The point of this passage is that God
has made it so that we experience and participate by the Holy Spirit in his
self-revelation through Jesus Christ, a revelation that changes us by the sheer
fact of knowing we are beloved children of God the Father towards whom he is
steadfastly loving and ever faithful. I
make a bold statement in saying that for two reasons. One, I am saying that God actually can be
known. We can actually know God who is
otherwise unknowable and we can know this because God has revealed himself to
us in, through, and as Jesus Christ according to the gospel. Two, I am saying
that we participate in God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ because God is in
us and acting through us. Due to our
actually knowing God in Christ through the work of the Holy Spiritwho makes us
to know ourselves to be God’s beloved children we participate in God’s
self-revealing to humanity.
To say that we can know God is a bold
statement because we have all been enculturated by a particular philosophy of
science that says everything that exists can be known and understood by us
because we have the ability to know and understand. Yet, what we mean by known and understood is
that it can be observed and measured or at least proven to exist by
mathematical formula or by its effects on other things. Also, it can be proven by experiments which
we can predict their outcome. Here’s an
example.
This cookie is an object that we with
our ability to know and understand things can know and understand. We can know and understand its ingredients
right down to their sub-atomic make-up.
We can know and understand the processes of chemical interactions that
take place as it is transformed by heat from a doughy mixture of ingredients to
what we call a cookie. We can know its
smell and most importantly it’s taste.
We can know it as intimately as taking it into ourselves by consuming
and digesting it so that it becomes part of what we are; and if it’s effect on
us was profound enough we could say it has become part of who we are or because
that cookie was so good I am now a cookie lover when before I was
agnostic. Yet, the strange thing about
this way of knowing and understanding, the object we want to know and
understand sooner or later ceases to exist simply because we destroy it in our
wanting to know it. We find ourselves
consumed with the desire to know the pleasure we derive from the cookie and we
create technologies to become more efficient in producing cookies and we
produce cookies and consume them until all the resources needed to produce them
are gone and we find ourselves buried in the unusable byproducts of our
consumption. This fact I base on my own
experience of the Oreo.
Well, that’s a
cookie. This philosophy of science
begins to break down a bit when we apply it to persons. Rule number one: human persons are not
objects to be known the way we know a cookie.
To attempt such a thing would be cannibalism. The human body can be known as an object, but
the human person, the human “being” is a mystery. Indeed, life itself is a mystery that cannot
and should not be reduced to biological mechanism. My wife Dana is not an object for me to
observe, manipulate, or consume in my efforts to know and understand her. I think by nature we all feel very violated
when we sense someone is trying to objectify us or manipulate us or consume us
by sapping the life out of us. Dana is a
thinking, feeling, and willing subject in her own right meaning she is a
person. Dana is not the object of my
desire, but rather the subject, the person, whom I desire to know. I can know thing’s about Dana, her likes,
dislikes, and habits for example. But
there is a limit to what I can know of her as a person. I cannot know what it is to be Dana. If I
could, only evil would result for that would mean I could objectify,
manipulate, and consume her at the core of her being for my own pleasure. When we call a person evil it is because they
attempt to do just that.
Martin Buber, a Jewish biblical
scholar and theologian from the early twentieth century wrote a book called I
and Thou, in which he says we cannot really know another person. We can only know the change that comes about
in us from having encountered that person.
I cannot know Dana as Dana is in her person, but I can know the change
her person brings about in me in our relationship and that is only if I am
willing to let her person have an effect on me.
We as persons know one another by the way we have been changed by
relating to one another. If my
relationship with Dana has not changed me, then I have not let myself be
vulnerable enough to let Dana truly be present in my life. She would be just an object in my life. Her thoughts, abilities, giftedness, love,
support, and even her dysfunctions all have an effect on me that changes
me. She does not do this intentionally
for that would be manipulation. Thus, we
can never know what it is like to be another person. We can only know the change a person has
caused within us by means of personal relationship.
Now let’s talk about knowing God. God is not knowable as an object. God never offers himself to us as an object
to be known, God cannot be observed and manipulated. God cannot be seen or measured. God cannot be proven by reason or
mathematics. God is not part of what
makes things make sense nor is God a part of the equation. God cannot be known by his actions nor the
effect he has on things. God is not
knowable as an object otherwise God becomes nothing more than an idol onto
which we project an image of ourselves to which relate through our own
awareness of our own subjectivity, i.e. much of what passes under the guise of
“spirituality”.
God makes himself known to us as
Person. God is Person and what we know
of God personally is the change that encountering him brings about in us. This entails that we must have an encounter
with this God who does not have a physical presence that we can know other than
as Jesus Christ God the Son resurrected from the dead who sits as a human at
the right hand of the Father and makes himself known to us by the Holy
Spirit. So, we say God is spirit,
meaning a Person to whom we can relate – not a force, not an essence, not an
energy; but rather a person. Just like
my being in relationship to Dana, we cannot know God apart from God’s revealing
of himself, a revelation that we can only know because it renders a change in
us. Let us know talk about this change,
our personal knowledge of God and its effect on us.
Paul says here in verse six that God
spoke and said “Let light shine out of darkness.” He is probably referring to the first day of
creation when God said let there be light.
Please capture that image. We
would say that light shinning forth from darkness is impossible because there
is nothing in darkness that can produce light both in a scientific sense and in
a spiritual sense. But, God speaks the
Word and it makes light shine forth from out of darkness. Now let us take that image of God speaking
the Word and making light to shine forth from darkness and apply it to our
hearts because he has spoken into our hearts the Word Jesus Christ by whom he
has revealed himself and by whom he has saved us by the Holy Spirit through
hearing the gospel. The Word is spoken
to us by the proclamation of the gospel, the announcement of our salvation, a
salvation that is made real in us by the Holy Spirit who is God’s personal
self-revelation to us and by having met the Holy Spirit we are changed,
saved. We encounter God in his very
person and know God as the one who has rendered this saving change in us
through Christ Jesus and the Holy Spirit in accordance to the gospel.
This saving change, which is our
salvation, is nothing short of being a new creation according to the promise of
the gospel. This saving change one could
metaphorically say is to experience the first day of the New Creation. We know God by the saving change we
experience having encountered Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit according
the gospel. The change that we
experience is that we now know ourselves to be the loved children of God even
though we were dead in our sin. God has
made light shine forth from the darkness of our dead hearts.
That is what Paul says is knowledge of
the glory of God that we see in the face of Jesus Christ who’s glory shines to
us through the gospel which is veiled to those who are perishing. When we see the word glory in the Bible we
must think the personal presence of God. To have knowledge of the glory of God
is to have knowledge of the personal saving presence of God as it shines forth
in the face of Jesus Christ and touches us by means of the Holy Spirit to say
“you are my beloved child because I have made you able to hear the Word of
salvation that I have spoken to my creation as Jesus Christ your Lord and
Savior.”
The saving change that happens in our
hearts that comes about by encountering the love and forgiveness of the Father
towards his children causes us to treat others with the same unconditional love
by which we have saved. Light shines
forth from the darkness of our hearts.
When we relate to others accordingly the effect our persons have on
others is part of how God saves them.
The light of God shines forth from our hearts so that our personal
presence proclaims the gospel of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit
to others. In my relationship with Dana,
because she is a Spirit-filled Christian, her presence that changes me is part
of God’s working to transform me into the image of Christ and so it is with
each of us. Friends, be aware that you
are now part of the shinning of God’s saving light simply because he has saved
you. You are part of God’s saving “I
love you” to every one you meet. Be ever
so careful to let it shine.
