SEEN THRU FAITH

ACCESS BY FAITH

 

God in pure essence is spirit and is therefore almost completely inaccessible to mankind. "Nevertheless he left not himself without witness" (Acts 14:17). God had ways of discovering Himself to men so that they could reach after Him in faith (Heb. 11:6, 27).

1.     However, God is invisible (Col. 1:15; Heb. 11:27), being spirit, and is therefore inaccessible to sense perception. By no operation of the senses, see­ing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, was it possible for men to apprehend God. So the Scriptures make an absolute statement. "No man hath seen God at any time" (John 1:18; 1 John 4:12). Exploration by means of the senses was impossible (Luke 24:39; 1 Cor. 2:10-12).

2.     This meant that men were left without any material conception of God. Since God is spirit and separate and apart from His creation, there was nothing in creation that could possibly represent God. All the ideas men held concerning God were in reality mere abstractions. The readers of these lines may take all the material in the preceding pages, and however well you may comprehend them, you cannot fashion them into a substantial conception of God. You are forced to apprehend them by faith and live in the light of that persuasion.

3.     But men have always wanted to see in some substantial form something that represents the God whom they worship. This explains the plaintive cry of Job in the midst of his anguish. "Lo, He goes by me, and I see Him not: He passes on also, but I perceive Him not... For He is not a man, as I am, that I should answer Him, and we should come together in judgment...Oh that I knew where I might find Him, that I might come even to His seat" (Job 9:11,32; 23:3). It was this same earnest longing that moved Philip to address Christ: "Lord show us the Father, and it sufficeth us" (John 14:8). Nor is this surprising to God, for He made man with this insistent longing and had already planned to satisfy it in the right way. But to guard against a false method of satisfying this longing, the Lord warned Israel, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in the heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me" (Exod. 20:4-5).

4. But already mankind had fallen into idolatry, and Israel soon followed in the same path. "Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and to four-footed beasts, and creeping things...who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen" (Rom. 1:22-23, 25); having turned away in their hearts from a God who is totally separate from and different from creation, they then fashioned God over the various aspects of creation with ever diminishing level. To false deities they gave devotion along with degenerating morals until God gave them up (Rom. 1:24-28). All this teaches us that the level of morality is always commensurate with the level of man's conception of God. To rescue men from this quagmire of human depravity, the revelation of God in Christ broke through the clouds of spiritual darkness.