This morning I went with Luke, Diane and her father to the pediatrician for Luke’s two-year-old checkup. He is an amazingly patient boy, especially for being two. It helped that the doctor was quite helpful, personable, chatty and looked a lot like Diane’s dad (similar build, mustache, glasses), someone with whom Luke is very close. Diane left the room for a minute and her father and I stayed with Luke as he got his shot for the day. It was over quickly; he had three big cries and that was it. We went to Chik-fil-a afterward and all was well. It was a good morning, and an encouraging morning. The doctor was full of good advice about Luke’s developmental progress and for Diane as a parent and me as a possibly prospective parent. Of course we depend on God for everything–our continued health, the future, all blessings and sustenance–but others certainly encourage us when they speak genuinely out of their knowledge, as the pediatrician did.<\/p>\n
The theme of Coffee Theology last night was the knowability<\/i> of God. We addressed the fact we know of<\/i> Him through the universe He created (“general revelation”), but that the Bible (“special revelation”) is necessary to come to a specific knowledge of His character, attributes, ourselves and His plan for us and the world. The juxtaposition of the facts that He is<\/i> the Creator of everything that we see and experience and so much more than we know, and<\/i> that He is a personal God Who we can know and have close fellowship with–it just…astounds me.<\/p>\n
We touched on the difference between the concepts of absolute truth and complete knowledge. When we reference absolutes and absolute truth as believers, it in no way means that we presume to have complete “truth” or complete knowledge. There are many absolutes in the Bible, unequivocal statements and principles (no matter your translation or interpretation), and we can certainly come to a knowledge of truth through the Word, but even having complete knowledge of just one<\/i> attribute of God is impossible for our finite minds. That said, in the Bible we have all necessary<\/i> knowledge for life and after life, everything that God purposed for us to know and that we need<\/i> to know (it is “complete” in that sense), but it is far from comprehensive.<\/p>\n
Indeed, as an object that exists in finite time and space, in the midst of His creation, it by definition cannot explain Him, an infinite Being, fully. That in itself amazes me. As Brett mentioned last night, every time I read the Word there is something new, a new insight about a passage or a verse that the Holy Spirit reveals to me, even if I’ve read that passage fifty times before. Rock-solid believers and Biblical scholars immerse themselves in the Word their whole lives and still discover new things every day. If something so “incomplete” and finite in its ability to describe God is so surpassingly rich, how many more orders of magnitude must He Himself be?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This morning I went with Luke, Diane and her father to the pediatrician for Luke’s two-year-old checkup. He is an amazingly patient boy, especially for being two. It helped that the doctor was quite helpful, personable, chatty and looked a lot like Diane’s dad (similar build, mustache, glasses), someone with whom Luke is very close. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1099"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1099\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}