Yesterday in class we were discussing Augustine of Hippo who is claimed as a church father by both the Protestants and the Catholics.  One of his teachings was that God was a perfect spiritual being who can be understood through insight and vision which were products of man’s contemplation.

I asked my students (there are only five in my class and they are all graduating in March): Is this true or false?

Well, as is common for students, they either blinked uncomprehending or they were stunned.  So I asked, what does Augustine mean?

• God is a Spirit (He has no visible body parts therefore He cannot be explored by men using the five senses.  We cannot see God, we cannot hear God, we cannot smell, taste or touch God.)
• Can men, using the power of their minds, find God and understand him? God is infinite and our minds are finite.  According to A.W. Tozer, if finite man were to try to understand the infinite God, it would be like taking the sea and squeezing it into a cup.  It cannot be.
• If God can be known only by insight and vision, then he would be unknown to men who have had no education, no intelligence and no higher mental experiences. Is this the God of the Bible?  Certainly not because the God of the Bible is the “God with us.”

So I asked again, What does the Bible say?

• The Bible says, “No man seeketh after God.”  That is to say, it is not in the nature or inclination of man to look for God, to feel after Him or to even spend one minute searching for God.  This just isn’t man’s priority. And even if we try by our self to find God, we cannot really find Him unless He seeks us first.
• And why does not man seek after God?  It is because God is righteous and man is not.  Man cannot abide the holy righteousness of God simply because man is a sinner.  The Bible says, “There is none righteous, no not one… They are all gone out of the way.”
• Then, too, the Bible says that the “god of this world hath blinding the eyes of them which believe not.”  Man is incapable of looking for God because man is blind to spiritual things.

So how can we know God?  How can we ever know God?

• The Bible itself has an answer: It is found in 2 Corinthians 4:6: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
• It is the Bible’s truth that God can only be known through his Son Jesus Christ.  He is the express image of God: like Father, like Son.
• Jesus himself said in John 6:44: “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him.”  This means that we can only know God if the grace of God has already started working in our hearts and in our minds to draw us to God so that by the time we find God, we realize that God has been looking for us all this time and we have been hiding from him as though we can; just like Adam who tried to hide from God.

The next question I asked was, “How does God draw us to himself?”  How does God draw us to his Son Jesus Christ? How can we believe that Jesus Christ is who he says he is?

• This is the work of the Holy Spirit whose ministry is to “guide us into all truth.”  The Holy Spirit leads us, pleads with us and works on us that we may know Jesus Christ.
• The Holy Spirit does this through the word of God.  David says “The entrance of thy words giveth light.”
• The Holy Spirit uses the gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news of the death, the burial and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  This is power of God unto salvation.
• The Holy Spirit uses men who preach the gospel; men who are sent to bring the gospel to those who sit in darkness.

My challenge was:  you are one of those men who have been called to bring this gospel.

• You are in a unique position to bring this gospel because you were also once blind but now you see God through the face of Jesus Christ.
• You were once lost but you have been found by the grace of God and by the truth of God in Jesus Christ.
• And who are you for God to go out of His way to seek you out, to send His Holy Spirit to follow you around, to whisper to you and lead you to people who will sow the seed of the Word of God in your mind and water that seed until the day it brought forth fruit in faith?
• Only by grace you have been saved by the faith of Jesus Christ.  That faith you exercised was not yours by nature.  No sinful man can have faith.  That faith is a gift of God to you, nurtured through all those years until the time was ripe and once you hear the call to trust Jesus Christ, that He is who He says He is: He is the Savior, you believed.
• And it dawns on you, God had indeed chosen you.  He knew beforehand that when you hear the gospel, you would believe, so He made sure that you heard it, and you believed.

WHO ARE WE THAT GOD SENT HIS SON TO BE MADE FLESH; TO DECLARE TO US THE FATHER; TO DIE ON THE CROSS AND TO RISE AGAIN FROM THE DEAD TO SAVE US?

By the time the period ended, all my students (including the teacher) were in tears. Those were tears of worship for we felt small and we felt God to be so big.  We were put in our rightful place: of joy and awe. Joy that God sought us out though we were unworthy; awe that the God who sought us out is a God so intimately interested in our insignificant lives.  There is, indeed, no room for boasting.  We seek and find God because He sought us and found us first.