Only as Far as He Permits

I was forty years old when I first read the Bible from cover to cover, and when I finished, I still didn't know God.

I had a college degree. I was already an avid reader. One day I felt an urge to read the Bible, and I couldn't have told you where it came from. So I picked up the Living Bible, Kenneth Taylor's paraphrase, and read the entire Bible.

Here is what I came away with. The God of the Old Testament was a force you did not want to reckon with. He protected His people with great power, though I never once connected that protection with love. And He was brutal to anyone who disobeyed Him.

Then I reached the New Testament, and the focus shifted to Jesus. I never connected Jesus with the God I had just read about in the Old Testament. Next to that God, Jesus looked weak to me.

I finished with an opinion about God and no knowledge of Him at all.

You could say I missed it because I read carelessly. I've thought about that, and it doesn't hold up. Reading was never my problem. By any measure a college would use, I read the Bible well.

Paul explains what was wrong.

"The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned" (1 Corinthians 2:14).

Not able. My trouble sat somewhere no reading skill could reach.

Looking back, I believe that urge to read came from the Holy Spirit. It was the beginning of God's effectual call on my life. I mean, God was already drawing me to Himself before I had any idea He was doing it. At the time I knew none of that.

In 1986, four months after I closed that Living Bible, I came to faith in Christ. I kept reading, and it was as if I had picked up a new book.

John 14:9 stopped me. Philip asks Jesus to show the disciples the Father, and Jesus answers, "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father." I went back through the life of Jesus with that sentence in my head. I saw Him protect His own. I saw Him make a whip of cords, drive the money-changers out of the temple, and overturn their tables (John 2:15). That was the same God who defended Israel and judged sin. The weakness I had seen in Jesus was my own blindness. The Son was showing me the Father.

Before I was saved, I read words printed on a page. After I was saved, I heard God speaking to me through those same words. I had the same book and the same ability to read it. The difference was the Holy Spirit.

When I read Herman Bavinck's The Wonderful Works of God, I found language for what had happened to me. Bavinck teaches that we know God only because God wills to be known, and only as far as He permits.

"We cannot credit a knowledge of God to ourselves, to our own discovery, investigation, or reflection. If it were not given us by an act of free and unobliged favor, there would be no possibility that we could ever achieve it by an exertion of our own efforts" (p. 16).

Our knowledge of God depends entirely on Him. We receive it. We add nothing to it.

A person can learn a great deal on his own. He can study the natural world and uncover a wealth of knowledge about how things work. Even there he runs into limits he can't get past, and those limits ought to humble him.

God is different. You cannot put Him under a microscope or run a test on Him. He remains unknown unless He chooses to make Himself known. For a man to think he can know God without God first opening the door is the height of pride.

Jesus said this Himself.

"I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him" (Matthew 11:25-27).

Look at who does the choosing. The Son reveals the Father to whomever He wills. My degree didn't qualify me, and neither did my reading habit. The first time through, I was one of the wise and understanding, and the Father hid these things from me. Four months later He revealed them, and Jesus calls that the Father's gracious will.

It's worth stopping to see how rare this knowledge is. Peter writes that the prophets searched and inquired carefully about the salvation to come, and that the things now announced to us in the gospel are "things into which angels long to look" (1 Peter 1:12). The angels stand in God's presence. They have served Him for ages. The message of how God saves sinners is still something they long to look into. You have been told what they want to see.

God gives this knowledge through His Word. Everything He has chosen to tell us about Himself is in the Bible, and the same Spirit who inspired it opens it to the people He calls. Anyone who claims a private revelation of God outside of Scripture is deceiving himself and everyone who listens to him.

Most Christians understand that salvation is grace. "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God" (Ephesians 2:8). You didn't earn it. He chose you before you ever thought of choosing Him.

Your knowledge of God works the same way. What you know about Him, you know because He chose to tell you and then opened your eyes to see it. An unbeliever can read the same Bible you read. He may read it more often and remember more of it. He can read every word and still come away with only an opinion, the way I did at forty.

That should settle how you carry what you know. Paul asks the Corinthians, "What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?" (1 Corinthians 4:7). The knowledge God gives of Himself is sacred. It is something to cherish. You should never toss it around lightly, use it to win an argument, or look down on the Christian who hasn't read as much as you have. You received every bit of it.

Think about that the next time you open your Bible. When a verse you've read twenty times suddenly speaks to you, God is doing what Jesus described in Matthew 11:27. The Son is revealing the Father to you, and He is doing it because He chose to.

So thank Him. Thank Him for your salvation, and thank Him for every true thing you know about Him, because both came to you from the same mercy.

The grace that saved you is the same grace that lets you know Him, and you received both with empty hands.