Clough Hebrews Lesson 3
Doctrine of Revelation
I presume you have your worksheet that was handed out. When we get in the first four verses of Hebrews 1 we’re in some very complicated material, and if you look on your first worksheet, these verses are the summary of the Son as God’s superior revealer. And this means that there is a lot of doctrine packed into these four verses and therefore until we get out of these four verses the only way I know to help you organize your notes so you won’t miss the great issues that are taught in this book is to help you by means of these worksheets. The first four verses of Hebrews, I challenged you last week to see if you could diagram it, we had one person who did diagram the sentence, and as I said it would take you some time to do it but if you would do this when you come to complicated sentences in the Word it would help you understand the contents because you see at least you have to interact with the text if you’re going to diagram it. You’ve got to find out what the subject and the verb and the predicate are, you’ve got to find out how the various clauses modify one another, you’ve got to do those things and the process of forcing you to do it by having to diagram something will illuminate you to some of the contents that’s involved.
Tonight we’re going to go back to Hebrews 1:1, to the verb and the verb is to speak, it’s used twice; the main verb occurs in verse 2, the primary location is verse 2, the Father “spoke by a Son,” emphasis without the article on the characteristics of the Son, supported by the many phrases tacked on. The first part, the participle version of the verb to speak is in verse 1, having spoken, God spoke. The problem is the connection between “having spoken” of verse 1 and “speaking” in verse 2. And when we deal with God speaking we have to ask questions about the doctrine of revelation. So you should have worksheet #2 that deals with the doctrine of revelation. We will work mostly tonight from the worksheet and then I will cite verses which we will then deal with in the book of Hebrews and elsewhere in the text, so you may understand the classical Christian doctrine of revelation. I want to acquaint you with terms that have been used for nineteen centuries to describe the doctrine of revelation.
If there’s one weakness in independent fundamental circles, I’ve discovered, it is the inability that a lot of our people have to think creedally. Those of us who have come out of churches where there has been a creed, where you’ve had to sit down and recite, for example, the Apostle’s Creed, the Nicene Creed, if you’ve been in a Reformed church the Councils of Dork, the Presbyterian Church the Westminster Confession, you would have a capsule summary of two Christian doctrines. Now the weakness in independent fundamental circles is that we teach the Word piecemeal and we never tie it together into a system of doctrine with the result that people do one of two things. They become eclectic; now an eclectic is one who takes doctrines, who will take, say human viewpoint, or some heresy and combine it with divine viewpoint or orthodoxy, and not even realize they’re doing it. They’ll borrow things and put these together and it’s very easy to slip into this habit if you don’t think doctrinally and creedally. You don’t have any framework to do this. This is one of the reasons why I’m pushing this framework so hard.
We’ve got to get a framework in our thinking as independent fundamentalists or we’re just going to be liable to this infiltration all the time. Then the opposite extreme is what we will call the purists, and the purists are people who will take one area of teaching and one particular narrow area and make that the criteria of orthodoxy. That’s not right either. There are, what we call dividing points, within classical Christian doctrine, the deity of Christ, the physical ascension and so on, all these things are what we call keystone doctrines. And then there are doctrines that are not keystone and you’ll find independent fundamentalists often making issues out of doctrines that are not very critical when it comes to the perspective of nineteen centuries of church life. So in order to do this when we work with doctrines in the book of Hebrews I’m going to give you overviews of how this doctrine has been looked at for the history of the Church so when you go out here you won’t just be parroting somebody’s exegesis of a particular passage but you’ll know the exegesis and you’ll also know how this has been handled in other places at other times in history.
So tonight our concentration is God speaking or revelation. And if you’ll look on the worksheet our first point is that the author of Hebrews, along with every other Bible author, insists that knowledge starts with revelation and that actually all knowledge is revelation. Now that’s very, very critical; knowledge in the Bible doesn’t begin after revelation. What do we mean by this? Let’s take Adam in the Garden. Adam was spoken to by God; before Adam could study the universe Adam had to start with the revelatory framework. God gave Adam the framework and after he attained his framework then he began to know. Revelation, then, is the basis and starting point of knowledge. Those of you in the family training framework literature by now understand that human viewpoint is not ignorant, human viewpoint is rebellion against what already is known of revelation. It is man’s unconscious rebellion against what he knows God has revealed to him. This is why there never will be a person who didn’t know, can plead ignorance, at God’s throne.
