![]() And Jesus says that the great benefit of eternal life, his salvation from sin, is the benefit of knowing God:Īnd this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. Adam came alive when God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (Gen. This is true both of our natural lives and our spiritual lives. But creatures receive great benefits from knowing God indeed, they cannot live without knowing him, for he is the author of life. One cannot know God exhaustively unless one is God. The creatures of the world cannot know God exhaustively. Because self-revelation is his nature, he wants all his creatures to know him. It comes also to the world he has created, and especially to the intelligent creatures of that world: angels and human beings. Moreover, God reveals himself to himself, each Trinitarian person to the other two, and his revelation extends beyond his own being. There are hundreds of references to the divine word in Scripture, in both testaments, as the means by which God reveals himself. So the existence of the Word did not begin with Jesus’s incarnation. John identifies this Word with Jesus Christ in John 1:14. In his eternal nature, he has the power to speak (the “Word”), and that power to speak is who he is: his Word is eternally with him, and his Word is his very nature. God is not only eternal, holy, all-powerful, and so on, but he expresses and shares those qualities through something like human speech. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. One way Scripture describes God’s exhaustive self-knowledge is by saying that he is a speaking God or, simply, that he is Word: Much about God is mysterious to us, but not to him. In human beings, there are hidden depths in our nature so that we cannot fully understand our own actions and motives. The persons of the Trinity know one another exhaustively, and each understands the thoughts and actions of the others. The doctrine of the Trinity underscores this fact, for the biblical God is not only personal but a society of persons, existing eternally in mutual love and deference (John 17). The God of the Bible is a personal being, in contrast with the gods of many other religions and philosophies who are abstract or impersonal forces. ![]()
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