The Science of Knowing God: God Revealed - How We Know Him
Pastor Fletcher preaches from Psalm 19 about the different revelations of God to humankind. Discussion points: Everyone can learn about God through general revelation in the natural world, the theological argument says that the special fine tuning of the universe points to an intelligent designer, God personally revealed himself to us through Jesus coming to earth.
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Scripture reader: [Psalm 19] The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words whose voice is not heard. 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, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber and like a strong man runs his course with joy. It's 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 law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever. The rules of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold, sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.
Moreover, by them is your servant warned. In keeping them, there is great reward. Who can discern his errors, declare me innocent from faults, from hidden faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless and innocent of great transgression. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Preacher: All right, good morning, everyone. It's good to see you all this this morning. My name is Fletcher. I'm the lead pastor here at the church. if I haven't had a chance to meet you, I'd love to get that opportunity before we head out today. It's a lighter, it's a lighter Sunday, so maybe we have more time to chat. But, today we're continuing our study on theology. We started our our series on theology, the science of knowing God last week, and the emphasis for last week was that this idea that a proper study of theology should just fuel love for God. That doctrine, devoid of devotion is dangerous, that our hearts are to be drawn toward God through our study and theology, not our heads to be blown up to think we are God through our study of theology.
And so today we're continuing this series and you know, there's gonna be several breaks throughout. So if theology isn't your thing, if you, then don't worry, you know, next week we're gonna do a different topic and, and go back to the theology series, soon and then we'll start a series on the gospels in the fall. But if but this series on theology, the idea is that we want to work through what the Bible teaches about different topics in the Bible. And, and one of the ideas with theology that you have to talk about just before you can start thinking about who is God is how can we know? How can we know what God is like? How does God reveal Himself? If, if theology is the science of knowing God, then the question is how do we know anything about God?
Maybe you've won wonder to yourself, if God is real, why doesn't he show up like he did in the Old Testament? You know, in the Old Testament we read story after story of God showing up and doing really big things, and he splits the Red Sea, he sends the plagues and, he, he, he leads the Israelites by a pillar of fire during the day and a pillar of smoke at night. No, the other way, flip it. but he guides them. And he shows himself in a variety of different ways. Why doesn't God just do, why doesn't he just like go split the Charles River or something like that, so that we can know that he is real. How does God reveal Himself to us?
Today's passage handles those questions. Along with the theology series, we've been kind of jumping through a Psalm series. This is not the typical way we do this. We usually work through books of the Bible, but through the summer with people, you know, sporadically here and gone with vacation and whatnot, we thought it'd be good to have some series that you can kinda pick up at any point like sliced bread, you know, just any slice is good. And so with this theology series, we've been interspersing with the Psalm series and today we get that wonderful middle Venn diagram, part of it because we're doing a Psalm and a theology together.
So Psalm 19 is one of my favorite Psalms in the scriptures. In fact, it was one of CS Lewis's favorite Psalms if you know CS Lewis, and you know me, you know that I, he's one of my heroes, but CS Lewis. Wrote a short book on the Psalms, and in it he says that Psalm 19 is the greatest poem in the psalter and one of the greatest lyrics in the world, which is something because he was a literature professor at the University of Oxford. He, he wasn't just like an expert in Christian writing. He was an expert in all of literature. And so he said that Psalm 19, not only one of the greatest poems in the scripture, but one of the greatest lyrics in all the world in in history. And in the Psalm, what we find are at least 2 different ways, and we know of at least 3 different ways that God reveals Himself. So let's walk through those, OK? Three different ways that God reveals Himself, and remember this is theology, so I'm gonna give you kind of the theological terms as we go through.
The first is called general revelation. General revelation. General revelation refers to God's self-disclosure to all people through the natural world and human conscience. So, General revelation available to everyone. Anyone who can observe the natural world. can observe general revelation, and can see it, and they can see that God is real through what he has created. Let's look at the Psalm and how it describes it.
Psalm 19 verses 1 through 6. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words whose voice is not heard. 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, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber. And like a strong man runs its course with joy, it's rising is from the end of the heavens, and it's circuit to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat.
