Canst a man know God? Before you flippantly reply, "But of course", we need to think about that statement a little. Certainly, through Christ, we each develop a relationship with our Heavenly Father. Yet do we really know Him, do we really comprehend His essence? Many Christians reject the doctrine of the Trinity on the basis that they don't understand how Three can be One. Yet are we allowed to reject that which we really don't understand? Is it possible for the created, born in the finity of time, to fully understand the Creator who stands in infinity?
 

1 Corinthians 2:9-10 "But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God."

John 1:18 "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him."

John 3:13 "And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven."

Add to this the fact that man is an experiential creature. We understand and fully comprehend what we can experience through all five of our senses. Yet no man hath seen God at any time. We know God by faith, we know God through the gentle calling of the Spirit. Yet we cannot sit down at the dinner table with God and really get to know Him. We cannot touch Him, though we can hear His leading in our hearts. We can know that He is, and know that He has saved us because of the experiential change He wrought in our lives. Yet we will not, until we ascend into Heaven by death or Rapture, be able to fully experience His presence. This limits our knowledge of Him. When Job realized how great Our God is, this led him to cry:

Job 11:7-9 "Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know?  The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea."

Exodus 3:14-15 "And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you. And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, the Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations."

God's response was to tell Moses that He was infinite in being (something incomprehensible to us), the same God who called the first patriarch of Israel and who, without changing, was now calling Moses to serve. Though as humans it is incomprehensible that a being can be without beginning or without end, we can understand some things about our Creator through His attributes or characteristics. We can know God:
 

1. By negation, that is, we must not attribute to God the limitations of man. All that man is, God is not necessarily. He is greater than man, we are finite and weak.
2. By imminence, that is, we attribute to God an infinite degree of all that is good in man. God is infinite in love, infinite in mercy, unfailing in justice, perfect in giving.
3. By causality, that is, we attribute all the works of earth and man to His power, save for that of sin, which He will not bear. God is the cause of all power, all governments.

Further natural proofs that help us understand God can be found in nature itself:

Psalm 19:1-6 "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.  Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.  There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun,  Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race. His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof. "

The heavens indeed declare the glory of God. It is impossible to look at the miraculous design in nature and not know that He is. Have you ever thought about rain, and how it occurs among mankind in an almost clock like cycle? Or of the position of the earth relative to the sun, a position that makes earth ideal for the sustaining of life? To all but the most foolish evolutionist, Nature is a screaming, blazing, neon sign that points upward and says, "Look, God did this". Consider this:

Evolutionary uninformed geologists date the earth at 4.5 billion years old. Based on what we know to be true, erosion caused by the sea would have destroyed all land mass above sea level in just 14 million years. In only 1 billion years all land mass would have been destroyed 70 times. Hence evolution disregards provable scientific fact.

It is conservatively estimated that 14.3 million tons of dust from meteorites falls on the earth each year. Since the earth has a fully developed atmosphere the majority of this dust is burned up. The moon, on the other hand, has no atmosphere and yet receives about the same amount of dust. In 5 billion years the amount of dust that would have settled on the moon's surface would be 137 feet deep. It's interesting that in the 70's manned space flight Neil Armstrong's footprint only sunk 1/8 of an inch into dust when he walked on the moon. Summary: we have a very young earth and moon!

One of the greatest evolutionary finds, Peking Man, was discovered in China by archaeologists and kept well guarded. Two French scientists were eventually allowed to examine the remains. After the examination they concluded that these were in reality animal bones. ["Science of Today and the Problem of Genesis", O'Connel, pages 108-136]

Piltdown Man, another great evolutionary find, was no more than a prefabricated hoax. On closer examination the remains were the mis-matched jawbone of a modern ape and a fossilized human skull. ["Evolution and Christian Faith", Davidheiser, pages 340-349]

Yet another "great discovery", Hesperopitheous Man, was built up from the tooth of an extinct pig.

Evolutionist scientific dating methods are also flawed. Carbon-14, Potassium Argon, and other radiometric dating methods often return bizarre results. A living mollusk was tested using the Carbon-14 method and was conclusively proven to be dead for 3000 years. Lava rocks that were recovered from a volcano that erupted in 1801 were proven to be 3 billion years old with the Potassium Argon method. The rocks taken from the moon were also dated to be from 28 billion to 700 million years old. ["Science", volume 141, page 634, Kieth and Anderson]

Evolutionary theory states that man did not walk on the earth when dinosaurs were alive. Yet in Paluxy, Texas, a fossilized human footprint was discovered next to the track of a dinosaur. ["Journal of Geophysical Research", Frankhouser and Naughton, volume 73, page 4601]

You may fight it, you may try to twist it's message, but you cannot deny that the nature which surrounds us cries out that there is a Creator. Yet nature's message is imperfect in that it does not reveal who that Creator is. We know that He is God, we know that He is greater than we are, yet we don't really know who He is. God wanted us to know Him, at least enough that we could develop a relationship with Him. So He gave us revelation.

Romans 1:20-21 "For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:  Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened."

General revelation tells man that God is there, that Our Maker is watching over us. All men, whether they know the God of the Bible, know within themselves that there is a Creator God. This knowledge alone is not sufficient to save, but it is sufficient to point the lost man to the Cross of Christ. Where General revelation only points in a vague direction, Special revelation defines God to man in ways that man can grasp. We have Special revelation in the written Word of God, the Bible.

