Untitled Sermon

First brik. The relationship between the Bible and knowledge, The second brick, is the relationship between the Bible and revelation. The third brick would be inspiration.

Bibliology signups: inspiration

Now when when you signed up for the bibliology elective you probably imagined that were where about to jump into the inspiration of the scriptures and start with “all scriptures are inspired by God”

The antecedent to revelation

And we will certainly get there, but before that we need to fist talk something that antecedes inspiration and in fact is the foundation of inspiration and that is the word revelation.

Question?

Can anyone be saved without the Bible?

Can anyone be saved without opening one page of the scriptures?

Well the answer is yes: Adam did not own a Bible and was saved, Abraham did not have a bible and was saved. And you know why, because both Adam. Noah and Abraham did not own, or read a bible, but they had revelation.

Necessity of scripture

Now you remember last lecture, we spoke about the necessity of scripture. Why do we need the scriptures? We need the scriptures because of three reasons: Because the scriptures is the epistemological foundation of of knowledge, there is a universal that without which we are lost. We need the scriptures because God’s general revelation though glorious is insufficient,: the book of nature is limited. We need the scripture because our mind is limited and fallen and it cannot know God from reasoning of mental intuition. The final conclusion was that we cannot know anything aside from Revelation, God has to disclose itself, if he does not disclose himself, we are in total darkness.

Revelation

The difference between revelation and inspiration

Inspiration

Now the very first thing that me must learn is that there is a difference between inspiration and revelation. Inspiration has to do with the method that God chose to record his revelation using men as his agents.

Easton's Bible Dictionary

INSPIRATION: Is that extraordinary or supernatural divine influence vouchsafed to those who wrote the Holy Scriptures, rendering their writings infallible. “

M.G. Easton, Easton's Bible Dictionary (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1996).

Revelation

Revelation is a more vast concept It is God's supernatural self disclosure whether it was in Scripture eat it, whether it was recorded or not.

Bible=God’s revelation/God’s revelation=Bible plus

If we could see in an equation it would be. The bible=Gods revelation, blue the inverse is not true. God’s revelation=Bible + –and this, of course I am not referring to continuing revelations as claimed by so many nowadays. But I am referring to past revelations. To the fact that

Adam and Eve. Would not read their Bibles. Because their Bible version was the "Living word" God's voice would visit them daily. And not evey single encounter aside from what we have in scripture was recorded

that Fact that Melquisedec was the priest of the most high God and surely God most have been revealed to him in various way to get to have that privilege. The fact is then that God’s verbal revelation goes beyond God’s written revelation.

Study of bibliology: Revelation | Self disclosure of God

So to be able to talk about bibliology before studying the doctrine of inspiration we have to study the doctrine of revelation. Because you in more important then inspiration is the self revelation of God and this self disclosure, this self revelation did not start with the Scriptures but started before the Scriptures.

Kids |Difference revelation and inspiration

When when her kids were growing up we used to have a poster by the table dad listed as serious of table manners. Such as do not chew with your mouth open, do not leave the table without asking permission to be dismissed etc. well let's see dad one of my kids would come and eat while chewing gum. One of my kids would have said you're not allowed or you're not supposed to do that. The reply would be wait a minute is not written here so I can do it and the answer to that would be well no I once heard mommy say that you were not to eat while chewing gum. Whether it's true or not you see the difference is there between inspiration and revelation is Parisian is what is written on the table manners poster, revelation is what mommy and daddy have said much of which has not been written. Just like God would speak to Adam directly

The unknown God aside from revelation

Gods is transcendent

Now this is a very important word the dictionary defines it as: that which goes beyond normal or physical human experience. So that when start on the quest of knowing God, we should not from the start that God is unsearchable. unfathomable, incomprehensible. Some of this is expressed in the scriptures.

The biblical testimony of God’s transcendence

Human searching would not get us to know God

Job 11:7 (ESV) — 7 “Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty?

