The Unknown God

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.