(Transcription started at 0:50 of the audio file. Headings added by Christian Library.)

In this lecture, we are going to look at God’s general or natural revelation in creation; God’s speaking in creation. To set something of a context, let’s read the opening verses of Psalm 19, one of David’s Psalms.

¹The heavens declare the glory of God; and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. ²Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.

Here is the psalmist declaring that the creation, the universe, the stars in the night sky, the beautiful sunsets, the birds singing in the trees, whatever is part of the created order, it speaks and it speaks of a Creator. It speaks of One who has made these things. John Calvin was particularly insightful on the doctrine of general revelation, how God speaks in creation. In the Institutes of the Christian Religion, one of the most important texts in Christendom, he has this to say: “It is moreover to be observed that though they struggle with their own convictions and would feign not only banish God from their minds but from heaven also. Their stupefaction [isn’t that a wonderful word?] is never so complete as to secure them from being occasionally dragged before the divine tribunal.” It is a wonderful way of saying it. I’ve actually quoted from a very famous translation of Henry Beveridge, which I like very much. Calvin is saying that every now and then, even those who call themselves Agnostics or even those who call themselves Atheists, every now and then, they are dragged before the divine tribunal to be told in no uncertain terms, “There is a God, and I am he!” Even though they may deny that and even though, as we shall see in a minute, they may suppress that knowledge with which they are bombarded day by day and night by night.

Well, this is how the Westminster Confession (1645) begins. It begins with the statement on the divine self-disclosure: that God discloses himself, reveals himself, and it also talks about the light of nature. “Although the light of nature and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable, yet they are not sufficient to give that knowledge of God and of his will which is necessary unto salvation.” This is the opening sentence, in fact, of the Westminster Confession of Faith.

Now, this is a somewhat complex topic and it actually is a topic that begins somewhere else. I remember one time being in Dublin, Ireland, and this was before GPSs and iPhones and so on, and when you wanted to know the way to somewhere, you had to go out of your car and go into a gas station. And I was trying to get somewhere in South Dublin to preach at this church and couldn’t find it, and went to this gas station and asked my way there and the man said, “Oh, if I was trying to get there, I wouldn’t start from here.” Which was not terribly helpful. And, in a sense, if I wanted to talk about the doctrine of revelation, I would not start from here. You really need to start in a whole preliminary subject and topic that we are going to completely pass by this evening. That the Bible begins with these very famous and well-known memorable words: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”; in the beginning, God.

The Bible does not begin as it where with a course in apologetics. It doesn’t begin with, “You must first read a couple of books by C.S. Lewis, before we can talk about God.” Or, “You need to study the whole history of philosophy and we need somehow or other to build a platform on which the idea and concept of God is meaningful”; that is not the way it begins. It begins with the assertion a bold, unapologetic assertion of the being and the existence of God. John, in his gospel, has been reading Genesis in his devotions, when he begins to write his gospel, I think. He echoes, of course, the beginning of Genesis 1:1. In the beginning was the Word, the Logos, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, it is of course a reference, the Logos, the Word is a reference to Jesus Christ, but it is a deliberate echo of Genesis. The assertion of God or in John 1:1—of God, with God. And yet, as we shall see, there is only one God, but there is plurality within that one God. The Father is God, and Jesus is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. What the Bible is saying to us, and it is saying this to believers, it is saying this to those who actually read the Bible and can hear the Bible and are within sound of the Bible, that God is the ultimate context for all of knowledge.

How Can God Be Known?⤒🔗

Now Dr. Ferguson uses big words as you know and some of those words are Scottish words that nobody knows except Dorothy and Sinclair. But in a sermon recently he gave the title, you remember, “Epistemology.” He used this grand word epistemology, in a sermon title, and no one balked! I thought people would cough and splutter, and this congregation takes everything on the chin. But this is epistemology; we are talking here of the doctrine of knowledge. We are talking here about how we know God, but we are also talking about how we know anything. And the ultimate question, then, is not for the Bible, “Does God exist? How do I prove the existence of God?” We will come to that in a moment. The ultimate question for Scripture is: “How can God be known?” God exists. The question is: “How can God be known? How can I come to know God?”

