Sermon Tone Analysis

In the past few weeks we found out that God reveals Himself to everyone in what is called ‘General Revelation’.

God reveals Himself in creation or nature, that is, the whole earth is full of His glory; in our consciences, that is a law within ourselves telling us there is a lawmaker; and in history, in that God is in control of the rise and fall of Kingdoms and in control of our lives too.

But this general revelation is too general because we only get a glimpse of some of the attributes of God but none of these can lead to salvation or really knowing God at all.

Now we come to Special or Specific Revelation.

It is Special because it is God revealing Himself and His will to specific persons – it is God’s intervention in a supernatural way into the natural order of things.

God has revealed Himself especially, not just through nature, conscience or history, but explicitly to people through three main ways:

Direct communication from God

God in Jesus or the Incarnation

Scripture

Today, then, we are looking at the ways God has directly communicated with people.

Adam walked with God in the Garden and was the first human to know His voice until he really didn’t want to hear it:

He knew it to be the voice of God because of their perfect relationship but God’s voice dimmed afterwards because of sin.

All people stopped hearing God except for a select few that we are going to look at.

Everyone was originally given the ability and faculty to be able to hear God.

Sin gets in the way of us hearing God and the only way to reverse this is to keep on good terms with God confessing our sin.

God revealed Himself to Abraham

God revealed Himself to Isaac

Notice how often there is no other purpose of God speaking other than to bring comfort and hope and to reveal Himself to Isaac.

God revealed Himself to Jacob in a dream and directly giving directions

God reveals Himself in a dream but later on He spoke directly with him when He returned from his journey:

God revealed Himself in dreams to Joseph

God reveals Himself in fire to Moses

God revealed Himself as Captain:

God seems to appear in the way that they need Him to appear – for Joshua who was Israel’s General we find that the Commander of the Lord’s army appears!

God appears in what are called ‘Theophanies’ which are God revealing Himself in humanoid or angelic form before the birth of Jesus: For instance to Gideon:

Abraham experienced this when 3 men came to find out what was happening in Sodom and Gomorrah.

2 of them being angels and the other was Jesus.

Samuel was visited By God

And all his life he heard God speak.

Prophets of the Old Testament such as Samuel had two tasks each requiring they listen to God: First and most important, to teach what God is saying and second, to predict the future.

Of Samuel it is said that none of his words fell to the ground.

Elijah heard God speaking in an unexpected way:

Isaiah saw God:

I have not even begun to show how many times God spoke and revealed Himself and His purpose throughout history.

God still communicates directly with us today.

I have heard God speak and according to Scripture, so have you.

Today, in the first part about Special Revelation we have seen that God has revealed Himself by speaking with an audible voice, through dreams and, though not touched on today, through visions such as Daniel’s and Ezekiel’s, and God has spoken through prophets and through angels and various other ways.

God has not hid Himself for He wants to be known.

God has gradually revealed more and more of Himself and next time we will look at how He has revealed Himself in the most remarkable of ways.