What Does God Mean to Us — Ralph Shallis

Seeking God Rather Than Human Voices

Oh, Father, don't let anybody here make the mistake of thinking that the Word of God can come from a man. Father, you've blessed us during this week, and we've got used to hearing your voice through human beings and seeing the light of Christ on many faces.

But, oh God, don't let us make the mistake of letting our eyes see no further than the human face, and our ears hear no further than the human word. Lord, turn our hearts to you now, and save us from the besetting sin, the appalling sin of looking to the creature instead of the Creator, to a man instead of the Spirit of God.

Father, we depend upon you, speaker and hearer alike, with all our being in the most desperate need to have your pure word from heaven, your own heart opened, and, oh God, deliver us, deliver us from any kind of human intervention.

We ask this because Jesus died for us. We are only standing with you, and we ask with confidence, and we believe, Lord, that you can satisfy our heart this evening. We believe in you, Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen. As I've been praying it over, I believe that what we need more than anything else in the world, and what we need constantly, and what we need more and more all the time, is a true vision of the Lord Jesus Christ, a true knowledge of God.

Because our faith only exists when we first begin to glimpse God, when we first have our inkling of Christ, which comes to us through the preaching of the gospel, through the reading of his word, through the Spirit of God looking at us through somebody's eyes, and it is this which begets faith in our heart.

We turn to God, and with our tiny, infant, imperfect face, we put our trust in him. And then it's as we continue to look at him, understand him, and know him, that our faith grows. And as our faith grows, God is able to reveal himself more and more.

I'm absolutely certain that the reason why most men's faith, most Christians' faith, is so weak, imperfect, is simply because they don't know God, except in a most fragmentary way. When we consider that it took God thousands of years of human history before he could even bring his son in human flesh upon this earth, because he would not have been understood before, how it took him 2 ,000 years to create and educate and discipline and condition the thinking of a human nation, where only a tiny handful of people recognized him when he did come.

We realize what immense difficulty God has in getting through to the human soul, in revealing himself to us. And it's only in the measure that we see God and know him, that our faith can take hold of him and bring God's Spirit into operation.

The Word of God as the Message for the World

Let us read, I would like to read, if time permits, several passages in the Scriptures with you. John 1 and verse 1, first of all, which we all know by heart, I dare say. In the beginning was the Word.

We are going out this month with the Word. Not our Word, not man's Word, not George Verwer's Word, but with the Word of God. We have a message to men, the only message which can meet their needs, the only message which can save souls, the only message which can give the light of Satan.

God is sending us out with this Word. It's the Word which the Apostles were driven out to preach. And in the beginning was the Word. In God's estimation, the Word is the beginning of everything. This is why God had the Bible written, so that we could have his thought concentrated in human language, expressed in human language, and completely defined.

Thought is indesignable until it's expressed in language. You may have a marvellous thought as you walk down the road one spring morning, but if you don't stop to put it into language, it very quickly disappears, and you can't even remember what it was two minutes later.

It isn't until thought is embodied in Word that it has real significance for anybody else. But when God speaks, that Word is accompanied with power. The Word of God, as we understand it in the Bible, is God putting into execution what he has on his heart, what he has in his thought.

When God speaks, the thing happens. Because God is in authority. God is the supreme authority. The whole universe only exists because God is thinking about it and holds it in his hand. And therefore, if we can only hear the voice of God, if only we can hear the Word of God and see it and understand it, if God can design, define his thought to us, then our message to this world will come crystal clear and like a blazing fire, like a hammer blow, as Jeremiah said, breaking in pieces even the hardest rock.

God is looking today for men and women through whom he can push his Word, but men and women who first of all hear his Word, see his face, men and women who know him, who are prepared to have any sacrifice in order to get this vision and this knowledge of God.

God isn't looking for preachers today. He's not looking for tract distributors. Thank God for them. But what God is looking for is men and women of God, men and women who know God so deeply, so intimately, who've had the very Word of God burnt into their souls, men and women who've been almost blinded with the vision of Christ, men and women who are obsessed with the supreme thought of God's heart and who've got something really to say to men.

