“Therefore let us, as many as are mature, have this mind; and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal even this to you.” (Philippians 3:15)
As much as there is no Christian life without the indwelling Spirit (Romans 8:9), there can be no regeneration without divine revelation (Galatians 1:16). God’s Son must be revealed at the personal level or else Christianity remains a religion twice dead, plucked up by the roots.
The modern tendency to attribute to the human intellect capacities foreign to its field has already backfired on us, leaving wounds and bruises and putrefying sores. Yet, strangely enough, the trend is still flourishing and promoted as the spiritual bargain of the century.
That “a man can receive nothing unless it has been given to him from heaven” (John 3:27) seems to be increasingly doubted, and here we are, receiving ‘something’ on this side of the everlasting doors as to challenge the understanding of the wise. So time and again people enter our churches by the backdoor, get refined in the seminaries, and soon after put into the ministry. In such a setup it is not surprising to see amoral practices hallowed in the name of “knowledge” and taught in the name of “scholarship”. The sooner we will realize the limits of our evangelical ingenuity the better off we will be. Left alone our intellect, as good as it might be, cannot fly very high when the time comes to grasp spiritual reality. By itself it is doomed to remain earthbound as an eagle without wings.
The example of the Apostles
Jesus could not have put it any clearer when He said: “No man can come to me, except the Father which has sent me draws him: and I will raise him up at the last day” (John 6:44). This has been the experience of all the apostles, including Peter. He came to Jesus because the Father had drawn him; and the Father had drawn him by revealing His eternal Son to him. This is the reason why Peter could say:
Also we have come to believe and know that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (John 6:69).
Peter’s faith and knowledge were not merely intellectual; they didn’t proceed from men neither were they the product of human effort per se. According to Jesus they were the result of an enlightenment coming from above, a revelation from Heart to heart:
Simon Peter answered and said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus answered and said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 16: 16,17).
These verses reveal clearly that the faith and knowledge Peter had in regard to the person of Jesus was the aftereffects of a divine revelation. This and nothing else is the pattern for all Christian knowledge. Anything proceeding from another source will shake in the wind and crumble in the storm.
Too far and too deep
What makes revelation absolutely necessary is the fact that God’s knowledge is too deep for us to fetch. From the very start our finiteness disqualifies us. Not only we are not able to reach it, would we have it we could not retain it. Paul expresses this truth beautifully when he writes:
Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!” (Romans 11:33).
This is the bitter reality a person faces when he attempts to grasp the divine; the infinity has to be crossed before he can touch the substance. The wonderful news is that the infinite Spirit can metamorphose the fathomless distant to the immediate present: “But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God” (1 Corinthians 2:10). What is too deep for us is brought up by the eternal Spirit and communicated directly to our heart. On this truth and nothing else resides our hope.
Only God knows the things of God
“For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God” (1 Corinthians 2:11). Here man is declared unfit and altogether inept to secure the knowledge of the Holy. All his cleverness and ingenuity, all his prowess and competence are here smashed upon the eternal rock of divine mystery. It is revelation or nothing; God’s gift or man’s utter ignorance. There is nothing in between.
It follows that we humans cannot grasp the heavens above as we grasp the earth below. Actually Paul goes even further; he declares that “no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God”. Notice here that the verb to know is in the present tense. What Paul is saying is that not only we cannot reach divine knowledge without the Spirit as intermediary, had we received such knowledge we could not retain it without His presence. In other words, the One who reveals knowledge is also necessary to retain it. Only He knows the things of the Spirit of God, which means, without Him the revealed knowledge would cease to breathe and suffocate within man’s finiteness. We have the knowledge as long as we have the Spirit.
From start to finish
This sort of enlightenment is not only necessary to enter the Christian Life. It is the only bridge uniting the earth with the heavens on a daily basis. When Jesus says: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4) He is referring to this impartation of knowledge which is always accompanied with its corresponding faith. Notice that the verb Jesus uses is in the present tense, ‘proceeds’. The words spoken thousands of years ago—reported in the Bible—can only fill our head. But when God reverbalizes these words to us they become “spirit and life” (John 6:63). Without this passage from potentiality to actuality they would remain denuded of any sort of revealing power. Consequently the question confronts us: Do we hear God’s voice?
I like the way Young’s Literal Translation reads Romans 10:17 “So then the faith is by a report, and the report through a saying of God.” If God does not speak, nothing will reach the heart regardless of how much one may read. David had understood it well: “To you I will cry, O Lord my Rock: Do not be silent to me, lest, if You are silent to me, I become like those who go down to the pit” (Psalm 28:1). This truth doesn’t apply to David only but to all people, including all evangelicals.
Conclusion
Men’s words can only produce intellectual knowledge and intellectual faith; and at times the knowledge so received is unfortunately invalid, i.e., not according to truth. If the anointing of God is not present nothing eternal can be achieved. Likewise human effort can only reach the summit of a mountain, never the heavens above. We need God’s gracious communication to get there. Only then are we going to obtain the sort of knowledge able to produce the fear of the Lord and the fruit of righteousness. And the knowledge so obtained will always coexist with its corresponding faith, and this, in the very same proportion.
To claim to have great faith with little knowledge is an absurdity that has conquered, sadly enough, the mind of many sheeple (see my post Knowledge & Faith, March 11, 2015). Yet the truth stands unshaken: “Only those who know His name will put their trust in Him” (Psalm 9:10). And the more they will know it the more they will trust Him. There is no shortcut. Without knowledge coming from above there can be no saving faith below.
If you think this post can help somebody else you can share it with the options presented bellow.
