Richard Bauckham - Who Is God?: Key Moments of Biblical Revelation

In our ever more secular age many people pose the question Does God exist? or Is there a God? But to consider this question seriously we must also ask the question Who is God? The content that people give to the word god has varied and still varies enormously, and so one has to ask, What kind of God are you actually talking about? What God? or Who is God? In biblical times this was the obvious question. Very few people thought there was nothing to which one could apply the term god or the gods or the divine. But which god was truly God? Who is the God you are talking about? This was the key question and I think still is.

Even though all notions of the divine have something in common, and some more than others, Christians give priority to those key events and experiences that the Bible relates and expounds as the revelation of God. We can answer the question Who is God? only by attending to who God has revealed himself to be. To this the whole biblical revelation is relevant. Asked what the whole Bible is about, I would say it is most centrally about the identity of God, while at the same time it tells the story of God and his creation, that all-encompassing story that extends from creation in the beginning to new creation at the end. Intensively the Bible is about the identity of God; extensively it tells the story of God and the world.

Within that all-encompassing story, there are key moments of revelation that could be said to define who God is for usor, it would be better to say, moments in which God defines who God is for us. These are not merely moments that are narrated once within the biblical story; they are more like reference points to which the rest of Scripture constantly refers back. They are moments that reverberate through the whole story. Moreover, like all events of great significance, their significance is not grasped all at once and forever. They are moments whose meaning is never exhausted. So we should read them as events pregnant with meaning, pointing us finite creatures of God to Gods inexhaustible and mysterious identity. They should challenge our own understanding of God and our own relationship with God, for, as J. B. Phillips famously said, Your God is too small.

The key moments of divine disclosure we shall reflect on in this book are by no means the only such moments in the Bible. Others could have been chosen. But those we consider here are undoubtedly among the most significant. They are Jacobs dream at Bethel (Gen. 28:1022), the revelation to Moses at the burning bush (Exod. 3), the revelation to Moses on Mount Sinai (Exod. 33:1734:8), and the three key moments of revelation in the Gospel of Mark (1:911; 9:28; 15:3739). In all these cases our exploration of biblical theology will range more widely than these moments of disclosure themselves, but they will be our guiding stars by which to travel through related territory.