How can we define General and Special revelation? General revelation is like the sign on the road that points down the road, saying, "Go this way and you will find a map to God". Special revelation is that map, defining God in such a way that we can grasp His infinity. The proofs of God under General revelation are:

Intuitive Proof

All men, whether they want to admit it or not, have an intuitive belief in the existence of God. Man may educate himself to the point where he can spout off scientific theories on evolution, the amoebae, or what not yet all people instinctively (on the subconscious level at least) that there is a God. You don't think so? How do you curse? Yes, I asked, How do you curse? Those who say that they don't believe in God are often the very ones who take His name in vain numerous times during the day. I don't mean to shock you, but how often have you heard someone say "Buddha damn it"? Or Mohammed, or Krishna, or any number of a thousand other little false gods running around? You haven't heard this. Yet daily you hear men take God's name, the Son's name, or something Biblical and holy in vain. Mike Warnke tells the story that while he was in Vietnam he never met an atheist. He said he met several who claimed to be atheists prior to the warfare, but afterward none were visible. He said that one old boy was wearing a Star of David, an elephant's tusk, a Christian cross, a four leaf clover, and about four other religious trinkets around his neck. Warnke asked him, "What are you wearing all that for?" The boy said, "I BELIEVE". Warnke said, "Who do you believe in? I can't tell by looking at all that mess." The ex-atheist said, "I don't know, but in my position, I can't afford to offend anyone!".

There are no atheists in foxholes, neither are there any atheists in trouble. Devout atheists immediately change their minds when confronted with death and suffering. A mother, who thought nothing of God her entire life, was living the horror of having her child in surgery after a car crash. The first words she utters on learning of the incident, "Oh God", and while the child is in surgery she goes to chapel at the hospital. Pain draws us out of our complacency and makes us realize that He is there.

The Rational proofs of God are derived from human logic. They help the believer to prove to the unbeliever that there is a God, but do little to explain who that God really is. The Rational proofs of God can br broken down into several categories:

The Cosmological Argument

This argument focuses on cause and effect. Since we can see the effects of a Creator (the order in nature, the design of the planet and the human body) then a Creator must have caused these things.
The Teleological Argument
This argument seeks to prove the existence of God from the point of aim or focus. Since there is a design in nature there must be a Designer. Since the design is intelligent, the Designer must be intelligent. Since the design in nature seems to have purpose, the Designer obviously had purpose. Therefore the Designer, a Person, is an intelligent Divine and Benevolent Being.
The Moral Argument
 
Everyone possesses a conscience, and from the conscience all people possess a more or less equal moral code. If this moral code is worthy to establish law and order among humanity, it must not be some arbitrarily assigned code stumbled upon by an evolving humanity. The code must have been established by One who knows what is right and wrong, this One being God.
The Ontological Argument
 
Every human has the idea of a Perfect Creator God. Since this is a universal theme throughout humanity, this must be proof of His existence.

1 Corinthians 2:12-14 "Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned."

1 Corinthians 15:21-22 "For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive."

Special Revelation tells us that man naturally rejects God because of that sin nature that resides, unnaturally, in each one of us. When the first Adam (Adam of the Garden of Eden) rejected God by disobeying His will he brought spiritual death on the human race. Even the precious newborn baby comes into this world under the umbrella of the Adamic curse. Man rejects God because man, entrapped in sin, is unable to comprehend the essence of God unless the Holy Spirit lifts the veil of that sin. Calvin called the state of the human race total depravity, that is, man is entrapped by sin into blindness toward the Maker. Our own unnatural inclination toward sin acts as a barrier between ourselves and the One who created us.

Ephesians 4:17-20 "This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart: Who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness. But ye have not so learned Christ."

Paul called the sinful walk of man the vanity of their mind,  that is, a state of emptiness and vacuum where Divine truth cannot exist. The atheist or scientist who tells you that there is no God is like the man with no nose telling you that the rose doesn't exist because it doesn't smell. A person immersed in the sin of Adam has no concept of the Almighty, outside of a nodding acquaintance that He might possibly exist. I often grieve when believers, on hearing of a new evolutionary or archeological discovery, quickly start developing theories so that Special Revelation will be vindicated. How foolish! Why follow the noseless man? Why ask the blind to explain the color red? When Darwinism came to the forefront a few years ago many Christians scrambled around until they developed a hybrid doctrine of "Biblical Evolutionism". That is, these poor misguided believers tried to explain how the Creator actually created the amoebae that crawled up out of the sea. That the Creator guided the evolution of amoebae to fish, frog, sea urchin, to man (whatever). When many of the evolutionary "proofs" were discovered to be fraudulent these believers looked like what they were, poor misguided creatures with little to no faith in our Father. Stand on the rock of Special Revelation, on God's Word. God knows what He's doing, and we have no need to twist Scripture to suit those without sense.

Acts 17:27-28 "That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring."

God will reveal Himself if you only seek Him. But, on the other hand, will we ever fully understand God in this life? No, not really. We may learn much about Him, yet in many ways He remains incomprehensible to us. We are finite, tied to time. He is infinite (1 Timothy 1.17; 6.16), standing outside of time. We create from that which was already created. He creates from out of nothing. We, even if yet saved by Grace, yet have the siren call of sin in our members. He is pure, holy, so righteous that to look on His face would kill a frail man. We say "today, tomorrow", yet He says "I Am", for He is without today or tomorrow. He is infinity itself. Can I understand this? No, I can comprehend it, I can see it revealed in Scripture, but I really can't say I understand it. As Calvin said, "His essence is incomprehensible, so that His divinity wholly escapes all human senses". We see Him now, howbeit as through a dark glass, yet one day shall see Him clearly if we have accepted Christ as our Savior. Have you accepted Jesus as your Savior? If not, your view of God will forever be halting, poor, astigmatic. Think on this, my friend, and write me if you have any questions. One day I will see Him clearly, and I want you to see Him, too. God Bless!