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Apologetics
31. Questions about the Revelation of God
(How
it came)
A
series that helps consider the foundations for faith
Contents:
Introductory
Comments
•
the nature
and purpose of this page
1.
How this Subject Arises
•
Why this
is an important subject to consider
2.
Options for God's Design
•
Two ways
God could have designed the world
3.
God doesn't develop but...
•
Development
is necessary to understand
4.
Why Abram?
•
Revelation
starts through one man
5.
Why Isaac and Jacob and...?
•
Revelations
continues through the ongoing family
6.
What about Moses and the Exodus?
• Revelation
through big events and a nation
7.
What about the Law of Moses?
• Revelation
through God's design rules
8.
And so on through the whole Old Testament
• Revelation
continues to be reinforced through the nation of Israel
9.
The Revelation so far
• A
Recap of the Revelation seen so far
10.
The Coming of Jesus
• Revelation
through the Son of God
11.
The Struggle of the Years of Church History
• The
struggle of the last two thousand years.
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This
page is for those who would like to think about how the revelation
of God came to us. We need to approach this slowly and systematically
if it is to be satisfying and producing answers that ‘fit'.
Please
do take the time to read it all through. On this page we put
aside the question approach, for this subject really flows
on chronologically and is best read as a complete piece.
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| 1.
How this Subject Arises |
Criticisms
In
the writings of modern crusading atheists, there often appears
strong criticism of Biblical things far back in history. There
is often a derisory note about a God who would make an imperfect
world, and how primitive man was unlikely to have been part
of God's plan, and as for dinosaur's?????
Questions
It
is only as we start thinking about these issues that we start
thinking about 
•
why God made the world in
the way He did, and
•
why He revealed Himself in
the way He did.
Archaeology
When
it comes to looking to archaeology for answers, we find we
are limited. In his book, Is Religion Dangerous?,
professor Keith Ward, who knows about these things, declares,
“The truth is that we know virtually
nothing about the first origins of religious belief.”
He continues, “From a purely scientific
point of view, all we have to go on are grave-goods and archaeological
remains.”
Old
Testament
If we
hope to look at masses of ancient parchments of the Old Testament
of  the
Bible to help us, we again find ourselves disappointed. The
reason for this was that the Jews destroyed every old, damaged
document once they had fastidiously copied it. Yes, there
were lots of copies, but they don't go back three thousand
years plus.
When
we study the nature of how the Old Testament documents came
about and how they were passed on (see elsewhere on this site),
we can see that we can trust what we have in what we call
the Old Testament. Our work then becomes to understand what
is written and ponder how it ‘fits' what else we know about
the rest of the world.
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| 2.
Options for God's Design |
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The
Bible is blatant is ascribing to God the role of Creator. It
doesn't tell us how He created the world and in fact we are
given only broad brush stroke descriptions.
The
Debates that Rage
This
means we end up with debates about
-
whether the world was brought about by pure-chance
evolution (which excludes God, and leaves us with
a meaningless and purposeless existence),
-
whether God brought it about by directed evolution
(i.e. the chances weren't chances but God's way of moving
from simple cell to complex organisms etc.,)
-
or some other alternative.
Some
believers even desperately put forward the idea that God made
everything about five thousand years ago, complete with fossils
etc. to give an appearance of great age. Well of course such
a thing is possible but somewhat unlikely (wait to you get to
heaven for the definitive answer!).
Those
are the usual lines of debate which we aren't going to follow
here. We have a much more specific goal in mind. When our atheist
friends deride God making a ‘primitive' world which, they say,
is much more likely to have come about naturally, they are in
fact, without realising it deriding the almost only logical
option if God made the world. Let's explain.
In
this line of thinking, there are really only two likely possibilities:
Option
1:
God
makes man as fully developed in thinking as modern man is,
so that he didn't have to learn, and he didn't have to gradually
develop. Please see this; this is the only possible alternative
to what happened if God made the world.
