Knowing God through His Word — Part 11
This essay is about hearing from God. While writing it I felt like a grandma eager to pass on insights and experience.
Human language alone cannot communicate the glorious depths and riches of God’s Word. The Holy Bible is a wild book: its record of how the Holy Spirit has progressively revealed God and His plan is full of adventure, drama and surprise. It is as full of life today as when it was written. But only the author Himself, the indwelling Holy Spirit, can open it up to readers.
God’s Word needs unlocking for it is full of divine mystery. Its timeless, unchanging truth is revealed through human history, culture, and language in changing figures of speech, idioms, and definitions. Inside of sixty-six books of data for archeologists, etymologists, historians, theologians and researchers, God waits to speak His ever-fresh and relevant truth to all who hear and receive.
Art Tipon* wrote that it’s “ . . . utter fascination . . . discovering what God is saying . . . now although it was written thousands of years ago. There lies the secret. God’s Word is totally relevant to our day and culture, for its truths are not locked into a mechanical form of interpretation which is governed by [human] intelligence.”
My own experience bears out Tipon’s thinking: it is impossible to understand the relevance of God’s written Word by intellect alone. Strategies and analytical approaches fall short.
I recall a time, decades ago now, when I grew impatient while wearily plowing through the list of begots in the beginning of 1 Chronicles. To me, it was a boring, irrelevant list dead men. Only a determination to read the entire Bible kept me going. Then understanding dropped into my heart and tears began to run down my cheeks. I saw that behind each name was a person, a man who once lived on earth. God knew each one by name. “The very hairs on all their heads were numbered” (Matthew 10:30) just as He numbers each hair on my head. Each person, like me and my sons and daughter, was “fearfully and wonderfully made. (Psalm 139:14)
With no one telling me, I also knew-that-I-knew that God dearly loves fathers and their families. He established them. That’s why He chose Abraham.
For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing what is right and just, so that the LORD will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him. Genesis 18:18-19
Perhaps because my own children were practically fatherless, my heart ached with loss to realize that God once loved and watched over each family listed in Chronicles. He still knows today who is descended from whom and which fathers taught their children about Him and which ones didn’t. I sensed a divine purpose in family lines and in generational fulfillment. The list of names was no longer tedious or boring to me. I’d seen into God’s heart.
Understanding like I received that afternoon comes only through personal revelation, even though sound reason and factual evidence both support Biblical truth. And strangely, where the Bible is concerned, otherwise highly intelligent men and women refuse reason, fact, and truth. It has been so for two thousand years. As Paul wrote
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written:
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”
Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him. 1 Corinthians 1: 18-21 NIV
It is a strange phenomenon that many who reject the Bible as God’s Word do not recognize their own intellectual bias and idolatrous faith. They discount logically sound reasoning and factual evidence given by intelligent believers like Hugh Ross, Os Guinness, Josh McDowell, Nancy Pearcey and Eric Metaxas, whose books (all on amazon.com) I recommend to earnest seekers.
It is also strange that God will often bypass an agnostic or unbelieving mind and speak directly into a human spirit. (See my essay Three Rifles for a personal example.) Although Jesus said that His sheep know His voice, He didn’t mention lambs.
At times, we recognize God’s voice immediately, but at times it is a process. While reading and studying His Word, revelation and understanding will come in many ways. It may come rationally, by considering reasonable evidence, or it may be a sudden epiphany. Sometimes, God speaks to us through a growing conviction. Other times we get a sure insight or a conscious awareness of a thing known without knowing that we’ve known it. It can be an observation, a picture, a hunch, a thought or an emotion.
My revelation about Biblical genealogy ignored the cultural importance of ancestry in the Middle East; it ignored the importance of establishing Hebrew identity; it ignored the theological significance of ancestry in the lives of Jesus and David; it was a personal multifaceted glimpse into the heart of God. He talked with me about families and met me where I was that afternoon. I got my understanding in a conversation with God.
A conversation with God? God is a spirit, not a person. How does that work. My next essay on Knowing God through His Word continues the discussion,
