Revelation -- Surprise, Reveals

Without revelation people run wild, but one who keeps the law will be happy. -- Proverbs 29:18

Man can discover many things. After all Adam ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. I would have thought we could discover the law. Isn’t that what law is all about, right and wrong? Isn’t it, as the materialist says, simply a matter of how to get along well in community?

The law, which is a foundational revelation, serves two purposes. The first and obvious purpose is to restrain the natural man, the flesh.

They want to be teachers of the law, although they don’t understand what they are saying or what they are insisting on. Now we know the law is good, provided one uses it legitimately. We know that the law is not meant for a righteous person, but for the lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and the sinful, for the unholy and irreverent, for those who kill their fathers and mothers, for murderers, for the sexually immoral, and homosexuals, for kidnappers, liars, perjurers, and for whatever else is contrary to sound teaching based on the glorious gospel of the blessed God that was entrusted to me. -- 1 Timothy 1:7-11

Paul gives us a scary recital of wickedness. People are not intrinsically moral; we need the law to rein in the impulses that would rip civilization apart. We also know that under the best of conditions those impulses, though restrained, are lurking just below the surface. We have been "enlightened" relative to many who, at the beginning of the 20th Century, thought the world could be free of war and conflict. Utopian schemes have failed from the Kibbutz to hippie communes to Communism. It might be reassuring to speak of the inherent goodness of man but you will lose the farm betting on it.

Those who define evil in terms of behavior seem to miss this point. Hatred is evil even if it is never expressed in action. Jesus equated hatred with murder and lust with adultery. The materialist dismisses this idea, arguing, perhaps, that it is only dangerous to hate because one might act on it, or that it is bad for digestion. I'll stick with Jesus on this one. I may be from down on the farm but I know how the cows come home.

After corralling the flesh, the second purpose of revelation is to nourish the spirit. Logos is the interface for knowing God and having His strength enter our spirit. (The written word is sort of like a UNIX command line. The Word, Jesus, is more like a GUI.)

For a long time I was what you might call an influential person in whatever local church I attended. I was willing to work, I could speak effectively, I gave money, and I was a legalist. I thought that restraining the flesh was the primary thing. I wanted better sinners -- as silly as that sounds. When I did wrong, I repented, but I remained, even by my own standards, basically unchanged. Despite the fact that I was going to church every time the doors were opened, I was no closer to God than I had been sitting on my deck twenty years earlier when I had realized He was real and I needed to live differently.

Of course I was living differently on the outside. The law had done its work. The wickedness was under control most of the time. What wasn’t different was my heart. Jesus said that out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks. So what if, under a little pressure, the mouth speaks vicious hatred and vileness? I concluded that I had a heart problem. I needed to take the next step, to move from being a man of the flesh with reasonably good behavior to being a man of the spirit, really alive and happy.

It hasn’t been easy and I’m not too sure I’m making much progress. I do know, at least, that revelation does not end with merely being good, that transformation is possible, and even to be expected. Perhaps I am finally on the right road.