The Old Testament promotes revelation as the most important process in religion which helps believers to communicate with God. The attention from the divine to believer through which all of a man is involved is revelation. It is God making Himself known to all people, disclosing Himself so that believers, in turn, must do something in response. The problem is not to project thought to God or divine power: it is more simply to recognize and understand the divine approach to believers.
Revelation, in the Old Testament, gives believers knowledge of specific events to take place in the future. Believers think of the prophet in this role of learning the secrets of the future from God and announcing them to the people concerned. In ages past, believers thought that answers to specific questions would be given them by revelation, that the gods would declare their will in such matters as launching a war or planting crops.
Tools for discerning the divine answers varied from watching for certain patterns in the flight of a released flock of birds, or looking for a particular coloration of the internal organs of an animal purposely sacrificed, to throwing dice or drawing straws. In more sophisticated cultures, the revelation of God is sought from seers especially gifted, and later from religious texts which were usually the writings of religious believers of an earlier day.
The date of the end of the world has been sought for centuries in the words found in the books of Daniel and the Revelation. Others have tried to make suggestions about the future from the mysterious writings. In fact, the declare of revelation is apt to call up a host of thoughts about bizarre and unsupported ideas, esoteric teachings, and voices out of the darkness. Revelation is akin to the self-giving of a friend who is willing to be known. In the same way, the process of revelation involves the response of faith in wholehearted personal involvement or commitment (Klein 2005).
In Christianity, the concept of the Reign of God is closely linked to the ministry of Jesus. Many religious believers suppose that what God reveals are the great eternal truths of the Christian faith, such as that divine power is one in three persons, or that Christ and God are of the same substance. The God Father figure focuses in man’s faulty apprehension, but revelation cannot be successful if it results in obscurity or contradiction. In either case, it is difficult to see how revelation could really be relevant to life. The Reign of God allows the Ministry of Jesus to exist. It does not give believers something that lies within their powers to supply.
It gives believers, rather, that which they can receive in no other way. Since life as believers know it neither guarantees its fulfillment nor defines its own meaning, believers can see that knowledge of the scientific or historical sort can furnish no answer to the questions for which revelation must supply the answers; hence, scientific or historical data cannot be the content of connection at all (Klein 2005). And while perhaps it is easier to regard doctrine as the content of the link between the God Father and the Ministry of Jesus, even here believers have a human response that in itself cannot answer the human problem.
What believers may expect to find as the content of revelation, then, is not impersonal information but that quality of knowledge that elicits our entire personal response. But since that sort of response is generated only by trust and commitment which are personal qualities, the content of the Reign of God must, itself, be personal. This distinction should save believers from ignoring revelation in religious matters because the Reign of God know its irrelevance to scientific matters and because we see it does not save us from inconsistencies in philosophical thought. In revelation, God seeks to give believers Himself.
Bibliography
Klein, W.W. Blomberg, C. L. Hubbard, R. L. 2005, Introduction To Biblical Interpretation. Word Publishing.