The
main difficulty about this option, would have been how much
knowledge to implant in us. The other difficulty would have
been how to create the structure of civilisation already developed
(we take for granted that one invention follows another.)
Option
2:
God
created primitive man and allowed and encouraged man to gradually
develop in all the ways archaeology suggests. Now we do need
to note something quite specific here.
Evolutionists
suggest (and they may or may not be right) that mankind developed
from apes. The only thing about this is that at some point
there had to be a cut-off point where mankind suddenly developed
and the apes didn't.
The
differences between apes and mankind are staggering. Think
of all the things that we do – communicate with words, think,
plan, reason, formulate, investigate, research, invent, create,
write, produce music, paint, sculpt and so on – and worship.
Something,
somewhere, somehow, did something that triggered the changes
that make us so different from the animals. If you ever saw
the film 2001 – A Space Odyssey, you may remember
the apes come across the monolith that is used to suggest
‘something other', and from that point they are changed.
The
Biblical description is that at some point God made the first
two beings, male and female, as human beings with all the
capabilities we now have.
Now
very little is said about them so we don't know if they were
‘primitive' men, or what, but the suggestion is there, because
in following chapters men do develop and become those who
raise livestock, produce music and invent tools from bronze
and iron (a suggestion of the period that they lived in.)
Thus
from the outset there is the concept of development, development
that is slow and gradual – because learning is always that,
invention is always that.
Remember
the only alternative is to have mankind dropped onto this
planet as fully developed and my atheistic friends would object
to that, so let's think about this one, the gradual development
scenario.
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| 3.
God doesn't develop but.... |
God
doesn't develop
This
needs to be said from the outset. Unlike man, God didn't
develop. He always was as He is and always will be. It
defies our imagination and understanding but that's what
the Bible says, and it makes sense for an ‘Ultimate Being'.
Our
Understanding does
Now
God may not develop but our understanding of Him does
and that's what we see in the Bible. I'm not very bothered
whether or not you accept the story of Adam and Eve, but
it does explain a lot of things and makes a lot of sense.
The
Start of the Story
Genesis
2 & 3 show us these first two truly-human beings relating
to God. Now we don't know how this happened but all we
know is there was this communication interaction which
occurred daily. When they rejected that, this daily communication
was broken.
In
the chapters that follow, in succeeding generations that
could have been spread over a very long period, there
is sporadic contact. It is not until we come to Abram
in chapter 12 of Genesis that we see God taking the initiative
to establish a long-term relationship with this particular
man.
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Answer:
Serious
thinkers might ponder this question. Why Abram? Why this childless
nomad? The answer, we suggest, is that God saw in him a man
through whom He could reveal things about Himself.
The
first thing I want to suggest, is that:
1. God sees and knows and
understands everything there is to know about us.
God
sees this man who has gone along with his father on a trek from
Ur to Canaan but has settled
in Haran. He sees he is childless and sees that this is something
through which He can reveal something of Himself. (The unfolding
story indicates all this is true).
The
second thing God shows is that:
2. He has a purpose for
the earth which
stretches far into the future.
He
communicates with Abram and tells him that He has a land for
him to settle in and He will make him great and He will give
him many descendents. For a childless nomad, this quite an amazing
promise. God is going to take him and use him to bless many
people in the centuries to come.
The
third thing that comes through about God is that:
3. He
persists with our slowness to understand.
Remember
Abram is the first man that God is going to reveal Himself through.
This is a very embryonic relationship. Abram has nothing to
go on beyond what he senses he is hearing. Difficult! Yet God
understands us and understands Abram and knows how difficult
it is, so we find Him speaking again and again to Abram, reiterating
His original first promises, that the land
of Canaan
will be his, and he will
have many descendents.
Now
after many years pass, Abram's wife Sarai suggests that perhaps
Abram has misheard (I'm assuming) and in all those previous
promises there was no mention of her, so why not take her maid
and have the first of the children through her (culturally a
common thing to do). So this is what happens and Ishmael is
born.
But
God doesn't give up. Some twelve years later He speaks to Abram
again and tells him that a coming son is in fact to be born
to Sarai. Now the only trouble about this is that Sarai is also
very old and well past the menopause and well beyond child-bearing
capabilities. By now, Abram has learnt that he can trust what
he is hearing from God, so this lovely old couple try for a
baby, and miracle of miracles, she conceives and Isaac is born.
So
fourthly, through this incredible event, God reveals that He
is:
4. A God who can intervene in His world and bring
miraculous changes,
i.e.
the things He can do, can go completely against what we call
the course of nature, the way that God originally designed things
to be.
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| 5.
Why Isaac and Jacob and....? |
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Answer:
So
as the book rolls on, we see Isaac growing up, getting a wife
and eventually having twin boys, Esau and Jacob. Isaac doesn't
come over very well in some of this, but one thing that does
become clear through him is that he has learnt that:
5. God
knows the future and acts into it.
We
then watch Jacob growing up, and he's a real little twister.
He's an opportunist who gets his older brother to sell him his
birthright (culturally the older son became the leader and took
over management of the farm) and later cons his father into
promising him the goodness of taking the role of the older son
with all that went with it. We watch him working his way through
life as a schemer, working for his own selfish good.
Now
here's the tricky part: God has chosen him, even though he's
the younger son, to become the leader and also to become a major
figure in history.
6.
God knows what He can do with individuals.
Thus
Jacob encounters God, submits to Him and we gradually see some
remarkable changes taking place, until eventually in old age
(renamed as Israel),
he is a wise old man, patriarch of a family of twelve sons and
one daughter, with a great understanding of God.
Following
Jacob, we said, are twelve sons, but one of them, Joseph,
is picked out by God. He is given pictures of the future by
God but then apparently everything goes wrong, except the
end result of it all is that he ends up as Prime Minister
of Egypt, one of the most powerful men in the world. It is
in this position that, with the wisdom God gives him, he acts
as saviour of that whole part of the world, by making provision
for seven years before a further seven year period of famine
strikes.
We
see behind Joseph, all the way through his tumultuous circumstances,
the invisible hand of God at work, being there for him. In
this we come to realise that:
7. That God works in and
through and around us as He works for His end goal
for the good
of mankind.
He
is the God of destiny. He doesn't make us do things,
but uses what we do for His long-term goals.
In
other words, God who is Almighty, works for the good of mankind
and uses those He sees will be open to Him, as He sees the
future and knows what He wants to achieve in it. He doesn't
force them but calls them – despite their initial apparent
negative, self-centred and godless attitudes. Part of the
process of revealing Himself, involves drawing out the best
out of men and women who will be open to Him. With Jacob and
Joseph in particular it is the picture of a God of grace and
mercy who tolerates their self-centredness because He knows
their potential – the ability to develop into men of faith
and goodness.
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| 6.
What about Moses & the Exodus? |
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Answer:
Remember
this is all about God gradually revealing Himself to mankind.
At the end of Genesis we are left with Joseph and the rest of
this family settled in Egypt. In the book of Exodus, about four
hundred years pass and with the passing of time two things have
happened.
First,
this family, now named Israel, has multiplied and multiplied
and may well have been in excess of a million people. Each son
has essentially become a separate ‘tribe'. The second thing
is that their numbers have become a threat to the Egyptians,
who have now made them slaves.
In
the early chapters of Exodus we find a miraculous encounter
of Moses with God (not visible, but a voice from a burning bush).
In the discussion that ensues, God instructs Moses to go to
the Pharaoh or king and demand the release of the Israelites.
This Moses does but Pharaoh refuses.
Through
a series of ten ‘plagues' of increasing severity we learn some
more things about God. Because He is Creator:
8. He is all powerful and can act into His world
and change it with what we call acts of nature.
