Sinclair Ferguson (0:00)

Although people repress, deny, refuse the revelation of God, there will be those moments because they cannot finally keep it down because they are made as the image of God, when the only response they can make is to become angry and to silence your testimony to it. And they may do that in very sophisticated ways, or as in some cultures, they may do it in very violent ways. But there is no final escape from God's general revelation.

Nathan W. Bingham (0:41)

Have you encountered that someone snapping, getting aggressive when they learn that you're a Christian? What is it that we know about unbelievers that even they try to deny? Welcome to the Tuesday edition of Renewing your Mind. Nathan W. Bingham, this week you're hearing messages from a brand new series with Sinclair Ferguson. It's an overview of Christian doctrine called Theology for All. If you have family or friends who profess Christ, but they push back on the idea of studying theology, perhaps share this week's messages with them. It's easy to share a message from your favorite podcast app or from the official renewing your mind YouTube channel. Well, here's Dr. Ferguson on the God who reveals himself.

Sinclair Ferguson (1:29)

We are trying to explore what it means for us together as ordinary Christians, really to explore Christian doctrine and to understand the different ways in which the doctrines of the Bible theology makes a difference to the way we live the Christian life. And last time we were thinking about the significance, the importance of this whole exploration of Christian doctrine, how it's intended to not just help us intellectually, but actually to build in Christian character and to transform our lives. And now I want to begin to focus for a number of sessions on God himself, God, the true and living God. Many philosophers, I think perhaps the first to express it this way was the philosopher Leibniz in the 17th century. But many philosophers have said that perhaps the most fundamental philosophical question of all is why is there something and not nothing? Why is there something and not nothing? It wouldn't surprise me actually. If you were able to survey children under 10 years old, you would find an amazing number of them had asked that question. Sometimes in our non Christian or anti Christian age, they may even have formulated the question one way or another to their parents. And their parents said, you shouldn't be thinking about that. And I sometimes think what a tremendous amount of damage has been done by parents to their children because they have squashed those instinctive questions and caused them to suppress them and repress them often for the rest of their lives. But you can see why it is that philosophers have regarded this as perhaps the most fundamental question of all. Why Is there something and not nothing? And by and large, there are basically only two answers to that. One form of a non Christian answer would be to say, well, it all came from nothing. It just all came from nothing. There was nothing and then there was something and it just happened. It's some kind of great accident. But even a child would be able to see through that and say, but mommy, nothing is nothing and nothing comes from nothing. And so then often the alternative is to say something. Well, it's evolutionary, but evolution from what? And the alternative at the end of the day tends to be the answer. Well, the world is eternal, or matter is eternal, but that amazing phenomenon, not that everything came from nothing, but everything came from something that was eternal, a piece of stuff, but we don't know where it came from. So it's pretty simple, isn't it, that these are profoundly unsatisfactory answers? It's pretty evident that the answer, as we explore reality, must be something quite different. And although it's not true by any stretch of the imagination of all scientists, there are certainly some scientists who, by what they say and by what they write, are kind of determined to demonstrate that somehow or another the answer must lie in these answers and not in the answer that convinces us as Christians. And that is that there is something because God created it. And when we look at that something, while we cannot fully understand it, we are at least able to take in that the God who created this something. And we know this better than any generation in the whole of history. We see and understand in a small way the sheer size and magnificence of the cosmos. Then we understand that this is truly a being who is called quite different from us. He cannot simply be a big man or a big woman, but is a being so different from us that he has his own being within himself. And this, of course, is how the Scriptures teach us right from the very beginning, the first words of the Bible. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. I think it's one of the most beautiful things about Christian theology that the simplest, the humblest, the newest Christian knows the answer to this great philosophical question, why is there something there and not nothing? Because God, our God, is the creator of the cosmos. That doesn't mean, and we certainly should not think it means, that we know a great deal as Christians or that we know everything about everything as Christians. We are know alls. But it does mean, if you think about it, that we know something about everything. We know this about absolutely every person we meet, about everything we see that Underneath it, undergirding it, is our creating and creative God. And of course, we are the first to admit that there is great mystery in this, that, as the theologians say, God is incomprehensible. We can come to know him, that is to say, we can apprehend him, but we cannot