Men and women who really know the truth. And so John begins his gospel with this plain statement, in the beginning was the Word. In the beginning was the logos. In Greek the word logos has a double meaning.

It doesn't only mean the spoken word. It doesn't only mean also, I might mention in passing, it doesn't only mean the isolated word, the noun or the adjective or the verb. It means the whole sentence and the whole discourse.

And this is why the whole Bible is said to be the Word of God. If you make a speech or if you make a declaration or a manifesto or a statement, all that is your word, your logos. And the Bible is the logos of God.

It's God's statement, God's declaration to mankind. God defining his thought, his textbook. But the word logos means more than the expression. It means the idea, the reason, the thought that is behind that expression.

What John is saying here is that in the beginning was the logos, that is, God was thinking, God is thinking, it would be more correct to say, because God has no past or future, for God everything is an eternal present, if we can express it that way.

I think any way we try to define God must sound impotent and ridiculous to him, but that's perhaps the only way that we can understand it. God is simply reality. And there cannot be anything passing away or still to come with God.

Everything just is, as far as God is concerned. And God thinks. God made man in his image, a thinking creature. But God thinks. God has a thought. God has a reason for his existence. And this reason he calls the logos.

What God is thinking of, all the time, is the sum total of everything that is truth, goodness, and beauty. The sum total of all intelligence, of all wisdom, of all that is right, of all that is conformable to his own nature.

And because God thinks this, this thing that he thinks is as real to him as himself. In fact, it is himself. And because we are born and made in such a way that when we see utter beauty we fall in love with it, whether it's a sunset or a girl's face, or the birth of our little child, or a flower in springtime, God loves the logos with all his power and all his being.

And he calls the logos his sum. He says, today have I engendered you, but that is an eternal today. God, in a certain sense, is always at the point of having engendered his sum. And God loves the sum with a love that is beyond all comprehension.

And yet the Lord Jesus said to his apostles the night before he was crucified that he loved us in the same way that his father loved him. And he said, you've got to love each other as I have loved you.

And this is the hallmark of true Christianity, and it's by this that all men will know that you are my disciples. When God made the universe, I'm sure there is no doubt that with the delight of a creator's heart, the delight of a poet's mind, the desire to create beauty, he was projecting, so to speak, something of himself into all his handiwork, just as in a painting or a poem or any piece of workmanship.

You can see the artist's soul. You don't have to study a man's work very long to recognize his character in everything that he has made. And those of us who have eyes to see, those of us whose eyes have been anointed by God, we can see through all the handiwork of God in the whole creation, in the whole universe, from the smallest things in the microcosm to the nebulae and the whole universe itself, the whole macrocosm, we can see the thought of God.

We can perceive his logos, as Paul said in Romans 1, in the things that he has made. And this is why everybody is inexcusable. God has written an immense book of philosophy and science and poetry. The whole universe just shouts out the name of God.

Yet men are blind, they don't see. They're deaf and they don't hear. Their heart is insensitive and they don't perceive. What a tragedy for God. How God must weep over this human race that he created to love himself and to know him.

Jesus said, this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent, the only human form in which we can know God. I'd like to turn back now to the Old Testament a minute, to Psalm 33.

Scripture as God's Answer to Every Human Need

When I was a young Christian, I was very troubled because it seemed to me that the Bible said practically nothing about many of the deep problems and thoughts which I felt needed resolving and needed definition.

But when I really undertook to read the Bible, I discovered that God says a tremendous lot. This is what is so marvelous about the Bible. It satisfies the plain, blunt realist who's just interested in getting a job done.

It satisfies the philosopher. It satisfies the poet, the mother, the king. It satisfies the dying man. It satisfies an impotent cripple. It satisfies everybody. It satisfies the man who's headlong in love and about to marry.

It satisfies the mother. She looks at the face of her little newborn child. This is what is so miraculous about this book. It is God's answer to every human need. And it is in proportion as we study the Bible, which is a sort of mirror, that we really begin to see what God is like.

