Revelation

What makes a gourmet meal? I know almost nothing about cooking, but I suppose it is something prepared by an expert chef, with ingredients carefully chosen and combined to complement each other. It is probably a meal with dishes I don’t know and flavors I can’t even imagine could be so delicious.

When I was a child, my idea of a “great meal” likely would have included all my favorite foods: pizza, peanut butter and jelly, donuts, Oreos, apple sauce, bologna, macaroni and cheese. Separately these foods may be tasty in their own right; but combined they are hardly what anyone would call “fine dining.”

The source matters. Where does the menu come from? Has it been assembled haphazardly among things we like? Or do we leave the cooking to someone who knows what they are doing to prepare dishes we can’t imagine? It’s a little like the way humans understand God. Is God something we make up, an assortment of “ingredients” we like? Or is God more than humans can invent; someone complex, dynamic, mysterious?

When it comes to knowing God, the source matters. The source of all our knowledge and awareness of God is the Divine One himself. Revelation is God making himself known. God is known to us because God chooses to make the Divine self known, particularly through the testimony of the Bible.

Why does God’s self revelation matter? For one, God is more than we can imagine. God is not constrained to the limits of human reason but is and is capable of more than we can conceive on our own.

For another, neither is our life limited to the “ordinary” and the mundane. The God who creates us calls us to glorious lives, participating actively in his work of saving the world. God forms us for lives more wonderful than we can imagine.

No one should settle for simplistic explanations for things that have no basis in God’s revelation, like “Hurricane Katrina must mean God is punishing someone,” or “God must not be real because faith hasn’t solved my problems and blessed me with wealth.” God is better than that. We must allow God to speak for himself, let God be God, and we are a whole lot better off.