I love so many different parts of the Psalm. I think that the one that just to, just to look at the first verse, the heavens declare the glory of God and the skies above proclaim his handiwork. You know, in an ancient society, many of the ancient people would worship the sun as a deity. So many times when you're looking at ancient Israel. And their religion, it's put in juxtaposition against the religion of Egypt. And in Egypt, they worshiped the god of the sun. In fact, they thought that the sun was a god in many ways. And so here, David is pointing out, and he's actually poking fun at that belief, and he's saying, the sun is not a god. The sun is merely the, the messenger of who God is. He is nothing compared to who God is. The heavens declare the glory of God in the sky above, proclaim his handiwork. David is saying the sun is not God, the sun is merely the messenger of God.
What he's trying to teach throughout this entire first part of the Psalm is that God can be clearly observed in creation. And this is, this would explain how all people groups until fairly recently, kind of universally believed in a deity, because when you look at creation, you can see that there is a creator that all people can see this as we've been saying, as, as Alexis shared, earlier, and I've been saying all week because I've been working with the kids with Kid Summer Adventure, that one of the main things that we did with Kid Summer Adventure was this idea of God sightings.
So they were in the, through North the Alaskan wilderness and we're supposed to look for different ways that God is showing up. So we had them write these go sightings on these boards with little on little trees and whatnot, and they had a lot of really wonderful cute ones. One person wrote, I'm thankful, or I see God and my sister Claire and her sweet little baby hugs, and I just thought that that was the cutest. And we just talked about how we can see God and the creation around us.
And I think it is true, and even in the way he orchestrates things. Yesterday, my, my, two sons and I went for a long bike ride, long for us, you know, it's like 4 miles, but, for a 3 year old or a 4 year old, that's pretty good, right? who learned how to ride a bike two weeks ago, so, um. And we got all the way we rode out to Arlington and played on a playground started on our way back and I noticed immediately that I had a flat tire and so then I just stopped. I, they actually have one of those workstations right there where I noticed that my tire was flat, so I started trying to, you know, figure out a way to fix my tire, and. As I'm there, I figure out the, the workstation doesn't work, so the pump is, is broken, it's not gonna happen. And all of a sudden this guy walks around the corner and he's like, hey, do you need help? And I'm like, well, I mean. I have a flat tire. I'm gonna have to figure out a way to get home and I was gonna rent a blue bike or something like that, figure it out, lock up my bike and come back and get it.
And he's like, well, I've got a patch kit and a pump and, and my bike. Would you like some help? And I'm like, oh, I mean, sure, I guess, like it would be a real pain. So he, this guy, he's like, OK, take off your wheel and let me see it. He goes to town on my wheel, like he knows what he's doing. And like he got, he, if you've ever replaced a bike tube, it takes me a normal human, like 10 minutes to get the thing off the rim, you know, it takes forever. He had it in like 2 seconds. He was just boop boop and I was like, well, who is this guy? Are you like bike Jesus? I don't know what's happened here. And he was like, oh, I used to be a bike mechanic, and I'm like, well. Lucky for me that I used, I have a bike mechanic right here. He took the tube out. He's like, oh, there's too many holes in this. I can't fix it. I've got another tube. Let me go get another tube. He wouldn't even let me pay, like he like fully replaced my bike tire for me and as we were leaving, Shepherd was like that was a God sighting. Right?
Because God is right there, like orchestrating the whole thing. For some reason, this guy decided to ride down from Bedford with his two little dogs on his bicycle all the way down to Arlington. And God just kind of placed him there to where, so we look at that type of thing and we can see how God has orchestrated the world to function as he is sustaining it, that he is active in the world, and sure, sometimes things happen we're like, why was that happening like that? And we don't know for a long time, but we can look at creation and we can look at the way that the the world works and see that there is God.
This basically is every apologetic defense for the existence of God that we have, almost all of them. I'm gonna list just a few because I think that this is helpful for us as we think through how God reveals Himself through creation. There there's so many arguments and so one of them is the cosmological argument. The cosmological argument says that everything has a cost. I'm sure that you've used this argument with friends. Be like, OK, you don't believe in God. Well, where did the world come from? Oh, it came from the Big Bang. Well, where did the Big Bang come from? Oh, you don't know a massive energy source. Well, where did the energy come from? And so you just keep going back. Back and back until you get to the point that where there has to be a beginning.