The Bible quickens our spiritual sight and gives us such a vast and accurate and marvelous definition of God and knowledge of God, that our faith is multiplied by infinity. When we understand what God really is, what he's driving at, what his objective is, why he made the universe, why he tolerates evil, his whole process of delivering men and his conception of the new scheme of things that he's going to bring into being and that he's already beginning to work on as he saves men and women now.

This enables us to pray objectively and we're praying in the line of God's thinking. The result is God helps us in our praying. The Spirit of God himself prays for us with groanings that can't be uttered.

God just drives us along evermore to take hold of the realization of his full will. Oh, brothers and sisters, how is it that so many of us can spend so many years just footling around, messing around with things of secondary value, messing around with second-hand knowledge of God and content with a little limited vision when God has such tremendous things to reveal to mankind.

You remember there was a young fellow who used to sell boots who heard a couple of Christians, older Christians, talking one day, I think it was in front of his shop, saying the world had never yet seen the man, what God can do through the man who really does believe in him.

And that young fellow said, well, I'll be that man. That was Dwight Lyman Moody who led two million souls to Christ in his lifetime. But you know what God did through Moody? That's not God's last word.

I believe that if God today can find the man who can take hold of him for more than Moody did, God will use him in a greater way still. Oh, if only all of us people would take hold of him. If only all of us would move forward in faith.

I believe the whole world could be turned upside down in one month. If every Christian in the world today won only ten souls a year, in two years the whole world would be converted, not just evangelized.

You work it out on paper. We've got a God who is limited by nothing except by the principles of his own nature which he has established for us in the word and by the limitations that we put upon him by our unbelief and our sin.

Creation Reveals God's Power and Authority

In Psalm 33 and verse 6, we read this marvelous line of David's poem. I think it was David who wrote this. So everything that exists, the nebulae, the atoms, your nerve cells, your brain, all these things were made by the word of the Lord.

This is what John tells us in the first chapter of John. All things were created by the word and without him was not anything made that was made. Doesn't this enlarge our conception of God and enlarge our faith?

Until a few years ago, I think many, even Christians, thought that God had created the universe and sort of wound it up like a clock and left it to function more or less on its own and that God intervened when he wanted to and we call those things miracles.

But now, even our secular scientists have come to understand that the whole universe is simply energy built up according to the most marvelous mathematical pattern into a structure that we call a material universe but which is really immaterial.

You probably know better than I do that our human body, scientifically speaking, is almost empty. The spaces between the atoms forming the molecules are like the spaces between the stars in the universe and the spaces between the molecules forming the tissue of our body is even greater.

And even the electrical charges which we call electrons and neutrons and all the rest of it are merely charges of energy or electricity which apparently are immaterial and that nobody can define and that nobody understands.

This is why the Bible says that God has made the universe of things which do not appear. He has made them by the word of his mouth. I believe that the energy of which the universe is constructed with all its marvelous, intelligent mathematical pattern is nothing else but the creative energy which God is forever putting out by his Holy Spirit so that if God ceased to think about the universe the universe just wouldn't exist.

All things exist simply by the word of the Lord and this ties up with what we read in Hebrews chapter 1 where we read that Christ himself upholds all things by the word of his power. In verse 3 of chapter 1 of Hebrews he reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature upholding the universe by the word of his power.

Isn't it nice to think, brothers and sisters comforting, reassuring, strengthening, invigorating as we plow through the villages and towns of France surrounded by so much atheism apparently like a needle in a haystack there's one soul here and there who believes these things whereas the vast majority of human beings seem to give us the lie to everything that we say and believe.

Isn't it marvelous to think that as you walk along the street you're giving out your tract every last electron of your nervous system every single particle of your being exists because God is thinking about you and Jesus Christ is holding that in existence and the man who is opposite you and who is laughing at you because you believe in God even his whole physical system is simply held in being because Jesus Christ is upholding the material structure of his being all the flowers, all the trees the clouds, the dust under our feet all this only exists because Jesus Christ is holding it in existence keeping it together exerting the energy by the spirit of God which gives it existence and gives it what we would call reality but which for God is something transient and which will disappear one day.

