Thinking about God

A. W. Tozer, in his landmark Knowledge of the Holy, writes: "What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us."  He adds, "Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God.  For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like."

Understanding God is one of the great concerns of humanity.  It stretches the very bounds of languages and thought for man to endeavor to comprehend God.  To be sure, the vastness of the topic pushes the discussion into the realm of metaphor; we can only describe what God is like, never come to full comprehension of who He actually is.

There is also a fundamental obstacle to humanity understanding God.  This obstacle is based on the limitations of man as they meet the unlimited infinitude of God.  The equation is uneven; finitude cannot ascend to know infinitude because all of the categories of finite thought are incapable to address that which lies outside of its own faculties.  The only way for finite man to know anything about the Infinite One is for Him to initiate that knowledge, to reveal Himself willingly.  

In this sense, the revelation of God is a self-revelatory, as in, it is God's revelation of His self.  And considering that God does not need to reveal Himself to Himself, this self-revelation is intentional, for the purpose of God revealing Himself to man.  This is what revelation is all about; and God has revealed Himself: in the nature of creation, in His Holy Word of Scripture, and, ultimately, in the incarnation of His Son Jesus.

Faith, as it were, is not at the onset concerned with the content of that revelation but more that the revelation has taken place at all.  That is to say that the need for introductory faith is only in as much as humanity believes that God exists in Himself and that in order for us to know anything about Him at all, He is the one who must reveal that message.  We rely on Him for any information about Him.  

So even in the exercise of our cognitive faculties in the pursuit of Him the human is, in fact, a revelation of God unto himself.  This recognition that the abilities of reason and of thought are, in themselves, a revelation of God unto mankind is but an introduction, a beginning in the reception of God's self-revelation to mankind, which culminates in the person of Jesus.  But praise be to God that He has revealed Himself at all!