Alright, let's turn this morning to Romans 1. Romans 1. We want to look at verse 18. And we'll read 18 forward. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold the truth in unrighteousness. Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has showed it unto them. 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. Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful. but became vain in their imaginations and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man and to birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things. Wherefore, God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts to dishonor their own bodies between themselves, who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. Let's pray. Glorious and ever-faithful Triune God, We thank Thee so much that Thou art a knowable God, even though Thou art essentially in Thyself an incomprehensible God. For Thou art so far above and beyond us that we, puny creatures that we are, would be prone to cry out, how shall we know God? And yet, Lord, Thou hast wondrously, miraculously, amazingly revealed Thyself in Thy Word, in Thy well-beloved Son, and has shown us who Thou art to an astonishing degree. Oh, that our hearts may be enamored with that this morning, and that we might know the unknowable God. Please, Lord, Show us Thyself. Show us Thy glory. Show us who Thou art in Thy well-beloved Son, and it sufficeth us. Bless us now as we lecture. Be near to us and make this lecture useful. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. All right. Today we want to look at the subject of the knowability of God, and perhaps a bit at the incomprehensibility of God. Luther, you know, called God the knowable, unknowable one. And hopefully the lecture today will shed a little bit of light on statements like that. You can move from incomprehensibility to knowability, but If you do that, which is what really quite a few systematicians do, the only problem logically is if God is incomprehensible, how can you even begin to talk about him? If, on the other hand, you move from knowability to incomprehensibility, then at least something that you know can be the basis of talking about something that you don't know. Both of these themes about God really are inseparable from each other. You can't talk about incomprehensibility without talking about knowability. And vice versa, they're involved. Now, let me begin by saying that the knowability of God gives us a certain priority. It's a topic that really sinners that we are already implies grace, grace that God establishes. God didn't even have to make us, create us. And then as sinners, God didn't have to reveal anything about himself. He just could have squashed us and cast us away. But he's so gracious, that he reveals himself and makes himself knowable. So we need to establish that immediately, that there is such a thing as the knowability of God that flows out of his existence. God wants to be known. God is a God who doesn't just exist to be in isolation. with himself, although he would have been perfectly happy that way, because he's perfectly happy within his own Trinitarian being. But God in his Trinitarian being is a family God. He relates, he's a father, he's a son, he's a spirit. And so God has a propensity within himself to make himself known outside of himself. much as when a couple gets married, there's this urge that they want to have children, they want to let the knowability of their own relationship and the love they share spill over into something beyond themselves. And I think there's that kind of gracious, sovereign propensity in God, even though God didn't need it, even though God was totally self-sufficient, there was no lack in Him, But his character, this is his being, this is the existence of God that we were looking at before. His very mode of existence is one in which he delights to be knowable. We can say, actually, that even the ungodly know God. The ungodly know God. Well, of course, The question then is raised, how do they know God? And where does the Bible say they know God? Well, one of the clearest passages is the one I just read to you, Romans 1.21. Because that, remember it's talking about the ungodly here, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God. Neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. In Romans 1, as you well know, we have one of the most thorough discussions of what sin and sinfulness are. And if we take sin seriously, we might conclude that by the way of penalty, the revelation of God would be withheld from us, or that the natural man might succeed totally in suppressing the knowledge of God. But Romans 1 makes plain that neither of these alternatives, God withholding revelation, or us succeeding in totally suppressing the knowledge of God, neither of these have been realized. Revelation is still there. We still have the Bible. God continues to speak to us through nature and through scripture. And we are not able. to totally suppress this knowledge, not even in nature. Now, ethically, of course, man rejects the true knowledge of the true God. After all, we believe in total depravity. It's the knowledge of God, the knowledge of the true God, the true knowledge of the true God that is being suppressed But even that implies God is knowable and that He is known, even by those who stand outside of the pale of His special revelation in the Bible. Even they recognize His power. Now, from the context of Romans 1, We also see that this knowledge of God that even the ungodly have is not just a kind of bare bones, impersonal academic knowledge. It's a knowledge that comes to the ungodly and relates to them in a personal way, particularly vis-a-vis their sin. Verse 18 says that the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. And that's why, if you link that up with verse 32 of the same chapter, speaking of the ungodly, who, knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them, you cannot but come to an astonishing conclusion. The ungodly know something of the judgment and the wrath of God. And they know, deep, deep down, they know that what they're doing is wrong, their conscience is speaking, they're not living right. They know Him not simply, you see, as a cold deity, oh yes, there's some unmoved mover, there's some supreme being, but they know Him in their own conscience that He's a God who punishes sin. They know the true and the living God. However much they suppress that knowledge, And so isn't it interesting that even from the ungodly, we can conclude God is knowable. Now if that is true from the ungodly, then