Yes, I think it's good to remind ourselves of these things. Sometimes when we're in a tough corner or we seem to be so much alone it's a good thing to remember that God does really hold the whole world in his hand but that's putting it even feebly.

Isaiah's Vision of the Sovereign Creator

Let's see what Isaiah said about it in chapter 40. I think this is a tremendous passage because Isaiah lived 700 years before Christ at a time when he saw the ten tribes of the ten northern tribes of Israel swept away into captivity in Assyria because of their unbelief he saw the whole testimony crumbled to pieces.

Even the good king Hezekiah who had produced a certain amount of reformation in his earlier days. Now that Isaiah was an old man he turned more or less away from the Lord. He'd married a young wife begotten a wicked son, Manasseh who for 52 years led Judah into apostasy.

Poor Isaiah in his latter years it seemed to him as if even the whole spiritual universe which God had brought into being in creating Israel and the bitter Bible that existed at that time. All this even seemed to be crumbling about him.

What a vision this man had of God. Look at chapter 40 verse 12. Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance.

Who has directed the spirit of the Lord. Or as his counselor has instructed him whom did he consult for his enlightenment. And who taught him the path of justice and taught him knowledge and showed him the way of understanding.

Why? The nations are like a drop from a bucket and are accounted as the dust on the scales. Behold he takes up the isles like fine dust. Lebanon wouldn't suffice for fuel nor are its beasts enough for a burnt offering.

All the nations are as nothing before him. They are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness. To whom then will ye liken God. Or what likeness will you compare with him. The idol. A workman casts it and a goldsmith overlays it with gold and casts for it silver chains.

A man who is too poor chooses for an offering wood that won't rot. And he seeks out a skillful craftsman to set up an image that won't move. Haven't you known? Haven't you heard? Hasn't it been told you from the beginning?

Haven't you understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he who sits above the sphere of the earth and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the curtains the heavens like a curtain and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.

Who brings princes to naught and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing. Verse 25. To whom then will you compare me that I should be like him says the holy one. Lift up your eyes on high and see who created these the galaxy the nebulae the universes of universes.

He who brings out their army by number and calls them all by name by the greatness of his might. And because he is strong in power not one misses its way. I think we could go on all night drawing from the Bible from the infinite resources of God's revelation.

Genesis, Creation, and the Image of God

Let us just turn a minute to Genesis chapter 1. This is a chapter that has been a tremendous problem for Christians. The chapter that has been more attacked than any other in the Bible. And today the vast majority of people who profess the name of Christian treat this chapter as sheer mythology.

The German liberal theologians and philosophers have destroyed the faith of the majority of Christendom in this book. And yet Christ said that not one jot or tittle of this book could disappear. It was easier for the universe the material universe to disappear than for one jot or tittle of the books of Moses the law to disappear or to fail.

It was because Christ believed this page the story of creation that I was driven to study it and to search and to find out what was the real truth of the matter. I realized that if I couldn't believe this page then I couldn't necessarily believe anything that Christ said.

If he was mistaken on this point then he might be mistaken on any point at all. And in chapter 2 where we read that a man leaves his father and mother and gives to his wife and they become one flesh Christ quotes this verse and builds all his teaching on marriage and divorce.

On this particular verse Christ was convinced that these two chapters were the word of God. We haven't time to look in any detail at this but I want to point out just a few things down to the creation of man in verses 26 and 27.

I reckon that there are about 22 phenomena listed beginning with the creation of the heavens and the earth that is the whole universe and the from verse 2 onwards with the creation and the adapting of this planet for life and the appearance of life in its progressive and different forms culminating with the appearance of man.

It's very interesting indeed to go through this chapter and make a comparison with the discoveries and statements of modern science. Men have taken a long, long time to discover what God said at least 6 ,000 years ago.

We don't know who wrote this particular chapter. We know that it must have come from Adam and must have been passed on down from father to son. We know that it came into the hands of Moses. It was almost certainly revealed to Adam personally by God.