In fact, I don't get it. When, when the Big Bang was first theorized, there were many people who didn't believe in God, who were upset about the Big Bang theory and saying this thing is saying it's something that we don't believe. They had believed at that point that the universe had always been. And so the Big Bang was like an enemy to this non-theistic idea of the world. And somehow it's gotten changed to where now people who are Christians are afraid of the Big Bang theory, like it, I mean, guys, this supports the, that the universe began. As the Bible says that it did, that that God is the beginning of the universe. And so this idea of the cosmological argument, is something that we can observe from nature and see that there is a God.
Another argument that we might use or another way that we might see that there is a God from from general revelation is the theological argument. And this says that the fine-tuned complexity of the universe points us toward an all an intelligent designer, that the world is highly fine tuned, that if things were just different by a little bit, if any of these physical any of the physics of the universe were just like a tiny bit different than what they are. Life would be very difficult to sustain, if not impossible, and it points toward an intelligent designer. The alternative is that it's all random. But the but when you think about it all being random, no one looks at a Mercedes Benz, a Mercedes Benz, and thinks that there must have been an explosion in the junkyard. It's not all random. Someone designed that be, and that is what we have with our world, that it has been designed and crafted by God, the heavens declare the glory of God. The sky above proclaims his handiwork.
There's also an aesthetic argument that we might look at, might say that this might be one of the ways that we see that creation shouts the praises of God, that The world has many beautiful places in it, and you might be able to naturalistically explain many of them, but you cannot explain the feeling you have of awe as you stand on top of a mountain. Or you see a raging river. My family loves going to the national parks. You walk into a national park and your jaw drops in many different places. And this argument that there must be a God. Behind all that sense of awe and wonder.
And then finally one other one that we might think about is the moral argument that our objective moral values point toward God as their grounding. All cultures have actually some sort of similar moral values. They might be slightly different across cultures, but. Universally accepted across cultures are many different moral values that we say point toward the fact that we were all created in the image of God.
But each of these arguments, it only leads us toward theism. And beyond this, we cannot get to the full idea of who God is. We can know that there is a God, but none of these actually teach us who God is or how we know Him. In order for us to know who God is, we must go beyond the general revelation and into what we call special revelation, which is God self-disclosing himself. I'll just read my definition. That special revelation refers to God's specific and personal communication to humanity, primarily through the Bible and culminating in the person of Jesus Christ. You can know that there is a God by observing the universe. That's what Romans Romans one says that for his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world, and the things that have been made. So we're without excuse.
But you cannot know who God is on a personal level, apart from special revelation. This is why, let's just look at the passage, OK? Psalm chapter 19, Psalm 19 verses 7 through 11. The law of the Lord is perfect. Reviving the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart, the command of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever. The rules of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold, sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb. Moreover, by them as your servant warned, and keeping them, there is great reward.
So many things to point out about this. First of all, when you read Psalm 19, you read the first 6 verses, and it almost feels like one psalm, and then you read the next 6 verses and you're like, this is a totally different psalm. It just has a totally different vibe to it. The first 6 are almost on a different category, a different topic than the second 6 verses. And when you think about it, he's going from this idea that all creation declares the name and the glory of God to, and God has revealed himself through his written word. And to the the original author to David, he did not see any difference between those two.
As CS Lewis puts it, he says, I think that the psalmist felt effortlessly and without reflecting on it, so close a connection between his first theme and his second that he passed from the one to the other without realizing he had made any transition at all. Here's my favorite part of this whole Psalm. And it's one that you don't get at until you stare at, stare at the Psalm for like a few hours and then you're like, wait, what is happening here? Because in the first half of the Psalm, the part that's talking about God in general, the general revelation of God, you see the name of God being used as El. And so it, it mentions God. That's heaven declare the glories of God. A God in general. That's the word for in general, God. But when you get to the next part, where it talks about the special revelation of God, all of a sudden, God has a name. And it's Y H W H, Yahweh. In our Bibles, we often translated as the Lord, because it is the sacred name of God, and one that ancient Egyptian, ancient Egyptians, ancient Israelites would not even speak. Because it was the name of God. And so often when they would come to the, the sacred name of God, they will replace it. They wouldn't say Yahweh, they would say Adonai, which is the word for Lord. And so we've translated it into the Lord, but when you see that all caps, the Lord, that is the name of God.
