How We Know God: The Incarnation

06/10/10
How We Know God: The Incarnation
BASIC

Over the last few weeks here at BASIC, we have been considering and discussing the question, “How do we know God?” in order to be able to begin to answer the question, “How should we live in response?” So we have been considering ways in which we might come to know God. This whole project really gets down to one of the very most central ideas in all of Christian faith; the idea of revelation. Now, as Christians, we are not just interested in revelation in the abstract. We aren’t interested in revelation of any old thing, but the revelation of God. Now, ever since the very beginning, the people of God, right on back to the ancient Israelites, were intensely aware that only God can reveal God. Not only did God tell them this, they were able to look around at all the nations around them and see what happened when God did not reveal himself to human beings. They made up bizarre rituals, they sacrificed their children, they had drunken orgies, and all the rest. Every time the Jews began to do the kinds of things their pagan neighbors were doing, God sent prophets to remind them of who they were and what they were about. They worshipped a God who told them who he was. They had a God who revealed himself to them in a unique way.

What is really important for us to understand is that, since it is only God that can reveal God, it means that, under absolutely no circumstances at all, can we reveal God. This means that, no matter how much sense an idea about God makes, no matter how much we might want to believe something about God, no matter how good a speaker might be at convincing people that it is true, if it is not rooted and grounded in God’s actual revelation, we must not take it as truth. This means that we are utterly bound to what God has actually revealed about himself to us in our actual world of time and space and we cannot ever bypass this actual self-revelation and invent a god of our own. By the way, there is a word for this kind of behavior. It’s called idolatry.

God has never left humanity utterly without any revelation, but this revelation has always been fundamentally veiled. I want to consider a few ways in which God has revealed himself to us and see in what ways we can come to know God. As the one who created the universe out of nothing, God has left something of an imprint of himself on creation and we encounter creation. However, in spite of this interaction, creation is something other than God so, at the end of the day, we are encountering something that is consistent with God, but not God himself. As the one who inspired the writers of the text of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, God has revealed himself in a way that is much more full. However, we cannot forget that, though God has imprinted himself more clearly in the text of the Bible, the Bible as a text, as a book, is not God (for example, we do not worship the book of the Bible). So, when we encounter the Bible, we are encountering something that is not only consistent with God, but something that is an active witness to that God, but it is still something that is not God.

Now I want you to consider the fact of the Incarnation. When God became a human being in Jesus Christ, he revealed himself to us in a staggering way where the fullness of the divine majesty took up residence within our broken and weak humanity. He died two thousand years ago, but he was also raised from the dead and ascended into heaven and lives even today as a person that we can meet. And when we do meet Jesus, when we encounter him in a personal way, we do so by the power of the Holy Spirit. However, unlike creation which is not God and the Bible which is not God, Jesus is indeed God and the Holy Spirit is indeed God so, when we encounter Jesus in the Spirit, we are encountering God through God.

This is not meant in any way to make it seem that the Scripture is unimportant. After all, how is it that you and I learn anything about Jesus in the first place? It is because we have heard the stories of Jesus as told by his first followers, the ones who knew him and lived with him and were transformed by him. Unless you know of a reliable way to access Christ rooted in what God has actually revealed to the apostles that doesn’t involve the Bible, you are stuck with it. If we try to know Jesus by ignoring what he actually did and said, we are once again trying to make an idol.

The real point of everything I have to say is that Jesus is absolutely the answer to both of the questions “How can we know God?” and “Who is God?” Point me, if you can, to another decisive self-revelation of God along side of Jesus or some source of revelation that tells us something that is true of the reality of God that is utterly new and outside of the revelation of God in Christ and not really an unpacking of what God has actually revealed in Christ and everything that I have to say tonight is absolutely useless. However, be careful about what you say, because if you think you have such a source, then one of the things you are actually saying is that Jesus is not really the fullness of God, but that something has been left out and we can only really know God by trying to peek behind the back of Christ, and if we do that, we set him aside as something less than God in doing so.

Let’s turn to what I think is a particularly amusing passage in the Bible to try to understand this. John 14:7-10 says, “If you had known me, you would have known my Father also; from now on you know him and have seen him.” Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father; how can you say, ‘Show us the Father?’ Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?” The real point that Jesus is trying to make here is that there is no need, and actually, no possibility of finding another source of revelation to see God. There is no outside way of thinking, no abstract speculation, no philosophy, nothing else whatsoever that is going to get us closer to God than we are in Jesus Christ.

When we look at Jesus’ response to Philip, we see him saying that a request to see the Father from those who know Him is silly. If you know God, how can you ask to be shown God, as if you did not know Him? He is saying to them. “God is in your midst, living as one of you. God is right in front of you if you have eyes to see it.” The same God that the Father is has come among us as the man Jesus. When we look deeply into the face of Christ, we do not simply look into the face of a man, but into the very face of God. Just earlier in chapter fourteen, Jesus told his disciples that he was going away and that they knew where he was going. Thomas responded, saying that they did not know where he was going. “How do we know the way?” The response is very famous. “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through me.” What this means is that Jesus is the way to God and there is no other. If we try to think about God without thinking about Christ, if we try to generate an understanding of God that is not fundamentally rooted in the reality of Christ, we are trying to find a way to God outside of Christ. We would be trying to get to God by avoiding God, which would be incredibly stupid, to say the least.