Some interpreters of the Bible think that these 6 days and nights evenings and mornings were 6 progressive revelations that God gave to Moses lasting over a period of 6 days and nights during which God revealed things that no human brain could ever discover by itself at that time, at any rate science has come to believe exactly what this chapter says has come to establish the same facts and also to put them in exactly the same order.

I haven't time to go into this it would take me perhaps 20 minutes and it's not the place this evening but maybe you can work it out for yourselves. It's a phenomenon beyond comprehension that anybody, especially in such a remote antiquity could have thought of all these phenomena without introducing any absurdity at all.

You know the ancient Hindus used to think that the world was a great disc a great plate, so to speak resting on the back of four enormous elephants in this chapter we have nothing of the folly that men used to introduce into their cosmogonies.

We just have a sober, simple account of God's creation of things. And the only difference between what this chapter says and what pretty well all modern scientists have come to believe is simply that most modern scientists are atheistic or agnostic and they say that it all happened by itself whereas the Bible simply assumes that God is the author of all these things.

The Bible doesn't tell us how God did these things and the scientists still don't know how the things happened. But the Bible affirms that God is the author of these things. And the Bible also affirms that when God made man he didn't just make another animal or evolve one animal into another but that man was a definite act of God made in the image of God as something quite distinct from a mere animal.

And this changes our whole attitude to life our whole philosophy of life changes our politics changes everything. Whereas today we've grown up in a world where pretty well everybody believes the opposite that man is simply an evolving animal and that the only real God that exists is matter itself and that therefore God must be good and evil if he has any consciousness or any entity at all because there is both good and evil in the world around us.

And if all things that exist are simply a form of God if God is nothing but matter well this means that we have to do with a God who is no more intelligent than we are possibly and a God who is perhaps good to me today and evil to me tomorrow.

A God in whom I can't trust and a God with whom I cannot dialogue a God in fact with whom I can have no dealings at all a God that I must fear and distrust through this chapter every time that God created something specifically it stated God said.

And then the thing happened. God had an idea so to speak he spoke he put forth the energy of his spirit and this word was vocalized. It became concrete it became as we would say real. The universe came into existence.

The Bible doesn't tell us how long this process took. The Bible doesn't tell us anything about the details except that God is the author. But it's not only astonishing that the man who transmitted this chapter to us found all the right facts 22 of them at least but he got them all in the right order that is to say in the order that modern science has come to look upon as as correct.

And you know very well that if you have two things A and B which you have to arrange in a certain order you can have 50 -50 chances of getting it wrong which is quite a lot. And when you have three things to put in a certain order A, B and C there are six different ways of arranging them.

When you've got five things that you have to arrange in a certain order you've got 120 chances of getting it wrong. One chance of getting it right when you have 22 or you may like to think of it as 21 I work it out in different ways at different times.

There are more than a thousand trillion ways of arranging these 22 facts more than a thousand million million million chances of getting it wrong against one chance of getting it right. This isn't why I believe the Bible is the word of God.

But it's marvelously reassuring as we come to the word of God on the very first page which has been so attacked and ridiculed to find that we can only come to one possible conclusion if we have any intelligence and intellectual integrity at all which is this must be the inspired word of God it cannot possibly be anything else.

And when Christ said that every jot and tittle of it matters to God and is correct well I can believe it. And so it's with this behind us that we can then start reading all the rest of the Bible. It's very reassuring very very reassuring.

Nature as God's Poetic Revelation

I want to go a little bit further. Let us go to psalm 19. This psalm was written by my old friend David. I'm going to have a terrific session with David and Paul and quite a lot of them. When the time comes the heavens, says David, are telling the glory of God and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.

I'm sorry I read that badly. The heavens are telling the glory of God and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. The Greek word here in the Septuagint version. You know the Jews translated the Hebrew into the Septuagint some time before Christ.

The Greek word for handiwork is poiesis. From which comes our English word poesie or poetry. It means handiwork, craftsmanship but it also means poetry. You know the Greeks were so enamoured with poetry.

They had such a tremendously developed aesthetic sense that for them every work, every bit of workmanship anything that you made just had to be beautiful. And a piece of workmanship was a poem. A poem was a piece of workmanship.

