Revelation

Dabar: a word that does something

Before I tell you a story, I want to give you one Hebrew word. Dabar.

It is their word for word. It is also their word for thing. And for deed. And for act. And for event.

Hebrew uses one word for all of these. The book we call Chronicles is called, in Hebrew, the words of the days. What it means is the events of the days.

So when the Old Testament says the word of the Lord, it is not just talking about information.

Look at the first page of your Bible. God says, then it is. The saying and the making are not two steps.

Or listen to Isaiah. As the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth. It shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose.

Rain does not come down to teach the field about water…

Hold on to that. Everything I am about to tell you is God saying something. And every single time He says something, something happens.

Moses: opening scene

There's this guy.

He used to be a prince. Now he's a fugitive watching someone else's sheep. He's 80 years old and probably wondering what he did to land him in this situation.

Just to give a bit of a backdrop.

He's Hebrew. His tradition has taught him of a God who has led and watched over his ancestors going all the way back to Abraham. They had rituals. An altar for sacrifice. Covenant cutting. Circumcision. It was an oral tradition and a nameless God. They referred to Him as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Do you know who I'm talking about yet?

The burning bush

Moses became fascinated by this bush that kept burning and burning and burning but never burning up, on a mountain nearby.

He climbs that mountain and makes his way to that burning bush. Much to his surprise, the bush speaks. His name. MOSES.

We know about the exchange. Moses was not a fan of public speaking. And at 80, I am guessing he was in retirement mode, at least mentally.

God instructs him to go back to Egypt. The place he is fleeing from. Moses argues, but eventually accepts. 

And what might seem like an oh, by the way question: Who should I say sent me?

The name: I AM

God answers. With His name.

I AM WHO AM 

Think about that name.

Everything else gets its existence from something. God doesn't get His existence. He IS existence.

But here is the part I don't want you to miss. Up until now, God was a distant figure up in the sky. He just officially introduced Himself.

Think about it. When you give your title, you are giving information about yourself. When you give your name, you are offering yourself on a personal level. You are saying, here I am, you can call me now.

And remember what I told you about a Hebrew's definition of "word"? That name was not a fact He handed over. Moses carried that name back into Egypt, and a nation walked out.

Takeaway: revelation comes in stages

Our first takeaway. God reveals Himself gradually. In stages.

Read: Hebrews 1:1 to 2. In times past, God spoke in partial and various ways to our ancestors through the prophets. In these last days, He spoke to us through a Son.

Abraham and Isaac: deeds first, understanding later

God revealed Himself to Abraham and tested him. (Gen 22:2) He says sacrifice “your son, your only one, whom you love”. (Isaac). And because he passed the test, God says “through your seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.”

I doubt Abe knew the significance of that ask. At least not to the level we know it. Right? Only son? Sacrifice? Making him carry the wood of his own sacrifice? Then God will provide the sacrifice?

That's the pattern. Deeds, then understanding later.

Hosea: a whole life as a message

This pattern continues. God tells the prophet Hosea to marry a woman who will repeatedly be unfaithful to him. And Hosea is to keep bringing her back to him.

Hosea's marriage becomes the way Israel finds out what God's own faithfulness looks like when it is betrayed. This is God, using a man's whole life, to teach something in a very effective way.

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The Ark: (God moves in)

Go back to Moses for a minute, because I skipped something.

God gives them a box. Gold, carried on poles, holding the stone tablets, and God says of it: There I will meet you, and from above the cover I will tell you all that I command you.

That is not a metaphor. That is an address.

Up until now God visited. Now He moves in.

It gets quiet

This revelation continues for centuries. A word here, a rescue there, a prophet who sees part of it and writes down what he can. The writing and the oral tradition are handed down.

And then it goes quiet. Not silent. There are still writings, still wisdom being handed down. But there are no more prophets like Isaiah, no more voices from the fire. For four centuries nobody stands up and says “thus says the Lord”.

Nazareth: and THEN He shows up

And THEN He shows up.

There was no burning bush. No lightning. No thunder.