Next,
9.
Where He does bring pressure to bear on individuals or a nation,
He always gives a warning and options first.
But
more than that, when He does bring such pressure to bear it
is always with:
10.
The Intention of bringing such people through to a place of
agreeing with Him, for their good and
the good of His people.
Stubbornness
and total refusal to respond means the death will ensue, i.e.
11.
When all else fails, God will sometimes take that person
or people off the planet,
yet
it becomes very clear in Scripture that,
12.
God does not delight in death but wants people to repent and
live.
This
part of Scripture reveals the shear folly of proud men who think
they can outthink God, but it is also a chance to realise, as
some modern counsellors have concluded, that ‘love must be tough'
and it is not loving to let tyrants carry on beating up on people.
Why, we may ask, doesn't He do it with all tyrants, and the
answer from this part of the Bible is that he only does it when
He is able to speak into the lives of such tyrants and give
them the option to repent.
For
anyone carefully reading and thinking about the ‘plagues' that
came upon Egypt, it becomes obvious that God could have wiped
out the entire nation instantly from the beginning, yet the
process that follows through chapters 4 to 12, amazingly gives
ordinary individuals in Egypt, as well as the ruling class,
the opportunity to come in line with God's wishes for all people,
and to avoid the plagues. Moreover observing the plagues shows
that they gradually increased in intensity so that the message
could gradually sink into to these obtuse people. It was left
to the prophet Ezekiel, many years later, to declare the truth
from God which was obvious in this situation: “Do
I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the
Sovereign LORD. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from
their ways and live?”
(Ezek 18:23)
and “I take no pleasure in
the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign LORD. Repent and
live!” (Ezek 18:32).
As
became obvious many years later with Israel
before the Exile, God
warned again and again and again before He acted. Some of us
today might become exasperated with a father who kept on warning
his wayward child and did nothing but warn, yet that is what
we find again and again in the Old Testament. Those who speak
about God as a capricious, hasty or angry God simply reveal
they have never read the Old Testament!
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| 7.
What about the Law of Moses? |
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Answer:
Moses,
at God's instigation, leads his people out of Egypt, and across
the desert to Mount Sinai where they have a longer encounter,
as a people, with God.
God
conveys to Moses the Ten Commandments and then a number of other
laws which might be divided into national, social, or ceremonial
laws.
The
national ones applied to them as a nation, the social ones were
about relationships, and the ceremonial were all about how they,
as individuals or as a people, should deal with their sins.
Within these we see two more important things about God.
The
first one, which should not surprise us if we accept that He
is the Creator of the world, is that:
13. God knows best how we
‘work'
and
therefore
14.
Any laws He gave Israel
could perhaps be seen as His ‘design rules'
for living'
The
second one is that,
15.
God knows we are weak and will fail,
and
so
16.
He provides for a way for our guilt to be taken.
That
comes out clearly in the provision of the ceremonial or sacrificial
law. This is all about how to deal with personal or corporate
guilt. God knows what many counsellors state today, that one
of man's biggest problems is that of guilt. So how did God deal
with it? He gave them a procedure whereby they would present
an animal that would die in their place, and in presenting it
they would become aware of the seriousness of their wrongs and
seeing the animal die in their place, determine not to repeat
that wrong. Also, having gone through the procedure instituted
by God, they knew that they had dealt with it according to His
requirements, and therefore they also knew that they would not
have an ongoing issue with God. It was sorted!
So
many religions (or people) today try to appease God for their
guilty consciences by their own striving to do good things to
make up, but the trouble is you never know if you have done
enough. When God lays down a simple and specific procedure to
deal with your guilt, when you have done it, you know it is
dealt with and you can walk away from it without fear and carry
on with your life. Are we advocating we all follow the sacrificial
law of Moses? No, the teaching of the New Testament is that
Jesus Christ came as our sacrifice and all we have to do is
believe that. When we do and approach God on that basis, the
New testament says, we ARE
forgiven.
