2: THE UNKNOWN GOD

“Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”^[1]John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., ed. John T. McNeill, trans, Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), p. 35. These words from the opening paragraph of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion mark the point to which the preceding chapter has brought us, but they also introduce a new problem. If it is true that wisdom consists in the “knowledge of God and of ourselves,” we are at once led to ask, “But who has such knowledge? Who truly knows God or knows himself?” If we are honest, we must admit that as long as we are left to ourselves and our own abilities, the only possible answer is “No one.” Left to ourselves, not one of us truly knows God. Nor do we know ourselves adequately.

What is the trouble? Clearly, we do not know ourselves because we have first failed to know God. But why don’t we know God? Is he unknowable? Is the fault his, or is it ours? Obviously, it is more appealing to us to blame God. But before we jump to that conclusion we should be conscious of what is involved. If the fault is ours, although that fact in itself may be uncomfortable, then at least it can be corrected, for God can do anything. He can intervene. On the other hand, if the fault is God’s (or, as we might prefer to say, if the fault is in the very nature of things), then nothing at all can be done. The key to knowledge will inevitably elude us, and life is absurd.

In The Dust of Death Os Guinness makes this point by describing a comedy skit performed by the German comedian Karl Vallentin. In this routine the comic comes onto a stage illuminated only by one small circle of light. He paces around and around this circle with a worried face. He is searching for something. After a while a policeman joins him and asks what he has lost. “I’ve lost the key to my house,” Vallentin answers. The policeman joins the hunt, but the search eventually appears useless.

“Are you sure you lost it here?” asks the policeman.

“Oh no,” says Vallentin, pointing to a dark corner. “It was over there.”

“Then why are you looking here?”

“There’s no light over there,” answers the comic.^[2]Os Guinness, The Dust of Death, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1973), p. 148.

If there is no God or if there is a God but the failure to know him is God’s fault, then the search for knowledge is like the search of the German comedian. Where the search should be made, there is no light; and where there is light there is no point in searching. But is this the case? The Bible declares that the problem is not God’s but ours. Therefore, the problem is salvable, it is salvable because God can take, and actually has taken, steps to reveal himself to us, thereby providing us with the missing key to knowledge.

Awareness of God

We must begin with the problem, however: strange as it may sound, the person who does not know God, still in some lesser but valid sense, does know him yet represses that knowledge.

Here we must go back to the distinction between an “awareness” of God and truly “knowing God.” Knowing God is entering into a knowledge of our deep spiritual need and of God’s provision for that need, and then coming to trust and reverence God. Awareness of God is merely the sense that there is a God and that he deserves to be obeyed and worshiped. Men and women do not naturally know, obey or worship God. But they do have an awareness of him.

This brings us to some of the most important words ever recorded for the benefit of humanity —from the apostle Paul’s letter to the newly established church in Rome. They contain the apostle’s first thesis in his greatest exposition of Christian doctrine.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been dearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse; for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles. (Rom. 1:18-23)

Here we see three important ideas. First, the wrath of God is displayed against the natural man. Second, man has willfully rejected God. Third, this rejection has taken place in spite of a natural awareness of God possessed by each person.

Twofold Revelation

The third point, the natural awareness of God possessed by every person, is the necessary place to begin. For here we see that, although no one naturally knows God, the failure we have in knowing God is not God’s fault, God has given us a twofold revelation of himself, and we alt have this revelation.

The first part is the revelation of God in nature. Paul’s argument may be rephrased as saying that all that can be known about God by the natural man has been revealed in nature. Of course, we must acknowledge that this is limited knowledge. In fact, Paul defines it as just two things: God’s eternal power and his deity. But although such knowledge is limited, it is sufficient to remove excuse if any person fails to move on from it to seek God fully. In contemporary speech the phrase “eternal power” could be reduced to the word supremeness, and “deity” could be changed to being. Paul is saying then that there is ample and entirely convincing evidence in nature of a Supreme Being. God exists, and human beings know it. That is the argument. When men and women subsequently refuse to acknowledge and worship God, as they do, the fault is not in a lack of evidence but in their irrational and resolute determination not to know him.