Now we come to the two views of revelation, the human viewpoint and the divine viewpoint. For some of you this is going to be boring but I can’t help it, you have to know this, the two different ways of looking at revelation because sooner or later you’re going to be in a conversation with someone, you are going to use the word “revelation,” they are going to use the word “revelation” and you’re going to absolutely fail to communicate because the people with whom you’re speaking are not using the word the way you’re using it. So learn how people use the word and how they misuse the word.
First, the human viewpoint view of revelation. Other religions beside Christianity claim to be revelatory; Islam for example, Mormonism for example, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science, all of these cults and non-Christian religions speak of revelation. Therefore, what do they mean by it. Here’s what they mean by it. Human viewpoint assumes that the universe is just there and this is akin to saying, “Chance is the author.” If you push them back they’ll just say why is the universe there—well it’s just there, and this “just there-ness” of the universe is saying Chance is ultimate, and that man must start from himself to know; that is autonomy. In order to have meaning at all apostate man erects God substitutes, such as the Laws of Nature, which is idolatry. Revelation then comes from these idols, which in turn were picked by autonomous man.
Thus human viewpoint revelation ultimately depends upon man. By this we mean, first, man decided the place of the revelation; man decides the time of the revelation, it is all under man’s control. If man chooses to study then man chooses to learn something; if man doesn’t choose to study then man doesn’t learn. In other words, man is the master of his learning; man is the master of the entire learning educational process. This is the view of education held by every major school of education today, that man ultimately is in the final charge of education, so education becomes shaping the destiny of the children in his school; God is totally left out of the picture, not realizing, of course, that learning comes only as God schedules it to the human soul. But human viewpoint revelation depends upon man; man is the one who picks his god, man is the one who picks the place and time when the gods reveal themselves.
Under this, as two versions of it, point 2 and point 3, are two extremes in the human viewpoint anti-Biblical idea of revelation. Under point 2 the eastern wing of non-Christianity which you will find infiltrating today, Maharaja, the Baha’i, all of this stuff is Oriental religion and they hold basically to point 2, that the cosmos itself is God so that cosmic history unfolds revelation of God to himself and to man; God himself is learning in the process because the universe is God, it’s a pantheism, and that is the Eastern influence. The reason for the Eastern influence is they have denied Genesis 1. If you deny Genesis 1 and literal ex nihilo creation you must wind up with God as creation. Here’s what ex nihilo creation does, it makes God separate from the creation. If you deny Genesis 1 you deny the line and so then you have to make God is the creation. The only way you can keep the two separate is to hold to a literal Genesis 1. Dump Genesis 1 you wind up in the camp of the Eastern religions, always have, always will, you always must logically. This is why we are ardent in our defense of the truth of Genesis 1. Christians who play with Genesis 1 are playing with Hinduism.
The second wing, which afflicts even fundamental churches, is what we’ll call Western intellectualism. Here human viewpoint claims that man’s thoughts that are divine so that revelation occurs solely through ideas, and this is a distortion. For example, we can say God speaks; let’s take that word, “God speaks,” and if you hold to the Western idea and most of us do because we’ve been brought up in the West and we tend to think this way and so we have kind of an ingrained human viewpoint to listening to this the wrong way, we think God speaks and therefore we have ideas and we learn doctrine. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. When you speak to somebody you not only communicate truth in what you say, but you communicate truth in how you say it, don’t you? If someone listens to the tone of your voice, they watch the actions of your body accompanying what you tell them, doesn’t that add something to just the content of what you say.
So revelation is more than just the ideas,
revelation includes what we will call, to use a human term, the moods of
God. When God speaks, what kind of a
mood is He in when He speaks? What kind
of a mood was God in on
Now let’s switch to the divine viewpoint and clarify it by way of opposition. Divine viewpoint begins with the Creator/creature distinction so that three things follow; many more things follow but at least these three things follow. God was totally known to Himself before creation and thus cosmic history is a revelation only to man, not to God. In the Christian position, the Biblical position, God is not learning about Himself as the Eastern religions teach. God is not becoming more aware of Himself as the Eastern religions teach. God already was fully aware of Himself before creation; God did not need the creation in any way. The mystery, ultimately, is why did God ever bother to create at all, He didn’t need it. God did not need creation in any way whatsoever. If you hold that God needs creation then you hold to an incomplete God, but we believe in a complete God, He did not need to create. Why He created? Because He chose to, this is as far back as we can go.