In
the midst of these laws comes the clear and stated revelation
that,
17.
He
is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in
love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and
forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.
(Ex 34:6,7)
Can
we see that everything God does here is show us how we can live
in peace and harmony with ourselves, with others and with Him.
The Law didn't only provide a ‘blueprint' for living for Israel
, it also made provision
for when they failed. This is a picture of God who seeks to
work for our ‘success' in life!
This
is a far cry from the callous, capricious, angry God that others
try to make Him out to be. We thus see that this God is more
concerned to bring people into a place of peace and harmony
than He is to tell off, chide or punish.
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| 8.
And so on through the whole Old Testament |
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Unity in the
Old Testament
Those
who struggle with the idea that God inspired people to write
all these different books of the Old Testament also struggle
to see (often because they won't read it) the incredible unity
that there is throughout it.
These
seventeen points that we have picked up purely from the first
two books of the Bible, are seen again and again throughout
the Old Testament. There is no contradiction of these points
throughout all those books.
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Recap:
Let's
pick out those points again that have come as gradual revelation,
and put them all together:
1.
God sees and knows and understands everything.
2.
He has a purpose for the earth.
3.
He persists with our slowness.
4.
He can intervene in His world and bring changes.
5.
God knows the future and acts into it.
6.
God knows what He can do with us.
7.
God works in and through and around us as He works for
His end goal.
8.
He is all powerful and can act into His world and change it
in what we call
acts of nature.
9.
Where He brings pressure to bear on individuals, He always gives
a warning
and options first.
10.
The intention is of bringing such people through to a place
of agreeing
with Him.
11.
When all else fails, God will take that person or people off
the planet.
12.
God does not delight in death but wants people to repent and
live.
13.
God knows best how we ‘work'.
14.
Any laws He gave Israel
could perhaps be seen
as His ‘design rules.
15.
God knows we are weak and will fail.
16.
He provides for a way for our guilt to be taken.
17.
He is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in
love and
faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands,
and forgiving wickedness,
rebellion and sin.
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The Passing of Time
Now,
at the end of the Old Testament, we have a nation, Israel
, who have a history of
revealing God. By the beginning of the New Testament, history
has moved on some four hundred years and they are now under
the rule of Rome.
It is into this environment that Jesus Christ comes. Although
he is born as a little baby, his arrival is surrounded by supernatural
events.
Jesus'
Ministry
At
the age of about thirty Jesus starts preaching, teaching, healing
people and performing miracles. He clearly has a power beyond
anything known to mankind. He reveals himself as the Son of
God who has come from heaven.
After
three years he is arrested, falsely tried and put to death by
crucifixion. It was clear that he knew this was going to happen.
More than this he had predicted that he would come back from
the dead after three days. This happened, and in such manner
he convinced his followers that he was who he said he was.
Jesus'
Transformation
To
all who believed in him he gave life transforming power and
in the Acts of the Apostles, following the four Gospels, we
see the power of God flowing through these followers of Jesus,
who has now returned to heaven.
It
is so staggering that it would be almost impossible to believe
if the same life transforming process is not observed in every
new follower of Jesus down to the present day.
Jesus
reveals God
The
New Testament teaches us that Jesus came to more fully reveal
God, his Father. Thus when we look at the life and character
of Jesus we see this same love that the Old Testament spoke
about, a love which accepts us exactly as we are, and yet
which loves us so much that wants to help us change so that
we can more fully enjoy being who God has designed us to be.
The
work of Jesus on the Cross, for that was what it was, a purposeful
‘work of God', was to deal with our guilt in the same way
that the sacrificial system in the Old Testament had helped
the people of Israel
. That Old Testament
sacrificial system, the New Testament teaches, was simply
a picture of what the Son of God would come and do.
