GOD AND HIS REVELATION SUMMARY, PART 1.

In this summary blog of the previous blogs written, the concept of God and His revelation is seen. I believe in revelation through nature, history and personally. I believe that in some cases this natural and historical revelations will be enough but from my own personal experience I know that most people are hard-headed, and not until God reveals Himself in a personal manner, when circumstances have brought them to the end of their rope, and then they seek God by putting themselves in the place where they can hear the gospel and have a conversion and turn to Him, and continue with justification and regeneration!

I stand for the fact that the Scriptures were inspired by the divine breath of God and also for their inerrancy in that they are fully truthful in all of their teaching. A Scripture which shows the divine breath that inspired all Scripture is 2 Timothy 3: 16. One of the current positions I stand for is ‘limited inerrancy’ which regards the Bible as inerrant and infallible in its salvific doctrinal references. In this position the Bible’s scientific and historical references reflect the understanding current at the time it was written and the Biblical writers were limited by the limitation of their time! An example is 2 Chronicles 4:2.

As for the Bible’s content and context in the present days, I feel that if everyone went about changing the content of the Bible and its biblical doctrine, then humankind would be in bad shape as to who to believe! If everyone comes saying they are prophets and they have the true revelation of the Bible, that would be terrible! So I believe that like the councils of old who admitted the canon, there needs to be great discernment and respectable and integral people making decisions. I do not hold to the view that the worlds then and today are so different in terms of the spiritual realities and revelations: evil is still evil, good is still good, men and women are sinners in need of salvation through the only true Savior, Jesus Christ! As for the Bible’s context, there is a need for Christians to pray for religious, secular and political leaders, for their nation and for the world, in order that all changes can be acculturated in each society of the world. Even though different societies hold to their own cultural ideals, still the Bible’s context should remain the same and understandable for each individual culture.

As for the fact that the Scriptures come with the authority of God, it is seen that God, as the Creator and source of all truth, has the right to command a human’s way of belief and a human’s actions. He has spoken clearly through His prophets and apostles in what is called the Bible. He has shown in its historical content, specially through the books of the Prophets in the Old Testament, how He told His people through this same prophets, that certain events were going to occur, such as impending judgment by the invasion from other nations, such as is seen in the book of Isaiah where the exile of the Israelites took place after God warned them through Isaiah in advance. And all these are historically verifiable events! So Scriptures are “ historically authoritative, that is, it tells us correctly what God expected from specific persons at particular times and places.”1 I believe like Erickson in that the illumination of the Holy Spirit is necessary to give understanding of the Scriptures to a person’s heart; of course, I believe also that a person has a free-will and can choose to obey or not the Scriptures!

NOTES
1. Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006),267.