it's much more true, I'm moving to point three in the outline now, sub point three. The godly know God. The godly know God. And of course they know God. in a much more profound way. They've been brought out of darkness into light, and John 17, verse 3 says of them, this is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent. So it's not only clear here that God is knowable, but knowable even unto eternal life. So eternal life itself, the whole case of eternal life, of heaven, hangs on the truth of this proposition, God is knowable. Now this knowledge is of course I mean, it stares us in the face, doesn't it? It's obviously personal knowledge. It's obviously loving knowledge. It's obviously not mere intellectual knowledge. To know the Lord God in Jesus Christ, John would say to us, unto eternal life is to love Him. Now I'll give you some passages that we won't have time to look at in depth, but you would be edified and strengthened in this area of your dogmatics if you looked them up and meditated on them. Matthew 11, verse 27. 1 Corinthians 2, 9 through 15. 1 Corinthians 13, verse 12. 2 Corinthians 3, verse 18, and 2 Timothy 1, verse 12. All of these texts will affirm that God is both knowable and known. Now that brings me then to the question, how is God truly known? How is God truly known? And you can see I've got four points on the outline. Personal knowledge, derivative, covenantal, and God-glorifying. So first of all then, we have a knowledge of God in scripture, which is a personal knowledge. And this personal knowledge can never be reduced to a mere, as J.I. Packer calls it, a mere spectator knowledge. The knowledge of God, when it's true, is personal. And that's why we feel rather dry and uneasy when we study the Middle Ages more recent theology as well, and you see all this stuff, all this time and pages and ink, we're prone to say wasted, but just poured out in terms of abstract being, in terms of pure act or pure action or the first mover. All of these expressions trying to prove the knowledge of God from a depersonalized knowledge of God. Leave us high and dry and empty. Now, of course, throughout the ages, and today as well, not everyone is ready to admit that God is truly known. In your Bovinck readings. Bovinck attempts to reduce the arguments against the doctrine of God's knowability to their essential elements. Bovinck argues that though they differ in form, at bottom they're all amounting to the same thing. And basically what he's saying is, if you go into a restaurant and you see ten different hamburgers on the menu, and one has this topping, another one has that topping, and you debate and finally you make a decision, and your partner makes another decision and gets another hamburger, really basically you're eating hamburger. It might be fixed a little different, but hamburger is hamburger. And Bob Mink is saying, you see, man is limited by his physical perceptions. And therefore, we must always derive material for our thinking, also for our knowledge of God, from the visible world. of me, the world of what I read, the world of what I see, the world that is all around me. But I am limited, you are limited, by space and by time. So our thinking about God will prone to be material, prone to be, well it will be, finite, and it will be limited. And because of all these limitations in our nature, we are not omnipresent, for example, we can't be everywhere God is. We cannot, and we do not, perceive spiritual things in their fullest depth. So Bobbink says that what happens in these situations is one of two things. We're prone to either bring the absolute down to our level of finite existence. Well, let's stop right there. Let's just deal with number one. We're prone to bring the absolute down to our level of finite existence in order to make God knowable so that we can enter into personal relationship with him. But the result of that, of course, is to limit him. But you see it all around us also in Christianity today, people want to make God like he's your neighbor next door. And they want to talk to him casually like that. And they want to perceive him and see him. And they say, if we're going to know God, we've got to have a personal relationship with Him. And of course, they're right on that. But they're wrong by then concluding God has to be brought down merely to our level, into our sphere, in such a way that He no longer is transcendent. So if we're going to preserve this knowable personality of God, we must make Him like one of us. at least pretty much like one of us. The other possibility, Boving says, is that we seek, instead of bringing God down to our level, we seek to transcend space and time ourselves, eliminating from the idea of God every similarity to what is created, because God is not a creature. He's the creator. So the result of this, says Bhavik, is an entirely abstract idea of God, which doesn't relate to our time and space. An abstract idea that is valueless for religion. So if you subtract from God everything that makes him knowable as a creature, you're left only with an abstract idea, and you lose the personal dimension. All you've got left is the absoluteness of God. So this is man's tendency. We either are prone to talk about a God who's nothing but absolute, or we're prone to talk about a God who's nothing but personal. Bobbink then goes on to say that this antithesis between the absoluteness of God and a personal God is really identical with the difference between positive theology and negative theology. I remind you here of the proofs of the existence of God. Positively speaking, by way of affirmation, We cannot get beyond the personality of God, which is nevertheless limited. So this is exciting. We can identify with this. This is personal, that everything, everything we ascribe to God is creaturely. At least we think that's positive because we are creatures. And so we add things. about the personalness of God that we think are positive. Now, if we focus only on absolute God, we do that by way of negation. We take away from God everything that is creaturely. So we don't work with the whole concept of incarnation and what he's become in Jesus Christ. And all we're left with is a blank, useless absolute. Now this whole problem, then, is one that permeates, especially in modern theology, the so-called dialectical tension that exists in modern theology has very much to do with this whole battle between the personalness of God and the absoluteness of God. If our ideas of God remain fully within the sphere of our existence, if God is nothing but personal, then