The second thing that follows is that God is creator of all things, not just ideas. Thus, His revelation encompasses far more than mere ideas. It includes acts and responses. You’re dealing with a person at the other end of the line, not an IBM machine. An IBM machine can give you a fine printout at a thousand words a minute but God is not an IBM machine and He’s giving us more than just content. He’s giving us other things with the content. God is a personal God and He acts and He responds in this speaking that is mentioned. So beware, we are not just talking about doctrine, we’re talking about doctrine out of a personal God who is interested in what we do with the doctrine.
The third thing that follows from this, because God decreed all parts of history, sovereignty, He designed man in his culture to be capable of receiving verbal revelation without distortion. So it’s foolish if you’re in a class some place and they argue that we do not accept the fundamentalist dogma of inerrant Scripture because to be human is to err, and therefore the fundamentalists are claiming something for the human race that is not properly human. And our counter to that is that God has made man to be the receiver of revelation and therefore we are not claiming something that is beyond man’s created intent.
All right, all those have to do with what comes out of the divine viewpoint concept of revelation. The second point under divine viewpoint that you must be aware of is the Trinity. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are always active in every point of revelation together; don’t separate them, they are logically distinguishable but they can’t be separated spatially. You don’t have a point where God is speaking that all three persons aren’t involved. You can distinguish them in your mind but all those three persons always act together; the Trinity never acts separately, it always acts together. So the Father has planned, the Son is the content of every part, He’s not just the executer of the plan, He is the content of the plan, so the plan centers on the person of Christ from Genesis to Revelation. So this is one answer that you can infer, if you think sharply tonight, point b under 2 is ultimately the answer to what about the heathen who have never heard, because if the heathen have ever heard anything in the light of creation they must have heard something about the Son and so therefore if they heard something about the Son more information provided by a missionary to the gospel is continuous to what they’ve already heard, they’re not introducing a radically different concept than what the heathen have already seen because Christ is always the center of all revelation. And the Spirit is the One who brings every part of the revelation to pass.
Please notice something else about the order of a, b and c, and you’ll head off another heresy in our own day or not heresy but it’s a bad emphasis, and that is the glorification of the Holy Spirit. Due to neo-charismatic influences and others who accuse the Church of never having developed the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, which is ignorance because the Church has, we have a tendency to over emphasize the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit does this, the Holy Spirit does that, Holy Spirit this and Holy Ghost that. And if you look, the orthodox way of looking at the Father, Son and Spirit is that the Holy Spirit brings to pass the content of the plan, and what is the content? Christ.
So if the Holy Spirit is active, genuinely active, if you know orthodoxy, you know the doctrine of the Trinity, immediately what can you tell? If the Holy Spirit is working, who is going to be glorified, the Spirit or the Son? The Son is going to be glorified, not the Spirit; the Spirit is not given to glorify Himself, therefore don’t buy this glorifying the Holy Spirit business. It is a distortion of the Trinity, of all things, a rather central doctrine you might say. But you see here again it’s because people are not well-educated in the things of the Word of God and so they just leap off into these things, ignoring nineteen centuries of church history, nineteen centuries, both the Catholics and the Protestants have tried desperately to state in a balanced way the doctrine of the Trinity. Now in the name of spiritual progress people come raving into the 20th century and we’re going to talk about the Spirit this, the Spirit that and everything else, completely distorting the whole doctrine of the Trinity. And it’s ridiculous. The Holy Spirit, when He works, always centers His work on Christ, not Himself. There’s something radically wrong with the glorification of the Holy Spirit. Three; to use modern political terms the Holy Spirit develops a low profile.