And the answer of Scripture is twofold. There is a knowledge of God that everybody has. Yes, I mean everybody. Every single person and even the person who is on some remote island, in our fictional imagination, who has never heard of Jesus, never read the Bible and has never been in contact with any other human being, yes, even that person knows God. He knows God from creation. He knows God from the things that are made. But also in the second place, God is known savingly, God is known redemptively by those who come to hear the good news of the gospel and by the grace and power and sovereignty of God, respond to the good news of the gospel. Now the answer, and it is a somewhat surprising answer on the face of it, is that God is known, God is knowable because he reveals himself.

I will quote a very famous saying, whose origins are in some dispute, but certainly it is a medieval saying among theologians and philosophers: “Finitum non capax infiniti.” That is, the finite cannot contain, the finite cannot grasp, the finite cannot comprehend the infinite. So there is a problem. How can a finite human being come to know the infinite God? That is the great question. And it is a question that troubles not just theology, but it is a question that troubles philosophy. And the great philosophers, Plato in one school and Aristotle in another, have been concerned with answering that question. How can a finite creature come to know something that is essentially unknowable to the finite mind? Namely, infinity itself! Namely, God himself! And the answer of the Bible is astonishing from one level: that the finite man, human beings, not only can come to know God, but that they actually do know God. God reveals himself. God discloses himself. God pulls back the curtains and unveils himself. He shows us a little of himself. And in one very special but limited sense, God does that to every single human being.

So, we are on the boundary here of something that belongs perhaps in a history or philosophy course, and something that belongs in what we might call, “prolegomena,” sort of the starting blocks to theology. I want to get beyond that. We are talking about the theory of knowledge. We are talking about epistemology. And we are talking about how do we, how can we come to know, not just anything, but how can we come to know God.

Now, there is an enormous elephant in the room. And that elephant in the room is the Enlightenment. The nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries are in many ways a footnote to the Enlightenment. And one particular individual comes to the surface and that is Immanuel Kant. Some of you have to go back to your college days and school days and history of philosophy courses on Immanuel Kant, and the discussions on The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critic of Practical Reason and they gave you a headache, and you were just glad that the course was over and you could move on to other things!

But one of the things that the Enlightenment established (and modernity and postmodernity are responses to the Enlightenment) is that if God exists, and Immanuel Kant did not, in fact, doubt the existence of God, it was just irrelevant for Immanuel Kant because if God exists, he cannot be known. And because God is a thing in himself, to use his technical language, and things in themselves, pure ideas if you like, cannot be known. And some of you will remember from your philosophy days, that “the numinous cannot perforate into the realm of the phenomenon”. That is a gross simplification of Immanuel Kant, but it all boils down to the issue that God cannot be known and the Bible flat out contradicts that. The Bible says the very opposite: God exists and God is infinite, and in a sense he cannot be fully known, the finite cannot fully know the infinite. But he can be known because he reveals himself, he discloses himself.

Now Calvin said, “He discloses himself using baby-talk” (yes, that was Calvin’s language). He accommodates, that was the term that he implied over and over, God accommodates himself and speaks, just like you speak to a little two-year old. You get down, perhaps on your hunkers, and you begin to change your tone of voice, and you talk like a two-year old. When my three-year old in New Zealand comes on face-time almost every evening, you know he talks in a language all of his own. And you have to get into that language if you want to communicate with him, you have to get down to his thought forms and his language, and that is what God does.

Now, God reveals himself: What is the justification that we can know God?

First, God reveals himself. Second, we are made after his image and after his likeness (Gen. 1:26) so we have the capacity to understand him. We have the capacity to know him, because we were made in his likeness. Third, the incarnation of Jesus; God is manifest in flesh, so that when you see Jesus and hear Jesus, and encounter Jesus in space and time and you hear the words of Jesus you are at the same time hearing the words of Almighty God. God is speaking in space and time in human words and through a human being. And then, fourth, that revelation gets inscripturated into the Scriptures and that will be what we are looking at next week, and eventually by the Holy Spirit the words of Scripture are taught us and those words are illuminated by the Holy Spirit so that we can come to an understanding of the very mind and the very being of God, albeit in an accommodated form! Now there was fire hydrant stuff, that would probably last an entire 3 hour course, which I had summarized, but we need that building block in order to get to the character of revelation.