So far makes an unwise comment to job, but nonetheless a true statement. The knowledge of God is unreachable, beyond our mental reach

He is Beyond me

Have you ever been taking classes from someone that you just can’t seem to understand, someone of whom half of what you read you don’t comprehend, and you just sigh and say: Forget it He is beyond me. I had a theology teacher like that, and remember how another pastor would describe him to me by saying, I wish I knew what he’s forgotten.

God=Times Infinitum

The highest IQ can not figure out God

1 Co 1:21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.

He lives in unapproachable light

1 Timothy 6:15–16 (ESV) — 15 which he will display at the proper time—he who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, 16 who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.

Paul speaks of this aspect of God’s nature which is beyond human grasp he dwells in unapproachable light, and his essential spiritual nature is not perceivable by the naked human eye.

William Shedd

The Divine being is of an essence whose spirituality transcends that of all other spirits, human, angelic, or arch-angelic; even as his immortality transcends that of man or angel.… The transcendent nature of the Divine spirituality is seen in the fact of its being formless and unembodied. “No man hath seen God at any time,” John 1:18. “You saw no similitude,” Deut. 4:12. The Infinite Spirit cannot be so included in a form as not to exist outside of it.

His habitat is ineffable

2 Co 12:2–4 I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. 3 And I know that this man was caught up into paradise—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows— 4 and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.

Paul entering the unapproachable light

Now, Here in a sense we see Paul having had the opportunity of going up to that unapproachable light and seeing some things which are “ man may not utter”

Sworn to secrecy?

Now commentators go back and forth as to whether what Paul is saying is that he was sworn to secrecy: you cannot shar what you saw, of whether they are inexpressible things, unutterable things, which I tend to think the latter, since is similar to the experience some prophets of old had when they saw heavenly things.

Formidable experience

Paul speaks of this experience as formidable, he doesn’t really know if it was in the body or out of the Body, the things are glorious, magnificent, but humanly ungraspable.

Author about transcendence

To what distance above God do ye lift up your imaginations, O ye rashly elated men? Ye have heard “that the heavens are meted out in the palm of [His] hand”? Tell me the measure, and recount the endless multitude of cubits, explain to me the fullness, the breadth, the length, the height, the beginning and end of the measurement, things which the heart of man understands not, neither does it comprehend them. For the heavenly treasuries are indeed great: God cannot be measured in the heart, and incomprehensible is He in the mind; He who holds the earth in the hollow of His hand. (AH, 4.19.2 in Roberts and Donaldson, ANF, I) Norman L. Geisler, Systematic Theology, Volume Two: God, Creation, 520 (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 2003).

The problem of God’s transcendence

God cannot be known or explained to humans

Norman Geisler quoting evangelicals

A transcendent God is a wholly other God. If He were not wholly other, He would not be transcendent. If, however, God is wholly other, then we cannot know Him, for “wholly other” means that God is not like us at all, and not to be like His creation at all is to make all our talk about Him equivocal.

Faith vs. skepticism in the scriptures

See this problem is directed not to create faith in the scriptures, but rather to create skepticism, because is basically saying, God is so wholly other and different, that any attempt for human language to explain God will fail, because humans cannot relate to God. Is like the differecen between me trying to translate Italian, and Arabic. The Italian is a romance language so knowing Spanish I have a point of Reference, but Arabic, well is read from right to left and I have no idea whatsoever what they are talking about. God is so other than us that humans cannot grasps his words and communicate God in the Bible, is like what Paul described in Romans of the language of the Spirit. “Groaning too deep for words”

Bibliological implications/practical implications

Now this can have devastating bibliological implications to render the Bible as inadecuate to convey God as two year old drawing is to convey the sixteenth chapel. It also has implications in our Christian experience because a Transcendent God, that is a whole other than us God, is so separated that he is not unable to relate to us

Someone put it

He is so remote as not to be relatable; He is so distant as not to be able to be near; He is so far that He can’t be close to us.