Point 3, the divine viewpoint accepts a
literal historic comprehensive fall so that at least two things follow and
here’s where we get into some of the text for the evening. The fall causes a radical thing to
happen. The first result of the fall is
that revelation is no longer buddy-buddy, like it was in the Garden. God just
doesn’t simply trot along under the trees of
Let’s see some Scriptures to see how revelation comes in this way, that it’s a conscious theme of Scripture from beginning to end. Turn back to Exodus 20, I fill you in on this point particularly because you won’t understand why the author of Hebrews says certain things that he does in these warning passages unless we work at it for a couple of weeks, preparing ourselves for these warning passages. We’ve got to convert out of our human viewpoint and purify and purge our minds to line up with how a Hebrew of the first century would have taken these warning passages. So in three or four weeks we have got to reproduce fourteen centuries experience in Israel’s history in our souls so we’ll be prepared to read the book of Hebrews through the glasses of a Hebrew first century Christian.
Exodus
And so “they said unto Moses” this, [20] “And Moses said unto the people, Fear not; for God is come to test you, and that His fear may be before your faces, that you sin not.” Now that word “test you” in verse 20 shows that what God tries to do first is to secure our respect, not our obedience even. God is first interested in securing our respect. That is the first lesson you are going to learn in sanctification, is respect for God’s authority. And until you learn to respect God in His full authority sanctification cannot proceed. As long as we take a low flippant attitude to the Word of God we cannot be sanctification, and every time we come near the Word of God it just hardens our hearts that much more, and the next time we come up to the Word of God with our flippant attitude, it’s that much harder to listen. And then if we continue in our flippant attitude it gets harder and harder and harder to even understand what the Word of God has to say and then finally we just leave it and we drift off as Christians, we drift off because we’ve been literally driven away from the words of God by our own flippant attitude.
So the first lesson in history that God
said I put my fear before you, that when I speak, it’s out of a thick darkness,
you fallen creatures don’t come to Me, I come to you on My terms and places of
My choosing, at times of My program, but you do not just freely trip into My
presence any more, you’re excluded from Eden. That’s what the expulsion from
Let’s look further in Scripture to see this
theme of revelation to a fallen creature.
Deuteronomy 4:11, to get the context come halfway up into verse 10, when
God said, Moses is talking this way and he said God said unto me this, “Gather
Me the people together, and I will make them hear My words,” you see that, “I
will make them hear My words,” do you
know what that means? Every person at
the bottom of
Let’s turn to 2 Samuel 22:10, this is also Psalm 18:10, it doesn’t matter where you look it up, same thing. Again God appears to David, and David says in 2 Samuel 22:10, “He owed the heavens also, and came down; and darkness was under His feet. [11] And He rode upon a cherub, and did fly; and he was seen upon the wings of the wind. [12] And He made darkness pavilions around Him, dark waters, and thick clouds of the skies,” that’s how God appears, in darkness. Man cannot see except where God shows him the light. God comes to man in a cloud of darkness, surrounded, as it were, with clothes so we can’t see him. There’s a reason for this; God clothes Himself darkness that we cannot look upon Him; if we do look upon Him it’s only by His choice at certain times and places. [13, “Through the brightness before him were coals of fire kindled. [14] The LORD thundered from heaven, and the Most High uttered His voice.[15] And he sent out arrows, and scattered them; lightning, and routed them. [16] And the channels of the sea appeared; the foundations of the world were laid bare, at the rebuking of the LORD, at the blast of the breath of His nostrils.”]
Turn to Psalm 97:2, this is one of those gospel psalms, the enthronement psalms, those of you who have been here in the Psalm series you’ll notice the significance of that, this is an eschatological psalm, a psalm that looks forward in history to completion and as such a psalm notice what it says in verse 2 when it describes God as He appeared, “Clouds and darkness are round about Him; righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His throne, do you notice those attributes? Which attributes are connected with the darkness? Righteousness and justice, God when He speaks shines with His glory but the glory, so to speak, when it comes into a fallen world comes behind a cloud of darkness; the glory does not shine freely into a foreign universe, into a fallen universe. It shines only behind a cloud of thick darkness, so thick that no man can see. [3, “A fire goes before Him, and burns up His enemies round about. [4] His lightnings lightened the world, the earth saw and trembled. [5] The hills melted like wax at the presence of the LORD, at the presence of the Lord of the whole earth. [6] The heavens declare His righteousness, and all the peoples see His glory.”]