Now there are three words, New Testament words in particular, which are particularly important. One is the word Apocalypse; which means an unveiling God. God unveils himself. So imagine a painting or a statue that has a veil on it and you take the veil away, to reveal the statue or the painting. And the New Testament uses the word apocalypse, or apocalupto, the verb. Epiphany is another word; meaning an appearance. And Phanerosis is another word meaning an open manifestation. So there are some technical words that are translated into our English New Testaments. But these technical words are words of revelation. There are things that if God had not revealed them, we would not know. So God manifests himself, he does that openly, he unveils his being. And because human beings are finite and God is infinite we cannot know God unless he reveals himself to us. God must unveil himself to us.

Now, that says to us, you know that one of the things that we ought to have, I think, is a sense of wonder, a sense of awe, a sense of delight, a sense of astonishment: “How great Thou art!” We have just been singing that and there is an almost childlike sense of astonishment. God has unveiled himself to puny little creatures like us. So what is revelation? A revelation, not the book of Revelation now, but the idea of revealing, God revealing himself! And the Biblical idea of revelation is God telling us a little about himself. Yes, I want to put it that way, although when you think about the Bible and when you think about the universe and all that God has revealed, it is a whole lot, it is more than can occupy a two-year course in systematic theology here at First Presbyterian Church.

But actually in comparison to what God knows, God knows everything and he knows everything exhaustively, and he knows everything all at once. Now, I can say that, I don’t really understand what I am saying, I can say that, but in comparison to that what God reveals to us is just a little. So revelation is not exhaustive, and is not exhaustive in space and time, it is not exhaustive in your life time, and neither will it be exhaustive in heaven. I know that people say, because they pick up a statement from John 13:7: “What I am doing, you do not understand now, but afterward you will understand,” and I hear that sometimes cited as justification, that when you get to heaven you will understand everything. But actually that is not necessarily the case. Providence will still be a wonder to me in heaven as it is here. It is just that I will accept it. I will accept it with absolute peace. “The secret things belong unto the Lord and those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children,” Deut. 29:29; that is as true in heaven as it is here.

So revelation, let’s think of God revealing himself, let’s think of God unveiling himself, showing us a little of himself. We are thinking about that along two lines of thought here. One: he reveals himself to us as creatures, as human beings, as finite human beings. And the issue there is one of dependency and finitude. We are small, we only have, I don’t know how big your hard-drive of your brain is, how many gigabytes it can contain, but it is finite. Some of you more than others, to be sure, or some of you less than others, to be sure! But everybody in here has an enormous hard-drive that is why you are here. But you understand that is one of the lessons of the book of Job; the ending, the peculiar ending of the book of Job, where Job’s questions are not answered. Job lays his hands upon his mouth. He learns the lesson that he has no right to know certain things. It is not a right; it is not an entitlement that he knows. What is important is that God knows and understands. So, that is the issue of our finitude, but there is also a second issue and that is the revelation of God to sinners. Because at stake there is not just our finitude; at stake there is the issue of receptivity? (22:37) Because as sinners we push back the revelation of God. We hold the revelation of God in unrighteousness. We deny what God actually reveals to us.

God Reveals Himself through General Revelation←⤒🔗

Now there are two aspects of revelation. One is the one we are going to look at tonight and that is: general revelation. Then there is another branch of revelation and that is special revelation. And if you want for now to think of that as the Bible, as Scripture, it is a little more than that, but that is coming down the pike next week and subsequent weeks. Tonight we are concerning ourselves with that revelation of God that everybody gets. Not just those who have a Bible, not just those who are within sight and sound of the preaching of the gospel—this is true for absolutely everything and everyone. Now what are the limits of general revelation? Look at the quotation there on page 4 of the Westminster Confession again. “Although the light of nature and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom and power of God to leave men inexcusable, yet are they not sufficient to give that knowledge of God and of his will, which is necessary unto salvation?”

