GOD AND THE BIBLE

Given that knowing God deeply begins with knowing about him, where do we go to find this information?

If you have studied theology you will know that theologians talk about two major ways God reveals himself to us – through his general revelation available to all people in the things he has made (including our own self-awareness) and upholds, and through his special revelation by acts and words now recorded for us in the Bible.

I confess I’m not a very good student of the first of these forms of revelation. Some people – including my wife Nola – are much better at reading general revelation than others. They see “God’s fingerprints” everywhere. Nola and I can be walking in a forest, for example, and she sees things in ferns and mosses that reveal God’s glory that I’m blind to.

Still, I don’t feel too bad about this because, as J.I. Packer points out, God’s revelation in nature is always “smudged by sin.” It’s hard, for instance, to see the glory of God in the vicious attack of a lion on a harmless gazelle. Perhaps there is a way it can be seen, but it’s not immediately obvious to me. That’s why I feel on much safer ground when I turn to the Bible. I fully agree with J.I. Packer when he writes, “Getting God in focus means thinking correctly about his character, his sovereignty, his salvation, his love, his Son, his Spirit and all the realities of his work and ways… How can we learn to think correctly about these things? Calvin’s answer (mine, too) is: by learning of them from Scripture. Only as we thus learn shall we be able to say that God the triune Creator, who is Father, Son and Spirit, is more than a smudge in our minds” (Keep in Step With the Spirit, p. 18).

But simply turning to the Bible is no guarantee that we will get to know more about God – at least not every time we consult it. For one thing there are passages, and even one entire book (Esther), that don’t mention God’s name or seem to have any direct connection to him. For another, it’s possible to approach the Bible and read it in such a way that we miss what it is telling us about God.

We were talking about this in a recent class at College. We noted that you can read any book from a number of different angles. You can approach it with an eye to what it teaches about history, or geography, or philosophy, and basically miss everything else. Or you can read it as a piece of literature, and focus on the language the writer uses, his style and so on. The same is true with Bible reading. It’s possible to read the Bible with the eyes of a systematic theologian, always looking for facts to classify. Or you can read it as a historian, or a linguist, recognizing only those things that fit within your field of interest. In doing so, you can miss the essential relational and personal character of the Bible altogether.

This was a point that the late Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones stressed. He constantly warned against the danger of reading the Bible in a purely intellectual (or for that matter, a subjective) manner. Instead, he argued, we always have to seek to know the Person revealing himself in the Scriptures. On one occasion he said, “The great rule which must never be forgotten is: Seek the Lord himself. Seek the Person. The Christian life is not simply a matter of adopting a number of ideas; Christianity is not a philosophy, not a collection of thoughts and concepts. It’s special glory, and what makes it unique, is that it not only teaches us to apply a teaching, but to get to know a Person, and to walk with him in the light” (The Unsearchable Riches of Christ, p. 261). That’s the key to getting to know God through the Bible – always seek the Person!

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