And then finally the New Testament counterpart, Matt 27:45, when our salvation is worked out; can you see the crucifixion? No you can’t. This is why in some degree these crucifixes you see are false, because the crucifix doesn’t tell you what happened on the cross. Nobody could see what happened when Christ was dying on the cross; when the work was being done it was done behind thick darkness so the eyes of fallen creatures couldn’t see, and that’s why it says in Matthew 27:45, “Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour.” God drew the blinds and He said I’m going to save you and I’m going to work a work that you’ll never understand and furthermore I’m going to make it so you’ll never understand it, I work behind closed doors. So again as fallen creatures we’re banned from looking, from gazing upon this work of God on the cross. We’re prevented from doing so because He comes in a cloud of thick darkness. And this ultimately is why, in the fall, then, this point, when God speaks He speaks on His terms. He surrounds Himself with darkness and there’s light but He lets the light shine through only at His point, not ours. That makes us have to meet Him, He gives us the calling card, we don’t send an invitation to Him.
Now this is going to have some very
interesting applications because ultimately the gospel of Jesus Christ is not
inviting Jesus into your heart. The
gospel of Jesus Christ is when the Holy Spirit, out of His thick darkness,
booms in the message into your heart.
There’s no inviting Yahweh, can you imagine them standing down at the
bottom of
So this is how God speaks into a fallen universe, there’s always this darkness around Him. Even in the book of Revelation, when John looks he almost has to be shielded from what he sees. Isaiah experiences the same thing in Isaiah 6, that God cannot be looked upon, He can speak only to creatures on His schedule.
The second thing about point b, to reach the self-blinded sinner there must be a subjective work on the inside in addition to an objective work on the outside. Not only must the historic evidences for the Christian faith be present externally but internally the Holy Spirit must boom these into the heart, must open their heart so they can see. The self-blinded sinner would remain blind, and dumb, and stupid, in the face of God’s Words, unless when God speaks the Father, Son and Holy Spirit… let’s look at this, the Son and the Holy Spirit. What has the Son done? In history He’s died on the cross, that’s the Son speaking. And by the way, you know this epistle to the Hebrews begins with God spoke through His Son, and do you realize that at no place in the text of this epistle do we have one word that Jesus ever spoke. Now isn’t that interesting, the whole epistle starts out with saying God speaks through His Son and not a word of what Jesus said is contained in this epistle. What is contained in this epistle? What Jesus did! And so the Son does, and the Holy Spirit says. He is the One that reveals and opens the eyes to what the Son does and when the Holy Spirit opens our eyes, then we see what the Son has done. But again notice, the Holy Spirit is the One who decides when and where the speaking occurs.
Now there are certain categories of revelation with which you should be familiar. The reason again is to build up to these warning passages. There are two kinds of revelation that have been distinguished down through the centuries. I emphasize down through the centuries; these are terms that have been used all the way back to the early fathers. In any good systematic theology or any well-educated approach today you will see these two terms. You ought to know what these two terms mean. One is called general or natural revelation; the other is called special revelation. All worlds rotate about how you understand these and use these two.
General or natural revelation, now there’s a certain problem with a pre-fall revelation but we’re going to ignore that in these categories tonight and make it simple. General/special: First, what is general revelation about? God, man and nature. So general revelation is about God, it’s about man and it’s about nature. What is special revelation about? God, man and nature. So special and general revelation deal with the same subjects. So special and general revelation can’t, then, be absolutely different. They’re both talking about the same thing, God, man and nature. I, if they’re both talking about the same thing then what is it that distinguishes general from special revelation?
General revelation comes out of man and nature, how they’re made; special revelation comes out from God, what God says. Whenever you have this expression, “God speaks,” you’re dealing with special revelation, not general revelation. When you have in Romans 1 God has shown us all things that we can know about Him through the things that are made, we have general revelation. What do we mean by man and nature speaking? It means that you are made a certain way, you are made with a conscience, and no matter how gross you think you can become and no matter how much you can deny the Christian faith, when you live with yourself you know you have a conscience, you know you are built to serve a right and avoid the wrong; you know this in the depths of your heart because you’re built this way; you can’t deny the way you’re built. You can try awful hard; some people pay a tremendous price for doing this; we call them insane because they ultimately pay. You can’t put down the general revelation in your soul; try it, you’ll go nuts. That’s why people do go nuts, because they try to put down God’s general revelation and God’s revelation is never put down; you don’t put it down, you put yourself down but you don’t stop God’s revelation, it goes right on anyway. Man is made the way he’s made and that speaks about both God, man and nature. It speaks of his Creator, it speaks of who he is, it speaks of what he’s supposed to do over nature, he’s built to subdue. Nature itself speaks about its Creator. Why? Because God made them and He made them to function, so general revelation speaks.