Now what is the confession trying to say? It is saying that there is a revelation in creation, there is a revelation in the things that are made, it is a revelation of God, it is true revelation, and what it reveals is true, but it is not sufficient to save. So there is a question that arises: can the person who has never heard the gospel, the person who lives in the other side of the world somewhere, has never heard the gospel, the pagan to whom the gospel has never come, can that person be saved? And the answer of Scripture and the answer of general revelation is: no, it cannot. It cannot save. And this is true revelation about God, but it is not sufficient to save.

Now, I am just going to mention the next section and really pass it by if I can get away with that, it is too big a topic to open, but there have been those who have asked, can you get true, saving, genuine knowledge of God simply from general revelation? Can you argue for a true knowledge of God and even a saving knowledge of God, from general revelation? And there have been those who have advocated such a view; I have mentioned Anselm of Canterbury and his so-called ontological argument, and Thomas Aquinas, at least one interpretation of Thomas Aquinas (and then I am not persuaded that that interpretation is necessarily correct, but I put him down there). And then there was a very famous 18^th/19^th century gentleman by the name of William Paley, who put forth the argument of somebody who finds a pocket-watch on the beach and has never seen a pocket-watch before, but looks at it and examines it and from its complexity has to conclude that there is a maker. A pocket-watch is not just something that just happens. It argues for a maker, it argues for a supreme being. Now whether that is a sufficient argument to argue for the existence of the One, true, living God is another matter. Reformed Theology has been negative on the idea of arguing for true knowledge of God; the Christian God, the Biblical God simply from general revelation.

Biblical Testimonies to General Revelation←⤒🔗

Now let us change gears a little, and get into the Bible. And ask ourselves, what are the Biblical testimonies to general revelation? There are some important Psalms here and I mention 3 of them: Psalm 8, Psalm 19 that we read at the beginning this evening, and then some verses in Psalm 104. But by far and away the most important passage is the opening chapters of Romans; and in particular Romans 1:18ff., which is a sustained polemic on Paul’s part to general revelation. And I am going to more or less now confine my thoughts here to that passage in Romans 1:18 to the end of the passage. What are the means of general revelation according to Paul? God’s invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So the means of general revelation are the things that have been made. The made things! The created things! Creation itself, the cosmos itself, the universe itself, is the vehicle, the organ through which God reveals himself, discloses a little of his being.

Now Calvin says that there exists in the human mind and indeed by natural instincts some sense of deity. He calls it divinitatis sensum: a sense of deity! And this is true of every individual. This is true of every person that ever has been and ever will be. It doesn’t matter who they are, what language, what race, what ethnicity, what part of the world they live in. There is a divinitatis sensum: there is a sense of the divine. Another of Calvin’s phrases: a seed of religion, semen religionis, is divinely sown in us all! Man as man. Man who lives in creation. And then another quotation from Calvin, as he refers to something that Paul says in Acts 17 in Athens. Now this revelation in creation is twofold. First of all it is a revelation external to man, and it is a revelation within man; internal to man.

Internal Revelation←⤒🔗

So let us think of the latter first. There is a revelation of creation that is internal to man, in the way that man is, the fact that man has the ability to sense and see and hear and reason and feel and respond and has a sense of obligation and “ought-ness”! The very constitution, the fabric of man as man, is a testimony of God’s revelation within creation, that he himself is a created being. Look at what Paul actually says in Romans 2, and he is talking about the Gentiles who don’t have the Law, they don’t have the Bible, they don’t have Torah, and they don’t have the Old Testament scriptures. When the Gentiles, who do not have the Law, by nature, do what the Law requires, they are a law to themselves. Even though they do not have the law, they show that the work of the Law is written on their hearts. There is a revelation of God internal to man, that testifies to his createdness. So man as man knows God, as both judge and Creator. That knowledge is inside him, it is a semen religionis—a seed of religion. It is a sense of deity within the natural man. Now this is true, and this is very important here, this is true despite the fact that we may not acknowledge it. The fact that you acknowledge what I just said is irrelevant. The Bible is saying it is true, whether you acknowledge it or not. You may deny it, you may flat out deny it, and you may go red in the face and scream blue murder, and say, “This is not so!” And the Bible will simply say calmly, “But it is so.” And actually the fact that you are screaming blue murder is testimony to the rage that is within you against that seed of religion. It is also true even if you believe it is true, but you can’t explain why it is true. Our inability to explain the sense of deity that is within us is true, whether we can explain it or not. This is in a sense not something subjective, this is true objectively, it is true whether you acknowledge it or not, and it is true whether you understand it or not.

