Knowledge about God – about how He is and who He is – ought to teach us two things: respect, and more respect. (You will also hear this sort of respect referred to as ‘fear.’ What is meant by this is a sort of deep respect – it’s a type of fear, but without the foreboding.) Above and beyond that, our knowledge of God shows us that we should look to God for every good thing that we seek, and when we receive good things, to properly acknowledge that they come from God. How can our thoughts about God come to us unless we realize that we are made by Him ? As His creation, we have an obligation and an debt of obedience – even for our own lives – to Him. Whatever we do, any of the glory of it belongs to Him.

Following from that, if we don’t in turn honor God through a life of service to Him, we have become wicked and ungrateful. God’s will ought to be, for us, the law of our lives. To repeat: We cannot understand God correctly unless we understand that he is the source and origin of every good thing. This alone should be enough to compel us to be deeply loyal to Him and to trust Him, if not for the fact that our sinful nature seduces our minds away from seeking Him.

A person who desires God doesn’t sit around thinking about any ‘god’ they please – they think instead about the one true God. And in thinking about Him, a person who desires God doesn’t make God out to be who they want God to be; rather, they find delight in the adventure of discovering how God reveals Himself to us. This adventure of discovering God is a guided journey, one in which we are listening for His will and taking care to journey along the path the He has set out for us. If we recognize the path of the journey, we recognize the one who carved it, and we trust that it is a sturdy and protective path that we can travel on without fear.

Suppose that along the way of this adventure towards discovering God we encounter opposition or suddenly realize that we’re missing something vital. Not to worry! We know to look to God for help. We know that God is good and full of mercy – therefore, we can have perfect trust in Him. In his kindness and love, God will provide for exactly what we need.

A person who desires God acknowledges that he is Lord and Father, and as such, God deserves the respect that an elder and person of authority should be given. The person who desires God intentionally and thoughtfully obeys God and looks for ways to advance His glory. And also, because the person who desires God recognizes that part of God’s role is also to judge righteously, they keep God’s judgment in mind and are inspired by respect (that deep respect that people also call fear) to restrain themselves from coming upon the wrong side of that judgment. But please understand that it is fear and respect – not terror –that commend obedience to God. It’s not a terror that shrinks down in its seats and tries to hide (as if it were possible to hide from God anyway!). No, it’s a recognition that God’s love means that as much as he blesses us, he must always, like any good parent, punish wickedness. The person who desires God truly recognizes this – both the eternal glory of the people who honor God as well as the punishment of those who are not are equally part of God’s greater glory. And so, the person who desires God does their best to keep from sinning, not because they’re scared and afraid of God, but because they love their Father God and acknowledge Him as the ruler of this world. Even if there were no such thing as hell, the thought of merely offending God would still be enough to cause us to shudder.

And so, this is what true religion is: It is deep faith in God joined together with a healthy respect of Him – a respect that compels us to honor and worship God. And know this most of all: Everybody has a vague and general respect for God, but very few honor and worship Him out of that respect. This is why, when you see over-the-top religious ceremonies, it’s so rare to find a truly faithful person who actually desires God.

Now understand that I’m not talking about the well-refined spiritual knowledge of God – the kind that understands the way in which God redeems sinful humanity through the work of Jesus Christ, the mediator between God and humanity. When I’m talking about “knowledge of God” here, I mean only a very basic knowledge – the kind that truths that would be simple and obvious if our spiritual vision hadn’t been obscured by the sin passed down from generation to generation from Adam and Eve. That generation-to-generation sin – the sin that is the ruin of all humanity – makes it impossible for us, with the help of Jesus Christ, to understand even the simplest things about God, such as God being our Father, or God being the author of salvation from sin.

It’s one thing to believe that God is our Creator, and that He supports us with power, watches over us with wisdom, encourages us with goodness and blessings. It’s another thing entirely to believe that Jesus Christ frees us from our sin and reconciles us with God. But even though those are two different things, they’re the same one God! The God who first reveals Himself in the Bible as the Creator of the world is the same God who later reveals Himself in the Bible as Jesus Christ the Redeemer.

So then, when we talk about “knowledge of God,” we’re talking about a two-part knowledge: The knowledge of God the Creator, and the knowledge of God the Redeemer. Let’s talk for a while about God the Creator. In a later book, I’ll talk about God the Redeemer.

Let’s be clear about something – our minds cannot conceive of God. The closest we come to understanding Him are the times that we’re caught up in worship. Nevertheless, there isn’t any merit in us deciding that, because our minds can’t conceive of Him, the only thing we can do is worship and love Him. We should love and worship Him, but we should do it because that is the fountain of all the goodness in our world, and that we should seek everything – everything! – in Him, and no one else. In other words, we need to believe in our hearts that God not only created the world, but that he continues to watch over and govern the world.

Few people have been as instrumental in the development of Protestant Christianity as John Calvin — born 500 years ago today — and few works have been as seminal in the theological development of Protestantism as the Institutes. In recognizing the importance of this work, I have decided to undertake the project of creating a vernacularized English translation of Calvin’s Institutes. A “freshened up” rendition might be a more accurate description.