The Old Testament speaks of the clear revelation of God in nature, “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world” (Ps. 19:1-4). The point is that the revelation of God in nature is sufficient to convince anyone of God’s existence and power, if the individual will have it.

There is a second part to God’s self-revelation. We might call it an internal revelation or, at least, the internal capacity for receiving one. No one in his or her natural state has actually come to know God in the full biblical sense.

But each person has been given the capacity for receiving the natural revelation. Paul is talking about this capacity when he says that “what can be known about God is plain to them” (Rom. 1:19).

Suppose that you are driving down the street and come to a sign that says, “Detour—Turn Left.” But you ignore this and drive on. It happens that there is a police officer present, who then stops you and begins to write out a ticket. What excuse might you have? You can argue that you didn’t see the sign. But that makes no difference. As long as you are driving the car, the responsibility for seeing the sign and obeying it is yours. Further, you are responsible if, having ignored the sign, you recklessly plunge on over a cliff and destroy both yourself and your passengers.

Paul is saying, first, there is a sign. It is the revelation of God in nature. Second, you have “vision.” lf you choose to ignore the sign, and so court disaster, the guilt is your own. In fact, the judgment of God (like that of the police officer) comes, not because you didn’t or couldn’t know God, but because being aware of God you nevertheless refused to acknowledge him as God. Paul writes, “So they are without excuse; for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him” (Rom. 1:20-21).

Paul is not saying that there is enough evidence about God in nature so that the scientist, who carefully probes nature’s mysteries, can be aware of him. He is not saying that the sign is there but hidden, that we are only able to find it if we look carefully. Paul is saying that the sign is plain. It is a billboard. No one, no matter how weak-minded or insignificant, can be excused for missing it. There is enough evidence of God in a flower to lead a child as well as a scientist to worship him. There is sufficient evidence in a tree, a pebble, a grain of sand, a fingerprint, to make us glorify God and thank him. This is the way to knowledge. But people will not do this. They substitute nature or parts of nature for God and find their hearts darkened.

Calvin gives this conclusion: “But although we lack the natural ability to mount up unto the pure and clear knowledge of God, all excuse is cut off because the fault of dullness is within us. And, indeed, we are not allowed thus to pretend ignorance without our conscience itself always convicting us of both baseness and ingratitude.”^[3]Calvin, Institutes, pp. 68-69.

Rejection of God

When Calvin speaks of baseness and ingratitude he brings us to the second point of Paul’s argument in Romans: the fact that all have rejected God in spite of God’s revelation of himself in nature. However, in developing this point in Romans (v. 18) Paul also shows the nature of our rejection and why it has taken place.

The key to this universal rejection of God is found in the phrase “who by their wickedness suppress the truth.” In Greek the word translated “suppress” is katechein, which means “hold,” “hold fast,” “keep,” “take,” “hold back,” “restrain” or “repress.” In a positive sense the word is used to mean holding to whatever is good. Paul speaks of “holding fast the word of life” (Phil. 2:16). In a negative sense it is used to mean wrongly suppressing something or holding it down. Thus the newer translations of the Bible speak in Romans of those who “suppress the truth by their wickedness” (NIV), “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (NASB), and “keep truth imprisoned in their wickedness” (JB). The NIV English Bible says that such people are “stifling” the truth. This, then, is the nature of the problem. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against human beings, not because they have simply and perhaps carelessly overlooked the truth, but rather because they have deliberately and wickedly repressed whatever, deep in their hearts, they know about God.

R.C. Sproul has called this argument “the heart of Paul’s psychology of atheism,” ^[4]R.C. Sproul, The Psychology of Atheism, (Minneapolis: Bethany Fellowship, 1974), p. 59. pointing out it is here that human guilt lies. Sufficient knowledge has been given to all people to cause them to turn from themselves and their own way of life to God and so at least to begin to seek him. But this knowledge, like a great spring, has been pressed down. Now the spring threatens to leap up and demolish the views and lifestyle of the one repressing it. So that person holds it down, suppressing the truth.

