For
the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all
ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in
unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in
them, for God has shown it to them. (Romans 01:18-19, NKJV).
While in this context
what is “revealed from Heaven” is God's wrath, the concepts of
Heaven and divine revelation are worthy of discussions in and of
themselves, and much could be said about both.
First, our full knowledge
of God is dependent upon His revelation of Himself. While it is true
that Creation, in all of its immense and microscopic complexity,
speaks of His power and intelligence and glory, it says little about
His innate character.
Many ancient, so-called
primitive cultures recognized that power and glory by observing the
world and sky around them, but their conception of the Being (or
beings) behind it all was limited by their own feeble imagination.
They guessed, but could not know, and in their guessing they devised
fantastic and nonsensical tales that attempted to explain everything
they observed and experienced.
Interestingly, every
culture throughout human history has at least two mythologies in
common: Creation; and at least one instance of global destruction.
Even naturalists recognize a beginning of things, and call it the Big
Bang, and admit to evidence that geological catastrophe occurred in
the past on a more or less global scale. Usually, this devastation is
attributed to a “natural” event, as in a meteoric collision.
The Bible's explanation
of these two events is the only ancient account that is ordered and
logical. Creation being explained by four immensely profound words,
“In the beginning God...”, and the global devastation by the
catastrophic flood which God caused to occur during Noah's time.
Both these explanations
have lost favor during our lifetimes, but that is irrelevant to the
discussion at hand. The point is that we could not know what happened
with any precision without Someone providing an eyewitness report.
For us, that eyewitness is God Himself, who inspired His Word to be
recorded and preserved for mankind throughout the ages.
Which brings us to a very
important subtext (underlying theme) of divine revelation, called
Inspiration.
Ask yourself this
question, if an all-powerful God exists, could He cause information
to be known about Him in any way He chose? The obvious answer is,
yes.
Given that, if this same
Being ordained that faith is the vehicle by which His fallen
creatures could return to Him, then how could that information come
about that would both inform, and not invalidate that required faith?
While it is true that God
could declare His existence unequivocally by ripping open the fabric
of the Universe and stepping into Causality unmistakably at any time,
(something He has promised to do in the future - Ro 14:11; Php 2:10),
that act would absolutely negate faith. It is impossible to have
faith in what is actually seen (Ro 8:24,25).
So then, what method of
communication meets the requirements of accuracy without negating the
opportunity for belief? The answer is the written word penned by holy
men of God empowered (inspired) by the Holy Spirit.
The written word is
objective and persistent. It is there for all to see throughout time
and not subject to the vagaries (unexpected change) and
miscommunication of the spoken word. The fact that these “oracles
of God” were men does not in anyway detract from the claim that
their writings were of supernatural origin; that they were, in fact,
words “revealed from Heaven”.
God inspired these men to
record exactly what He desired recorded.
Now this “inspiration”
is not at all similar to what occurs in occult practices where a
human claims to be “channeling” a non-material entity. When such
happens in reality, and it undoubtedly does, what is taking place is
not inspiration, but a type of possession.
That is not how God works
at all. When the prophets who wrote our Bible operated under God's
inspiration, these men were not possessed, but directed. They
retained their own consciousness and identity, and wrote as God
instructed of their own free will. They in no way became God, nor
were they any less themselves, but instead faithfully recorded the
words or visions God gave them.
Now can we prove that
this happened? No, not in the scientific sense, but we can in an
evidentiary sense in that much of what was given was history recorded
beforehand (prophecy), so that the authenticity and origin of the
information would be confirmed.
In fact, the Bible, by
some reckoning, is more than two-thirds prophecy, and all of these
that have been so far fulfilled have come to pass literally, just as
foretold. The most verifiable among these are those 300 or so
directly related to the birth, death and resurrection of Christ, all
detailed centuries before taking place in time and space exactly as
predicted. No other holy writings come close to such a track record,
and no other writing stakes its claim to authenticity and its
reputation on such prophecy. And given the accuracy of the events
already fulfilled, there is no reason to conclude that the remaining,
as yet unfulfilled, prophecies will come about in anything other than
an equally literal sense.
One final point to make
here is that this inspired revelation, like God's wrath, originates
from Heaven.
Heaven is discussed at
some length in Scripture, not perhaps as exhaustively as we would
like, but with enough details to provide us with the following:
- It is the abode of God.
- It is a real location somehow apart from our four-dimensional reality of time and space, at least for the here and now.
- Between here and there is a separation impossible to cross in a physical sense, and requires either physical death or an explicit translation by God.
- At some future date, Heaven will emerge into our reality, and what has been separated, likely since the Fall of Man, will once again be reunited.
- It is a place where evil cannot abide.
- It is where a believer's true citizenship resides.
Perhaps
the most important thing to keep in mind from the above list is this:
Heaven is where God is, and is therefore the Source from which our
own reality emerges. All that we see and experience in this life is
but a pale shadow of what there is in Heaven.
Whatever
beauty exists here comes from there. Whatever joy and satisfaction we
may encounter here is but an echo of the joy and satisfaction we will
experience there, if we believe in Christ.
Remember,
Dear One, we are finite creatures who live on the edge of the
Infinite. God has provided us from Heaven all that we need to know of
Him now so that we can choose to believe in Him and abide with Him
eternally.
Is
it possible to understand fully what all that means? No, but it is
enough to exercise our God-given reason to understand enough of Him
to evoke rational faith sufficient to bring us into His presence
forever more.
Love,
Dad
