How does God reveal Himself to us?

God's eternal power and divinity may be known in creation, Rom. 1:20; but He has revealed Himself in the person of Christ, the Son, the eternal Word. God has been pleased also to reveal Himself in His written word. His purposes, His ways, and what He has done for sinful man, all demand universal reverence, adoration, and worship.

Here we have an answer divinely simple, divinely sure. Jesus reveals God to the soul — reveals the Father to the heart. Precious fact! We are not sent to creation, to learn who God is — though we see His power, wisdom and goodness there. We are not sent to the Law — though we see His justice there. We are not sent to providence — though we see the profound mysteries of His government there. No; if we want to know who and what God is, we are to look in the face of Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, who dwelt in His bosom before the worlds, who was His eternal delight, the object of His affections, the centre of His counsels. He it is who reveals God to the soul. We cannot have the slightest idea of what God is apart from the Lord Jesus Christ. "In him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead [Theotes] bodily." "God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, has shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ."

There are things concerning God that the natural man is capable of discerning, if he is at all disposed to ponder what he sees in the creation. Of this, the Apostle Paul writes in Romans1, "For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse" (verse 20). But God Himself, in His nature of love, is not to be known from the study of the creation; only by the revelation of Himself in His Son could God be known. Nor can man apprehend the purpose of God apart from divine revelation; and without the knowledge of God and His purposes, man must take his way in darkness through this world; but the believer in the Lord Jesus Christ is not in darkness, for he has been enlightened with the knowledge of God through faith; and the purpose of God has been made clear for us in the holy Scriptures.

In Old Testament times there were certain limited revelations of God's attributes and ways. The heavens declared the glory of His power, and the firmament showed His handiwork. The law given at Sinai announced the uprightness of His kingdom and the justice of His throne. He showed Himself often in His providential care for men and as the covenant-keeping God; and proclaimed His name, "The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth." But these partial revelations, rays from the eternal splendour, only served to make those who received them cry out for a fuller, a complete knowledge of His heart and nature, as when Moses said, "Show me Thy glory" (Ex. 33) and David pleaded, "O send out Thy light and Thy truth; let them lead me, let them bring me to Thy holy hill and to Thy tabernacles" (Ps. 43). Those soul longings have been answered in a manner that neither Moses nor David could have conceived; the glory has appeared and the light and the truth have come in the Son of God, for "God who at sundry times and in diverse manners spake in times past to the fathers by the prophets has in these last times spoken to us by His Son (lit, in Son) … Who being the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His person" (Heb. 1:3). "No man has seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him" (John 1:18). And the Son in whom God has spoken and who has declared what God is in His very nature and has glorified Him on the earth, said. "I am the light of the world" (John 8:12), and "I am the truth" (John 14:6).

The book of nature reveals God’s fingers (Ps. 8:3); the book of revelation His heart. The former tells us of His originality, design, forethought, omnipotence; the latter reveals Himself, His heart, His love, His design in the creation of man and His ways in blessing Him.

We have God Himself revealed in our own nature, in our own world, in our own circumstances. Well might kings and prophets have longed for such a privilege. But they had it not. It is ours, and it is beyond all price. We are not left to gather our knowledge of God from description; we see and hear and learn for ourselves, through personal manifestation, Who and what He is. We sit before His Image, His Likeness, in the Lord Jesus. The gospel is "the gospel of Christ, Who is the Image of God." Scripture, as I may speak, lets God show Himself by His acts, and does not take the method of describing Him. He has not committed the revelation of Himself to the pen of even inspired description. He has graciously chosen to be His own Revealer, in personal, living action, by His own sayings and doings — that simplest and surest way of making Himself known, the way in which the wayfaring man may not err, and in which the child need not mistake his lesson.

Christ is the Revealer of God. Before His incarnation clouds and darkness more or less hid the Creator from the ken of His creatures. Christ's coming into the world has made known all that God is. His love, His grace, His holiness, His righteousness, have all been expressed perfectly in Jesus Christ. He who would know God need not study nature or providence for this purpose (these at best only declare parts of His ways); Christ and Christ alone is the manifestation of God to man. We recall His own words: "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man comes to the Father, but by Me" (John 10:6).