And so, with special revelation, when God reveals Himself to you, it's not a god in general, it is Yahweh, the God of all creation, the one who formed it all, that we long to be near. And to know. I've heard many people say that they don't go to church because they feel God's presence more in creation than they do in church, more in the mountains than in the people of God, and more beside a lake than in the word of God. Or if you wanna get especially bold, more on the golf course than with the people of God. And I, I'm just saying that you, you don't have to put these two in opposition of one another. You can experience God's glory in those places and I have, and I enjoy it. But it, you still need the revelation of God. You need God's word in your life for you to know him on a personal level.
The law of the Lord is perfect for, seven, reviving the soul. No matter how great God's creation is, it cannot re revive your soul quite to the level that God's word can revive your soul. The word of God is better revelation than the wonders of creation. Verse 10. More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold, sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb. Do we believe this? I think it's hard for us, many of us, that God's word is this valuable. If I told you That I have $1000 for every verse of scripture that you can memorize by next Sunday. Some of us would all of a sudden become Bible scholars this week. We would say that's more efficient than my job. I'm gonna load up the cash this week. But yet this scripture says that the word itself is more valuable than gold. Meaning that as you read the scripture, you gain something more valuable than if I had $1000 to give you. That you gain an insight into who God is, that you learn of his character and his truth and who he is and what he has for you.
The Bible, get getting to the core of what we believe the Bible is. When we think about the Bible, often we might think about the Bible as writings of men, speculating about who God might be. But that is not the Bible. The Bible is God's self-disclosure to us, which leads us to many wonderful questions about how we know the Bible is true, how we can believe in it, why we can depend upon it. Wonderful questions that I'm not going to get into in detail today. I, I'm kind of burying the lead there a little bit, I suppose. I will do a Q&A session afterwards if you wanna stick around, but if you wanna come hang out, I'll, I'll answer questions about scripture. In fact, I think that the, and Alexis will too, so she just discovered. But I think that that's actually better handled in a Q&A also than in this, and we can write and maybe I'll teach a whole sermon on scripture sometime soon because we would love to answer those questions. They're really good questions.
We we think that the Bible is God's self disclosure to us. So we have general revelation, we have special revelation, and finally, we have this number 3, ultimate revelation. The ultimate revelation is a subtype of of special revelation. Not only has God told us who he is through his word, but he has revealed himself by entering into creation himself. That Jesus of Nazareth is God in the form of a human. If you want to know what God is like, look no further than Jesus. Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God. So we have his word telling us much about it, but his word really points us toward Jesus, who is the revelation of God. We learned the character of God, through what we learn about Jesus from the accounts of the gospels.
Hebrews chapter one puts it this way. Long ago, and many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. But in these last days, he has spoken to us by his son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom he also, he created the world. As we spoke about in the beginning, many of us would love it if God would would reveal Himself to us in Old Testament kind of ways, unless the Lord actually start to reveal Himself to us in Old Testament kind of ways, because those were not always easy for people when they experienced them. We would love to see God split the Charles River or send plagues to modern day pharaoh Elon Musk, easy hits, sorry.
But God has done something better. He is sent His one and only Son, who is fully God, second member of the Trinity to live among us. How better could God reveal Himself than if he comes himself into creation? If the author of creation writes himself into the story. That we might know who he is. The story of the earth is actually. An autobiography of God, riding himself into the story as Jesus. What the Old Testament saints knew in part, we know in full, we get the sense of the grand, they got, they may have gotten a sense of the grandeur and the power of God, but we get to know him as a person.
Jesus was not just a messenger about who God is. Jesus is God Himself. And he reveals the nature of God, the character of God. This nature that is slow to anger. I mean, just think about the man of Jesus of Nazareth, slow to anger, abounding in love, grace and mercy. Patient, willing to heal, humble, compassionate, kind, always committed to good, self-sacrificial laying his life down for all who would call on him. When we think of God, we might have different categories for Old Testament God and New Testament God. And when we see Jesus though, he is the summary of what God is like, revealed to us. As a man. And the entire life, death and resurrection of Jesus. It wasn't simply to reveal who God is, but to actually introduce us to God Himself.
