Lesson 2: Avenues of Revelation

The different ways God has revealed to humanity.

How did God reveal himself to us? God, though perfect in His nature, is very well-pleased to communicate and
reveal his will to mankind, that is, he wanted all men to have an open access to the Father, through His Son Jesus
Christ, and in unity with the Holy Spirit for them to become sharers in the Divine nature (Paras, 2015).

God’s revelation comes to us in many and diverse ways. Not all of these ways are dealt with here, but we
have attempted to point out the principal avenues of communication so we can become aware of the presence of
God in our lives.

1. Revelation through Creation

The first way God reveals Himself to us is through creation. “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the
firmament proclaims His handwork” (Psalm 19:1). In creation, man holds a special place. God said: “Let us make
man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). God even gives us a share in His own creativity: “Be fertile
and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). God creates the whole world for us, to support us in life
and reveals Himself to us through His handiwork. “Since the creation of the world.... God’s eternal power and
divinity have become visible, recognized through the things He has made” (Romans 1:20).

We can come to know God by contemplating the created universe. Most of us, at one time or another, have
had our religious sense awakened by the beauty of nature, the stillness of the forest, the pounding of the waves, the
reflection on the surface of a lake, the beauty of the aurora borealis. We believe that God is the creator and the
giver of all. In the very heart of creation God’s goodness and God’s self-gift are revealed. Thus, through applying
our faith to our experience of nature the experience becomes revelatory. So many experiences open up to us the
possibility of discovering the presence of God. For example, as we took a look at creation, we see how marvellously
balanced and ordered it is. We begin to understand how all things in the universe are related, how we ourselves are
part of an eco-system, linked in the deepest way to the environment. The balance and order in nature could only
have come from a supremely intelligent and loving being. That very fact tells us something about who God is (Knox,
I., 2011).

For us Filipinos, then, the world and everything in it are natural signs of God – the initial way God makes
Himself known to us. Yet in our everyday experience, we meet not only love, friendship, the good and the beautiful,
but also suffering, temptation and evil. All creation has become affected by sin- “sin entered the world, and with sin
death” (Romans 5:12). The “natural signs” of the Creator have thus become disfigured by pollution, exploitation,
injustice, oppression and suffering. So God chose to reveal Himself in a second, more intimate way, by entering into
the history of the human race He had created.
2. Revelation through History

The Bible records God’s entering into a special covenant relationship with His chosen people, the race of
Abraham, the people of Israel. “I will dwell in the midst of the Israelites and will be their God” (Exodus 29:45). He
promised the chosen people of God that they would be provided with their piece of land in Canaan where milk and
honey abounds. Covenant is made by God with Israelites in Mt. Sinai and the Ten Commandments given at Mt.
Sinai become their guide in living a moral and virtuous life. In the different era of Israel’s history, God’s intervention
is evident (Paras, 2015). In order for the events of history to become revelatory we must take a faith view of
them. It is part of the religious genius of the Jewish people that they understood God as intimately concerned with
the ordinary events of their life, not aloof from them. They understood their history as meaningful, as giving
evidence of a divine plan with a promise for the future. God was the guiding principle for their history. Thus what for
us might be a purely secular event in history (such as a battle, or a plague, or a drought, or a plentiful harvest) is
interpreted as God speaking to them, God intervening in their life, God revealing (Knox I., 2011).

3. Revelation through the Prophets

To understand what God is saying to us in history and in the events of our life, we need prophets. A
common misunderstanding of the role of a prophet is that a prophet is someone who predicts the future. Prophets
may predict the future, but this is incidental to prophecy and not its main focus. Prophet comes from the Greek
prophetes (pro means for, on behalf of, and phetes means speaker): thus, “to speak on behalf of someone”. The
prophets speak on behalf of God, they tell us God’s message. They interpret the signs of the times so that we may
understand what God is saying to us in these events. The Bible is insistent that God has spoken to us through
the prophets. In many places in the Christian Scriptures we are told that the life of Jesus is a fulfillment of the
ancient prophecies. (See Hebrew 1:1). The prophets referred to are the ancient Jewish prophets whose works are
recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures and whose names are familiar to us – Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekiel, Daniel
and others.

