Welcome to A Better Bible Study Podcast. These are the notes for the fifteenth episode of our Bible study series called  “The Gospel and Spiritual Growth.†In this episode, we talk about the revelatory implications of the Gospel -the things that the gospel reveals to us Christians.

We are happy to be able to share with you this online Bible study. Our hope is that you might find it useful in your everyday walk as a Christian. We are a group of friends from different congregations of the church of Christ. We publish this free Bible study because we want to have more in-depth adult bible studies available to our brethren online.

 

Revelatory implications

The last tier of implications that we come to understand through the study of the Gospel is called “revelatory†because that is what the Bible indicates. Most of the  things that the gospel reveals to us, that we believe, are invisible and intangible. This is why science criticizes us. The majority of what we accept and proclaim is invisible, intangible and non-empirical. Science attacks us particularly in these terms. This is where they seek to create a divide between science and Christianity.

As we progressed through the  19th, 20th and now have entered into the 21st century , our brethren  in the US (at least) have regressed in spiritual understanding. We accept these invisible tenets but don’t really believe. Instead, our doctrinal emphases focus on legality. This has lead to the slow breakdown of our unity.  We continually shrink our focus until it is in a box that is so small that Christ cannot really fit into it.

 

Invisible reality

 

Hearing is important. It fits into the picture of how we come to obey the Gospel. It is a working component in how we grow up in all aspects into Christ. If we do not understand hearing or that we ,Christians, are equipped to discern the revealed Biblical truths, it will difficult to accept that the  reality of God is not discernable by human faculty.

 

Understanding of the invisible reality is not obtained through the usual human facilities. Our usual means of figuring out what is true involves an exercise in intellect that can be linear, logical or mathematical. There is nothing wrong with this. We can learn many things about our environment using logic and our intellect. However, understanding the realities of God, require more than just mental effort. The knowledge that comes from God, which we cannot deny, isn’t proven by formula or equation.

 

Today scientists are seeking something that they cannot see. An example of this is in the field of particle physics. Christians have been doing that for a long time. There are concepts that science seeks ,which are not yet proven true but cannot be proven to be untrue because doing that is absurd. Examples of such concepts are eternity and infinity applied to space. These are undeniable yet it cannot be proven.

 

Paul refers to this kind of thinking in his letter to the Church of Christ in Corinth. This is knowledge that is inarticulate knowledge. It cannot be described. It is an undeniable yet improbable state of affairs. Paul speaks about this in Romans. The human mind that is not equipped in Christ is a faculty arrested. It cannot go beyond the barrier of human reasoning. Paul calls this the wisdom of the world. It is limited and cannot penetrate the true and genuine realities of God ,who is spirit.

Another kind of  faculty has to be implanted in Christians. Some other eye must be opened so that we can see beyond the limit of logically determined or empirically verifiable worldly realities.

Susan Lange, a non-Christian author wrote a book. In it ,she wrote the words “Most new discoveries are suddenly seen things that were always there. A new idea is a light that illuminates presences, which simply had no form for us before the light fell on them.†People call these “epiphaniesâ€.

This is very much like what we read in the New Testament.