God’s Self-Revelation
By Jerry Batson, Th.D.
Special to The Alabama Baptist
Last week we began looking at the biblical doctrine of general revelation by thinking about the created order as one channel through which God has offered His world insight about some aspects of His being.
The created order speaks about His eternal power and divine nature (Rom. 1:20). Not only has God chosen creation as a channel of self-revelation, He also reveals Himself in a general way through the constitution or makeup of human beings, since the Bible declares that in the beginning His creative intention was, “Let us make man in Our image, according to our likeness.” Thus, we are made in God’s own image (Gen. 1:26–27).
Of all that God made, human beings bear the greatest witness to God’s existence and nature, thereby being a channel of His self-revelation. A thoughtful consideration of human nature bears witness to what God is like. This likeness is not to be found in our physical features, since God is Spirit. Rather, the likeness is to be seen in such nonmaterial aspects as humankind’s mental capacities, moral sensibilities and spiritual possibilities.
When you and I look upon another person or in a mirror, we are beholding a living witness to an infinite, all-wise Creator. All of us are incredible and intricate beings, possessing qualities and abilities that are beyond all other creatures God made.
Of all living beings, humans possess wide-ranging skills and potential as thoughtful and communicative persons. Of all creatures, we humans can think about God and communicate with Him.
Although marred by sin, humans possess some degree of moral consciousness of right and wrong, good and evil, with the capacity to feel guilt after sensing that some actions are right but left undone and others are wrong but committed. Though crippled and sometimes distorted, our capacity for moral discernment bears witness to the perfect moral nature of our Creator whose image and likeness we bear.
Possessing the capacity for moral discernment makes it possible for human beings to experience conviction over sin and realize the need for absolution or forgiveness. The human religious experience, however elementary or even misguided, witnesses to the felt need to appease a divine Being, even if the attempts seem crude and repulsive, such as child sacrifice, a practice expressly forbidden in God’s law to Israel (Lev. 20:2–5), but which God’s people encountered among the pagan Ammonites in their worship of Molech and even on occasion later practiced by some of their own kings, such as Manasseh (2 Kings 21:6) and Ahaz (2 Chron. 28:1–4).
God’s creative nature
Beyond moral consciousness and human creativity that bear witness to God’s own moral and creative nature being imaged in men and women created in His likeness, the intricacies of our physical makeup with its nervous, circulatory and digestive systems, as well as the inter-connectedness of bones, muscles and nerves, witness to an unbelievably wise, imaginative and creative God, whose characteristics we mortals possess to some degree. Humans, unlike any other living creatures, reflect creative characteristics in music, literature and art, as well as in inventions, medicine and technological advances. Whether through nature in general or human beings in particular, no one is without opportunity to know something about God. The fact is that human sinfulness suppresses or distorts truth about God. Every human being is responsible and no one is innocent. This fact is part of the missionary motivation to take God’s offer of grace to all people in all places.
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Jerry Batson is a retired Alabama Baptist pastor who also has served as associate dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University and professor of several schools of religion during his career.
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