--The other side of yesterday’s discussion about God’s mystery is God’s knowability.
--Sometimes, we are baffled by God, and the more we consider the gulfs of capacity (knowledge, power, goodness) that separate us from God, we can become almost pessimistic about the possibility of knowing anything about God.
--But without undoing the mysteriousness of God, we must also declare that God wants very deeply to be known and has made us for precisely this purpose.
--And in a certain sense, trusting that God wants to be known is itself an act of faith that motivates us to try to learn about Him because we believe He did give us the capacity to do so.
So how can we know God?
--Well, one way is by studying the world He gave us, since the artwork always says volumes about the artist. That’s in fact, a big reason why any artist does artwork: to be known.
--For instance, one of the reasons we even bother studying nature (and doing science) is because we believe there is a natural order or law to the universe that we can discern. And if God is the giver or maker of that orderly nature, then we know that He, Himself is an orderly God. So we study anything about Him we can find because He reveals Himself to be discoverable. A God who would make this world is an orderly God, a knowable God.
--This study of the natural world reaches its pinnacle when we start to study the human body and our relationships because we are told that we were the highest point of the created order (“very good”) for precisely this reason of revealing God’s knowable features.
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