GOD IS NOT HIDDEN OR SILENT - BUT RATHER, REVEALED!
Over the decades I have spent engaged in creation/evolution apologetics, the single most important thing I have come to appreciate is the absolute centrality of the Christ of Holy
Scripture to this entire sphere. Please indulge me as I share with you some of my favourite quotations with regard to this topic, and try to unpack them for a general readership.
First, as Dr. Geerhardus Vos wrote in his famous volume ‘Biblical Theology’:
First, as Dr. Geerhardus Vos wrote in his famous volume ‘Biblical Theology’:
‘To take Christ at
all, He must be taken as the centre of a movement of revelation organized
around Him, and winding up the whole process of revelation.’
Of course, this
statement is equally true, whether we are considering special or natural revelation – both of which obviously reveal the
same Creator! So as Prof. Edgar Andrews once put it:
‘We cannot have a
truly biblical perspective on the cosmos without recognizing the absolute
centrality of Christ.’
Indeed, all divine
revelation is focused upon the person of our Lord Jesus Christ; the revealed knowledge
of God is mediated through him. This is what the Scriptures teach. God is
there, God is Light. And He has spoken with power and finality through His only begotten
Son! And so, human knowledge is only possible because of one particular person,
and one particular being. And the study of being is known in philosophy as
ontology.
To speak of
ontology is to introduce the idea that creation itself possesses a special
language, precisely because it has been created by the Being of the Triune God.
Now one of the
core tenets of postmodernism is summed up by Richard Rorty in the following pithy quotation: ‘The world does not speak.
Only we do.’
Yet this statement is culpable nonsense, since we know from the Psalmist of
Israel in Psalm 19 that: ‘The heavens declare the glory of God; and the
firmament sheweth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto
night sheweth knowledge. No speech nor language without their voice heard.
Their rule is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the
world.’
As the 19th
century preacher Charles Spurgeon warned: ‘Men who never heard the
gospel can see God in his works if they open their eyes. There is written upon
the face of nature enough to condemn men if they do not turn to God. There is a
gospel of the sea, and of the heavens, of the stars, and of the sun; and if men
will not read it, they are guilty…’
Let’s think about
this point in a little more depth. Romans 1:20 indicates that God’s eternal
power and divinity are understood through the ‘things that are made’. As
philosopher Willard Quine suggests, language and ontology have intimate
connections. His thesis is that the use of a particular language system commits
one to the existence of certain things. If so, a universal language seen and heard
by all (as that of the Triune God in creation itself) should commit one to the
existence of an Absolute Being – i.e. the Triune God. But sin causes such
blindness and deafness that this cannot be admitted! The natural person is truly dead to it. They simply
‘will not have this man [Christ] to rule over them’. As Van Til put it: ‘Absolute
personality implies that all of man’s life is under authority and judgment.
This is the offense of the Trinity.’
Dr. Henry Morris
wrote concerning the witness of God in Christ: ‘According to this remarkable
verse [Romans 1:20], there is a clear witness to the God of creation to be seen
in the created cosmos. Thus there is no difference; every man who has ever
lived has been confronted with this testimony of creation to the nature of the
God who made it. Whether or not he ever opens the pages of Holy Scripture, or
whether he believes what he reads therein, he cannot escape confrontation with
the Christ of creation! He is without excuse. But how can this be? “No man hath
seen God at any time” (John 1:18). How is it possible that the ‘invisible
things’ of God can be made visible so that they are ‘clearly seen’? These
“invisible things”, according to Romans 1:20, are summed up in two great
concepts, those of His “eternal power” and His “Godhead”. Or, one might say,
His work and His person. That He is a God of infinite and eternal omnipotence,
one of “eternal power”, is revealed plainly, according to this verse, in the
created universe. Furthermore, His very nature, His “Godhead” is also revealed
in creation. And this means that Christ is revealed in creation, for the very
essence of the Godhead is found in Jesus Christ. “For in him dwelleth all the
fullness of the Godhead bodily”. (Col Col
ON THE
HOLY TRINITY, COVENANT AND CREATION EVANGELISM
How is all this
relevant to our apologetics and evangelism? It is only Christ, and the Spirit
of Christ, who gives light – whether that be in the first natural light of
cosmic creation, or in the first spiritual light of somebody’s deceived and darkened heart whom you might speak
to in witness.
