The God Who Spoke—Speaks

Author: Michael Gott

What are we to understand by the title of this essay?  It is this; that we strongly hold the conviction that in the Bible the God of the ages long ago once spoke to humans, but in this moment of time, now speaks!

We strongly believe that His word is truth without any mixture of error, but that is not enough.  If we as evangelists stop there, we are in trouble.  Why?  Because it means that God has nothing to say to us today.  The cynical response is, “That’s well and good that God once spoke, but what does He have to say to our world now?”

There is the story of a spirited debate on a university campus.  The conservative Christian argued for the Bible’s being the word of God.  The agnostic student replied, “I could not care less about that—I want to know what is God saying now, not what God said thousands of years ago!”  It is a point to be reckoned with, and we must reply.

The agnostic was saying, “This God who once spoke, is he now like bin Laden?  Is he alive or dead?  If he is alive but does not speak, then he is as good as dead!”

If we are to powerfully speak to today’s world, we must not give the impression that He, the God of the ages, no longer speaks, that He is now mute and completely silent!  We must not say to people, “Come hear me read from an old book to report to you what the ancient book says.”  That is not enough.
 
The danger is it makes the Bible like a well-preserved relic or fossil under glass in a museum.

If we make that mistake, it causes our preaching to smell with the odor of mold from an old, musty library.  It makes it seem that preaching is a faint and pathetic echo from ancient Jewish history.

We shout, absolutely not!  There is a dynamic about the Bible that cannot be truthfully made of any other book.  The Bible is unique because the God who spoke speaks!

The Bible, then, is living!  It is the Word alive for people alive from a God alive!  John Stott creates the balance by saying we must be concerned with “the Bible’s ‘yesterdays’ (its historical origins) and about its ‘todays’ (its contemporary relevance.’”

This is very clear when you read the Scripture with eyes of faith.  Several passages could be quoted as examples.  I choose only one to make my point.  When John wrote to the churches in Revelation 3 and 4, each message ends with the same ringing final challenge.  The entreaty goes, “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the church.”

Notice, why did not John say, “What the Spirit has said to the churches” since it was written and was already recorded and the book was in circulation among the churches?  Why did he speak in the present, continuous tense?  Since it was already written, should it not logically be in the past tense?  That is, “what the Spirit has already said to the church."

This is remarkable and noteworthy, for we have hit on something dynamically important.
 
Several times John says, “the Spirit was now speaking.”  When once we have a grasp on it—it means the God who spoke yesterday speaks today by what he said yesterday!  This shows that the writer John of Patmos believed that God was now speaking by what he spoke.  Therefore, there is nothing old or outdated about the Bible because it is alive.  God makes His living word as timely, as relevant, as contemporary as the headlines of this morning’s paper; but it is more important than this morning’s paper because we can totally believe it!

Another way of saying it is to say, because the Bible is the God-breathed word, it’s forever as timely as it is true, and as alive as the God who spoke it.

We believe God has said all He is going to say.  Revelation is complete.  There are no lost books and no important P.S.’s still to come later.  He has said it once and for all.  As the great hymn writer indicated:

What more can He say
Than to you He hath said?

That is, of course, gloriously true.  But we do not stop there; we say boldly—God still speaks through what He has already spoken!  What God has spoken has been written down and remains a perfectly preserved written record.  But on the other hand, God now continuously speaks what He once spoke.  What a wonder!

Scripture is far more than an ancient collection of old proverbs, wise sayings, and comments of patriarchs and prophets, apostles, and disciples who lived 2,000 years ago.  Scripture is the living Word.
 
Hebrews 3:15 has that famous verse, “Today if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts . . .”  The undeniable tone of the verse is, God is now speaking today!  The implication is today God is making His appeal as powerfully as it was made centuries before when the psalm or the book of Hebrews was written.  So the word of God is not some ancient outdated religious relic but alive and speaking today—contemporary truth, and it addresses us with powerful freshness.

Dr. J. I. Packer says it well.  “He teaches us not by fresh disclosures of hitherto unknown truth, like those whereby the apostles were taught, but by enabling us . . . to recognize . . . and bow to the divine realities before us.”  This has been called various names; inner witness, illumination, or even enlightenment.  Like Samuel in the temple we must say, "Speak [now], for thy servant heareth [now]” (I Samuel 3:10).

Therefore, we cannot lose the excitement of having a fresh word from the living God to our world today.  We are holding in our hands the very living words of the living God.

“When we tell you this, we do not use words of human wisdom.  We speak words given to us by the Spirit, using the Spirit’s words to explain spiritual truths.” (I Corinthians 2:13, Living Bible)  Yes, indeed, God’s words through the mouths and pens of men of former generations, but now His spirit is making them as alive as the God we love and serve, through us as we stand today and “preach the word.”

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