the problem, of course, that we come up with is that God isn't above us and beyond us in any way, and he can't save us. On the other hand, if our ideas of God transcend the world entirely, God has no relatedness to us. He's the Savior, but he cannot get into the world to save. So the dialectical tension in theology refers to that tension between God's transcendent eternity on the one hand, and our finite world of change in time and space on the other hand. Now some dialectical theologians actually teach that both of these truths cancel each other out. like Leonard Gilkey, for example, G-I-L-K-E. And so all that you end up having left then is myth, because there is no truth that's absolute. You can't have this only absolute God. It makes no sense. It's useless. You can't have only a personal God. He can't save. And so, Gilkey says, all you've got left is an analogy of the truth. If you try to bring these two together in God. This isn't the real God. This is just an analogy of truth. So, all we're left with in the Bible is kind of a non-saving form of skepticism. It's ultimately a confession that we simply can't get beyond our experience to God. And so God is really nothing more than our projection into a void And some of these modern theologians, believe it or not, even appeal to Calvin. They appeal to one particular section of the Institutes. It's 1.10.2, Book 1, Chapter 10, Section 2, where Calvin says this, in the enumeration of God's perfections, He is described not as He is in Himself, but as He is in relation to us. in order that our acknowledgement of him may be more a vivid actual impression than empty visionary speculation. So the thought here is that we cannot get beyond our experience to know God as he is essentially in himself. So how can we escape our creatureliness in getting to know God. A modern theology says we can't. We can't know God, therefore, as he truly is, and Calvin agrees with us. But actually, they're misreading Calvin. Calvin is not saying we can't know anything of God as he is truly in himself, but Calvin is developing a polemic against speculation. Speculation which begins from the bottom with man and then seeks by rational powers to penetrate upward to embrace the divine essence. What Calvin is pointing out is that we can't get beyond the revelation of God The revelation God has given to us of himself to say anything about God. We can't bypass this revelation. But we must develop our doctrine of God from the revelation of God. The revelation God gives us of himself in scripture and in nature, particularly in scripture of course. So the ideas we entertain with God, about God, must be ideas that are grounded particularly in the Scriptures. And as Calvin is saying, we are dependent on the Word, the Word of God. And that Word of God happily does not require us to abandon the concept of the knowledge of God as he really and truly is. We do have real knowledge of the true God in the scriptures. In fact, we don't even need to engage in speculation at all. So, our defining, if we can use that word defining, of God and who he really is in all his perfections means that we don't do an end run around revelation. But it means we must study revelation, come to grips with revelation, and take all our content about God from revelation. Professor Murray, John Murray comments on this quotation of Calvin, where Calvin says that we have a knowledge of God, quote, not as he is in himself. What Murray says is that just as Jesus speaks in Matthew 11, 25-27, is that we don't have, and indeed we don't have, a kind of immediate, a direct, intuitive, exhaustive knowledge of God as He is in Himself. Only the Son has that, Jesus says in Matthew 11. No man knows the Father like the Son. But Calvin doesn't mean to deny that we do have a revealed kind of knowledge of God. If you're married to someone, this is a poor analogy but it will give you the feeling, if you're married to someone and you know that person really, really, really well, you know that person far better than anyone else in the world, you have a very immediate knowledge of God and yet it's not a totally immediate knowledge of God because you don't know every thought, you don't know everything about that person. You're still discovering. I've been married 20 years and my wife still surprises me once in a while with thoughts that I didn't expect her to think. So I still don't know her really immediately. I come closer to it than anybody else in the world. But what about other people walking around? I know you, all of you, at different levels, very different levels. Some of you I know quite well, some of you, you're new here, I don't know you very well at all. So there's lots of different levels of this knowledge. But you see, what I do know of you is revealed to me. in some way. You've approached me, or I've sat down and talked with you, and I've questioned you, and things have come out. You see, and I could say, well, I know you. Someone says to me, do you know Scott David? I say, yeah, yeah, I know Scott David. There's a lot about Scott David I don't know. That's the way it is with God, Calvin says. We don't have what Jesus has, this immediate knowledge. And Jesus had the immediate knowledge perfectly, because He's not just married to the Father, so to speak. But He's more than that. He's one with the Father. There's no secrets. There's no thought of the Father the Son doesn't know. So there's this immediate, intuitive, exhaustive knowledge. That's what Calvin says. We don't know God as He is in Himself. But thank God we do know Him. We do know Him as He has revealed Himself to us. And so Calvin's point here is we shouldn't say because we don't know Him quite the way Jesus knows Him that therefore we should get involved in speculation because we've got this great lack. But rather we should be content not to rise above the kind of revealed knowledge God has given us about himself. Yes, we should probe the revelation of God as deeply as we can to learn more and more about God and come to know God within the confines of revelation, best we can. But don't step outside of those confines of revelation. Because then you get involved in speculation. And then, says Calvin, you get involved in all kinds of mysticism. And you go the wrong way. And you actually take away from revelation. God gave us as much revelation as he thought we needed. To know him as much as he thought we needed to know him. All right, so that's the first thing, personal knowledge. Secondly, we have derivative knowledge. Derivative knowledge. Our knowledge of God, and this flows from