It’s an idea that comes from an honest introspection: I have a master’s degree in theology and spent eight years learning about John Calvin from many of the world’s leading experts on him, but I honestly still can’t pick up the Institutes and make much sense of them without somewhat struggling to read through it. That’s not to say that the major English translations aren’t good, but they were translated for a more scholastic audience and rendered in a more archaic English, which has the effect of making them seem a bit stale.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a rendition of the Institutes that people could read? Our theology is scholarly, but it needn’t be stale. Indeed, it shouldn’t be stale — it’s book upon book talking about the vitality, wonder, and freedom of a life lived through God. Our theological language should be accessible wherever possible — it should be language that will draw people in, not push them away.

It is my humble hope that this project will encourage people to read Calvin’s writing with fresh eyes and see, through his writing, the multiplicity of ways in which God is alive and working in our world.

…

For now, Book I, Chapter 1 has been published for your consideration. Stay tuned for further details about how the project will proceed and more information about it, myself the translator, and the considerations and concerns surrounding such an effort.

-Christian Bell
(cshbell@gmail.com)

Looking for examples? Look at the book of Judges, or read through some of the writings of the prophets. These terrifying encounters with God’s brilliance and glory are so common that you find these holy leaders all saying the same thing: “We have seen the Lord, and we should die!” Think too about how much of the Biblical language and imagery about God’s wisdom and virtue comes from the book of Job, in which His wisdom and virtue stands in stark contrast to the feeble inferiority of so-called wise people. So too with Abraham – the closer he got to God, the more he talks about himself as “dust and ashes.” And the prophet Elijah couldn’t help but cover his face when God came near to him and God’s brilliant light seared his vision. What can we, who are so inferior and imperfect, possibly do if even the angels themselves are forced to cover their face at the sight of God’s perfect goodness? This is undoubtedly what the prophet Isaiah was referring to when he wrote, “The moon will be humiliated and the sun will be disgraced when the God of the universe reigns.” In other words, even the brightest and most brilliant lights we know will be ashamed of how dim they are next to the incomparable brilliance of God’s goodness.

So to conclude what we’ve been talking about, we’ll say again that there’s a lot of common ground between what we know about God and what we know about ourselves. As we start to think and talk more about these two things, let’s start by talking more about what we know about God, and then we’ll continue on to talk about how this relates to what we know, and can know, about ourselves.

We think even the smallest amount of goodness that we do represents the standard for all goodness. How hypocritical we are! We don’t recognize that everyone around us is broken too. If all we see are broken people, even the slightly little bit of good seems like an instance of shining virtue and justice.

It’s like this: Imagine living in a pitch-black cave with absolutely no light whatsoever; wouldn’t even the tiniest flicker of a candle seem like a brilliant and radiant light? And then think about how brightly shines the sun! This is exactly how it is when we look in the mirror and measure ourselves. When we only look in the mirror, if we see even the tiniest flicker flame of goodness in ourselves, we think we’re almost god-like in our goodness and brilliance. But when we look at God, the cave door is rolled back and the brilliant fiery light of his goodness sears our eyesight. We look at him and realize suddenly that the tiny little flame we saw in ourselves is nothing more than a wisp! He is perfectly good, perfectly wise, and perfectly just. His brilliant light sets the standard that we long to attain – who, after looking at that bright light, can possibly be awed by the dim flicker of a candle?

How foolish we are to think that our goodness is anything compared to God’s perfect goodness! How silly we are to think that our muddied thinking is anything compared to God’s perfect wisdom! How impotent we are to think that our constantly shifting opinion is anything compared to God’s perfect justice! It ends up that everything that we thought was good about ourselves is so inferior to God’s perfect virtue that we realize immediately that we don’t measure up to Him at all.

On one hand, I’d like to start by suggesting that we can’t think about ourselves without also thinking about God – in whom the book of Acts says we “live and move.” Obviously, all the life and movement we’re born with don’t come from us – in fact, there’s nothing about us that doesn’t fully depend on God. We’re like small streams of water that flow out of the mighty river of God.

Doesn’t the poverty of our sinful condition make the rich goodness of God all the more apparent? Our sinful condition – which started with Adam and continues in all of us to this day – makes our eyes want to stay wide open, searching for God. We search for God’s sustenance when we’re hungry, and when we realize just how much he provides for us, we can’t help but be humbled. It’s almost as if, without God, we’re trapped in a world of misery. We feel naked without the clothing of God’s righteousness, and everybody at one point or another feels the shame of this nakedness. This shame means that everybody knows at least one thing about God: We’re missing something in life without Him. In short, our shames, our failures – all of our sin – reminds us that in the river of God, and in Him alone, do we find all the wisdom, truth, and goodness that our soul thirsts for.

In other words, our sin actually makes us want to know about God’s goodness more! We won’t want to really know more about God until we realize just how bad of a shape we’re really in. Why would you care about fixing something that you didn’t know was broken? Well, the truth is that we are what is broken – but because we’re often too ignorant to realize it, we remain content with how we are and don’t go looking for a fix.

Therefore, to answer the question about whether knowledge of God or ourselves comes first, we can say this: When we come to really know ourselves and recognize that we’re naked, thirsty, and broken, we’re naturally led to want to know more about God. In other words, the knowledge we have about ourselves takes us by the hand and leads us down the path of wanting to know more about God also.