Some proponents of this way of thinking

Emanuel Kant

The phenomena

The world can be known because it lies before our senses.

Noumena

The beyond, tha realm of God can not be known because is beyond a mind whose categories are tied to the senses, and that world is beyond the senses.

Kant:Theology cannot exist

Karl Barth

God is not knowable outside of Christ

Karl Barth, for example, has denied the reality of revelation outside of Jesus Christ. So that it is only because of God’s condescension in Christ, and through Christ that we are able to know anything about God.

The knowability of God through revelation

Philosophical answers

We are similar to God

God can be transcendent without being wholly other, or totally unrelated. We are finite, he is infinite, nonetheless, we are, He and us are similar, he and us are analogous because the creator cannot create anything that is unrelated to who he is as a creator

Norman Geisler

A cause (God) cannot give what it hasn’t got, and it can’t produce what it does not possess. God is Being, and He gave being; He is Existence, and He gave existence to His creatures; He is Pure Actuality, and he made creation actual. Of course, there is a difference: Creatures have potentiality, and God does not. Without a difference there would be no transcendence.

God transcendent:not unrelated

See Mister what Mr. Geisler is properly saying the God is transcendent, that means he is different, very different to us I some ways, but he is not unrelated

God is Immanent

Definition: permanently pervading the universe. This is the effect that he has to creation coming from God’s immensity.

God above us/God with us

You see according to the Bible Gods is high and exalted, because He is transcendent, but He is also with us, because he is immanent, he is everywhere. That is the God of the Bible is God above us, but is also God with us and God in us through Christ. For in him Acts 17:28 (ESV) — 28 for “ ‘In him we live and move and have our being.

b) Theológical answers

The scripture is very clear unlike the animals in creation and the plants, Man was made in the image of God Part of that image has to do with rationality and 5 senses which allowed to be adressed by God, perceive his revelation and to address God

c) Biblical answers

He is approachable

Acts 17:26–28 (ESV) — 26 And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, 27 that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, 28 for “ ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, “ ‘For we are indeed his offspring.’

Context: unknown God

Now you remember the context. Paul had just passed by that monument among the many dedicated to the unknown God. Paul says, He is approachable, knowable why, because He has made men in evey nation, there is a way to relate to him because we are his offspring and not only that but he keept himself very approachable “ ‘In him we live and move and have our being

He is visible through revelation

“Acts 14:14–16 (ESV) — “Men, why are you doing these things? We also are men, of like nature with you, and we bring you good news, that you should turn from these vain things to a living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them. 16 In past generations he allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways. 17 Yet he did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness.”

See, Paul in this verse is stating that God is recognizable by men, because He has revealed himself without rains, and fruitful seasons which is a form of revelation.

Can we know God when he is transcendent?= Yes through revelation we will know him trhough not =not exhaustively but truly

Christianity is the true worship and service of the true God, humankind’s Creator and Redeemer. It is a religion that rests on revelation: nobody would know the truth about God, or be able to relate to him in a personal way, had not God first acted to make himself known. J. I. Packer, Concise Theology : A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House, 1995).

First means of revelation we must study called General revelation.

General revelation

The Dawn of revelation

Revelation started before the Bible was written

At creation God when public for the first time

We know that revelation started before the process of writing the Bible started. For our purposes for the purposed of us humans. Revelatio started when the world was created.

Pastor Brian Borgman

As Pastor Brian Borgman It was at creation that God decided to go public.

The chapters of general revelation

Creation and providence

His voice different from ours

And that that initial word that God spoke in the beginning that sound was different from the sound of ior voice. We speakand our voice dissipates, fades and dies, the is no memory of it.

Voice and echo encapsulated

Voice in creation

His voice and echo encapsulated

Bu the voice of God was permanently encapsulated by Gods creation and continues to be showcased in creation.

Echo in providence

Moreover the echo of that voice which continues to sound every single day is encapsulated by God’s providence

The biblical lesson

Psalm 19:1–6 (ESV) — 1 The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. 2 Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. 3 There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. 4 Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them he has set a tent for the sun, 5 which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy. 6 Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat.

