This post is the second in a series on “How God Speaks.” In my first post I covered how God speaks in creation and in our personhood. I now discuss two more major ways God speaks.
God Speaks in Our Conscience
Our conscience is simply the awareness that God is watching us. Because we know intuitively that God is moral, our awareness that God is watching us causes us to judge our actions as moral vs. immoral. Almost everyone has a conscience. The few who don’t we call sociopaths. Violating our conscience can be extremely painful. When we violate our conscience again and again, that pain tends to lessen. God calls this process “hardening our hearts.”
Needless to say, it’s not fun to talk about conscience, unless we have lived a perfect life, which none of us have.
‘Nuff said about conscience
So far in this series, I’ve been writing about what theologians call “general revelation,” that is, the knowledge of God that all people can glean from nature. I now want to turn to a discussion of “special revelation,” the knowledge of God that we have from his direct communication with us.
God Speaks in the Bible
Recent reports of the Bible’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. The Bible always has been, and still is, the most banned or restricted book in the world. It’s been suppressed by communists and Muslims and even by the church itself. At one point during the Dark Ages the church had strayed so far from the Bible that it chained the only copies it had to it’s pulpits to keep ordinary folk from reading it. And translating the Bible into the popular vernacular got one burned at the stake.
Governments and religions have reason to fear the Bible. Everywhere it’s been read, studied and believed, it has transformed those cultures. The Bible is insidious. It undermines the rickety foundations of mere human government and the vacuous imaginations of made-up religions and replaces them with the grand vision of an infinite and personal and holy God who has spoken and acted in human history and to whom all people are accountable: potentates, presidents, priests and popes alike.
Stand on the wrong side of the Bible and you teeter on the edge of the proverbial dustbin of history. The Bible has, and always will, survive its critics, detractors and obscurantists. Imagine taking the most radical German biblical scholar and skeptic of the nineteenth century and standing him next to an ordinary German farmer of that time who simply took the Bible at face value and asking: “Which one was closer to the truth?” Archaeology has proven, hands down, that the Bible-believing German farmer was.
The Bible tells us who we are, why we’re here, and where we’re going. Western civilization would be unrecognizable without the Bible’s influence on our laws, social order, history, literature, art, science – everything. And if Western civilization thinks it can go it alone without the Bible, it’s not the Bible that will suffer. For what the Psalmist wrote three thousand years ago still stands:
“Forever, O LORD, Your word is settled in heaven.” (Psalm 119:89)
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
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