Did you hear that thunder?
Posted at Reformation Scotland:
The one true God is a speaking God. He communicates with the creatures He has made, in a way that is both accurate and clear. These days, His message is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, but in earlier times, He would sometimes actually speak from heaven, in an audible voice speaking understandable words. On one occasion, when Jesus was praying in the hearing of a crowd of people, God the Father replied to His prayer directly. Jesus said, “Father, glorify thy name,” and the Father replied, “I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.” It was unmistakeable. But plenty of the bystanders misheard and mistook. “The people therefore that stood by, and heard it, said that it thundered; others said, An angel spoke to him” (John 12:28–29). What could possibly explain the confusion? The words were audible, the message was clear, yet somehow they couldn’t figure out what they’d even heard. Samuel Rutherford used this incident to make the point that we hear what we want to hear. When our wills are antagonistic to God, even our senses are biased away from perceiving God’s message to us. The opinions we form, which we like to think are rational and evidence-based, are shaped in advance by our wishful inclinations, and these, unless grace changes us, are wishes to be left to carry on without anything to do with God at all. In the following updated extract, Rutherford shows how the human tendency to dismiss the gospel as incomprehensible and irrelevant is not because of any defect in the gospel or God’s communication of it, but because of our sinful desire not to be bothered by it.The people had various opinions about the Father’s answer from heaven. Some said it was thunder. Doesn’t any ignoramus and the most simple idiot know thunder when he hears it?! This shows us how ignorant we are of God, and of the gospel way. Consider what was this voice of God from heaven to Christ. It was the gospel, and it was a clear expression of the communion between Christ and his Father. But what God means is unknown to us. Some say that the gospel is a thunder, and a work of nature, a mere imagination and a dream. Yet these are all false, and they do not agree one with another.
The gospel is the will of God from heaven, yet it is a riddle, a parable not understood (Matt. 13:14; 1 Cor. 14:21; Isa. 29:11–12). “For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness” (1 Cor. 1:18).
