Audio Transcript

Today we’re back, talking about the most extraordinary experience this universe can offer us (and we are not talking about hiking Angels Landing or traveling to Mars). The theme emerges from two emails from two different listeners — Erik and Mike — both asking about parallel texts in our Bible readings this week. The first is 1 Samuel 3:21, a great text: “And the Lord appeared again at Shiloh, for the Lord revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the word of the Lord.” God revealed himself by his word. And Erik and Mike both connect that text to 2 Corinthians 3:18 and 2 Corinthians 4:4 — again, all texts in our Bible readings this week.

So, how does 1 Samuel 3:21 set the stage for understanding the role of the word in the revelation of God and his glory to us, unveiled in the face of Jesus Christ? How is God’s presence mediated to us in and through his word? Of course, Pastor John, you have spent a lot of time working this out in Reading the Bible Supernaturally — a wonderful book I commend to everyone listening. But 1 Samuel 3:21 only gets a passing mention in that book. Any fresh insights into how we experience God through his word as we read those three precious texts in early May?

The short answer is yes. But first, the great question that we’re dealing with here (it seems to me) is this: Can we know personally the Creator of the universe, God? Can we know him? And can we know him particularly in a way that transforms us to be more like him, to be more in accord with his will? I think people all over the world, in every culture, in every language, in every age of human history, have wanted an answer to that question: “Can I know my Maker?” So, this is big. This question is big. We’re not just talking about something marginal, but something very central to human existence.

Now, I’ve been leaning on 2 Corinthians 3:18 and 2 Corinthians 4:4 and 1 Samuel 3:21 for a long time in my own answer to this question and my own experience of knowing God. What’s newer for me are the connections that I have discovered between these old familiar texts and other passages of Scripture. And these new connections have the effect of confirming and deepening the old insights and the old experience of knowing God and being changed by this knowing.

Seeing the Living God

Here’s 1 Samuel 3:21, just so people know what we’re talking about when we refer to these texts: “The Lord appeared again at Shiloh, for the Lord revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the word of the Lord.” Now, we can’t know God unless he reveals himself. God is God. We’re not God. He must take the initiative. We can’t climb up through the universe into heaven to meet and know God. God must stoop down and show himself, reveal himself, if we’re going to know him. And this text says that God did that for Samuel. Amazing. He “revealed himself”; that’s what it says. That’s a personal knowing of the Creator of the universe. Samuel met the living God. He knew him personally.

“God reveals himself to us by the word of the Lord, and by that self-revelation, we are changed.”

And then we read these wonderful words that show how we can be included in that experience. It says God revealed himself “by the word of the Lord.” So, a revealing and appearing, a kind of seeing, happens by hearing or reading. God has decided that the most ordinary way of knowing him personally is by hearing and reading his word. The most extraordinary experience in the world, knowing God personally, happens through the ordinary experience of reading or hearing God’s word.

Now, it was some time before I made the connection between 1 Samuel 3:21 and the earlier statement about the boy Samuel, who didn’t yet know the Lord when the word of the Lord came to him at night. We all know, if we grew up in the church, our children’s stories of God speaking to this little boy. And he runs to Eli over and over again because he doesn’t recognize the voice of God. And so, in 1 Samuel 3:7 it says, “Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.” So, this confirms what we saw in verse 21 — namely, that we know the Lord personally by means of knowing the word of the Lord.

Samuel as a little boy didn’t yet hear the word of God as the word of God. He heard a voice, he understood words, but he didn’t know it was God. He didn’t know the word of God. And that made me think of 1 Thessalonians 2:13 regarding our experience, where Paul says, “When you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.”

So, first we hear the word of God in Scripture. Then the Holy Spirit opens our heart to recognize it as the very word of God. And then we meet God. We know God personally through the word of God. This is why, when we read the Bible, we should constantly be praying, “O Lord, open my eyes. Open my ears. Open my heart. Open my mind to know you.” We’re not just collecting doctrinal facts or historical facts. We are meeting the living God in his word. That’s where it happens.

Vision That Transforms

And then comes the issue: Are we being changed by it? Are we being transformed into the likeness of God? Are we conforming to his will by hearing him like this? And that’s where 2 Corinthians 3:18 comes in. It says, “We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord . . .” So, he’s revealing himself, according to 1 Samuel, by his word. And now that revealing becomes a beholding in us, and it says, “We . . . are being transformed [by this beholding] into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” You could call this “becoming good by beholding glory” — becoming Christlike by beholding Christ’s glory.

It’s a foretaste of what John promises at the second coming. He says in 1 John 3:2, “We know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” And then Paul adds in 1 Corinthians 13:12, “Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.” Which goes a long way toward explaining why we are changed incrementally now, slowly now — frustratingly slowly now — by seeing Christ dimly. Oh, how we would love to see more clearly, know him more immediately — shockingly real to the eyes of our soul.

But then, at the coming of the Lord, we will be changed — “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye” (1 Corinthians 15:52) — when we see him face to face. And Paul does not leave us guessing as to where we should look now in order to see the glory of the Lord, which he says we can see in 2 Corinthians 3:18, because four verses later he says, in 2 Corinthians 4:4, “The god of this world” — that’s Satan — “has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”

So, where do we see the glory of Christ? Answer: He says we see it in the gospel, in the story of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, written for us with the authority of the apostles in the New Testament. That’s the place where we behold the glory of the Lord standing forth from God’s inspired word — and we are thus changed by it.

New Sight, New Self

Now, maybe just two other quick recent insights that I’ve gotten as I’ve pondered this cluster of texts. I never noticed, for example, that Colossians 3:10 is probably saying the same thing when it says, “Put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.” Now, that new self is the transformation we’re longing for, which is talked about in 2 Corinthians 3:18. It’s a transformation into the image of our Creator. It’s what Paul calls the new creation; we are new creatures in Christ. And he says it comes by knowing him. So, we know the Lord through his word, and we are transformed. We put on the new self by being transformed through that knowing, through the word.

One more connection. I saw in 1 John 3:6 something I’d never seen before. It says, “No one who keeps on sinning has either seen [Christ] or known him.” In other words, if we go on with no transformation in a path of sin, unrepentant to the end, we will show that we never saw him. We never saw or knew his glory, which I think confirms amazingly that it’s this seeing in 2 Corinthians 3:18 that produces the transformation.

The great question that people are asking all over the world and have for all history is this: “How can I know God personally?” That’s the key question: “How can I know God in such a way that I am transformed to be more like him?” And that question the Bible wonderfully answers. God reveals himself to us by the word of the Lord, and by that self-revelation, we are changed.