PERFECT REVELATION

PERFECT REVELATION FOUND IN THE BIBLE

 

 

 

This PERFECT REVELATION of God in Christ provides certain practical values that cannot be duplicated elsewhere.

1.        Since this PERFECT REVELATION OF GOD is preserved in THE BIBLE, there is an encouragement to study the Bible. "Search the scriptures: ...and they are they which testify of Me" (John 5:39). "That I may know Him" was the passion that drove Paul forward, for he knew that Christ was the secret to the understand­ing of God (Phil. 3:10-14).

2.        Beholding the perfect revelation of God in Christ is the enablement of coming into immediate confrontation with that which is concrete and real about God. "God was in Christ" (2 Cor. 5:19). All the lines of truth that were once mere abstractions, now take on the quality of life and reality. Christ is the Son of the living God (Matt. 16:16). It was the privilege of those early Christians to examine with the senses such as sight, hearing, and feeling, the reality of this One who walked among them. They concluded that this One was in complete reality the true God, and they did not hesitate to bear witness to this fact.

3.        Inasmuch as "In Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily" (Col. 2:9), the one who beholds Christ is safeguarded from narrow and lopsided views about God. Christ is a total revelation of God. Every attribute is present and works in proper relation with every other attribute. It is thus possible for the believer to balance the various aspects of God's being and see them in perfect perspective. One verse can never conclude that God is love to the exclusion of hatred for sin, that God is infinite and cannot be concerned with the finite, that God is powerless to deal with the enormities of sin.

4.      It is of inestimable value to know that having come to Christ we have had encounter with the ultimate about God. This dives believers assurance that they really know God. It was this point that John was trying to drive home to believers of his day. "And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life. Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen" (1 John 5:20-21).

The full realization of God is eternal life. But there is a sense in which the full realization of that life is dependent upon a progressive apprehension of God in Christ Jesus. That is the burden of Christ's prayer as recorded in John 17:3. "And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent". The word for “know” is in the present tense and refers to the necessary progressive realization by all the cognitive powers directed to God in Christ in order for the finite being to experience a growing realization of the infinite God. This provides the dynamic for continuous study now, and forever.