Why do we do this? If it is true, as pointed out in the last chapter, that the knowledge of God leads to our chief good and if, as we have just said, the beginning of that knowledge is already present to us, then why do we repress it? Would we not welcome such truth and seek to draw it out? Are people simply irrational at this point? Or is Paul’s view faulty?

Paul is not wrong. Men and women do suppress truth. But their reason for doing so is that they do not like the truth about God. They do not like the God to which the truth leads them.

Notice that Paul begins these verses from Romans by saying that the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all “ungodliness and wickedness of men.” Ungodliness has a variety of meanings. Here the meaning is not so much that human beings are not like God (though that is true) but that in addition they are in a state of opposition to God in his godly nature. God is sovereign, but people do not like his sovereignty. They do not want to acknowledge that there is One who rightly exercises rule over them. God is holy, but men and women do not like his holiness. His holiness calls our own sinfulness into question. God is all-knowing, but we do not like his knowledge. We do not like a God who sees into the dark recesses of our hearts and knows us intimately. Nearly everything that can be known about God is repugnant to the natural man in one way or another. So he represses the evidence that would lead him in the direction of a true knowledge of God.

The second word is “wickedness.” Everything about God is repugnant to the natural man, but the dominant cause of this repugnance is God’s righteousness. God is holy, but people are unholy. People are unrighteous, and they like their unrighteousness. Consequently they do not wish to know a God who would press moral claims upon them. To know God would require change. In other words, the refusal to know God is based not so much on intellectual causes as on moral ones.

Rejecting Knowledge of God

At this point we have come to the true source of the human problem. Men and women have rejected the beginnings of the knowledge of God for moral and psychological reasons. But they find it impossible to stop there. They have rejected God; but they are still God’s creatures and have a need for God (or something like him) in their intellectual and moral make-up. Being unwilling to know the true God and being unable to do without him, they invent substitute gods to take his place. These gods may be the sophisticated scientific laws of our culture, the gods and goddesses of the Greek and Roman worlds or the depraved, bestial images of paganism.

The universality of religion on this planet is not due to men and women being seekers after God, as some have argued. Rather it is because they will not have God, yet need something to take God’s place.

The process of rejection is a three-stage process well known to contemporary psychologists: trauma, repression and substitution. In his analysis of atheism, Sproul shows that confrontation with the true God shocks and injures people. It is traumatic. Consequently, we repress what we know. “There is no trauma if the eyes are forever closed so that no light penetrates. But the eyes close in reaction to the shock of the light—after the pain has been experienced.”^[5]Ibid., p. 75. The important point here is that the knowledge of God, though repressed, is not destroyed. It remains intact, though deeply buried in the subconscious. The lack is therefore felt, and substitution of “that which is not God” for the true God follows.

God’s Wrath

At last, then, we arrive at Paul’s first statement, having taken the three main points of the passage in reverse order: the wrath of God is justly revealed against human beings because they suppressed the knowledge of God that was plain to them.

Some people are deeply disturbed by the teaching that the great God of the universe expresses wrath. They understand that God is a God of love, as indeed he is, and cannot see how God can possess the one characteristic as well as the other. In this they fail either to understand or to know God. A God who does not have wrath against sin is a deformed or crippled God. He lacks something. God is perfect in his love. That is true. But God is also perfect in his wrath which, as Paul tells us in Romans, is “revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men.”

In any logical presentation of doctrine, the wrath of God is the first truth we have to learn about him. Why didn’t Paul begin by saying that the love of God is revealed from heaven? It is not that God is not love, for he is, as Paul will show later. Rather, it is so we will recognize our deep spiritual need and be prepared to receive the knowledge of God in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior, where alone we can receive it. If men and women come to God boasting of their alleged spiritual knowledge, God will declare them to be ignorant. If they come to God boasting of their own achievements, God cannot and will not receive them. But if they come humbly, recognizing that they indeed have rejected what has been clearly revealed about God in nature, that they are without excuse, that God’s wrath justly hangs over them, then God will work in their lives. He will show that he has already made a way for removing the wrath due them, that Jesus has borne it, and that the way is now open for their growth in both the love and knowledge of God which is salvation.