what I've just been saying, is always derivative because we are not God. So we don't have this immediate knowledge because we're not God, we're not Christ, Therefore, our knowledge is derivative in character. In Cornelius Van Til's language, it is subordinate. It is secondary. It is archetypal and analogical. Let me put a couple of these words on the board here. Archetypal and analogical. I'll explain these in a minute. Not immediate. Now this whole understanding of our knowledge of God is very important all throughout theology. It's very important for the whole area of anthropology, the study of man. Everything we have begins with God and moves to man. Everything comes from God's revelation to us. It moves from God to the creation, which includes us, the creature, and then through us, the creature, it moves back to God in worship and prayer. Now, this whole movement from God to us is very important for us to understand what we call the anthropomorphisms of the Bible. You see, the idea here is that since man is made in the image of God, that therefore all knowledge that man has of God and of the world is actually dependent on God. So that when we speak of God in anthropological terms, we're not merely projecting into God or onto God something that we find in ourselves, But we're projecting back to God what we find He has projected to us about Himself, because we are made by Him in His image. So this is part of God's revelation. When he reveals something to us, he reveals something to us about himself in our world, at our level, according to our finiteness. So that's why he takes on the qualities of a man sometimes and gives us these anthropomorphisms. He comes and speaks as if he has body parts. It's really what this means. Man, body. It's as if he comes and speaks as if he has body parts. He's got an arm. He doesn't have an arm. He's got a nose. He's got ears to hear the needy. No, he doesn't have any of those things. Physically. But they're all to help us understand him. They're all part of revelation. He compares himself in ways to us and enters into our world. He's accommodating himself so that we can know him. Now, Abraham Kuyper is the one who first did a lot with the words archetypal and ectypal. Actually, I think that's me, isn't it? ectypal and archetypal. And what Kuyper is saying is this, God's knowledge is original. God's knowledge is original. Our knowledge is ectypal. That is to say, God's knowledge is original and ours is patterned after that original. So when we ask the question, how can we know about God? Reformed theology always begins from the top. It works its way down. It begins with God and His revelation. And God taking the original knowledge of himself, the archetypal knowledge, then reveals himself to us. So we don't have the original knowledge in ourself, but God reveals it to us. And so our knowledge is ectypal, our knowledge is derivative and subordinate. So all experience of God All our true thoughts of God are revelatory from God, through His Word and through nature. And that is so also because, as Scripture tells us, that all things that come to pass are according to God's will and God's purpose. And there's really nothing that doesn't reveal anything of God. God is always revealing Himself. So Calvin picks up on this strongly and says that the revelation of God tells us true knowledge about God all the time, everywhere, if we just have eyes to see it. And Calvin draws attention to several important passages. First is John 1 verse 14, and the world was made flesh and dwelt among us. And we beheld His glory, the glory as the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. So we behold the Son, says Calvin, and in doing so we perceive the glory which is uniquely His as the only begotten of the Father. We understand He's full of grace and truth. So this glory is His uniquely. But it's also the reflection of the Father's glory when we meditate upon the Son, because the Son is the express image of the Father. And that's why Jesus can say, He who has seen me has seen the Father. John 14, verse 9. And then we have that wonderful text in John 1, another text in John 1, four verses later, John 1, verse 18, No man has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him, or literally, He hath exegeted Him, or interpreted Him, or reported Him, or described Him. So, to truly know God the Father, savingly, We can only do that through the Son who exegetes Him and reveals Him. John echoes that in 1 John 5, verse 20 as well. We know that the Son of God has come, and He hath given us an understanding, that we may know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even His Son, Jesus Christ. And this is the true God and eternal life. So, the answer, the answer about knowing God is always a derivative answer. We get our knowledge from the top down. And that's why Ventile calls our knowledge analogical. When he speaks about analogical knowledge, he says all our knowledge is analogical. He's saying this is our way of knowing. Our way of knowing. We know analogically. Our knowledge, in other words, is patterned after God's knowledge. There's an analogy here. We are creatures, we're not the creator. So we get to know from the creator. Since he's revealed himself, therefore we know him. It's like a little child, you watch his behavior and you say, wow, that behavior is just patterned like his dad. His dad's a carpenter, so he's got a toy and he's got some pegs in it and he's got a little hammer and he's pounding away. He's learned to do that. But it's really an analogy of his dad's work in the real world. And so man is God's image-bearer, you see, learns to receive this derivative knowledge analogically. Now, Van Til says, when we know analogically, it's not simply an analogy of the truth that we know, but we know the truth itself analogically. If it's simply an analogy of the truth that we know, that will lead us to skepticism. All that we have then is an analogy of the truth, we don't have the truth. But that's not what Vintel means. We're speaking of a way that we know, but we really do know the truth, but the way that we know it is analogical. So we could say, we could define analogy here as simply a way of knowing a way of knowing that presupposes the creator-creature distinction, but also presupposes the fact that God has revealed himself and made himself known. And because of these presuppositions, creator-creature distinction, God has made himself known. Analogy, instead of moving us to skepticism, actually preserves us from skepticism, says Ventile. Because we recognize that