Now let’s look at category A on your worksheet. General or natural revelation includes all truth about God, man and nature, from man and nature. God’s plan is manifest or clear in the order, movement and events in the universe. Thus man can know something about himself, nature and God, period. Now the next sentence is where the effect of the fall takes place. You can’t look at general or special revelation without asking yourself, hold it, what effect does the fall have? Question here at this point, was there both general and special revelation before the fall? Yes. I’ll show you why in a moment. But after the fall something happened to general, something happens to special. What happens to general revelation? Next sentence: Due to sin, however, general revelation is suppressed, less so regarding nature, more so regarding man and most so regarding God. The closer you get to the high voltage the more reluctance there is to face it.
This explains, if you put a little note under “less so regarding nature,” this explains how non-Christian science can gain truth, that when a non-Christian scientist learns something true about the universe it’s because for that moment he hasn’t suppressed all there is to know about the universe. He can learn things about the universe. This is why your subjects, for example in school, like mathematics, physics and so on tend to have less anti-Christian bias to them that other subjects because they’re furthest removed in the scale of general revelation.
The next phrase, “more so regarding man,” that is why your classes in psychology and sociology, those kind of classes are more hostile to the Christian faith because now you’re studying parts of the universe that are getting very close to God and so man’s sin begins to pile out intellectually, and so in these disciplines like sociology and like psychology, begin to get very close to high voltage because man is made in the image of God and so man’s sin comes out in the way these whole subjects deal with the design and you won’t be at any situation before you notice it; psychology, sociology and these kind of things demonstrate quite a hostility to the Christian faith. And the reason is because they’re getting too close to the truth and man has to insulate himself from God’s holiness and therefore he tries it through creation of intellectual things. And if you’re a Christian in the classroom and you begin to articulate a Christian position into this kind of hot atmosphere, you’re threatening them, and that’s why you get hit back so hard and so fast is that you are a tremendous threat to this whole façade of insulation that has been built up to protect from the holy God. And you just come in there and every time you open your mouth you remind them of the holy God and this is why you get the strong reaction back.
And then finally the next one, “more so regarding God,” this is why courses on religion are the worst courses a Christian can take at any university because the closer you go to God the more distorted it’s going to be. And this is why classes on theology and religion will be most apostate in any university. You will meet the most vicious forms of anti-Christianity in religious courses and Bible classes in the university campus than you will at any other point on the campus. It’s the most viciously anti-Christian. And this is the fallacy of the gullible American citizens who think well, we’re going to have Bible teaching in the public schools, the Bible is literature. Don’t ever allow that; I’d rather not have the Bible mentioned once in the school than have a Bible is literature course. You open Pandora’s box, don’t ever let the public school have Bible is literature courses. Every time you get involved in that you will always have a totally anti-Christian position presented; you can’t help it in Satan’s world. The job of proclaiming the Word of God is the job of the Church, not an amateur in the high school classroom.
All right, these are things that happened to general revelation. Now special revelation includes truth about God, man and nature, from God. Please notice that it does not include just truth about God but it includes truth about man and nature too; very important because what the liberal does today is he says special revelation, when he talks about it in those terms, special revelation is just about God and everywhere in the Bible that we have statements about man or statements about nature, such as the six days, such as in man, various things about his sin and so on, these things don’t count, special revelation only has to do with God. That’s not what the Bible-believing Christian says. Special revelation includes truths about man and nature too. It’s not the central importance; it’s not the special importance of special revelation but if the Bible, as a passing remark mentions the six days, then the six days are true; if the Bible mentions dietary laws then the dietary laws are true. When God speaks He speaks truth, He doesn’t speak half truth and half falsehood.