In A Survey of Christian Epistemology, among other works, Prof. Cornelius Van Til noted that: ‘God exists as triune. He is therefore
self-complete. Yet he created the world. This world has meaning not in spite
of, but of, the self-completeness of the ontological Trinity. This God is the
foundation of the created universe and therefore is far above it.’
Again, he unpacked
this a little more:
‘The foundation of
the representational principle among men is the fact that the Trinity exists in
the form of a mutually exhaustive representation of the three Persons that
constitute it. The emphasis should be placed upon the idea of exhaustion. This
is important because it brings out the point of the complete equality as far as
ultimacy is concerned of the principle of unity and of diversity. […] Hence the
problem of the one and the many, of the universal and the particular, of being
and becoming, of analytical and synthetic reasoning, of the a priori and the a
posteriori must be solved by an exclusive reference to the Trinity.’
‘The problem of
the one and the many relates to questions about the relationship of change and
stability, chance and determinism, facts and laws, love and logic — which means
that an apologetic which emphasizes the problem of the one and the many
actually has a broad range. It is not at all limited to issues of ultimate metaphysical
import…It was upon this foundation of a truly Trinitarian concept that Calvin
built his conception of covenant theology.’
God is a covenantal Being, who now lives fully and bodily in the man
Christ Jesus. And covenant can be found right at the very beginning of
Scripture. As Van Til further wrote:
‘Since the whole
being of God, if we may in all reverence say so, is built upon the representational
plan, it was impossible for God to create except upon the representational
plan.’
Indeed, Dr.
Nathan Wood explained this back in 1932: ‘The fabric of space, matter and time presents a
universal and exact confirmation of that Tri-unity in God. For the one vital and
conclusive proof which the physical universe can give of that Tri-unity is that
the universe should reflect it’… ‘…things
in the physical universe happen or take place or exist in three tri-unities, -
space, matter and time, - and in one great tri-unity of those three combined, -
and…these three universal tri-unities, and their combined all-inclusive
tri-unity, are the absolute image in every possible way of the supreme Tri-unity
of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.’
This representational plan is even discernable in the first chapter of the Bible, if one looks closely!
It is very subtle,
but it is indeed there! As I wrote elsewhere: ‘…from Genesis 1:3-2:3 there
follows a series of royal words, royal works and royal seals. Note then that who God is in eternity is reflected by how
he acts in creation. Martin Luther wrote of this pattern:
“These three expressions therefore, ‘said,’
‘made,’ ‘saw;’ are spoken by Moses, in a beautiful and appropriate manner, as attributively to the THREE DIVINE
Persons: that we might, by these three
expressions, the more distinctly understand that great Article of faith, the Holy Trinity!”
There are
precisely nine commands introduced by
the expression “and God said…” (wayyomer
elohim). This fact is noted by Jordan: “The refrain “and God said” occurs
nine times in the passage” together
with Hebrew scholar Jacques Doukhan: “…each creation work…[a total of] nine…is
introduced by the same stylistic expression… [the] …imperfect verb wayyomer”.
As Jordan highlights
in his book ‘Creation in Six Days’,
these nine refrains are wonderfully arranged in a Hebrew literary device known
as a chiasmus:
“Genesis 1 is not
concerned only with structuring and filling, but also with light. […]
…Genesis 1 is…a full chiasm. The passage is focused on the idea of day/light,
with each day moving from evening to morning, so that the work of each day is
an expansion of God’s original work of light-bringing.…”
Note well that
‘…the final Word from God “Behold, I have given you…” relates to humans viewing
God’s exhaustive pre-temporal Self-Image in the light of a Christophany (cf.
Proverbs 8:31). Thus…we move, organically, from the Spirit of Christ in verse
3, towards the embodied Christ in Eden, visibly robed in the first light of
creation (verse 29).