The psalmist Summarize the revelation of the glory of God in two things, creation, the Heaven declare the glory of God and the sky proclaims his handywork. But also indicates that that voice did not stop at the end of Genesis when he pronounced everything Good, but there is an echo, or better, yet, the ongoing witness of His voice in the dayly instructions God renders for the operation of the earth.

Remember that this was one of the arguments Paul used Acts 14:16–17 (ESV) — 16 In past generations he allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways. 17 Yet he did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness.”

Not incognito/anonymous

See Paul is telling this pagan idolaters unbelievers. God has not remained incognito, He has not remained anonymous. He has manifested himself to you, how? Well by the work of his providence, you see it in His harnessing the powers of nature to bring good and joy to you. Bringing you refreshing rains, and bringing you fruitful seasons the season of a good harvest.

Meeting the sun with doxology

What this menas bretheren, is that whenever the Lord bring a day of good wheathe,r wheaher it be rain, for some, or for others pure sun this should be met by us with doxology, because in that providence there is revelation God is manifesting His goodness.

General revelation in man

There is no Christianity apart from revelation.

David Martyn Lloyd-Jones

The creation account of man

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him;

male and female he created them.

Intertrinitarian conference

It is interesting to see that up to this point the narrative would repeat the fact tha God made, God created, but before man was created, there is a pause, then, and tue first intertriniterian conference

Man the masterpiece of creation

We must understand that Gods’ masterpiece in creation was man because it was in him, that reflected God’s image.

Image f God exclusive to man

Never is the term image of God in the creation account is used other that to describe man, male and female.

The implication of the image of God in man

The sctructural view

It means, that in whatever we are different to the rest of the animal created that defines the image of God in us.

Relational views

Expounde by Barth, says little attention has been paid that it is a social image that mans is stamped with and God created hm a social being, he created him as male and female, the image of God has to do with the social dimension of man not present in the animals.

The functional view

Which talk about talks about the function God gave man, and not the beast of having dominion over creation ad God’s delegate.

Wayne A. Grudem

The image of God, we found, describes not just something that man has, but something man is. It means that human beings both mirror and represent God. Thus, there is a sense in which the image includes the physical body. The image of God, we found further, includes both a structural and a functional aspect (sometimes called the broader and narrower image), though we must remember that in the biblical view structure is secondary, while function is primary. The image must be seen in man’s threefold relationship: toward God, toward others, and toward nature.12

Wayne A. Grudem, Biblical Foundations for Manhood and Womanhood, Foundations for the family series, 77 (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2002).

Image:revelation of God

Whatever we conclude of the image of God one thing is clear. That in that image, there is revelation of God in man and it is precicely that revelation which Paul utilizes in Romans to speak of man rejecting general revelation in nature, as rendering him inexcusable, and like wise man the pagan who has no written Tora as the Jews nonetheless culpable in that day to God because they have the law of God written in their hearts.

Arthur pink

The nature of man also bears witness to the existence of God in the operations and reflections of his conscience. If the external marvels of creation exhibit the wisdom and power of the Creator, this mysterious faculty of the soul as clearly exemplifies His holiness and justice. Whatever be its nature or howsoever we define it, its forceful presence within presents us with a unique phenomenon. This moral sense in man challenges investigation and demands an explanation—an investigation which the Infidel is most reluctant to seriously make, and for which he is quite unable to furnish satisfactory explanation. "Conscience is a court always in session and imperative in its summons. No man can evade it or silence its accusations. It is a complete assize. It has a judge on its bench, and that judge will not be bribed into a lax decision. It has its witness stand, and can bring witnesses from the whole territory of the past life. It has its jury, ready to give a verdict, "guilty" or "not guilty," in strict accordance with the evidence, and it has its sheriff, Remorse, with his whip of scorpions, ready to lash the convicted soul. The nearest thing in the world to the bar of God is the court of conscience. And though it be for a time drugged into a partial apathy or intoxicated with worldly pleasure, the time comes when in all the majesty of its imperial authority this court calls to its bar every transgressor and holds him to a strict account" (A. T. Pierson).