Point two, special revelation is logical
prior to general revelation. Now watch
the next sentence. Adam needed special
revelation in order to treat the trees of the Garden rightly, not just general
revelation. Before
So special revelation is always needed in order to digest general revelation. Notice that because this sets in mind everything you will ever do in school, anything you’ll ever do in study of anything. Special revelation is needed to digest general revelation properly. You need God’s direction to study His craftsmanship. His craftsmanship is the general revelation but His directions are His special. He must tell you how to start, how to proceed, what your framework is, then after you listen to God’s Word, then you can study His creation. Application, if you study history…[tape turns]…you cannot study history by simply looking at historic documents, without listening to God’s Word in His inerrant Scripture first. That tells you the purpose of history. That tells you the start of history, that tells you the course of history, that tells you the end of history. After you have listened to the Bible then you’re prepared to study history. So special revelation always starts first. Any history course that is not predicated on the Bible is anti-Christian simply because… and it’s not a bigoted statement, it’s just the truth, that’s just the way it is, it’s anti-Christian because it’s trying to do with general revelation what can’t be done with general revelation. You need special revelation to start off. The audacity of the unbelieving man to start study of the universe without listening to God’s Word is just like Adam saying God, you don’t know what you’re talking about, let me decide which tree I should eat of when God says I tell you which tree you shall eat of. God’s Word’s speak first, then we talk about general revelation.
Point three: Special revelation consists of miracles, prophecy and Theophanies; Theophany is appearances. Those are the three parts of special revelation. Deeds, suppose we have deeds without words, suppose God just acts in history but doesn’t tell us anything. If God just got the Son crucified on the cross, do some of you know if we didn’t have any word of explanation of what the cross would be, no words of interpretation, what as a Jew could you draw, from what you know of the Old Testament, that meant? Suppose you were a Jew of the first century and these guys were around saying Messiah died on the cross, and no explanation beyond the fact that Messiah died on the cross, no word, just the act, He did on the cross. Do you know what that means? [someone says something] All right, but suppose they hadn’t got to the sophistication of seeing the God-manness of Messiah, just suppose we have Messiah dead on the cross. [someone says something] Okay, He’s a criminal before God.
That’s what the cross meant. As 20th century we wear these crucifixes and so on, and go around and the cross becomes a symbol; the cross was an embarrassment to the first century Christians because the cross meant their Messiah was a crook. That’s what it meant. That’s what the cross was saying until they added the explanation, our Messiah was a criminal, wasn’t He? Didn’t He become a criminal in the eyes of God to pay for our sins? All right, with that word of explanation, with the word added to the deed now we have revelation, but you can’t have revelation by just the act. Be careful here; liberal clergymen will talk about God’s act today; you’ll have religion courses where they talk about God’s acts in history. Don’t be impressed, God’s acts in history can’t be interpreted without God’s words in history. Both words and acts are needed, together. Now suppose we have just the words without the acts; that’s unreal; how do we ever test whether His words come true if we don’t see some works? So you have to have both acts and words together.
A fourth point that we don’t have, the application in Hebrews in special revelation is suppression, this is point four under this third point I just mentioned, when special revelation is suppressed, the result can be lethal. When special revelation is suppressed… after man has heard God speaking and then he suppresses, the results can be lethal. Let’s see it from the book of Hebrews.
Hebrews 2:3, we’re going to look at some of the warning passages; I’ll take you to five passages in the book of Hebrews to show that suppression of special revelation can be lethal. I’m doing this to give you respect for God’s spoken Word. Hebrews 2:3-4, this is why the author cries out, and this is a cry, he’s very concerned for his readers here: “How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation,” notice the “we,” he identifies himself with his readers, “How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation, which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him, [4] God also bearing them witnesses, both with signs and wonders….” Turn to Hebrews 3:7, “Wherefore, as the Holy Spirit said, Today if you will hear His voice, [8] Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness, [9] When your fathers tempted Me, proved Me, and saw My works forty years. [10] Wherefore, I was grieved with that generation, and said, They do always err in their heart, and they have not known My ways. [11] So I swore in My wrath, They shall not enter into My rest.” See God’s reactions when we suppress His words.
