Calvin explains “What We Must Know About God.” He begins with “since the majesty of God in itself goes beyond the capacity of human understanding and cannot be comprehended by it, we must adore its loftiness rather than investigate it…” In short, we can only know so much about God. God is too great for us to comprehend. Karl Barth summarized it this way: “Only God knows God.”
That is true. We are finite and limited in our ability to comprehend the One who has created everything. Even the ancient writers in our Bible understood that our ability to fathom God was limited. Recall these words of scripture: ‘My ways are not your ways and my thoughts are not your thoughts.’
But know something of God we do. There is limited knowledge provided by considering the inestimable wonders of creation itself. We can go further considering what those wonders reveal. As Calvin points out, such reflection shows God to be majestic and wonderful and worth knowing. “His power has created such a great system and now sustains it; his wisdom has composed with such a distinct order a great complex of beings and things; his goodness is the reason all these things exist… his mercy which endures our iniquities with great kindness in order to call us to amendment… all this should abundantly teach us of a God that is necessary to know.”
But our sinfulness keeps us from recognizing all this in the world around us. We tend to focus on the ways that creation is not how we would have designed it. Or see “bad things” happening and wonder where that reveals this loving God. We overestimate own wisdom looking for other explanations for how this all came to exist. And we find other reasons for our behavior besides the “sin that clings so close.”
Calvin encourages us to overcome this “perversity” in viewpoint by turning to the scriptures. These become spectacles by which we see more clearly the God who is revealed to us. And he is right. In the scriptures we have a special revelation of God. Not just the revelation that comes from marveling at the beauty of the Earth, but a revelation that says among other things: “I am the LORD there is no other!”
What we should know about God is that the One, True, Living God is a God who speaks, who reveals; and all that we can know about God we can only know because God tells us. We learn who God is by what God tells us.
The ultimate revelation and telling of this God to us is the person of Jesus Christ. In his life and teachings we are shown the very nature of God. This is the point of what Christians call the Incarnation. In Christ Jesus we see who God is more clearly than we can ever see it on our own. Not only that, but in Christ we also have a mirror by which we can see the reflection of God. When on our own we develop a concept of God, if that concept does not correspond with the image of God we find in Christ, then our concept is flawed.
“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” Colossians 1:15
What does it mean for you that in Jesus the One True, Living God is revealed?
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