comprehend Him. We are, comparatively speaking, tiny, frail creatures of dust in terms of the cosmos, smaller than particles of dust. And so we understand we are not able to get our intellectual arms around the infinitely great being who created all things, even although by God's grace, we come to know Him. But it's not difficult for us to confess that he is without beginning, that he is without end, that he has his being within himself, that he is not dependent on others. He didn't need the world. And while there are many mysteries about the being of God, the great thing for the Christian is that this is the mystery that explains all other mysteries. This is the mystery that enables us to unfold everything we ever experience in life, everything we see. In the light of this mystery, all other mysteries begin to make sense. So when that is true for us, something else becomes true. We understand that if God is the creator of all things, visible and invisible, then in that creation, God has disclosed Himself. He has been, if I can put it in human terms, he's been like a great artist. If you ever watch on television programs of art experts analyzing a painting, perhaps a painting that has been discovered or rediscovered or been in somebody's attic or, for that matter, stolen, and now at last, it has come again to public gaze. And these experts looking at the paintings and showing you how they know that this, for example, is, say, a genuine work of Leonardo da Vinci or of Rembrandt or of one of the other great painters. Because every artist leaves, in a sense, his artistic DNA, everything he does. And Scripture teaches us, as it teaches us about God, that exactly the same thing is true of our God. But the heavens declare his glory. This is what Scripture and the Christian theologians have always called God's revelation, his unveiling of himself, his expression of himself in something that is other than himself. Just as an artist expresses himself, his talents, his genius, his mind, the ability he has to use different palettes and textures in what he does. Every time he produces a work of art, he is disclosing himself. And this is the same with our God. He does nothing without revealing Himself to us. And Christian theologians have thought about this essentially in two categories, usually called general revelation and special revelation. By general revelation, they mean the revelation that we see in the generality of things. And this revelation, in a sense, is like surround sound. Remember how, for example, Psalm 19 celebrates it. The heavens declaring the glory of God night and day. No matter where you go or when you go, in a sense, there is no escape. As long as you live in this world, you are surrounded by the sound. There are no words, Psalm 19 says, but you hear the sound in everything, as Paul says, reflecting on the words of Psalm 19, as he says in Romans 1. And everything that there is, we see indications of God's eternal power and deity. That is to say, we. We understand from the things that have been made. And as I say, we, better than any other generation, understand this, the sheer vastness of what has been made, that this vast cosmos is surely a demonstration of the eternity of the Divine One. And we see also many other aspects of that. Yes, we recognize we live in a fallen world. And often people say the great problem is the problem of evil. But people really should say the great problem is the problem of good. Why is there so much beauty? Why are there so many good things? Why is it that there is order? Why is it that the world in all its vastness actually seems to have been required to be so vast for human beings to exist? I remember seeing an interview with Sir John Polkinghorne. Sir John Polkinghorne was a very distinguished astrophysicist and mathematician in Cambridge. And he decided he was going to study for the ministry. And this, of course, was sensational. This great intellectual, this great scientist, he's going to study for the Christian ministry. People with a scientific background like that, and he still believes. And they foolishly sent along a relatively young reporter who stuck a microphone in his mouth and demeaned Sir John Polkinghorne by saying, but surely a man like you, you cannot possibly believe that a God who created the world so vast would have any interest in tiny man. And that was Polkinghorne's response. He said, I think, young man, you don't understand your science. It's only because of the vastness that the conditions for the existence of man are there. You're looking at things through the wrong end of the telescope. And so we are surrounded by it. Yes, says Paul, think of what we said earlier on. We may suppress that knowledge. By and large, most people do not want to think about is too intimidating to think about it, because you would have to acknowledge that God is. And that he is great and that he is good. And as Romans says, also you would acknowledge that he is judge. But there's more to general revelation than that it's not only surround sound, but general revelation is invasive in this sense that God has made. In that general revelation, he has made man and woman to be his image. So it isn't only that we can't escape the surround sound. It is that as men and women, we are part of the revelation itself. If we are made as his image, we can never truly find ourselves. And this is such an important thing for us to grasp today when people are searching for a lost identity. We can never actually find ourselves if we reject God's revelation because what we are is creatures made as his image. As Abraham Kuyper, a great Dutch theologian, put it. He says, this world is a revelation in which we human beings are both spectators and actors. We are spectators