Hebrews 6:4, you can’t be neutral toward God’s Word, remember what we said, Hebrews is a book of exhortation; what is the feature of exhortation? You’d better not be neutral because once you’ve heard the truth you’ve decided one way or the other. Verse 4 “For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Spirit, [5] And have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, [6] If they fall away, to renew them again unto repentance, seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put Him to an open shame.” We’re going to deal with that passage in detail but tonight I want you to see obvious, whichever view you take of it, it’s a rejection and suppression of God speaking, and look at the fierce strong condemnation. You haven’t got many passages in God’s Word that is as strong as this one.
But turn to Hebrews 10:26, “For if we sin willfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remains no more sacrifice for sins. [26] But a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries. [28] He that despised Moses’ law died without mercy under two or three witnesses. [29] Of how much sorer punishment, suppose you, shall he be thought worthy, who has trodden under foot the Son of God, and has counted the blood of the covenant, with which he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and has done despite unto the Spirit of grace? [30] For we know Him that has said, Vengeance belongs unto Me, I will recompense, saith the Lord. And again, The Lord shall judge His people. [31] It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” You see why? Because they have turned against God’s Word. He’s spoken and they turned a deaf heart.
Turn to Hebrews 12:25, “See that you refuse
not him that speaks.” Think of how this
whole epistle starts, “For if they escaped not who refused him that spoke on
earth, much more shall not we escape, if we turn away from Him that speaks from
heaven. [26] Whose voice then shook the
earth;” he’s speaking of
Now do those verses suggest a theme in this epistle. This is the theme of exhortation, the fact that God’s Word is a fearful thing because you can’t protect yourself against it; once you’ve heard it you’ve damned yourself. It’s an awful thing, the Word of God, in that you can be damned by just listening to it. And this is something that is altogether missing, I think, in many fundamentalists. We come to Bible class and we go to this place and we go to that place and hear this speaker and that speaker, forgetting all the time that if we’re really in the game this is the Word of God that we’re handling, or mishandling. And if it is the Word of God and it’s not just another address but if it’s the Word of God that we’re talking about there’s going to be automatic affects in our heart over which we have no control. We can choose to ignore it but we can’t choose to avoid the results of ignoring it. These are automatic mechanisms, so to speak, set up in our soul.
The last point in the outline: Together general and special revelation presents a unified picture of God, man and nature. This means that when faith operates it always operates in confidence. Faith is confidence and the confidence is inspired by the fact that general and special revelation all hang together, that all the facts fit perfectly together and that’s the launching pad for faith. And when you can believe that in some area of life there’s nothing that can stop you because God has revealed it to your heart. How do you know that the Holy Spirit is working in your heart? When you see the pieces fall together. That’s the only test to know that God the Holy Spirit has worked in your heart, because after He’s quiet you can’t see Him work, you can’t hear Him work, you can’t detect His work in your heart. But there’s only way that when the Holy Spirit finishes the results of His work are clear. And that is the pieces fall together and you have this confidence that enjoys fellowship with God. That’s the sign the Holy Spirit has worked.
I repeat: the sign of the Holy Spirit’s work is not how you feel; it is not how many things you know. The sign of the Holy Spirit’s work is that you perceive through that cloud of thick darkness. God has shined into your heart. Remember, that’s the word that is used, God has shined. Let me show you one closing passage out of the book of Titus 3:4-5; it says in the King James, “But when” or “after the kindness and love of God, our Savior, toward man appeared, [5] Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Spirit, [6] Whom He shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ, our Savior, [7] That, being justified by His grace, we should become heirs,” now the point that he’s making there is verse 5, that inward work of the Holy Spirit. How do you know in your own life that the inward work of the Holy Spirit has occurred? That’s the message of the book of Hebrews.
The book of Hebrews, we’re going to see, is a book that is trying to pinpoint, are you sure that God’s Holy Spirit has done His work, or are you just hanging around the Christian group, or just sort of picking up their social activities, listening to their vocabulary and mimicking their vocabulary because you like their friendship, because you’re attached to some of them personally, or is it because the Holy Spirit has done His work. And the warning over and over again in the epistle to the Hebrews is beware… beware that in your social associations with believers that you’re not fooling yourself and you’re just hanging on for social reasons and not because the Holy Spirit has actually spoken. And if you are hanging on for just social reasons beware again because you have rejected God’s Word. He has spoken and you’ve turned your back, and you are being blinded systematically; you’re being weakened systematically.
Next week we’ll pursue further the doctrine of Jesus Christ, who He is.