To avoid being conformed to the world we must also understand the doctrine of revelation. The God who exists has revealed Himself. Do you remember how Francis Schaeffer put it in the title of one of his books? He called it, He Is There and He Is Not Silent.1 That is exactly the point. God is there, and He has not kept Himself hidden from us. He has revealed Himself in nature, in history and especially in the Scriptures.
That God has spoken and that God’s word to us can be trusted has always been the conviction of the church, at least until relatively modern times. Today the truthfulness of the Bible has been challenged but with disastrous results. For without a sure word from God all words are equally valid, and Christianity is neither more certain nor compelling than any other merely human word or philosophy.
But notice this: If God has spoken, there will always be a certain hardness about the Christian faith and Christians. I do not mean that we will be hard on others or insensitive to them. But I do mean that there will be a certain unyielding quality to our convictions.
For one thing, we will insist upon truth and will not bow to the notion, however strongly it is pressed upon us, that “that’s just your opinion.”
Another thing the doctrine of revelation will mean for us is that we will not back down or compromise on moral issues. You know how it is whenever you speak out against some particularly bad act. People are likely to attack you personally, saying things like, “You’d do the same thing if you were in her situation” or “Do you think you’re better than he is?” We must not be put off by such attacks. Our response should be something like this: “I wasn’t talking about what I would do if I were in her shoes. I’m a sinner too. I might have acted much worse. I would probably have failed sooner. I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about what is right, and I think that is what we need to talk about. None of us is ever going to do better than we are doing unless we talk about it and decide what’s right to do.”
Cheating, because everybody else does it? Promiscuity, because that is the modern way of life and it is nobody’s business but our own? Abortion, because the law allows it? Divorce, because it seems the better option? “What the secular mind is ill-equipped to grasp is that the Christian faith leaves Christians with no choice at all on many matters of this kind,” writes Blamires.2 We are people under God’s authority, and that authority is expressed for us in the Bible.
1Francis A. Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1972).
2Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think? (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Books, 1978), 141. Original edition 1963.