When I pray I always seem to thank God for revealing himself to us in creation, Scripture, and Christ because I am blown away that God reveals himself in ways that makes doubting his existence and who he is, for me, impossible. I freely admit I find it difficult to believe in an invisible reality, an invisible God, and an invisible life after death. At the same time, I find it impossible to believe in any of the alternatives to Christianity, especially materialism (matter is all there is). As I daily confront this difficulty, I’m always brought back to the idea of God’s revelation. Thankfully, he has not left us benighted, i.e., in a state of moral or intellectual darkness, or unenlightened. Without his revelation that is exactly what we would be, without light. And without light we run into things we can’t see, and it hurts. We wonder, why didn’t anybody tell us that was there. And God says, I did! So, what has this to do with progressive revelation?
It’s very early morning, dark, but the sun is creeping near the horizon and light is imperceptibly starting to spread in the sky. Stars, streetlights, and houses offer only so much illumination; things remain indistinct. As the first rays of the sun begin to color, we see more of what’s there; slowly, imperceptibly everything comes into focus. Trees begin to take shape. Leaves, grass, dirt, flowers, and bushes become clear, and at some point you can see . . . . everything! That is how God becomes real to us, slowly, imperceptibly, progressively, as the Son rises, more and more of him becomes real to us. As C.S. Lewis put it so typically well:
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
The metaphor is perfect. The rising sun is as the risen Son. He, as it, brings definition to everything. Without either is darkness, coldness, confusion, and death. With sun and Son is light, and warmth, and life. Without all you have is puzzle pieces never quite fitting because there is no big picture; all the little pieces have no meaning bigger than themselves, and ultimate hope, meaning, and purpose always remain elusive. Not to mention we’re all gonna die, and Christianity is the only thing that makes sense of that too. Progressive revelation can be seen in three ways, theological, personal, and societal.
In theological terms, progressive revelation means God slowly but surely revealed himself to his people and the world. In other words, God in his infinite wisdom decided humanity couldn’t handle a total data dump, but needed to get knowledge about him and his plans, slowly, progressively. Jesus would have meant nothing to humanity apart from the entire 2,000 plus year history of Israel. When he rose from the dead and said the entire Old Testament is about him, it made perfect sense; until then, everyone had missed all the clues. We get further progression as the apostles tried to figure out what all this meant, and God spoke through them to give us our New Testament. But that was only the beginning. God, also in his infinite wisdom, didn’t give us a textbook to make everything absolutely clear. So the church in all its permutations for 2,000 years has grappled with what the Bible means theologically.
In personal terms, progressive revelation is kind of obvious. God also doesn’t do a data dump in our hearts and minds when the Holy Spirit transforms us from lost sinners into saved sinners, and his children. The progression of our growth in Christ and our relationship with the Triune God, known in theological terms as sanctification, is multifaceted. And progression often feels and looks like regression; the three steps forward two steps back can often seem like three steps forward, ten steps back. I often think of this as the pain of sanctification. Through it all if we are faithful to seek him, he will work in us and make himself more and more real to us; transformation is his work, not ours.
Finally, there is a societal or civilizational progressive revelation. In Western civilization post-Constantine to about 1,600, God was an unproblematic and undebatable fact of existence. As the so called Enlightenment gained steam through the 17th and 18th centuries, God became more problematic and debatable, and by the second half of the 20th century when God was not declared dead, he could be safely ignored. As the 20th century opened, through human ingenuity, science, and technology, most people thought mankind could conquer the world; no problem was too difficult to solve. Finally, what Satan told Eve in the garden, that man would be like God, was coming true—until it wasn’t.
The hubris led to claims where godhood didn’t seem so far fetched, but in the 20th century God slowly revealed to mankind he was God and they most certainly were not. Arguably, this revelation started with the sinking of Titanic in April, 1912, a ship many thought unsinkable. The shattering of Western culture’s self image was just getting started. A little over two years later The Great War exploded across Europe, and the most educated and prosperous people in the world were slaughtering one another in unimaginable numbers. Einstein’s theory of General Relativity in 1915 blew up Newton’s mechanistic universe, and space and time were now relative. Then the Great Depression, and “the war to end all wars” led to a second world war more deadly and destructive than the first. Communism added massively to the death toll, and it was apparent man wasn’t doing such a good job being God.
Through the 20th century God continued to reveal himself in the explosion of scientific knowledge, and increasingly in the 21st. It is becoming more clear every day that materialism cannot explain the universe and everything, or anything, in it. All agree the Big Bang means the universe had a beginning, and Genesis 1 is more plausible than ever. It is obvious to all but the most stubborn atheist that the universe is infinitely too complex and fine tuned to be a product of blind, material processes. Over the last three hundred years, God did a bit of a head fake, allowing man to think he wasn’t there, and slowly showing us all it is impossible to deny his existence. Some still will, but it is progressively becoming apparent that what Paul said in Romans 1:20 it true, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so they [mankind] are without excuse.” Praise be to God he has revealed himself to us, progressively, in creation, Scripture, and ultimately in Christ!
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