This is what Paul says in Romans 1, linking this to something that Moses said right in the first creation account in Genesis 1:26 about created in the image of God. Look at Kuyper, this very famous statement from Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch theologian, politician, journalist, and founder of the Free University of Amsterdam, and many other things. Abraham Kuyper: “If the cosmos is the theatre of revelation, in this theatre man is both actor and spectator.” It is not just that he is watching the revelation of God; he is himself the revelation of God. We are our existence. Yes, the way we are! The very fact that we are human beings means that we are actors in the arena of God’s revelation. Perhaps I have one more thought here, that is particularly relevant and cogent I think in 2012 that our rationality, that we are thinking human beings, is testimony to the revelation of God. That we are created beings! That we can think and reason and weigh and form judgments! Rationalism is not a bad word, although it has become a bad word, but the fact that we are rational as opposed to being irrational, that we can form coherent arguments is testimony to the revelation of God.

External Revelation←⤒🔗

Now let us look at the other side: External to man. God gives himself visibly in created things. The universe points to its Maker. Now I saw a picture of Mount Sharp. This is a very expensive mission on the part of NASA, this extraordinary little robot Rover, whatever it is, on Mars taking pictures, sending them back to us. It was a picture of Mount Sharp and you and I are the first generation of human beings, since the creation of Adam and Eve, to see it with this sharpness and clarity. And it says, Do you know what is written on Mount Sharp? Not Hollywood! What is written on Mount Sharp is not “made in China,” but made by God! Right, you look at that picture. When I saw that first picture coming in at 2:00 in the morning a few weeks ago, and when it landed on Mars and we were waiting for those pictures, because it takes like fifteen minutes for the pictures to get here, that in itself is mind-boggling. It said, “Made by God.” This is part of God’s creation!

Now look at what Paul has to say. What is the content of revelation? For what can be known about God? Romans 1:19. That which is, let me take this, this understanding of it, that Cranfield says, that which is knowable. The knowable things! Because there are some things that are not knowable, because God is infinite! The secret things belong unto the Lord our God, but those things which are knowable. And what are those things? And he says in vs. 20: invisible attributes. Creation! Mars! The planets! A river! A fish! A bird!

I was walking the other day and I was looking at one of that whole flock of Canadian geese that were somewhat suspicious to me. And as they sort of lifted up their heads and I thought, “Are they going to charge me?” And no, they did not, but they took a while to get off. All this running and galumphing that they do. And they put out their wings and I watched them and I thought, Isn’t that extraordinary? That this plump, fat bird can actually make it off the ground! And actually with relative ease! I mean you try and do that! And I just thought there is a display of the Creator. Who’d have thought, except God? You couldn’t come up with that. You know you can make an airplane, but it is not like a bird; it’s not as agile as a bird, and never will be like a bird. God’s invisible attributes. Contrary to the arguments of Kant, the numinous actually does penetrate into the phenomenon (for those philosophy buffs among us). The invisible attributes of God, actually make it through into the visible world; his eternal power and divine nature; that is a lot, isn’t it? What can the natural man, the man without a Bible, the man who has never been to church, the man who has never heard of Jesus; he is living on some remote island on the other side of the world, what can he know about God? And Paul says he can know the eternal power of God. And he can know something of the divine nature, the very essence of the being. The God-ness of God! A Creator who is powerful, a Creator who is eternal! Verse 18 of Romans 1: the wrath of God , those who don’t have Torah, those who don’t have the Bible, those who don’t have the Old Testament, are told in their own providence of the righteous anger of God. You remember Paul’s argument, saying: homosexuality is not something upon which God reveals his anger. Paul’s argument is that homosexuality is the evidence of God’s anger. That is God’s anger. It is not that he will come and judge it, it is itself his judgment. He gives them up to unrighteousness.