It must have been quite wonderful as men began to realise as the scriptures were translated into other languages as they looked up at the starry heavens and the galaxy that all this, all this is God's poetry God expressing his thought God writing his soul in the language intelligible to man.

It was marvellous when I began to discover this during those years when God began to open heaven to me and reveal himself. I learnt to read two books at the same time the Bible in my right hand and the book of nature in my left.

Every sunset, every dawn became for me a poem that God scrawled across the sky. I felt it was almost sin not to stop my work and to get away alone and just be saturated with all that God was telling me through the ecstasy of such an experience.

Oh what a crazy civilisation we have. I've lived in cities like Grenoble and other cities in the Alps and some of the most beautiful cities in the world where the most incredible beauty is up above our heads.

Snows, glaciers. You see all the people hurrying along the streets the cars honking just trying to get to the end of the street. Nobody ever looks up. You see a beautiful sunset come across the sky. Nobody has time to look at.

All people are insensitive and blind. I can remember when sometimes I used to go up on a Saturday or a Sunday up into the mountains to escape and be alone for an hour or two. All the people from the city would come crashing up there to ski or just to picnic on the grass.

They wouldn't look at the beauty. They just brought all their noise and their transistors up there they just desecrated the place. I remember once I was in a beautiful place in England a marvellous little mountain stream and some other people came along where we were camping.

They parked their car and all they could do was read the newspaper and wash the car. What a blessed thing it is to have eyes that are open, isn't it? There's a lot of truth in that old hymn. Heaven above is brighter blue earth beneath is sweeter green.

I think it is, correct me if I'm wrong. Well now, since the Logos is Christ himself because John tells us that the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us and we saw his glory that is his character, the character of God the character of the only begotten Son of God because the Logos is Christ that means that all the beauty, intelligence, wisdom, power that we see in all God's handiwork is simply an expression of Christ that God is trying to reveal to us falling in love, the birth of a little child.

All these things are meant to speak to us of God. God is just trying to get through to us and open his heart to us and tell us all kinds of things about himself if only we can understand and if only we can divorce forever all these things that God has made.

And God is saying from the appalling the artificial and corrupt interpretation that men put upon all these things. This is why, brothers and sisters any kind of perversion of the relationship that is meant to exist between man and woman who were made in the image of God male and female is like blasphemy against God himself.

It's a degradation of the image of God. God made man and woman in his image and he put them together and said be fruitful and multiply before they sinned. Human marriage was meant to be for man perhaps the culminating experience of the revelation of God it was meant to be something in which God could really open all his heart and show him what real love is.

And yet there's nothing that man has more degraded and in which man has lost the true nobility for which he was created in Christ. We can recover this although we are still in poor wretched bodies that have been contaminated by thousands of years of human folly and sin.

And we must never forget that even in our rediscovery of Christ in marriage and in love and in the family relationships we must always remember to our humility, our humiliation, our shame that we have to watch.

We've got to keep our bodies under. We've got to be as if we're not married. So to speak as Paul said we just haven't really time to be married in this world. We're married. But God will probably say well you have to spend half your life separated.

Ask George about that. Ask me too. I want to go a little further. I mustn't go much further or you'll have poor old George just giving the benediction as he said just now let us go to Colossians chapter 1.

Christ as the Image of the Invisible God

Please understand me. I'm not just trying to to give you a a pretty little sort of philosophical twist to your theological thinking. No I'm only I'm only trying to to whet your appetite to know God and to make it possible for us all to believe that we can know God in a way that probably is beyond anything that we have yet conceived.

And it's in proportion as we do know God that we shall really understand his love for us and understand his message and that our faith will be able to take hold of him for the things he really wants to do through us.

In Colossians 1 and verse 15 we read that Christ is the image of the invisible God. By him all things were created. He is, verse 17, before all things and in him all things hold together. He is the image of the invisible God.

Man's problem is since he was spiritually blind blinded by the fall that he could no longer see God. And all human philosophy and religion is really completely ludicrous in its attempt to define God. It's only when we come to Christ that we can have any conception of a true image of God.