Thoughts on Westminster Confession of Faith, article I.1, which you can find here.
If you’re going to start talking about God, where do you
start? These days most people seem to
start with their feelings or their faith experience. “To me, God is…” is common.
For the men who wrote the Westminster Confession of Faith, you have to
start with the Bible. Before you can
assert anything about God, you have to have a reliable source. Each person deceived in his sin and error
believes he is a reliable source, but no human being is. We had better find truth outside of
ourselves, for the “divine spark” within each person isn’t cutting it.
Before we delve into the Bible, you have to back up one more
step and ask, “Is there anywhere else God has revealed Himself?” And there is.
Everything we see in the world is a revealing of God in some way. People are made in His image (Genesis 1:27). “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm
19:1). The mountains, clouds and
galaxies show His power and majesty. The
beehives and bacteria show His complex and intricate designs. Without any Bible at all, we have no excuse
for rejecting God as our Creator on the basis of this information. And we do reject Him. We stand condemned before the Bible even
comes into the picture.
But God wanted to redeem and save us, so He spoke again.
He spoke in various ways in the past (Hebrews 1:1-3) –
through prophets, dreams, visions and writers like Moses, Samuel and the Chronicler.
He wanted to reveal Himself.
Knowledge of God was obscured and even lost from Adam’s generation
on. Men called on God by His name Yahweh
in the third generation (Genesis 4:26), but when Israel was in Egypt it seems
they did not know God by this name (Exodus 6:3). God wanted to make Himself known, and what He
did for the people He was saving (Exodus 3:13-14). Especially what He has done in Jesus
Christ. Jesus is the complete and final
revealing of God. Words and dreams that
came before don’t hold a candle to seeing God in the face of Jesus.
God wanted to declare His will to His people. As the Creator, He wanted to tell His
creation how things were supposed to go in the world. We lost this when we sinned, and got crazy
ideas in our heads about how we could live, instead. We need to be told how to live, or we go off
the rails. The Bible gives us clear
instructions. This preserves the truth
when we would forget and neglect it. It
is a pillar against our corruption, and a comfort when we are unsure or lost.
So after Jesus came, God committed His revelation to
writing, and stopped using other means.
This emphasized the importance of Jesus, and of the apostles who
recorded His life and work. Scripture is
necessary for salvation, for it reveals who and what we are to believe. It is a light shining in a dark place (2
Peter 1:19).
So creation and nature reveals God on one level. It is enough to condemn us, so that there is
no innocent native anywhere who has never heard the Gospel or seen a
Bible. Creation doesn’t give us enough
to go on to believe in. So we need the
Bible.
A.A. Hodge points to three errors refuted by this.
1. Rationalism – the assertion
that there is no revelation of God we have to go on. It’s up to us to assemble truth ourselves
from our own resources.
2. Deism – God may be
there, and set up the world, but we figure out the rest on our own. This is almost the same problem as the first
one.
3. Biblicism – the assertion
that only the Bible gives us knowledge of God.
What we see in nature is too obscure to be of any use.
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