Human beings routinely reveal themselves to one another, making themselves known to each other using words and actions. Actually, people really know one another only to the extent that they reveal themselves to one another in the context of some kind of relationship. Without conversation, talking to one another, and without standing in some sort of relationship to one another, people could not effectively communicate or interact and would remain essentially unknown to each other and as unknown in fact sub-human. Our character and identity as persons, not least our psychological and emotional health, is bound up in our relationships with other persons, and these relationships develop through willed interaction — at its best, freely chosen interaction — based on the use of speech and language with accompanying patterns of  behaviour.

God’s revelation too involves making known his character and expectations through speech and action, as well as God choosing, being willing, and deciding voluntarily to do this. According to Scripture, we have knowledge of God from a genuinely Divine origin, because, and only because, God graciously allows and gives himself to us as the object of our knowledge. God is known only through God, through God’s initiative, through God’s free and willing movement in making himself known. Otherwise, truth about God, facts concerning his nature and intentions would remain unknown and actually unknowable. As personal communication between people brings personal knowledge from one to another, personal knowledge is what the revelation of God achieves. Without God’s personal communication we would be without personal knowledge of him.

Due to the character of God there are, however, three critical distinctions between the human and Divine realms of personal knowledge.

God Is Not Immediately Accessible

Whilst the God of the Bible is absolutely personal, he is not immediately accessible or available to human beings in the way in which people usually are to one another. God is holy — fundamentally different, other, transcendent, majestic, pure loving fellowship. God is above us in a manner that is unavailable to normal avenues of investigation, unless, of course, he chooses to make himself available and present to us and for us. Yet God is not merely beyond us because he is more than us. Because God is uncreated, of an absolutely different order of reality to created humanity, he cannot be found or observed or reached directly, as it were, through independent inquiry, intuition, or reflection. God is also Spirit — infinitely personal and powerful, yet unbodily, immaterial, non-physical — and so may not be observed, researched, tested, or experimented upon through regular patterns of enquiry. True knowledge of God does not come from us; it does not emerge by thinking about it a lot and thereby eventually coming up with its content. True knowledge of God comes to us; it appears from the outside.¹‘God’s speech and action takes place in, with, and under created media and historical processes [yet remains] alien, other, coming to the world from the outside’ (Armin Wenz, cited in Webster, The Domain of the Word, 13). As creatures, we are in every way dependent upon God our Creator, and particularly upon God taking the initiative to introduce himself. People need to be told by God that he is, who he is, what is given, and what is required.

Otherwise, God remains ‘unknown’ (Acts 17:23). Clearly in the Bible there is a considerable tension between God’s remoteness and God’s nearness, between God’s transcendence and God’s immanence, between God’s incomprehensibility and God’s accommodation to us.²‘The prophets and the apostles believe more deeply in God’s transcendence of and independence from the world than the most ardent deists and more deeply in God’s immanence than the most ardent pantheists. No religion faces, welcomes, and proclaims this paradox as does the Christian faith. No religion is more convinced simultaneously of God’s radical difference from creatures and God’s radical identification with them’ (Michael Horton, Pilgrim Theology, 30). But the point is a relatively simple one: that ‘God has full knowledge of Himself,’ that he ‘is the fitting witness concerning himself,’ and that he is One ‘whom we can know only through His utterances.’³Hilary of Poitiers, The Trinity, 1.18, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2:9, 45.

With God, People Are Not Neutral

For God to be holy and spiritual does not necessarily entail his being unseeable or untouchable. God is currently invisible to us and he is at the moment hidden from us, but on moral and relational grounds. He has absented himself and withdrawn from us in our fallenness. We are blind to God, and as Jesus pointed out, deliberately blind to our blindness (John 9:39-41). Furthermore, in crucial respects God is against us. For our part, we are sinful, alienated from and at enmity with God, at odds, hostile to him. Although we may think that we want to know God, although we may genuinely believe that we seek him and ask for him, Scripture presents the reality being much otherwise. Actually, it maintains the reverse (Isa 65:1-3). To engage with us, not only must God condescend. He must reveal himself despite our resistance. Indeed, in making himself known, God must overcome our disinterest, setting aside our resentment, obstinacy, and rebellion. For God to unveil himself is an act of mercy, borne of sheer kindness. Disclosure by God is gratuitous, unnecessary, certainly undeserved, and — being rooted in the character of God — prompted by holy love. Indeed, God’s holy love is arguably the fundamental truth that God’s revelation conveys.

The Knowledge God Brings Is of Universal Significance

When God communicates in self-revelation, he communicates matters of untold weight with implications for all and ramifications for everyone, without exception. However, wherever, and whenever God does declare himself, the importance of what he reveals is unparalleled. The significance of God making himself known is totally unmatched and unsurpassed. Knowing God is of unrivalled consequence, a matter of incomparable magnitude. The substance of God’s revelation has all-round impact. Its content is global. There is, quite simply, no-one for whom God’s self-revelation is superfluous. Across the board, when the LORD declares his thoughts (Amos 4:13), all people are implicated. And the implications of disclosure by God are not brief and temporary, but permanent and eternal.

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• 1
  ‘God’s speech and action takes place in, with, and under created media and historical processes [yet remains] alien, other, coming to the world from the outside’ (Armin Wenz, cited in Webster, The Domain of the Word, 13).
• 2
  ‘The prophets and the apostles believe more deeply in God’s transcendence of and independence from the world than the most ardent deists and more deeply in God’s immanence than the most ardent pantheists. No religion faces, welcomes, and proclaims this paradox as does the Christian faith. No religion is more convinced simultaneously of God’s radical difference from creatures and God’s radical identification with them’ (Michael Horton, Pilgrim Theology, 30).
• 3
  Hilary of Poitiers, The Trinity, 1.18, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2:9, 45.