Very Good.
The Limited Nature of Revelation
When I speak of revelation, I am speaking of the Bible as the exclusive written representation of the mind of God given to us by the Almighty about himself. What I mean by limited is that God has not revealed everything to us about himself, Deuteronomy 29:29 and 1Corintheans 2:9-10. What he has revealed linguistically is found only within the Bible. Revelation is limited because of the limited capacity of the human mind to comprehend things it cannot envision and because of the inability of human language to explain things of the non-natural world. Revelation about God is very often anthropomorphic. This is because man can only understand that with which he has an experiential frame of reference. In order for God to reveal himself in scripture, he uses human language to present himself to us in terms with which we are all familiar and to which each of us can relate based on our own individual experiences. For example, in his relationship to man God speaks of himself as father, friend, shepherd, master, judge, king, and husband. He speaks of such physical traits as hair, wings, thigh, hand, arm, heart, and bosom. He speaks of character traits such as love, knowledge, wisdom, hate, will, anger, mercy, tenderness, and compassion. We are all familiar with these terms and can relate to them based on our own experiences, but only to a limited degree. We can only understand these terms to the degree that each of us experience them at the personal level. This means that each of us will have developed different levels of understanding about each of these concepts. Regardless of one’s level of understanding of these terms, we can never fully understand them to the degree that they relate to God.
The Struggle of Human Intelligence
In an effort to conceptualize God, man has posed such questions as, where did God come from, how big is God, how long is eternity, or can God create a rock so big that he cannot lift it? These and other such questions attempt to understand God within the confines of time and space. Since man draws upon comparisons to understand things in this world, he quite naturally tries to understand God in the same way. In the absence of revelation, he can do nothing else. Man feels that he must be able to qualify and quantify everything in order to understand and categorize it. The mind of the skeptic may find it difficult to accept the reality of something that cannot be proven empirically. In the struggle of the human mind to explain the nature of God, man has insisted upon measuring God through the process of natural comparisons. Since God stands outside of man’s ability to rationalize, it is impossible to conceptualize God in terms of time and space. Since we have nothing in our experience with which to compare God or eternity, these questions can add nothing to our understanding of God. God cannot be confined to time or space nor defined by any human metric. These are parameters of strictly linear measurements and can tell us nothing of the unseen world.