The God Who Speaks

Today's Scripture

Hebrews 1:1-2 — "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world."

Deuteronomy 29:29 — "The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law."

Isaiah 55:10-11 — "For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth... so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it."

The Big Idea

If God had never spoken, every idea about him — yours, mine, every philosopher's — would be a guess. The Bible's first and most staggering claim is that we are not guessing. God has talked. Revelation is the old word for this: God pulling back the curtain and telling us what we could never have figured out on our own.

Reflection

The problem with guessing

Imagine a new neighbor moves in next door and never says a word. Ever. You could still learn things about them. The lawn gets mowed, so they are alive and reasonably organized. Packages from a hospital supply company arrive, so maybe they work in medicine. Classical music drifts through the wall, so they have taste.

But notice what you could never learn. Their name. What they think of you. Whether they would help you at 2 a.m. if your kitchen caught fire. Whether they would want to. Watching tells you that someone is there. Only speaking tells you who they are.

Now scale that up to God. If the Maker of everything stayed silent, we could stare at the universe forever and still know almost nothing that matters about him. Is he kind? Is he angry with us? Does he notice us at all? Every religion, every philosophy, every late-night dorm-room theory would just be humans guessing at a neighbor who never talks.

And the guesses do not agree. Humanity's attempts to describe the silent neighbor have produced thousands of contradictory portraits: a distant clockmaker, an angry tyrant, a cosmic force with no face, a committee of squabbling gods. They cannot all be right. That is what guessing produces. If we are ever going to know the truth about God, the information has to come from his side of the wall.

The philosopher and missionary Francis Schaeffer spent his life with people paralyzed by exactly that fear — that the universe is silent. His answer was the title of one of his books: God is there, and he is not silent.

"God has spoken in a linguistic propositional form, truth concerning Himself and truth concerning man, history and the universe." — Francis Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent

"Linguistic propositional form" is a professor's way of saying something simple: God used words. Real sentences, about real things — himself, us, history, the world. Not vague vibes. Not a feeling you have to squint to interpret. Words.

That is what Deuteronomy 29:29 celebrates: "The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever." Notice both halves. God has not told us everything — there are still secret things, and that should keep us humble. But what he has revealed, he has handed over as a permanent gift. It belongs to us. To our kids. Forever.

A God who has been talking all along

Open the Bible almost anywhere and you find the same surprising scene: God talking. He speaks creation into being. He calls to Adam in the garden. He gives Moses words on a mountain. He wakes a boy named Samuel in the night, and the old priest Eli teaches the boy how to answer: 1 Samuel 3:10 — "And the LORD came and stood, calling as at other times, 'Samuel! Samuel!' And Samuel said, 'Speak, for your servant hears.'"

That little prayer — Speak, for your servant hears — may be the most basic prayer in the Bible. It assumes the one thing our culture doubts: that God is a speaker, not a statue.

A.W. Tozer, a pastor who wrote constantly about the presence of God, said the whole question of Bible reading turns on this:

"The Bible will never be a living Book to us until we are convinced that God is articulate in His universe." — A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God

"Articulate" just means able to put things into words. If God is a silent force, the Bible is a museum piece — interesting, old, dead. But if God speaks, then this book is a live wire.

Psalm 19 says God has actually been broadcasting on two channels at once. The first channel is the sky: "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech" (Psalm 19:1-2). The second channel is Scripture: "The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple" (Psalm 19:7). One psalm, two halves — stars, then Scripture. Tomorrow we will spend a whole day on why we need both halves. For now, just take in the claim: the God of the galaxies is also the God of the sentences.

Words that actually do things

Here is where God's speech stops being like ours. When I say "be quiet" to a barking dog, results vary. When God speaks, things happen.

Isaiah 55:10-11 — "For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout... so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose."

Rain does not give the ground a lecture about growing. Rain makes things grow. God says his word works the same way — it does not just inform you; it lands on you and changes what grows in you. People who have read the Bible for decades will tell you this is exactly their experience. The book does things to them.

Think about how strange that is. You can read a physics textbook and remain exactly the person you were, just better informed. But people who sit under this book for years report something different: courage they did not manufacture, comfort that arrived on schedule, sins they finally got free of. The word, like rain, soaks in and grows things.

That is why John Wesley — an Oxford scholar fluent in the classics, a man who had read everything — wrote this in the preface to his sermons:

"I want to know one thing, the way to heaven; how to land safe on that happy shore. God Himself has condescended to teach the way: for this very end He came from heaven. He hath written it down in a book. O give me that book! At any price, give me the book of God!" — John Wesley, Preface to Sermons on Several Occasions

Wesley called himself homo unius libri — "a man of one book." Not because he stopped reading other books (he never did), but because only one book carried words from the other side.

And the Bible warns us not to take those words for granted. Through the prophet Amos, God describes the worst disaster that can hit a people — and it is not war or drought: Amos 8:11 — "'Behold, the days are coming,' declares the Lord GOD, 'when I will send a famine on the land — not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD.'" A famine of hearing. Silence from heaven is a judgment. Speech from heaven is mercy. Most of us own multiple Bibles and treat them like furniture; Amos would call that famine in the middle of a feast.

The final word is a Person

Go back to where we started. Hebrews 1:1-2 says God spoke "at many times and in many ways" — through prophets, dreams, laws, songs. But the sentence is building to something: "in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son."

God's last and loudest word is not a paragraph. It is a Person. Jesus is what God has to say. Everything before him in the Bible is the run-up; everything after him is the echo. When you want to know what God thinks of sick people, watch Jesus touch the leper. When you want to know what God thinks of your failures, listen to him with Peter on the beach. When you want to know how far God's love will go, count the hours on the cross.

That is why this book exists at all — not to make us religious experts, but to introduce us to someone. John 17:3 — "And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent."

J.I. Packer opens his most famous book by hammering this home:

"What were we made for? To know God. What aim should we set ourselves in life? To know God. What is the 'eternal life' that Jesus gives? Knowledge of God." — J.I. Packer, Knowing God

And Packer is precise about how that knowing starts. Not with our spiritual talent. With God's talking:

"God has spoken to man, and the Bible is his Word, given to us to make us wise unto salvation." — J.I. Packer, 'Fundamentalism' and the Word of God

Here is the gospel hiding inside today's topic. A silent God would leave us doing all the work — climbing, guessing, earning, hoping we got it right. The speaking God does the opposite. He comes down. He initiates. He says your name first, the way he said Samuel's. Augustine looked back on his own conversion and realized he had not found God by being clever; God had simply gotten loud:

"You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness." — Augustine, Confessions

You did not start this conversation. You cannot even take credit for being interested — the fact that you are reading a devotional about God's word is itself evidence that he has been calling. The only question left is Samuel's question: will you answer, "Speak, for your servant hears"?

Going Deeper

Take five minutes and write down three questions about God that no human being could ever answer by guessing — questions about his character, his feelings toward you, his plans. Keep the list somewhere you will see it this week. As you read each day's Scriptures, watch for the moments when God answers one of your three questions directly. You may be surprised how few of them he has left secret.