It was just a quiet message, to a teenage girl in a nowhere town called Nazareth.

So. Abraham got the message. Moses got the name. The Israelites got an address. And we get… Him, in the flesh.

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John 1: the Word is a Person

Now go to the front of John's Gospel, because John says this better than I can, and he says it in one sentence.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Watch the first three words. In the beginning. That is page one of Genesis, and every Jew who heard it knew exactly where he was pointing.

And remember dabar. They already knew God's word does things. It made the world. It gave a barren woman a son. It called Moses by name from a burning bush.

But John goes further. He says the Word was with God, which makes the Word somebody else. And then in the same breath he says the Word was God.

That is not divine power anymore.

That is a divine Person.

The tent: the meeting place got up and walked

And then John goes one step further, and this is the line.

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”.

The Greek there is worth knowing. The word John picks for dwelt means pitched his tent.

Now go back twenty minutes, to a gold box in the middle of a camp, and God saying there I will meet you.

John is telling you that the meeting place got up and walked.

Jesus said: Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.

Visible. Tangible. Consumable.

The sacrifice

God will now become one of us and make the ultimate sacrifice that can only be meaningful from Him. He takes the consequence of our sin onto Himself by becoming man and dying. He becomes the ultimate sacrifice that all the centuries of animal sacrifices set the stage for.

A word asks to be answered

And one more thing about a word like that.

A word that does something is not asking to be studied. It is asking to be answered.

There is a second Hebrew word for that part, and I am saving it for the end of the morning.

Public revelation has ended

Catholics, Orthodox, and virtually every Protestant believe that God's public revelation has ended. We believe private revelation still occurs, and the Church takes that very seriously. However, we are not obligated to believe private revelation.

So how does this truth come to us today, in this room?

How do we know the message didn't get garbled?

How do we know we aren't misreading the words?

Story one: Acts 15, the Council of Jerusalem

Story one.

About 20 years after the resurrection, the Church has a crisis that could have ended it. Gentiles are coming in. Non Jews. And the question on the table is do they have to be circumcised and keep the law of Moses to become Christians.

Understand that the Bible they had, the Old Testament, was very clear that circumcision was the covenant sign that went back to Abraham. Scripture was being quoted on both sides and the Church had to judge. The apostles gathered in Jerusalem, argued, then said no.

This was the first council, and it is detailed in Acts 15. This is the Church, before the New Testament existed, settling a question that Scripture alone could not settle. And knowing the Holy Spirit was in the room while they did it.

It is the decision of the Holy Spirit and of us not to place on you any burden beyond these necessities. Acts 15:28.

Story two: Arius, Athanasius, Nicaea

Story two.

Around 318AD, a priest named Arius starts teaching that Jesus is the greatest of all creatures, but still a creature. Made. And he argues it from Scripture. And he is good at it.

On the other side, a young deacon named Athanasius argues that Jesus IS God, and he argues it from Scripture too.

Same book. Both sincere. And the book, by itself, did not end the argument.

So the bishops came together at Nicaea in 325AD and eventually settled it. And to protect what Scripture actually meant, they had to reach for a word that is not in the Bible anywhere. One in being. Consubstantial.

You say that word at Mass. Most Sundays during the Nicene Creed. Consubstantial with the Father.

That is not a Bible word. That is the Church's word, used to guard a Bible truth from a very smart man who was misunderstanding it.

Dei Verbum: the Church cannot invent

One last thing.

The Church is NOT above all this. There is a line in the Second Vatican Council's document on revelation, Dei Verbum, that says the teaching office of the Church is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully.

The Church cannot invent. It can only guard, and unpack, and hand on.

Closing: He did not stay hidden

God did not stay hidden. He chose not to, and He chose to work through humans.

He gave a man His name at a burning bush. He rescued people and then told them what it meant. He moved into the middle of their camp. He spoke through prophets for centuries, in pieces.

And then He came Himself.

The people who watched Him handed on what they had seen, in what they preached, in what they wrote, and in how they lived.

This brings us to The Bible: