Without a Loquacious Lord, You've No Basis to Believe God Loves You

God reiterates himself every time you relay the promise of the Gospel to another

The Old Testament assigned for the Second Sunday of Lent is God summoning the pagan, Abraham: “Now the Lord spoke to Abraham, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you...” Once again, God creates through speech.

A few years ago in an article Wall Street Journal entitled “Revelation Revised.” Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University, wrote:

“Any claim of revelation is preposterous. It presumes that God exists, that God speaks, and that all is not lost when human beings translate that speech into ordinary language.”

Stephen Prothero’s rejection of revelation reflects a skepticism which many people— many church people, in fact— share. It’s one thing to hold religious beliefs like “God is love,” to practice religious disciplines like prayer or charity, or to support the church with your gifts and your presence, but it’s another thing altogether to believe that God is a talkative God. It’s one thing to be on a spiritual journey.  It’s quite a different matter to believe that the Living God journeys to you through the Holy Spirit and by the word of God addresses you.

No doubt, Professor Prothero did not intend it as such, but those two sentences in his article are the perfect distillation of biblical faith.  As Karl Barth taught, the question the Bible answers is not, “Does God exist?” The Bible threatens us by answering a more disarming question, “What has the God who exists said? What does God speak to us?”

According to Barth, all of scripture and the entire Christian faith hang on the veracity of three little words from our text today, “And God said...”

Everything we believe as Christians follows from those three words, and if we do not believe those three words, then, as the Apostle Paul tells the Corinthians, “our faith is in vain and we are of all people the most pitiful.” These three words, “And God said,” are the grounds on which the Apostle Paul can insist that, like Abraham, we are justified not by what we do, but by what we trust. It’s not that what you do for your neighbor is unimportant nor is it that the Risen Christ will fail to enlist you in his Kingdom work. Rather, Paul’s point in Romans 4 is that the God, who is able “to speak into existence the things that do not exist,” has spoken to us a promise. “I will be your God and you will be my people,” a promise made flesh for us in Jesus Christ, therefore there is no other means for us to take hold of a promise, except by trusting it.

“I’m going to do this,” God said, leaving us no other response but to believe it or not believe it.

The only basis on which Paul can proclaim that faith is reckoned to us as righteousness is the veracity of those three words at the heart of biblical Christianity, “And God said...”

You don’t have to believe those three words, but you can’t kid yourself that the entire Christian faith does not hang upon them.

Your justification is by belief, not behavior, because the Living God is a loquacious God who speaks to us a promise.

The syntax of salvation begins with “And God said...”

Think about it— without a loquacious God, you have no basis whatsoever to believe (much less, bear witness to such a belief) that God loves you. You have no way of knowing that Almighty God loves you unless God has really truly said so.

I remember—

Years ago, a worshipper came up to me after service and introduced himself. “Hi, I’m John Bobo,” he said. “I’m new here, and I want to talk to you about transferring my membership to this congregation.”

“Really? What makes you want to join this church?”

“The preaching,” he replied.

“Oh,” I said, as I felt my head swell a little bigger. “You think the preaching’s pretty good, do you?” And I elbowed the choir director standing next to me.

“Good? No, you’re not very good, sorry. But, you do preach like you really believe God said all this stuff. That’s what I want. That’s harder to find in the church than you might guess.”

I’ve never forgotten his judgment.