General revelation:cretion, providence, imaio deo

Brethren it is this general revelation divided in God’s creation, Gods providence, and Gods imagio Deo, Gods image of God in man that constitute the nesesary context without which Gods scripture, Gods special revelation would not make sense.

‎‎Van Til

It is customary to speak of the necessity of supernatural revelation because of the fact that there is no revelation of grace in nature. However, it is equally true that the revelation of grace would operate in a vacuum if it did not operate in nature as revealing God. The supernatural can never be recognized for what it is unless the natural is recognized for what it is: both must be recognized in the light of God’s supernatural revelation.

Conclusion/application

God has revealed himself

Gratitude

In the society we leave, we are to be very thankful that we know God because Of his double revelation to us. Not only has God opened our eyes to see God in nature but also to see God in the scriptures, and that is because he has decided to reveal himself to us.

Anthony Flew

Anthony Flew leading british Atheist philosopher know believe in a creator as he studied more and more that general natural revelation.

'The evidential situation of natural (as opposed to revealed) theology has been transformed in the more than fifty years since Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism.'

Flew in other words. When he sees the intricacy of the human DNA has chocked more and more the possibility of Chance in origin, there is just a very strong pointing to design, and this a designer a creator.

Flew, though with all his amazing intellect has not come to see the God of special revelation.

Reverence

Familiarity and reverence

Gods is knowable through revelation, but He is transcendence. He is far above us in glory and power. It means that in our vocabulary and attitude of worship there should not only be familiarity, but reverence.

The effects of an egalitarian society

We live in an increasingly egalitarian society were more and more God is seen as our friend, our equal.

He is a King

God is transcendent, It is a king that has revealed himself and not an equal.

We should humble ourselves as creatures. Psalm 8. Who is man

Likewise, we should derive a sense of sinfulness from meditating on God’s transcendence

O Lord most high, with all my heart Thy wondrous works I will proclaim; I will be glad and give thee thanks And sing the praises of thy name. The Lord, the everlasting King, Is seated on his judgment throne; The righteous Judge of all the world Will make his perfect justice known. Jehovah will a refuge prove, A refuge strong for all oppressed, A safe retreat, where weary souls In troublous times may surely rest. All they, O Lord, that know thy Name Their confidence in thee will place, For thou hast ne'er forsaken them Who earnestly have sought thy face.

Thankfulness for God’s glorious theater of resonance for his word

The sound of the guitar

Let's talk a little bit about the guitar. How about you we were just to keep the strings and the neck but remove the body because after all it is hollow. What would that do to it? it Will remove it's resonance. Part of the beauty of the sound of the guitar is that is sound bounced back from the back of the guitar.

Creation the soundboard of the Bible

Precisely this is what happens with the Bible God created creation to have the Bible resonate as logic and understandable. It is well worth looking at a beautiful sunset and we read in the beginning God created that we understand. It is where we are you places I like the Niagara Falls and we read about God's omnipotence that we understand his power. Without creation the Bible would not make much sense.

C. Thankfulness for an even better means of Revelation

Revelation through creation | Revelation through redemption

And for Us who live in this New Testament dispensation God is all the more knowable because of one Glorious statement in the gospel of John “And the word became flesh” the knowledge of God has condescended in the person of Christ so that we would have the revelation of God in its maximum brilliance, John Say No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known. Literally the only begotten of God has exegeted him.And so The best illustration of our knowledge of God is in the kind of knowledge the disciples Had to Jesus, He was the word incarnate, they certainly did not understand everything that He said, but nonetheless they had true knowledge of Him. It was not exhaustive knowledge, but is was true knowledge of their savior enough to be saved and to grow in grace.

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