Notice that the seed of religion is perverted and it is perverted not in the direction of agnosticism and atheism, it is perverted in the direction of idolatry. Calvin says, here we may infer, that the human mind is, so to speak, “a perpetual forge of factory of idols.” What a graphic image that is. Fabricum idolorum: a forge, a factory of idols! That is what the natural man does. You know the person who says he is an agnostic, he is actually an idolater. He is making himself a god. He is making his reason a god. You know God does not believe in atheists. God does not believe in atheists. They are just idolaters. And another thing is truthfulness. The Creatorhood, righteousness, and justice, goodness, wisdom, glory!

We Are without Excuse←⤒🔗

Let me say something about the perspicuity of general revelation: it is clearly perceived. That which God reveals is clearly perceived. No man can say to God, “I am sorry but I never saw You.” There is clear perception. The revelation gets through. It actually gets through; it actually penetrates; it actually gets into us. Into the natural man! Verse 10: the result of general revelation! So what you have is implanted knowledge of God. An awareness of deity! The seed of religion! Now, what is the human response to general revelation? Paul says that he holds the truth in unrighteousness. He holds it down in unrighteousness. He suppresses it. It is a bit like a Coke bottle. You know you take the top off and then you shake it. And then you put something on the top and you shake it. And you put your thumb on it and you build up this pressure, you are holding this pressure down, you can feel it on your thumb. And the natural man suppresses that knowledge: he is bombarded with this revelation all around him! He may make all kinds of philosophical excuses, but all he is doing is he is holding his thumb on that pressure. So look at the verbs in Romans 1: “suppress,” “did not honor or give thanks,” “exchanging the glory,” “exchanging the truth,” “did not see fit to acknowledge God,” “haters, insolent, haughty, boastful inventers of evil, disobedient.” They give approval to evildoers. You see all those verbs and descriptives there of the natural man, and the response to that general revelation? Now what is the consequence of general revelation? “So that they are without excuse.” Is that not a devastating conclusion? That on the Day of Judgment the person who has never heard of Jesus, the person who has never heard the gospel, can never say I never knew you existed. I never knew you were there. They are without excuse. The whole of creation, the whole of the created order is bombarded with the being and the essence of who God is.

The stars don’t tell me Jesus loves me. The stars tell me that God is. The stars tell me that God is powerful. The stars tell me that I am a created being and therefore responsible. And I am accountable for what I do. The stars tell me that, but they don’t tell me, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for Mars tells me so.” No, it does not say that - only Jesus, only the Bible tells me that. So that is the need for special revelation.

I am just going to sow some seeds of thought here. This is a great German word: anknüpfungspunkt! It is a wonderful word, some of you may remember it from philosophy classes, it is a point of contact. What is the point of contact with the natural man? I mean, anybody, anybody you meet in the street, anybody you meet on a bus or a plane or a train. What is the point of contact? How can you address this person? And the point of contact is: every man knows more than they will ever admit about the existence and being of God. That is a card, if I can use a poker metaphor, in a lecture about the revelation of God, that is something that you can hold up your sleeve. You know, whenever you are speaking to somebody, he may say he is an atheist, and he may say he just doesn’t believe that God exist; you know more than he is prepared to acknowledge. Because he actually knows more than he is prepared to acknowledge! He actually does know God. He is actually bombarded by the revelation of God. He is just holding it down.

The problem, the problem is not intellect at the end of the day, the problem is sin. The problem is sin. So that is an important point in evangelism and in apologetics. That you never speak to a blank slate, you are always speaking to somebody who is actually bombarded both internally and externally by the revelation of the being of God. It is just that they are not willing to acknowledge it.