of the revelation that God has embedded into the created order. And we're actually moving parts of that revelation. Remember how Psalm 139 says, if I could take the wings of the morning and go to the furthest parts of the earth when I landed, if I was trying to escape God, he would be there. And you see, wherever we go, whoever we are, there is actually no last exit from divine revelation. And that is why when Paul speaks about this in Romans 1, he uses very strong language about what men and women do with this revelation. They have to deny it, they have to reject it, they have to repress it, they have to push it back. They have to fill in, as it were, their vision with obstacles to faith. And that's one of the reasons, why, isn't it? You may be the kindest, gentlest Christian on two feet, but as soon as you mention God, as soon as you mention creation, as soon as you mention the glory of God and the things that have been made, as soon as you mention what we are meant to be. Isn't it so fascinating how many people who are not Christians don't just shrug their shoulders and say, well, you know, John, he's a Christian. They get angry. And even a student of human psychology would tell you that when somebody gets angry in that kind of context, it's characteristically because they're trying to hide something. Isn't that the case? And that's what Scripture is telling us, that although people repress, deny, refuse the revelation of God, there will be those moments because they cannot finally keep it down, because they're made as the image of God, when the only response they can make is to become angry and to silence your testimony to it. And they may do that in very sophisticated ways, or as in some cultures, they may do it in very violent ways. But there is no final escape from God's general revelation. Now we know from the opening chapters of Genesis that God superimposed on that general revelation what we call special revelation. So for example, he gave specific instructions to Adam and Eve, especially for example, about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and commands about what they were to do, perhaps commands that Adam and Eve were not able to read off the way things are. So there was special revelation before the fall. But when Adam and Eve sinned, then even that special revelation was not adequate to restore them to fellowship with God. The general revelation wouldn't, because they rejected it, the special revelation they had rebelled against. And when you think about that, it is amazing that God in His mercy then provided a new kind of revelation, what we often call special redemptive revelation. And interestingly, Psalm 19, that celebrates God's general revelation also celebrates this particular revelation. When God came in His Word and His promises in his law. And essentially he did two things. The first was to deal with the confusion of our understanding brought about by our rejection of God. And the second was to deal with our rebellion against him by taking the judgment that was due to our sin, and then by the ministry of His Holy Spirit working in those rebellious hearts to bring us to submission to him and to trust in Him. And it's this, this special redemptive revelation that in essence is the whole story of the Bible from Genesis chapter three, verse 15, right to the end of Revelation, chapter 22. It's a great story of how the God who made all things in his generosity, his amazing grace, has been willing to restore his broken creation and especially to restore men and women who have rebelled against Him. So what are we saying? I think we're saying in a sense that built into us is the recognition that we cannot actually live without God, that we are not just chemical robots. I've only once in my life, in my period as a student felt the people in this class are about to incite a revolution. We were listening to a lecture given by the vice president of the British Humanist Society, who was one of our psychology professors. And the thesis of her lecture was quite simply, everything you do is chemically predetermined, biologically predetermined. It was like a hyper Calvinistic lecture in a theological seminary that was committed to Arminian theology. And you could feel the tension building up. How dare you non Christians, how dare you suggest to me that the things I do are not a matter of my own determination. There was a kind of pressure in the atmosphere and outside of the classroom argument of a heated kind. Now why would that be? Why? If that is scientific humanism, that we are pieces of biology, and in that biology there are certain characteristics that will determine the whole of our life. That's atheistic science, why would you rebel against it? Because everything within you tells you that cannot be true because that would make everything in life utterly meaningless. A couple of months later I had this extraordinary experience of being in the university bookshop. I was behind a bookcase. I heard a voice I recognized ask one of the shop assistants, do you sell Christmas cards here? The voice of my humanist professor. I don't think it would have done my grade any good, but I wanted to run round the bookcase and say, so you can't live without the Christian gospel either, but you will not admit it. And this is one of the things that the Apostle Paul especially emphasizes that as Christians we know something about non Christians that they are probably denying about themselves. We know that they know he is, and they know and can never escape the fact that they are running from him. And they also know that there is no possibility of really enjoying this life as long as that is true. And when we begin to pull on the loose threads, we begin to be able to point them to Christ.