all that comes our way, we're the creature, he's the creator. At the same time, we recognize that when he reveals himself to us, this is genuine revelation. God is making himself known. So the conclusion to all this is, as Baving put it so well in your reading, if we as human individuals, this is quoting Baving now, may not speak of God in a human and a logical manner, we must then needs be silent altogether, for it is certainly impossible for us to think and speak of God in a divine manner. So it really makes sense, doesn't it? We're not God. So we can't speak of God with the kind of knowledge which Jesus has of God, because he is God. So all of our knowledge is analogical, subordinate, derivative. And yet it's true, because Jesus Christ has come and revealed himself, and reveals the Father. So this is life eternal, that we may know God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. So don't minimize this analogical knowledge. This is wonderful. This is glorious. This is salvific. All right, this knowledge can also be looked at as a covenantal knowledge, a covenantal knowledge. Because in this knowledge, God communes with us through Jesus Christ in a covenantal way. And that is increasingly true as we move through redemptive history. The knowledge of God was given in very diverse ways before Christ came in the flesh. Fragmentary ways. But as Hebrews 1 verse 1 says, now we have been given this knowledge in the consummation of that movement of redemptive history that comes in the fullness of time when Jesus Christ becomes incarnate, the incarnation of the Logos in our flesh. And so our pathway to the knowledge of God is not a pathway of immediate access as the mystics teach. But it's a pathway of redemptive history, a linear history, through which we've come to know the Savior more and more, derivatively, through revelation. You see, that's why Kelvin could say in book one of the Institutes, and also in his commentary on Romans, he makes the same statement, only fools seek to know the essence of God. When you first read that, you don't think that through. You say, what in the world is he saying? I want to know God. The key word is what he means by essence here. He's not saying you're stupid if you want to know God, but he's saying that the medieval mystical pursuit to go directly to God and to know Him outside of Jesus Christ, to know Him in His essence as God, without going through revelation and redemptive history, seeking to rise above the historically conditioned revelation of God's covenantal dealings with his people in and through Jesus, and have immediate access to the being of God, is stupidity. So our knowledge, even of general revelation, our knowledge of nature, must always be subject to our covenantal, redemptive, historical knowledge, which comes to its apex in Jesus Christ. And thus Calvin warns us that when we try to know God, we must not bypass the historical. We always want to do that, don't we? We always want to bypass the historical. It's easier. We're prone to be lazy. We don't need all this historical revelation, covenantal redemption revelation of God throughout the Bible. And so we just want to go directly to God. So it's all the Bible. Just turn open. There's the text. Oh, there's what God's saying to you today. And you want to just get immediate revelation for immediate answers. And you don't realize, said Calvin, that God reveals himself historically, bit by bit. And we need to know his process of revelation, especially culminating in Jesus. We need to know what it means that he revealed himself to us in Jesus. So the grid that we have for our knowledge of God is the grid of Holy Scripture, in which we read the historic, covenantal, redemptive revelation of God to us in Jesus Christ. Now finally, I'll end with this here and then we'll open up for questions. This knowledge of God is a God-glorifying knowledge. It actually involves doxology, doesn't it? It involves glorifying God and enjoying Him forever, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it. And for the Apostle Paul, you see, that is the very antithesis of what has gone wrong in Romans 1 verse 18. We were made to glorify God. We were made to know God. And instead we have demeaned ourselves by worshipping things that we ourselves have created. Consequently, restoration to the knowledge of God turns us out from the created order, turns us out from bowing down before ourselves, and it compels us to bow down before the Lord, to come to Him in Jesus, and to live in fellowship with Him, and then to glorify Him as He's revealed Himself to us. And that is, of course, the chief end of life. This is why we're here on Earth. And that's why for Calvin, you see, the knowledge of God, as well as the knowledge of ourself, of course, we'll get to that in anthropology, but the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourself is so absolutely critical, overarching. Really, Calvin is saying in 1.1.1 in the Institutes, knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves is really all there is to theology and so to know God in Jesus is to and to glorify him for what we know is to begin to live as a redeemed saint according to the image of God that is now returned to us, or the image of God in which we've now been renovated. And this glorifying of God, and this enjoying of Him forever, is so powerful, it's so overwhelming, it's so all life encompassing, that it changes who we are to such a degree that if we get to know each other at all, this will come out because it's our life. Sometimes we say of people, well, you can't get to know them for more than five minutes and they're talking about God. Because God is their life. They're talking about Jesus. I remember the first time I flew over to New Zealand, the evangelist there that was laboring in his church, and he was just a man, wow, he was a man intoxicated with God. He just loved the Lord Jesus, loved God, loved talking about Him. We almost got lost going out of the airport. because we were so busy talking about God and Jesus and what God meant to both of us. We had just about had our conversion stories told to each other and talking about God and praising Him and joined the fellowship. I felt like I knew the man for about 10 years and we were still just going out of the airport. That's amazing, isn't it? So when your heart and your life is enamored with God, and you want to glorify God and enjoy God forever, this knowledge of God is everything. It's everything to you. And then you want to be careful, don't you? You don't want to misrepresent God. You don't want to go down the mystic path. You don't want to go down the immediacy path. You want to recognize that all your knowledge of God is ectypal and analogical. and in a sense, anthropomorphic, and secondary, and derivative. And so what that does is it makes you want to study the Bible to learn more about God, to be well informed in your knowledge of God. You don't want that just as a scientific textbook kind of knowledge so that you amass this great knowledge of God so you can impress other people. No, it's for relationship purposes. You want to know God better because you love Him. You want to glorify Him. You want to enjoy Him. And you want to recognize that knowledge in other people as well, because you believe also in the communion of saints, don't you? Some of you maybe know that little essay by B.B. Warfield entitled, Is the Shorter Catechism Worthwhile? And of course, if you're not from the Westminster Standard tradition, It's hard to grasp how much Question 1 of the Shorter Catechism means to Presbyterians, but it just means everything, doesn't it? To glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Presbyterians are just constantly repeating that over and over, much like we in the Dutch tradition just love to the very fiber of our being, question one of the Heidelberg Catechism. What's your only comfort in life? I don't belong to myself, but I belong to the faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. Well, this is foundational to all Puritan theology, to Calvin, to the Westminster Standards, to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. Warfield has this essay then on, Is a Shorter Catechism Worthwhile? And he tells this story that happened in the Midwest town last century or 19th century now, I guess. For some reason, there's been a lot of rioting and tumult in the town. Warfield describes a stranger coming to town and describes himself watching this stranger come from the far end of town, walking down Main Street. He's walking with a certain kind of dignity and poise. so that people were turning to him as he walked by, staring at him. The guy comes nearer and nearer, and as the man comes really near, Warfield, the person who's looking at him, thinks, I better not stare too much at him. But as he walks by, he can't help it, and his eyes lock with the man's eyes. pass each other by. As they pass each other by, the man is Warfield then. He can't help but take a look back, to look at the man again. As he looks back, the man is turning around looking at him. Staring at each other. And it's rather embarrassing of course. But then there's such a draw between these two men that they overcome their embarrassment and they come back to each other. And Warfield has himself tapping the other man on the chest and saying, what is man's chief end? And the other man says, to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. And Warfield says, I knew you were a shorter catechism man by your very looks. And the other guy says, that's what I was thinking about you. Now that's a bit over the top. And we've got to be careful, of course, basing everything on looks. Because people can look very differently and still be children of God and people can look very conservatively and not be children of God. But if you take this story at a deeper level, there is something to it, isn't there? You know, I've been sitting in the airport several times, watching people or hearing their conversations. walked over to them and said, you're a Christian, aren't you? I've done that. I was on a boat going over to Scotland and I was talking with a lady I met on the boat about God and I was just quoting Romans 7 verse 24, O wretched man that I am who shall deliver me from the body of this death. Suddenly there was another lady beside her. She said, do you mind if I just join your conversation? I've just been listening for a few minutes and I know you're both Christians and I'm just starving for some Christian fellowship. And she was the widow of a free Presbyterian minister. We can be mistaken in our judgments of other people, but there is something that ties Christians together. It's just God-glorifying knowledge. Sadly, you can have people in your own church, professing members of the church, maybe communicant members of the church, and you get together with them and you visit, and you can't get this connection. Are they backsliding? Do they just not like to talk about it? Is God not really their life? Are they deceiving themselves? Sometimes it's hard to know. Sometimes it's hard to know. But you do know when it happens the other way. When there's this wonderful connection, and you can speak together about the things of God, and you know that this person knows, you can tap them on the shoulder and say, you know the only comfort in life and death, is you don't belong to yourself, you belong to Jesus Christ. And they say, yeah, I know. And I know that you know. One more illustration of this and then I'll open it for questions. When I was a young man, I've had a 40-some year friendship with Reverend Elsau. His dad moved to Kalamazoo and I had just been converted. He was converted shortly after I came to Kalamazoo and we became very, very good spiritual friends of one another. But he came into great darkness before he came into liberty, and he was just an outcast, and he just felt like he was a reprobate. But I could see all the marks of spiritual life on him, his hunger for God, and it was just wonderful to talk with him. So we became spiritually very, very close friends. One day he came over, and he was just really spiritually distraught, and we were walking in, actually, our basement. I can still see him pacing back and forth in the basement. He said to me, I'm lost. I'm lost. I'm forever lost. There's no hope for me. No hope for me. I'm such a sinner. And I looked at him and I said, Bart, if there's no hope for you, there's no hope for me. Because I see you as being a much more godly man than I am. And closer to God than I am. He stopped in his tracks and he was stunned and he said, What? He said, You're like a mentor for me. I look up to you as my example. Now, he said, I see spiritual life in you. And I said, and I see spiritual life in you. You see, we saw it in each other. But both of us know ourselves somewhat. I hope somewhat. We know our own wretchedness. So often when we know our own sinfulness, It can drag us down. be so restrained in our glorifying of God that we actually need each other, you see, to encourage each other, to say, I see it in you, brother. I see you're a Christian. Encourage one another to seek the Lord and to glorify the Lord. That's one of the beautiful things about the communion of saints. You reinforce each other in what God is doing in your lives so that collectively and corporately, isn't that what worship is all about? You can praise God together. Think of it even logistically, even literally. Think of sitting in church next Sunday morning. Instead of 700 people there, you're the only one. The preacher's just preaching to you. Now it's time to sing the Psalms. It's not the same, is it? If you're saying it all by yourself. So this glorifying God, this knowledge of God, is not a Lone Ranger thing. But we need one another in the communion of saints. Let us seek to know God, yes, more and more. But as we do so, let's seek to recognize each other along the way, and to speak to each other, to encourage each other, and corporately to glorify God together. All right, any questions? Yes, sir, Leonard. My question is on the analogical knowledge of God. Particularly when you say there is a true knowledge of God which is not analogical, but then we come to think of our knowledge about the knowledge of God. So exactly where does it become analogical? Is it just our knowing God being analogical? Yeah, good question. Where exactly does it become analogical? It becomes analogical at the very beginning because of our creatureliness, because we cannot receive God in His very essence. So God can only deal with us analogically. If God were to deal with us essentially as He is, well, it would wipe us out and overwhelm us. His holiness would just and send us over the top, off the cliff. Even the angels, perfect angels in heaven have to cover their faces with their wings. It would be too much for us. And nobody would be able to grasp it because God is God. So yeah, from the very get-go, God begins with us in an analogical way. Now, the interesting thing about that, I think the best example of that is a father with him. with a two-year-old. I mean, not all of you have children yet, but if you had seen me when our kids were two years old talking baby talk to one of my kids, you wouldn't have recognized me. It's just, it's so much fun. But, you know, it's so silly, but you're relating to a two-year-old on a very different level. For me to give a lecture like I'm giving to you today, I would not give even in my own church. It wouldn't be edifying, they couldn't follow it. This is at a higher level. But for me to give a lecture like this to a two-year-old would be absolutely ludicrous. So Calvin says when God comes to us, Calvin says he babbles with us like a father does to his little child. at our level. That's the doctrine of accommodation, God accommodating Himself to us. There was another question over here? Would Kelvin argue that even in a pre-fall world order, God revealed Himself in a covenantal way through Jesus? Wow, that's a really loaded question. Not through Jesus as mediator. Covenantal way, yes, although Calvin's covenant theology in terms of the covenant pre-fall was not very well fleshed out yet. That came more in the next generations. But yet some awareness that the very nature of God and the very nature of man in terms of relationship demanded a covenantal mode. So I think the first part of your question is true, not with a full-fledged Westminster theology of covenant works. And that all relationship flows through Christ. I think with those caveats and those restraints, the answer to that would be yes. All right, let's just jump in a little bit about the incomprehensibility of God. Under number two, what is the very first point you have? Because I think somehow I skipped three. Oh, that is there, okay. So you have incomprehensibility presupposes knowability. And what's the next one? God is not incomprehensible to himself. Okay, good. And then incomprehensibility involves a spatial sense? Okay, good. It's all there then. Number one then. When it comes to incomprehensibility, this is the flip side of how I began the lecture this morning, it presupposes no ability. Van Til puts it this way, page 170 of his Systematic Theology. Without the presupposition of God's revelation to man, There could be no predication of God at all. God would not be incomprehensible, but inapprehensible. By inapprehensible, that's, you know, Ventile. Ventile's a good guy, but he just sometimes uses words he doesn't need to use. Did you ever notice that about Ventile? I don't know, it's just... He kind of writes the way I wrote when I first went to seminary. I thought the more complicated you could make things be, the better writer you were. I really did. Nobody ever told me anything different. And now I'm just striving all the rest of my life to be simple. But what he's basically saying is, without this knowability, there'd be nothing to say about God because we couldn't know Him in any way. So knowability and incomprehensibility have this fluid relationship going between them. I referred at the beginning to Luther's statement, knowable yet unknowable God. Both of these things are true. If he were not knowable, then we could not even be speaking about his incomprehensibility, but only about his inapprehensibility. But the beauty of God is He's both knowable and known by way of revelation, and yet not fully known. For if He were fully known, then He would be but man. We would be at His level. So incomprehensibility presupposes knowability. Number two, when we speak about the incomprehensibility of God, We need to always remind ourselves, and this is an obvious point, that God is not incomprehensible to himself. We're only speaking about what he is to us. Matthew 11.27 tells us that the son knows the father, and the father knows the son. And of course, at some level, At some level, we know them too, but not exhaustively. 