In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth
Genesis 1:1
What is it about the being of God that makes self-unveiling a fitting expression of who He is? Have you ever wondered that? It isn’t just that God creates, nor the why question of His creating. The question of why God created almost begs the answer of something He lacked or needed. Very few would claim this. The question is often addressed through the person of God, and that’s the exact way I want to approach this as well. I prefer the question of what it is about God that would make Him creating something as a fitting expression of Himself. God’s actions are revelations of who God is, and what God is like. Therefore, in my estimation, it seems that we should probe in that direction.
The secondary questions that arise from the first are threefold:
What does it mean for God to reveal Himself at all?
What does creation make possible that revelation then fulfills?
To whom, or to what, is God unveiled?
Revelation is the unveiling of a present God; God making Himself genuinely knowable within the reality He creates. If communion requires knowability, then revelation is its epistemic condition. The statements to come later in the Bible such as “From the least to the greatest they shall all know Me,” Jeremiah 31:34, or, “This is eternal life: that they may know You,” John 17:3, and the many more that could be cited, reflect the same disclosure of a God who can be known, and even wants to be known. I, therefore, increasingly suspect that divine self-revelation is not merely another action God chooses to perform, but an expression of a divine ontology that is relational and self-communicating.
By the time that Genesis 1:1 has finished, we know something about God. God has not even spoken yet, but we know something of Him. He created. Which makes Him creator and creating a part of His nature. As the Scripture says, God cannot lie. God cannot act as something that He is not. This is not a restriction imposed upon God. Falsehood is simply incompatible with who God is. I believe this principle applies more broadly: Whatever genuinely proceeds from God must bear some truthful correspondence to the God from whom it proceeds. From the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.
There is the caveat that just because God reveals Himself does not necessitate that it is full revelation, nor that it can’t be misinterpreted or misunderstood. But, when God acts, God becomes manifest. I’ve heard it implied, whether directly or indirectly, that revelation works as God possessing information, God communicates that information, and then humans now know facts about God. Biblical unveiling appears more fundamental than that. It manifests itself as God becoming available to encounter and know. The emphasis is not on the information communicated, but on the One becoming known. Revelation is personal before it is propositional, even though it may eventually include propositions.
Regarding the interpretation of revelation, it seems to be locked within the wisdom of God that personal exposure and walk with god is what gives proper understanding.
The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom. To depart from evil is understanding.
Job 28:28
The Lord shares His counsel with those who fear Him and makes His covenant known.
Psalm 25:14
By this we know that we have come to know Him: If we keep His commandments.
1 John 2:3
I understand more than the ancients, because I keep Your precepts. I have restrained my feet from every evil way, that I may keep Your word. I have not departed from Your judgments, for You Yourself have taught me. How sweet are Your words to my taste, sweeter than honey in my mouth! Through your precepts I get understanding; therefore I hate every false way.
Psalm 119:100-105
And then I will declare to them, “I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!”
Matthew 7:23
There is distinction between unveiling and perception. Hosea 4:6 speaks harshly to they who know the words and yet do not obey them. The covenantal language of Exodus through Deuteronomy is lathered in this concept. Jeremiah 2:8 indicts those who handle the law but do not know the Lord. Just because we see, read, and handle that which has been revealed does not mean that we inevitably have the perception of the God who manifested Himself. Even Christ Jesus our Lord had made very direct and extreme charges against the religious leaders of His day that while God was manifest before them through the Son, those who deeply knew the Scriptures more than anyone else around them failed to recognize the God they claimed to know and worship standing right in front of them. When God made Himself manifest in flesh and blood, they crucified Him.
Revelation does not mean universally recognized. Nor does manifested mean correctly interpreted. Revelation establishes genuine availability to knowledge. Perception concerns the creature’s apprehension of that unveiling.
The heavens declare the glory of God…
Psalm 19:1
The heavens are not evidence left behind by an absent manufacturer. They, themselves, declare. Creation itself is portrayed as communicative. How can creation genuinely manifest its Creator? Creation becomes a medium of manifestation, because it proceeds from God’s action, bearing truthful correspondence to the One acting. Creation is a reality within which its Creator can be encountered. God is not inferred from behind the cosmos, but present within the reality He has made, and becomes manifest through His relation to it. That makes creation itself a sphere of encounter.
Where creation makes creaturely relation possible, revelation make communion possible. Or, more precisely, revelation is the epistemic condition of communion. You cannot commune with that which you cannot know. A distant God is not a worship-able God. It is a construct of our own imagining; an attempt at communicating God without having His self-revelation and communication present and active to us. I’ve heard a man say, “Idols are man writ large.” How can we conceive of which we have no external basis upon that perception? We are left to our own abilities and imagining, even with the Scriptures themselves. You can turn Jesus into an idol just as much as your television or Buddha statues.
This brings us back to the original question: What must God be like for self-unveiling to proceed from His actions at all? My previous post helps shed some light. If God is increasingly being understood as self-communicating life whose relational expression is love, then revelation is not an unrelated Divine attribute. It may be another dimension of that same ontology. The God whose life communicates itself is consequently knowable. Self-communication contains the possibility of self-disclosure.
God’s transcendence does not mean inaccessible isolation or far away unknowability. It doesn’t mean outside of our ability or beyond what our brains can understand. Claiming the verse, “His ways are higher than our ways,” does not mean what it has often been quoted and declared to mean. The context of the verse takes us straightway back into knowing Him is to know His commandments, and to love Him, and to be obedient to Him, and to fear Him. His ways are higher than our ways in the sense that when we have reduced Him down to merely the Scriptural witness and blind obedience to it, then we have reduced God Himself from being known to being followed.
If God is love, and love describes Divine life relationally, then genuine relation involves some degree of self-disclosure. Love that could never become knowable, intimately and truly knowable, could never become communion. What I’m suggesting is that the relational movement of Divine life naturally contains the possibility of being known by another. Revelation is therefore fitting to love. Communion involves giving oneself to be known. Jesus’ rebuke at the end of the age is that, “I never knew you,” and not, “You never knew me.”
God does not need an audience. His act of creation is not from some lack in Himself. Rather, I believe that His creating is a revelation of a Divine overflow of the love that reveals itself. Revelation is cosmic in scope. Human beings behold and know. Creation moans for the revelation of the sons of God. Angelic beings look into divine works. Paul says that God’s manifold wisdom becomes known through the Church to the principalities and powers of the air (Ephesians 3:10). Revelation is not simply God toward individual human minds. It participates in something more cosmic. God unveils Himself throughout the created order according to the capacities of those who receive Him.
Within the Divine life itself, Scripture portrays relational communication: Father, Son, Spirit; receiving, sending, hearing, and making known. God’s self-communication is not foreign to even the Divine relationality or triunity. Divine life is characterized by communication and manifestation toward all in all, appropriate to the relation and capacity of the recipient. This makes mystery itself even a revelation. The God who clothes Himself in darkness, hides His face, and retracts His presence is itself another act of His self-communicating. Where communion is lacking, God is still revealing Himself.
Genesis has given us one verse. Yet, already, God exists in relation to time. God creates. God creates a differentiated heaven-earth reality. God orders the creation through distinction. And, in doing so, God has made Himself manifest. Before God has spoken a narrated word, creation has already begun to unveil its Creator. God acts, and His action bears witness to the One acting. The heavens can therefore declare His glory not because creation functions merely as evidence for an absent deity, but because the God who creates is present to what He has made and has made Himself genuinely knowable within it. Revelation is not something added later to creation. It is the beginning of communion.
The first verse of Scripture does not merely introduce a Creator. It introduces a God who refuses to remain unknowable.
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