So, if we need to look first and foremost at Jesus to understand God instead of trying to think up God outside of Christ, what do we find when we look there? Let’s try to think out God’s love in light of Christ. We don’t have to look very far if we want to find out how people think about the love of God apart from Christ. I don’t know about you, but I have heard all kinds of different things about God’s love. The real problem seems to be the word itself. What do we mean when we say that God loves us? After all, when we use the word “love,” we mean all kinds of things. Sometimes, we say we love our family. Sometimes, we say we love pizza. Sometimes, we say we love a particular sports team. If you happen to be married, you sometimes (hopefully often) say that you love your spouse. In the last year, I became a father and so I often say that I love my son. If we look out into broader society, we see that love takes on any of a number of meanings. Sometimes love means “a deep, committed decision for a lifetime of relationship.” However, sometimes love means “I enjoy your company at least a little bit.” It also sometimes takes on the meaning, “lust.”

If we have all these different meanings of “love,” which of them, if any, do we mean when we say that God loves us? When God says he loves us, is it like the love we have for our family or is it nothing more than saying he loves us like we love a band or a movie? As if this were not complicated enough, a person’s experiences can radically shape the way they hear the statement, “God loves you.” Even saying that God loves you like a father doesn’t always help because some people have had some terrible fathers, who mistreat them, who maybe have abused them, either physically or mentally. To say that God loves them like a father might (though this is not always the case) make them say, “Forget that! One father is bad enough. Why would I want another one?” Imagine someone who has never received real love before. Perhaps it is a young woman who, every time she ever heard someone say, “I love you,” it was only a way to manipulate her to sleep with them. What might be her reaction if we said to her, “God loves you?”

We have so many ways of understanding the word “love,” and they are not all equally helpful. In fact, some are actually destructive. If you look around, among people who want to talk about the love of God, there are groups who will lobby for one or another meaning for the word love. How are we to decide what God’s love is like, especially since the human expressions of love that we can see are not always very good at all?

In order to sort through all the garbage and actually come to know and be transformed by the love of God, we can’t start with our own experience, with what we imagined one day the love of God is like, or even what someone has told us that God’s love is like. We need to look at Christ, and, when we do so, we see a love that not only helps us to sort through some of the bad ways of thinking of love, but absolutely transcends anything that we would ever have imagined on our own.

Sometimes, we will talk about the coming of Christ into the world, and we will say that the whole world was just waiting for a savior, grieving over their sins, and then God came and took care of it. Now, it is indeed true that God has dealt with sin, but the fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of people in the world, even among the people of God, were quite content to stay in their sins, and may not have even been aware of them. Humanity was so utterly steeped in sin that they didn’t even notice it anymore. It was so much a part of their daily lives that it seemed truly natural and therefore, the way things ought to be. In coming into our midst, Jesus exposed our sin for what it is, evil rebellion against God that is not just manifest in what we do, but in who we are.

It is against that backdrop that I want to raise up two particular statements in the Bible about the love of God for us. In Romans 5:6-8, Paul says, “For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for a good man someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” When we were so steeped in sin that we couldn’t even see it anymore, God entered into our weak humanity, making our brokenness his own and standing as one of us and one with us. Can you even begin to understand what it cost the second Person of the Trinity to enter into the life of a newborn child, a weeping and wailing baby? For the God of the universe to have to eat food and drink water to survive? To have to go to the bathroom? Can we even begin to fathom the agony on the cross where Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” because he had identified with our sin so completely and suffered the unbridled wrath of God on our behalf and in our place?

The other passage of scripture I want to lift up is 1 John 3:1. “See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are.” We have been adopted into the very family of God and made children and, as Paul says, “if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ.” God has not just forgiven us, has not just invited us to be with him for all eternity, but has adopted us into the divine family where the Spirit of God takes the things that belong to Christ and makes them ours. When we look at the actual reality of Christ, we realize that God’s love for us isn’t like the love of our family and it certainly isn’t like we love pizza. We see that the God of the universe, who never needed anything and never had to do anything he didn’t want to do, freely chose to die for us, just because he would rather die and suffer the incredible wrath that our sin deserves than be without us. It means that the love of God is far greater than we ever would have imagined on our own. It means that, at least in a sense, God loves us more than God loves God’s self.

I wanted to talk about how the reality of Christ challenges our understanding of the love of God as one example to help demonstrate how important it is to begin and end all of our thinking about God in the actual, concrete reality of God’s self-revelation in Christ. If we tried to think about God’s love outside of Christ, we would end up starting with our experience or some other made up standard of love and applying it to God. Don’t be afraid to really let Jesus be God. Don’t be afraid that letting Jesus be your standard will somehow cheapen God. As we have seen with just one example, looking at what God has actually done in Christ does not show us that our concept of God is too big, but far too small. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is far greater than any idol we could make for ourselves, so let us abandon our idols and let God be the God he really is and not the false god we human beings want him to be. Let us pray.

AMEN