The worldview of the Bible and that of the world around us are in stark contrast. The world around us views all of life from a core of impersonalism. Science, history, language, culture, all these things and more are fundamentally impersonal. The Bible, by contrast, says that a personal God created all that is, oversees all that is, and interacts with all that is. Therefore, the Bible draws the conclusion that as God creates consistent with himself, so all that exists has elements of personalism to it. This is tremendously important to understand as we seek to interact with the God of the Scriptures.
God seeks to communicate himself to his creation, namely human beings. He does so through two primary means: natural revelation and special revelation. Natural revelation reveals God in the world around us. The apostle Paul speaks of this reality in Romans chapter 1. He writes:
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. (Romans 1:19-20a)
We can know something about the Creator through the creation he has designed. This means that as scientists study the world around us they are not studying impersonal entities brough about by chance, they are studying the communication of a personal God. Vern Poythress writes, “Scientists in exploring laws are exploring the speech of God and the mind of God that issued the laws” (31). At its root, then, science cannot be fundamentally impersonal, for it is part of a personal God’s communication to humanity.
Special revelation is God’s communication to His people specifically through the written words of the Scriptures. Natural revelation in and of itself is not enough to lead me to salvation, I need God’s special word. God has deigned to reach down into humanity and communicate directly with us through the Bible. God has used human language and human culture, and even human beings, to bring His word to us. This means that matters of language and culture are deeply personal elements. How we dissect and discuss matters of Scripture then must begin from a properly grounded framework, one that understands the God of the Scriptures, a personal God, has created these elements and chosen to utilize them for His purposes. This includes understand that God has built into language, culture, and individual perception the limitations that each possesses. God, as creator, did not make a mistake, did not create deficiently, he created intentionally and as just as he planned. Again the importance of God’s perosanlism permeates the concepts and causes us to consider carefully how we relate them and apply them to our study of Scripture.
This applies too to the concept of truth. We will discuss that in more detail next week, but we must say in brief that truth too is personal. We are not merely looking for and compiling brute facts detached from context and author. Such a concept is not realistic, nor is it consistent with the Biblical worldview. The Bible tells us truth is deeply personal.
As we wrestle over the subject of inerrancy in the coming weeks I want to continually come back to this foundational matter: God is personal and he has created a personal world consistent with himself. The world is not God, but it does bear markers of its creator. God creates consistent with who he is and that means that any philosophy that denies personalism in our universe will be incompatible with the Scriptures. Our God is a perosnal God!
Sparrow & Heart Soul Care 