Man is an insatiably inquisitive creature. His mind is so made that it cannot rest. It is always prying into the unknown. He pursues knowledge with restless energy. His life is a voyage of discovery. He is always questing, exploring, investigating, and researching. He never grows out of the child’s interminable “Why’?

When man’s mind begins to concern itself with God, however, it is baffled. It gropes in the dark. It flounders helplessly out of its depth. Nor is this surprising, because God, whatever or whoever he may be, is infinite, while we are finite creatures. He is altogether beyond our comprehension. Therefore our minds, thought wonderfully effective instruments in the empirical sciences, cannot immediately help us here. They cannot climb up into the infinite mind of God. There is no ladder, only a vast, unmeasured gulf. “Can you find out the deep things of God?’ Job was asked. It is impossible.

And so the situation would have remained if God had not taken the initiative to remedy it. Man would have remained for ever agnostic, asking indeed with Pontius Pilate, ‘What is truth?’ but never staying for an answer, because never daring to hope that he would receive one. He would be a worshipper, for such is his nature; but all his altars would be inscribed, like the one in Athens. ‘To an unknown god’.

But God has spoken. He has taken the initiative to disclose himself. The Christian doctrine of revelation is essentially reasonable. God has ‘unveiled’ to our minds what would otherwise have been hidden from them. Part of his revelation is in nature: ‘The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.’ ‘What can be known about God is plain to them (that is, men), because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.’

This is commonly called God’s ‘general’ revelation (because it is made to all men everywhere) or ‘natural’ revelation (because it is in nature). But this is not enough. It certainly makes known his existence, and something of his divine power, glory and faithfulness. But if man is to come to know God personally, to have his sins forgiven and to enter into relationship with God, he needs a more extensive and practical revelation still. God’s self-disclosure must include his holiness, his love and his power to save from sin. This too God has been pleased to give. It is a ‘special’ revelation, because it was made to a special people (Israel) through special messengers (prophets in the Old Testament and apostles in the New).

It is also ‘supernatural’, because it was given through a process commonly called ‘inspiration’, and it found its chief expression in the person and work of Jesus.

The way in which the Bible explains and describes this revelation is to say that God has ‘spoken’. We ourselves communicate with one another most easily by speech. It is by our words that we disclose what is in our minds. This is even more true of God who has desired to reveal his infinite mind to our finite minds. Since, as the prophet Isaiah put it, his thoughts are as much higher than our thoughts as the heavens are higher than the earth, we could never have come to know them unless he had clothed them in words. So ‘the word of the Lord came’ to many prophets, until at last Jesus Christ came, and ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt amount us’.

Similarly, Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, ‘…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’. Man comes to know God not through his own wisdom but through God’s word (‘what we preach’), not through human reason but through divine revelation. It is because God has made himself known in Christ that the Christian can boldly go to the agnostic and the superstitious and say to them, as Paul did to the Athenians on the Areopagus, “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you’.

Much of the controversy between science and religion has arisen through a failure to appreciate this point. The empirical method is largely inappropriate in the sphere of religion. Scientific knowledge advances through observation and experiment. It works on data supplied by the five physical senses. But when we enquire into the metaphysical, no data are immediately available. God today is neither tangible, visible nor audible. Yet there was a time when he chose to speak, and to clothe himself with a body which could be seen and touched. So John began his first Epistle with the claim, ‘That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands…we proclaim also to you…’

GOD HAS ACTED.

The Christian good news is not confined to a declaration that God has spoken. It also affirms that God has acted.

God has taken the initiative in both these ways because of the character of man’s need. For we are not only ignorant; we are sinful. It is not sufficient therefore that God should have revealed himself to us to dispel our ignorance. He must also take action to save us from our sins. He began in Old Testament days. He called Abraham from Ur, making of him and his descendants a nation, delivering them from slavery in Egypt, entering into a covenant with them at Mount Sinai, leading them across the desert into the promised land, guiding and teaching them as his special people.

But all this was a preparation for his greater deed of redemption in Christ. Men needed to be delivered, not from slavery in Egypt or from exile in Babylon, but from the exile and the slavery of sin. It was for this principally that Jesus Christ came. He came as a Savior.

‘…You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’

‘The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.’

‘For the Son of man came to seek and to save the lost.’

He was like the shepherd who missed the only sheep which was lost from the flock and went out to search until he fount it.

Christianity is not a religion of strange beliefs but the Way to know the Creator Himself as LIFE, and there is nothing in the non-Christian religions to compare with this message of a God who loved, and came after, and died for, a world of lost sinners.

How then shall we respond to God?

God has spoken. God has acted. The record and interpretation of these divine words and deeds is to be found in the Bible. And there for many people they remain. As they are concerned, what God has said and done belongs to past history; it has not yet come out of history into experience, out of the Bible into life. God has spoken; but have we listened to his word? God has acted; but have we benefited from what he has done?

What we must do will be explained in the rest of this book. At this stage it is necessary t make only one point: we must seek. God has sought us. He is still seeking us. We must seek him. Indeed, God’s chief quarrel with man is that he does not seek.

‘The Lord looks down from heaven upon the children of men to see if there are any that act wisely, that seeks after God. They have all gone astray, they are all alike corrupt; there is none that does good, no, not one.’

Yet Jesus promised: ‘Seek and you will find’. If we do not seek, we shall never find. The shepherd searched until he found the lost sheep. The woman searched until she found her lost coin. Why should we expect to do less? God desires to be found, but only by those who seek him.

We must seek diligently. ‘Man is as lazy as he dares to be,’ wrote Emerson. But this matter is so serious that we must overcome our natural laziness and apathy and give out minds to the quest. God has little patience with triflers; ‘he rewards those who seek him’.

We must seek humbly. If apathy is a hindrance to some, pride is an even greater and commoner hindrance to others. We must acknowledge that our minds, being finite, are incapable of discovering God by their own effort without his self-revelation. I am not saying that we should suspend rationalthinking. On the contrary, we are told by the psalmist not to be like a horse or a mule which have no understanding. We must use our mind; but we must also admit its limitation. Jesus said,

‘I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babe.’