You see, through our faith in Jesus. We can be forgiven of our sins, we can reign, we can be victorious over the sin and the suffering that reigns in this world. We can enter a divine relationship with God. The the same divine relationship that Jesus has enjoyed throughout eternity past. We can enter into that divine relationship, and that God gives each believer with the Holy Spirit, that we might know him. And so the question of how do we know anything about God is such a wonderful question. You can observe it from the creative universe. Praise be to God. Every person on this planet can do that. As long as they had the cognitive ability to do that. More than that, you can learn by how he has disclosed himself throughout the generations through prophets and apostles who wrote the word of God.
But also he came himself to reveal himself. We cannot say that God hasn't done enough. He stepped into history, revealing himself and calling all of us to follow after him. We know who he is, and now as we trust in him, he fills us with the Holy Spirit. And that is how we know God, to be filled with the Holy Spirit. You can know God. And this room is full of people who desperately Myself included need. Relationship and communion with God. We are a room full of people who are hurting, and people who are wayward and need God.
First Peter chapter 1 verse 8. Though you have not seen him, you love him. And though you not, do not see him now, you believe in him. And rejoice with a joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory. OK, with this first, the first part we might, we might vibe with, OK? Though you have not seen him, you love him. Yeah, yeah, sure. Though you do not see him. You believe in him. OK, we're going. What about this part? And rejoice with a joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory.
Friends, let's take, take a step back. And listen for Jesus in our lives. And allow that relationship to be nurtured. Because that inexpressible joy and filled with glory is available to you. It's available to you. When we pray, God responds.
Jesus says it like this, for John chapter 10, My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. Are you hearing his voice? Would you like to? Are you listening? You can't blame the radio station if the radio is not turned on. It's not that he cannot be found. You have to turn on the receiver. When God speaks, we move, we don't shut him out. Has it been a while though? I know for me, at one point this week, I said, I have barely prayed. It's been like the busiest week of my entire life. I've barely prayed. I haven't listened to him in the scriptures. My reading plan, I'm kinda in a section where it's like long, and I'm reading a lot within the Bible, but it's hard to slow down and absorb any of it or hear anything from God on it. I just need to take a moment to listen for God. To look for him in my life, and I, I do think when I did, when I finally did sit down, I'm like, wow. God is active. He's moving. He's moving in my life. This week, though busy and hard in a lot of different places, filled with glory, joy inexpressible at the same time, but I was just moving so fast through life that I was missing half of it. And is that you?
And you're invited today. Right now in this time. To experience the presence of God, to be reminded of it again. Every week we take a communion meal, and it's one of the ways that we participate and we experience the presence of God. We're being reminded that Jesus is with us. In this time, that on the night that he was betrayed Jesus took a loaf of bread and he broke it. He said, this is my body broken for you. He took a cup and he said, this is my blood shed for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And as we participate in this meal, it's as if we're being transported to that last final, last supper. With Jesus where the disciples are in the presence of him, and we're being reminded that one day we will live in his presence in full. And though now we know him in part, one day we will know him in full, these are like appetizers to the new creation, to the feast of the wedding of the lamb.
And so as we participate in this, we're being reminded that Jesus is with us. And so as we prepare ourselves to receive this community meal, I just wanna lead you in a prayer. Where you seek the presence of God in your life today. That you might be filled. With the inexpressible joy of what it means to know God Himself. If you're, so let me pray for us.
Father, we bow our knees before you. If you'd like to bow your knees, you're welcome to, to kneel. But we bow our knees before you, Father. From whom every family in heaven and earth is named. And we ask that according to the riches of your glory, that you might grant that we be strengthened with power through your spirit and your inner being. God, we want the riches of your glory to be granted to us. That we can be strengthened with power through your spirit and our inner beings. So that Christ might dwell in our hearts through faith. And that we can be rooted and grounded in your life. Jesus, I pray for those here today, that they may have the strength to comprehend what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. That you might fill us with the fullness of God. Now God, you are able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask and think according to the power that's already at work within us. We pray that you will receive the glory today. And throughout all generations. Would you move in our hearts and help us to see you. To help us to sense your presence and your nearness, your kindness, your gentleness. Would you convict us of our sin? And help us to run from that and experience your grace again. God it's so good to live with you. So we might know you. Would you do an amazing thing in our hearts today? In Christ's name we pray, Amen.