Mijoy2:
If God revealed himself to a much greater degree?
My question is not meant to call into light the degree of which he has revealed Himself. I’m hoping not to get answers of the variety;
the beauty of the creation, love, objective good etc. I don’t dispute these issues, these revelations. Yet they can, and have been argued since the beginning of time as to whether they are God’s revelation or, from the atheist perspective, a by product of evolution.
My question, admittedly seemingly silly (yet I ask with all seriousness) why hasn’t he revealed Himself in a indisputable manner? I realize there are hardcore atheists who would dispute nearly everything but I fail to see what the secret is. Why can’t (or more to the point; won’t) God reveal Himself in a manner such as moving Mount Everest to a different country, alphabetically every 10 years.
The obvious answer is He calls us to faith. My ignorance asks why? Why does He ask us to believe with a limited degree of revelation? It would not disable our free will. We would still be able to accept or reject Him. He could still read our hearts.
Frankly, why the mystery? What is the purpose?
ISTM that God can reveal Himself only if the recipient of the revelation can receive it.
To receive, we must be capable of receiving. That is the difficulty.
Suppose that God spoke Gujarati
- a revelation in Gujarati might be OK for a Gujarati-speaker: it would not be any good to speakers of Tamil, Urdu, or Hindi. Or to anyone else. IOW - a revelation which cannot be received by those to whom it is given, is no revelation in its effects.
As C.S. Lewis asks, “How shall we see God face to face, until we have faces ?” Christians “are being transformed from one degree of glory into another” - Christ dwells in them, and they in Him. They are being given faces - the Saints in Heaven have them. But how can those who do not have this transforming Friendship, be transformed by it ? To have it, they need to have what they do not have: they’re in a bind. That is why - presumably - the initiative in conversion always rests with God. Because God is transcendent, which we are not.
Not only that, but only God converts. God is able to enter into all the depths of the human heart - or rather, is in them already and always. Our arguments can’t go deep enough, they cannot enter into all the depths of human nature - but God can. And the reason they can’t go deep enough, is for the same reason that external marvels like shifting mountains are not going to be enough: they don’t, in themselves, affect the very core and heart of man; that is what needs to be converted. Unless man’s heart is made able to receive the Christ Whom, of himself, he cannot receive, he cannot receive Him. Let Him only be received - and those who do receive Him, will be on their way to having faces.
Why doesn’t God
force His way into our hearts ? Because it would destroy us. He has made us to be his sons, for the honour of His Son; and if we are to be sons (and daughters of course !) then we can’t be treated like robots. Our wills are free, because so is Christ’s. If anyone is intended to be remade according to the likeness of Christ - then his will has to have the same freedom. To force us, would be to ruin us. The obedience of Christ was a wholly free obedience, all the more real for being free: which means it was not forced. It had to be free, if it was to be an expression of His Love.
In becoming one of us, Christ put aside the full splendour of His Godhead: the Incarnation is a voluntary “dumbing-down” of the full Glory of God. He is God - but in a manner made endurable to us; so that He could be received by us.
The Incarnation, shows us how God works in revelation.
The Incarnation and what followed, is not a rather poor effort by a God Who is, when it comes to it, really not all that great: He is so great, that it is hard to see (from
this end, man’s end) what He could have done that He did not.
It’s not what God does that needs changing; the problem is with the (intended) recipients. People cannot believe, what they are unwilling to believe that they might find fit to believe ##