Again, to talk of creation as being another revelation, or a part of revelation, is mischievously false. Doubtless by creation men should discern God's "eternal power and Godhead" (Rom. 1:20 theiotes, not theotes), and they are "without excuse" for not doing so; but creation is no more a revelation of God, than one of his paintings is a revelation of Gainsborough. Certain qualities of a man may be perceived by his works, whilst the man himself is wholly unknown. Much more is this the case with God, who Himself has been revealed only in Christ; as Christ is revealed by the Spirit in the written word; but neither God nor Christ is otherwise revealed. Utterly false then is the following statement (however essential it may be and is, to our author's theory): "Nature, it is true, is a part of Revelation, — a much greater part doubtless than is yet believed, — and one could have anticipated nothing but harmony here" (Preface, p. xvii.). This is a notion in which all mystics delight to revel, simply because they have unlimited scope to do so. But if nature is a revelation, will those who hold it to be so kindly tell us what facts or truths it teaches men? If nothing but harmony could have been anticipated here, in what does that harmony consist? If nature is a revelation, surely it appeals as such to all men and in all time. What did it teach men prior to the advent of Christianity? The wisest men, in the wisest city of the ancient world, mocked at Paul when he spoke to them of the resurrection, and even fancied he was speaking of another God; and yet if there is a truth which can be said to be clearly symbolised in nature, it is that of death and resurrection. If moreover nature is a revelation, how came the state of morals and of "religion" to be what it was in the world at the advent of Christianity? Poetic fancies, or speculative ideas, are indeed not uncommon amongst the heathen writers; but where will you find in them one spiritual truth, definitely seen, and generally accepted? What single quotation can be given, as furnishing us, in part or whole, with a heathen creed? "Harmony," if harmony it can be called, was in abominable idolatry and wickedness, and in that alone. Alas, poor man! Not liking to retain God in their knowledge, men gave Him up, — the consequence was their heart became darkened, their mind reprobate, and God in fact gave them up. Man is lost. In sovereign grace God by His gospel may and does save those who hear and believe; but though the final and judicial sentence on individuals has yet to pass the lips of Christ, the Judge of all, — man is already morally and wholly lost. The Son of man came "to seek and to save that which was lost;" but the world would not have Him and cast Him out. How flatly opposed to Scripture then are our author's words, "The wicked are not really lost as yet, but they are on the sure way of it" (p. 102)! This is to confound the final and authoritative sentence, with a man's actual and moral condition.

When it says here that "the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him," it is perhaps the simplest of the statements that are made about this unveiling part, the great central part, of the mission of God's only begotten Son. We are told by the Lord's prayer in John 17 to which we will come afterwards, God willing, "I have manifested Thy Name unto the men which Thou gavest Me out of the world." Then we have the declaration of Psalm 22, "I will declare Thy Name unto My brethren." But this one is the simplest of all for it means to "tell the whole story." When you have Cornelius telling the messengers the story of the dream that he had had, and the apostle Paul telling the church at Jerusalem how God had worked by him amongst the Gentiles, and the disciples from Emmaus coming back and telling what had happened to them, it is the same word. It means, "tell the whole story" and that is exactly what the Lord Jesus Christ came to do. He came to say all that could be said, to say all that had to be said, to say all that must be said, in order to make God known and set the knowledge of Him in a light accessible to us by the Spirit of God. It was in the bosom of the Father that He was and therefore it is as the Father that He declares Him and that gives its character to the pages that follow. It is the whole story of the Person whom the Son came to reveal in all His glory and love and that is the Father.

Of old He had spoken at sundry times (or, by divers portions) and in divers manners, taking His servants at times by surprise, as Moses in the desert when keeping Jethro's sheep, and Samuel in the darkness of the night in close proximity to Eli the high priest. Then too He communicated His mind by visions, dreams, oral communications, or written ministry, as it pleased Him to speak to the fathers through prophets. Now again had He spoken after centuries of silence, and a new dispensation had been inaugurated by a fresh Messenger, but that Messenger was His Son. Dreams and visions gave way to fresh revelation. Partial acquaintance the prophets of old possessed of the Divine mind, and that only as revelations were vouchsafed. One now had come — the Son, who, though as a man had His ear wakened morning by morning to hear as the taught ones (Isa. 50:4), yet in Him dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily (Col. 2:9). By Him Christian revelation began to be unfolded — a man, yet more than a man, and in that relationship to God in which no prophet had ever stood.