What We Can Know

2009-03-23

Living in a day where there is doubt whether we can be certain about anything, I begin to ask myself a lot of questions. How can we know anything at all? How can we be certain that we do not delude ourselves from knowing the truth about the existence of God, his divine providence over the course of history and being the great architect of our salvation? In an age where there are many competing philosophies that sound quite plausible, perhaps we should examine how certain we are about what we call truth.

What can we know? I could say that Cole Porter wrote the song Night and Day and that Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, but how could I know that? Both of these things happened before I was born. Examining the evidence, I could have an audio recording of the song or the text of the speech. I could move on to secondary sources that confirm these facts, such as people that knew Cole Porter or a diary of a man who was there to witness Lincoln’s famous address. The more of these things I study, I can be more certain, but perhaps not one hundred percent certain. Perhaps it could be a delusion? Just because Richard Nixon was president before I was born, can I trust my parents’ generation who witnessed him in the White House? Enough witnesses may convince me, but perhaps not beyond a shadow of a doubt... there could be that small possibility...

There are not too many apologetic passages in the Bible about the existence of God; the opening of the Bible, Genesis 1, offers nothing other than “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” The evidence is the creation of the world: that there is something rather than nothing. In the following chapters and books of the Bible, we see eye witnesses to marvelous events. But what is it worth several millennia in retrospect? The voices of secondary sources, archaeological artifacts, are numerous, and could not all be itemized here. But they give us another testimony that the Bible is a document of historical veracity.

Interestingly enough, people in the Bible must have struggled with this as well. They saw miracles with their own eyes, and still disbelieved. There is constant refrain throughout the Old Testament of people rebelling against God despite his clear direction.

We get some understanding, however, that God knows we struggle with this. To the Jewish slaves in Egypt, he says, “Wherefore say unto the children of Israel, I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will rid you out of their bondage, and I will redeem you with a stretched out arm, and with great judgments: And I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God: and ye shall know that I am the LORD your God, which bringeth you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. And I will bring you in unto the land, concerning the which I did swear to give it to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob; and I will give it you for an heritage: I am the LORD” (Exodus 6:6-8). God promised them that he would deliver them, and he fulfilled his promise. They may have rebelled against him many times later on, but God demonstrated that he is the great Deliverer.

And for us today, we know that God is that Deliverer because he took us from the bondage of sin and Satan and gave us hope in Jesus Christ. Transformed lives give more evidence that God exists and that Jesus Christ makes a difference in one’s life. If we give heed to all of the evidence: the creation, the Biblical texts, and the evidence of changed lives of those who believe, it is clear that there is something higher than us that is at work. We may not always have all of the facts right, but the evidence for Jesus Christ as the center of humanity’s salvation becomes quite apparent.