1 Corinthians 2 verses 10 and 11 also underscores that the Holy Spirit knows God fully. God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit, for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man save the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man but the Spirit of God. So the point of Matthew 11.27 and 1 Corinthians 2.10 and 11 is that God knows himself comprehensively. So when we speak about the doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God, we're speaking about that doctrine in relationship to ourselves. That leads me then to the third point. Incomprehensibility involves a spatial sense. A spatial sense. And that is true in two ways. First, in terms of a sense of enclosure. a sense of enclosure, and then, secondly, in a metaphorical sense. A metaphorical sense. Well, let me explain that. Incomprehensibility is used in two different ways in the history of theology. The word comprehend is usually used in the older theology in a spatial sense. God cannot be comprehended means that God cannot be enclosed. You can't put a fence around God. And in this sense, incomprehensibility is very close to what the older theologians meant when they would speak of the immensity of God. God is so immense that nothing can contain Him. This is what Solomon is getting at, right? When he dedicates a temple, he says, Oh Lord, fill this place. But I recognize even as I pray this, that the heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee. Thou art a God of immensity, of incomprehensibility. Will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, the heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee. How much less this house that I have builded." Well, today we tend to use the word incomprehensibility more in the second sense. the sense of metaphor. And that metaphor is derived from the spatial image, namely that God cannot be enclosed or fenced in. But metaphorically, we take that up more today in terms of our thinking, in our comprehension of the mind. And we conclude, metaphorically, that we cannot have a comprehensive or exhaustive, you might say, understanding of God. Bent Hill puts it this way, God's revelation to man is never exhaustively understood by man. Bavinck, there is knowledge of God, but there is no comprehension of God. Charles Hodge, the reality of our knowledge of God does not mean that we can know all that is true concerning God, for we cannot have a complete and exhaustive knowledge of God. And again, Hodge, there is infinitely more in God than we have any idea of. And even what we do know, we know imperfectly. So, these are the things we're getting at under the doctrine of incomprehensibility. Basically, we're saying three things. I've given them to you in the outline. They're pretty straightforward here. We're speaking here quantitatively. In other words, There's always more to be known about God than He's revealed. We never know Him quantitatively. We know a little bit. We always feel like we're at ocean's edge and we're like little children dipping our toes in the edge of the ocean. And we've got this vast ocean before us. The vast tracts of the Bible are virtually still unknown. There are millions of religious books that have been written about God, all purportedly, at least millions of them, purportedly drawn from the Bible, and yet we've just begun, haven't we? We've just begun to know God. So in this quantitative sense, we speak of God's incomprehensibility. Second, we are speaking ethically. Ethically, Sin implies that we have a misunderstanding of God. We don't only have a problem with the idea that we don't have all the quantity there is. We also have a problem that because our sanctification is incomplete, we are bound to make mistakes, bound to make mistakes in our understanding of the word. So there's a kind of incomprehensibility. Yes, the basics of scripture are very clear about God, but because of our depravity, we can muddy the perspicuity, the clarity of scripture. And then thirdly, we're speaking qualitatively. Qualitatively. Qualitatively. We must say that what is revealed and what is grasped correctly, even that remains beyond our comprehension. In other words, let's take the doctrine of God's holiness. We can grasp quite a bit about it, can't we? God's separateness, His otherness, creature-creator distinction, His total lack of contamination with sin. his otherness, all of this is involved in his holiness. And we grasp that, and yet we don't grasp it. We say he is holy, we understand it, but by no means do we understand it qualitatively. We don't understand it exhaustively. In this sense too, we only begin to understand. So it's not just a quantitative problem or an ethical problem, it's also a qualitative problem. Now, these things are everywhere in scripture. Let me just give a few references to you briefly and then we'll wrap things up for today. First of all, God's knowledge and being are wonderful, too wonderful for us. Psalm 139 verse 6. They're incomprehensible. You might look up also Judges 13 verse 8. Second, the Bible tells us that God's greatness and understanding Understanding of Him is overwhelming. It's too great for us. His judgments and ways are unsearchable, says Psalm 145, verse 3. His judgments and ways are unsearchable. Thirdly, God's understanding is infinite, Psalm 147, verse 5. Fourth, God's name is exalted above all blessing and praise. Nehemiah 9, verse 5. God's thoughts and God's ways are exalted above man. Number five, God's ways and God's thoughts are exalted above man. Isaiah 55, a well-known passage, verses 8 and 9, and there are many more well-known passages. One that comes to my mind right now is Isaiah 40, to whom then will you liken me, shyly equal? I'm beyond everything you know. God is incomprehensible. So, in conclusion then, there is this inter-Trinitarian total knowledge of God. No one knows the Son except the Father, no one knows the Father except the Son, etc., and the Spirit. And the Father and the Son sovereignly reveal one another, but between the Creator and the creature. But God is knowable, knowable so far as we need to know Him for salvation. He is incomprehensible as well. All right, I think this has been fairly heavy material today and I think we should wrap things up at this point. Any final question? We'll pick up on Part D on the outline, another ten minutes or so on the incomprehensibility of God. Then Thursday we want to really focus on the spirituality of God. And then next week, God willing, we won't have class, but when we do pick up again, we will be picking up on the names, the names of God. Yes, Marty. Is there another day when you won't have class in September? I'm just looking at that last night. Thursday, what I want to do, this is Tuesday, right? Thursday, I'll come prepared with making up the days I'm gone and we'll talk about it. For those last four panels with the screen references, could we have those once again? Sure. 5, yeah. Number 1 was Psalm 139, verse 6, God's knowledge and being, too wonderful. Number 2, Psalm 145, verse 3, His greatness and understanding. Number 3, similar, His understanding is infinite, Psalm 147, verse 5. Number 4, His name is exalted above all blessing and praise, Nehemiah 9, verse 5. Number five, Isaiah 55, verses eight and nine, his thoughts are above our thoughts, his ways above our ways. All right, who's turn is it to pray? Siyamah.