The
end product is a people who can call themselves ‘children
of God' who are not ‘religious' but who have been made whole
or complete and able to live at peace and harmony with God.
There is nothing servile about this in the same way that a
poor child adopted into a rich family does not have to be
servile, only to enter into the fullness of a child of that
family.
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| 11.
The Struggle of the Years of Church History |
Persecution
& Heresy
As
we are still very much aware today, the ongoing history
of the Church is an ongoing battle. Those who do not want
to submit to a sovereign God speak out and do all in their
power to destroy Christianity. In the early centuries of
the life of the Church there was tremendous persecution
that went on against the Church, which went on
for the first three hundred years of its life. In some measure
or other that persecution has carried on throughout the
whole period of Church History and in some parts of the
world is just as terrible as ever. The sceptic would do
well to consider why such a pointless religion (as they
see it) should evoke such terrible violence and horror against
it.
There
was also a battle against heresies throughout
those early centuries, those teachings that sought to distort
the historical truths of Christianity. In the beginning
of the 21 st century we see a resurgence of many of those
heresies. What those who refuse to study these things fail
to see, is that the traditional Christian beliefs are clear
cut and free from the ‘weird and wonderful'. The New Testament
accounts and teaching is free from mystical or weird teaching.
It is very simple and straight forward and can be understood
by anyone coming to God through Jesus Christ. There is no
‘special' or ‘mystical' knowledge required as the variety
of heresies have demanded. The testimony of John in his
letter that we have above, is that this was all about the
eternal Son of God who had come, and who they had seen,
heard and touched. This was as down to earth as is possible
to get!
Internal
Struggles
Possibly
the biggest struggle that the church has had is within itself,
with what the Bible calls ‘sin', that tendency
to self-centredness and godlessness. So the further history
moved on from the life of Jesus and the early apostles,
the greater the distortions and variations and mishandling
by men involved in leadership in the Church.
Thus
we had one part of the Church growing up with a central
focus at Rome while
the eastern part grew under the focus at Constantinople.
Eventually came what was referred to as the Great Schism
where the Roman Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church
split apart to go their separate ways.
Reformation
& Revivals
Through
the Dark Ages, abuses eventually so upset Martin Luther
that we had the Protestant Reformation, the start of a return,
away from tradition and abuses, back to Biblical Christianity.
At various times in Church History in various places around
the world, different areas experienced ‘revival' where the
sovereign working of God brought many people to know Him,
often accompanied by signs and wonders.
Renewal
and Restoration
At
the beginning of the twentieth century, while much of the
Church was suffering the ravages of liberal theologians,
God came by His Spirit in California with the start of the
Pentecostal wing of the church, emphasising the use of the
gifts of the Spirit (see 1 Cor 12), now a strong worldwide
movement.
In
the latter part of the twentieth century came a fresh emphasis
on the teaching that the Church is the body of Christ. With
this came charismatic renewal and the so-called restoration
movement. In each of these movements can be seen, by those
with eyes to see, the ongoing revelation of God to and through
His church, confirming and affirming all that is found in
the New Testament.
The
history of the Church has included:
a)
a struggle to arrive at the truth of what happened two thousand
years ago
- in and through the life
of Jesus Christ,
- and its effects for us
as human beings, by
the early Church,
b)
a diluting of that truth by the formation of human institutions
and ideas of men, over the centuries,
c)
a recovering of the biblical truths through the protestant
reformation,
d)
a recovering of the biblical life of the Spirit, by a variety
of moves of God over the past hundred years.
In
these notes we observed the gradual revelation of God through
the first two books of the Bible which is echoed throughout
the Old Testament. We briefly considered the greater revelation
of God through His Son, Jesus Christ, and the effects of
that on mankind. The ongoing battle is to hold onto the
truth of the revelation of God through the Bible, and to
counter the many distortions that we, the sinful human race,
seem to manage to come up with about God, that are contrary
to the Biblical revelation.
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