middle ground). It is one or the other. The fact of the matter is that not all “truths” are true and not all opinions are equal and to assert otherwise is itself a contradiction.
This foolishness, however, stems from a very true assessment of the human condition, but it comes to a very false conclusion. It is true that man’s ability to fully comprehend reality and to universally recognize truth is flawed. We have different perspectives and we have different opinions because sin has permeated and fractured man’s connection to the world around him and has severed his connection to God who, by definition, is Truth. However, to fix this uncertainty we came up with the idea that we can define our own truth and everything will turn out fine. Essentially, we admitted to ourselves that we are blind and convinced ourselves the cure to our blindness is to close our eyes, jump in the driver’s seat and go on a joy ride. This kind of public-school logic is the best we could come up with. However, despite our backwards attempts to find Truth, God, who us above creation, saw fit to step in and show us truth, instead of letting us fumble around like a drunken prom date. This was done through relationship and revelation and providence. It was done by what is called inspiration. As God revealed truth, we began to recognize it a like lost sheep hearing the voice of its shepherd, and we wrote it down and kept it. As these things were passed from one person to another, they became volumes of historical accounts and letters and prophetic declarations, until finally they became one volume of complementary texts. These texts were transcribed and translated, and guys with too much time on their hands came up with lists adding in and subtracting books in the Bible. They did this to propagate their theological and political agendas thinking that they were more important than they were. Things became messed up, the original manuscripts were lost, and new ones were made. There were errors here and there—words misspelled, phrases adjusted, punctuation changed—but God preserved the truth of his word.
The original texts were written by men who were guided by the Holy Spirit making use of their personalities to superintend every word that was written. But over time as the originals were lost, errors occurred in transcription but not in such a way as to influence any significant doctrine. That is to say, as the different existing manuscripts are compared, although they vary in details, the overarching teachings and doctrines are not changed. The Holy Spirit preserved the truth as God laid it out for man to know and as hard as we tried, we did not destroy its message. This is a miraculous testament to the eternal nature of God’s truth and gives some credence and reason for the belief in the Word of God—it gives credence and validity to what we call the Bible. The words and teachings that come from its pages do not come from man who is crooked and deceived; they came from God who is the ultimate authority. It isn’t a book of good ideas or morals, but it is the standard by which we are to look at the world and verify whether we see the world for what it truly is or we are looking at it upside down because we are an upside down and perverted people.
This foolishness, however, stems from a very true assessment of the human condition, but it comes to a very false conclusion. It is true that man’s ability to fully comprehend reality and to universally recognize truth is flawed. We have different perspectives and we have different opinions because sin has permeated and fractured man’s connection to the world around him and has severed his connection to God who, by definition, is Truth. However, to fix this uncertainty we came up with the idea that we can define our own truth and everything will turn out fine. Essentially, we admitted to ourselves that we are blind and convinced ourselves the cure to our blindness is to close our eyes, jump in the driver’s seat and go on a joy ride. This kind of public-school logic is the best we could come up with. However, despite our backwards attempts to find Truth, God, who us above creation, saw fit to step in and show us truth, instead of letting us fumble around like a drunken prom date. This was done through relationship and revelation and providence. It was done by what is called inspiration. As God revealed truth, we began to recognize it a like lost sheep hearing the voice of its shepherd, and we wrote it down and kept it. As these things were passed from one person to another, they became volumes of historical accounts and letters and prophetic declarations, until finally they became one volume of complementary texts. These texts were transcribed and translated, and guys with too much time on their hands came up with lists adding in and subtracting books in the Bible. They did this to propagate their theological and political agendas thinking that they were more important than they were. Things became messed up, the original manuscripts were lost, and new ones were made. There were errors here and there—words misspelled, phrases adjusted, punctuation changed—but God preserved the truth of his word.
The original texts were written by men who were guided by the Holy Spirit making use of their personalities to superintend every word that was written. But over time as the originals were lost, errors occurred in transcription but not in such a way as to influence any significant doctrine. That is to say, as the different existing manuscripts are compared, although they vary in details, the overarching teachings and doctrines are not changed. The Holy Spirit preserved the truth as God laid it out for man to know and as hard as we tried, we did not destroy its message. This is a miraculous testament to the eternal nature of God’s truth and gives some credence and reason for the belief in the Word of God—it gives credence and validity to what we call the Bible. The words and teachings that come from its pages do not come from man who is crooked and deceived; they came from God who is the ultimate authority. It isn’t a book of good ideas or morals, but it is the standard by which we are to look at the world and verify whether we see the world for what it truly is or we are looking at it upside down because we are an upside down and perverted people.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
