God–Natural Knowledge of – What Does This Mean?

How Do We Know What God Thinks About Us?

Encore Post: Once in awhile, you have a bad day. You know the kind. Your alarm doesn’t wake you for work. The traffic lights are all against you on the way to work. You get there late and spend the whole day apologizing. Your car gets a flat tire when you are on your way home. You might begin to wonder if you did something to get God angry at you. This feeling is even stronger when you suffer from disasters — when you or your loved ones suffer from serious illnesses; when violent weather wipes out your home, your neighborhood or even your city; when evil people steal your property, wound or kill those you love or when you are dying and the doctors can’t make you well.

You are not alone. Everyone feels this way from time to time — even people who do not have faith in Christ. The world around us teaches us that there is a God, he is all powerful and that he has rules for us to live by. It also teaches us that he will punish us for breaking these rules and that someday we will die. This Natural knowledge of God is imperfect, though. It does not tell us what God really thinks of us, and, how we can keep him from punishing us. We need God to reveal himself to us to know the answer to that question.

Thank God that He in His love and mercy, does this for us in two basic ways. He Himself became a Man in Christ Jesus (John 3:16, Philippians 2:1-11). When we find it hard or impossible to know what God is like, we look at Jesus. (John 1:18 ) Secondly, God Himself has spoken to us through prophets and other authors in the Holy Scriptures, the books contained in the Bible. (Hebrews 1:1)

It’s All About Jesus

Encore Post: As we get to know God and the Christian faith, we run into many things that are not easy, even downright impossible to understand. Of course, God knows this and reveals himself to us in the Holy Scriptures. But sometimes even the Bible Is difficult to figure out. One thing that is certain. If we want to get to know God, we can get to know Jesus. In a way, all of theology, the study of God and His word, is Christology — the study of Jesus.

God’s law contains many commandments, yet these can be summed up in two. In the same way, there are many teachings in the Bible, divided into many subjects, yet all of Scripture speaks about Jesus. (Luke 24:25-27, John 5:39, Acts 10:43) No one has seen the Father, but the Son reveals him. (John 1:18, John 14:9) No one truly knows the Father except the Son and those to whom he shows the Father. (Matthew 11:27) In Jesus, God lives in bodily form.

With the Father and the Holy Spirit, Jesus created the world. (John 1:1-3, Colossians 1:16) In the form of the Angel of the Lord, He stayed the hand of Abraham as he was about to sacrifice Isaac (Genesis 22:11-19), spoke to Moses from the burning bush (Exodus 3) and in many other times and places throughout the history of Israel. He is the promised Messiah who, at just the right time (Galatians 4:4) was born to save us from our sins. (Matthew 1:21-22) He is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. By his suffering, death, resurrection and ascension, he has paid the penalty for all our sins, satisfied the demands of the law for us and won for us the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation.

And that is not all, Jesus is with us today when we gather in his name and he gives to us his body and blood with bread and wine for the forgiveness of sins. He understands our struggles, because he is in every way like us, except he did not sin. He prays to the father for us and prepares a place for us with him where we will live forever. On the last day, he will raise us from the dead and we will live with him forever. This is when we want to know God, we get to know Jesus, his Son, our Lord, Savior and brother.

Understanding an Unknowable God

“We believe in one God… And in one Lord Jesus Christ… God of God…” the Christian church confesses every Sunday. We love God, worship him, study his word and meditate on it. We want to understand God, but no matter how hard we try, one God in three Persons does not make sense to us. And that is a good thing, too.

God is our Creator, so there is always something about him we will not comprehend.( Romans 11:33-36) Because God knows this, he spoke to us in the Bible and revealed himself to us in his son.(Hebrews 1:1-2) He tells us exactly what we should know about him in our language and in ways we can understand. The trouble comes when we try to put it all together with human reason, which is limited by time and place. This will happen every time we deeply consider God’s qualities and characteristics. (His attributes) if you find you fully understand an attribute of God — worry. You are likely making over God in your image.

The way to come to peace with these limits is to believe exactly what the Bible tells us — even if it seems you can’t logically believe all of it at the same time. For example, the Bible tells us there is one God, but three persons are God, that Jesus is both God and man at the same time, that we are saved because God chose us before he made the world, but if we end up in hell, it is because we turned our axis on God and walked away from him. Because God Himself says all these things are so, we can believe them all and be at peace.

The Eternal Son of the Father

Encore Post: Jesus has always been God’s Son and always will be God’s Son. “I believe that Jesus Christ, true God, begotten of the Father from eternity…” Martin Luther explains in the Small Catechism. “And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds…” we confess in the Nicene Creed. It is why we sing in the ancient hymn Te Deum Laudamus, “you are the Everlasting Son of the Father.”

We can somewhat understand how Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. But how he could be “begotten” by the Father in eternity — outside of time — without having a beginning makes no sense to us. Yet that is exactly how God describes the relationship between God the Father and God the Son.

So far, so good. The problem comes when we try to understand how this can be. As we discussed in a previous post, we cannot fully understand God because we are creatures and he is our creator. It is a mystery — a riddle human logic cannot solve. The issue has to do with the quality of God (attribute) that he is eternal — that time does not exist for God. For human beings, everything has to do with the fact that time passes. We are conceived in our mother’s womb, grow, are born, become adults, grow old and die. Even though we we live forever, it is at best difficult to imagine life without a beginning and an end.

Yet God, in his wisdom, uses this language to help us understand the closest relationship in the universe — the eternal Father begets his eternal Son. (Psalm 2, John 1:18, 3:16-18, Hebrews 1) So, we also use this way to describe the Son and be content to understand him this way.