So the Christ of
the Covenants is Christ the Creator! He is the Logos! He is the Divine
Rationality – both Creator and Redeemer. Jeremiah 33:20-21 is especially
significant:
“Thus saith the
LORD; if ye can break my covenant of the day, and my covenant of the night, and
that there should not be day and night in their season; then may also my
covenant be broken with David my servant, that he should not have a son to
reign upon his throne…”.
As Robertson
highlights: “An argument basically of the same construction appears in Jeremiah
31:35f.:
Thus says the
Lord,
Who gives the sun
for light by day,
And the fixed
order of the moon and the stars for light by night,
If this fixed
order departs from before me, declares the Lord,
Then the offspring
of Israel also shall cease,
From being a
nation before me forever.”
Robertson argues
convincingly that this cannot refer to God’s covenant with Noah in Genesis 8:22
because:
“…the reference to
the sun and moon specifically as light-bearers for day and night is found in
the creation narrative but not in the narrative describing God’s covenant with
Noah. Furthermore, the narrative of the creation-activity of the third day
[sic] refers to the stars as well as to the moon (Gen. 1:16), as does Jeremiah
31:35. The record of God’s covenant with Noah makes no mention of the stars.
For these reasons, it seems likely that Jeremiah 31 alludes to the Genesis
narrative of creation rather than to the establishment of God’s covenant with
Noah. […] Because of the closeness of the parallelism of the two chapters, it
would seem that Jeremiah 33, which uses the term “covenant,” also refers to the
creational orderings of Genesis 1. If this is the case, then the term
“covenant” would be applied to the orderings of creation.”
J.V. Fesko agrees with
this application, further pointing out:
“Nowhere in
Genesis 1 does the reader have any indication that God has established a
covenant with the day and night, yet Jeremiah clearly states this is the case.
When God creates, it is covenantal.”
Upon verses 20-21
of Jeremiah 33, the famous commentator Matthew Henry remarked:
Creation in covenant also sheds light on why,
when Adam and Eve fell into sin, the whole
creation was subject to the bondage of corruption and death (Romans 8:22),
rather than just Adam and Eve themselves. Furthermore, since Christ has a
covenant with creation, as Golding points out: “…it means that covenant grace
includes the created order, which makes it unthinkable that the faithful
creator will drop the temporarily cursed earth from his covenant purpose…”. To be sure, then, the entire creation (having been subject to futility
through Adam’s disobedience) will one day be completely renewed and glorified
through Christ’s obedience (cf. Revelation 22).
OUR APPLICATION TO SCIENCE AND FAITH ISSUES
How should we use
this knowledge as Christians? Immanuel Kant asked the question: “Under what
conditions is it possible, or what would also need to be true in order for it to
be possible, to make sense of one’s experience of the world? The only answer,
according to Van Til, is that Christianity MUST be true! The ontological
Trinity is there, and He is not silent!
As Thomas Brooks wrote:
‘What are the
heavens, the earth, the sea, but a sheet of royal paper, written all over with
the wisdom and power of God?’
The mathematical physicist
Stephen Hawking once asked: ‘What breathes fire into the equations?’
We may be fully
and courageously confident in the Christian answer: ‘Christ does!’
References (alphabetical):
Doukhan, J. B. (2004). The Genesis creation story: Text, issues, and truth. Origins, 55, p.16.
Fesko, J.V. (2007). Last Things First: Unlocking Genesis 1-3 with the Christ of Eschatology. Ross-shire , Scotland
Golding (2004). Covenant Theology: The Key of Theology in Reformed Thought and Tradition. Scotland : (Mentor ) Christian Focus Publications, p.193.
Henry,
M. (1890). A Commentary on the Holy Bible,
Volume IV, New York and London : Funk and Wagnalls Company, p.1009.
Luther,
M. (1544). Translated by Cole, H. (1858). The
Creation: A Commentary on the First Five Chapters of the Book of Genesis. London
Van Til, C. (1946). Nature and Scripture. In: The Infallible Word: A Symposium. Philadelphia : Presbyterian Guardian Publishing Corporation. Online PDF available at: [WWW]
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