Today's passage of Scripture is Exodus 34:5-7 which reads: "And the Lord descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty..."

Today's words from a theologian are from Jakob Bohme. He said: "If men would as fervently seek after love and righteousness as they do after opinions, there would be no strife on earth, and we should be as children of one father, and should need no law or ordinance. For God is not served by any law, but only by obedience."

We can know God for one reason only: God has made himself known. If God had not chosen to do this, we could not have known him. That is, God is not accessible through our senses, our reason, our experience, or any other means apart from his willingness to be accessible. Our knowledge of God is absolutely dependent upon divine revelation; and not only is he willing to be known, he desires to be known.

The term revelation comes from the Greek word apocalypsis (also the title of the New Testament’s last book), which means an “uncovering†or “revealing†of something that was previously unknown. The doctrine of revelation, then, means we can know God because he has chosen to make himself and his works known.

There are two kinds of divine revelation: general and specific.

General revelation refers to knowledge of God that is available to all people of all times and all places. Such knowledge comes in three ways.

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There is no consensus concerning the methodology of Old Testament theology. Over the past two centuries there has been considerable diversity in the development of an Old Testament theology. The following are some of the approaches that have been used: The Dogmatic-Didactic Method, The Genetic-Progressive Method, and The Cross-Section Method.

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