God still does speak to us through the prophets; the message of God to us is still being honed and clarified
and applied to different circumstances. Modern day prophets exist because God still continues to speak through
people who live today, or who have lived in recent times, such as Jean Vanier, (Saint) Mother Teresa of Calcutta,
Mahatma Ghandi, (Saint) Pope John Paul II, Martin Luther King, and many others. From the message of these
modern prophets, God is revealing himself as caring for the poor and abandoned, bringing justice to those who see
it, concerned and compassionate with the weak and disabled. In the life and ministry of Jesus, God has already
said it. True, but in large part we seem to have forgotten it; we need to be reminded of it time and time again, we
need to be awakened from our weary response to God’s revelation. That is the work of the modern-day prophets.

But the work of prophecy is not confined to a few very special people. All of us have been given this gift of
prophecy for building up the church. By the example of our lives, we can serve as prophets to those who have
forgotten God’s message, or perhaps have never heard it.

The signs of prophecy are not always clear. Theologians have suggested some criteria for judging who
might be regarded as a prophet:

The prophet never claims to speak on his or her own behalf, but always on behalf of God (it is God’s
message, not the prophet’s). The prophet’s message will, in the long term, make for unity in the church (“that they
all may be one”), promote the reigns of God, even though in the short term the prophetic word may bring discord
and pain. Jesus said that he had come to bring fire on earth and that his message would set brother against
brother. The example of the prophet’s life must be part of the message. They must live by the words they speak;
otherwise they are suspect. True prophecy is never for show, for display, or for personal gain. Prophecy must be
clear enough to be understood by the majority of people, not so mysterious as to be available only to a few (Knox,
I., 2011). God performed great works for His Chosen People, and proclaimed their saving power and truth
through the prophet’s words. Through chosen men and women – kings, judges, prophets, priests and wisemen,
God led, liberated, and corrected His people. He forgave their sins.

4. Revelation through Jesus Christ

The greatest of all the prophets, the perfect revelation of God us; the definitive Word of God spoken to us in
history, is Our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus speaks God’s word to us in language we can understand, a human
language. The gospels show him as growing up in a human way and, as a human being, learning more and more
the meaning of human existence and sharing that vision and knowledge with his associates and followers. By
reading the scriptures, with help from the teaching church to interpret them, we too can share in this vision and
knowledge and learn how to live in union with him (Knox, I., 2011). CFC 70 Yet, even God’s revelation in history
was weakened by the infidelities and hardness of heart of His Chosen People. But God so loved the world, that in
the fullness of time, He sent His only Son to be our Savior, like us in all things except sin. Jesus Christ “completed
and perfected God’s revelation by words and works, signs and miracles, but above all by his death and glorious
resurrection from the dead” (DV 4). Thus the Risen Christ, prefigured in the Old Testament and proclaimed by the
apostles, is the unique, irrevocable and definitive revelation of God.

Jesus Christ is “himself both the mediator and the fullness of all revelation” (DV 2; cf. CCC 65). PCP II puts
it sharply: “We are followers of Christ, his disciples. We trace his footsteps in our times, to utter his word to others.
To love with His love. To live with His life... To cease following him is to betray our very identity ” (PCP II 34).
Filipino Catholics, therefore, recognize in Jesus Christ the goal, the content, and the agent of God’s Self-revelation
(CFC 76).

As goal, Jesus is “the key, the center and the purpose of the whole of man’s history” (GS 10; cf. CFC 77).
But Christ is not only the goal of God’s revelation; He is also its content, the Revealed One. In himself, Jesus
reveals both God and ourselves (CFC 78). Our faith centers on Christ precisely because we believe we “are called
to union with him, who is the light of the world, from we go forth, through whom we live, and towards whom our
whole life is directed” (LG 3). Finally, besides being the goal and content of Revelation, Christ is also its agent, the
mediator (cf. DV 2). Christ is revealer through his part in creation, through his becoming man, through his hidden
and public life, and especially through his passion, death and resurrection. After his resurrection, the Risen Christ
continues his revelation by sending us his Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth (CFC 79; cf. 79).

5. Revelation through the Church

Jesus’s chosen apostles, the twelve, together with some others, lived constantly in his company. They
reflected on his words, they came to appreciate and copy his way of life as meaningful for them, and thus they
received his revelation. The preaching of the apostles was, in fact, a prophetic interpretation of the life and words of
Jesus. After the Resurrection the early group of Jesus’ followers formed themselves into a community, a community
which was the beginning of what we now call the church. This early community in time generated other
communities and so, finally, the church as we know it today (Knox, I., 2011).

God continues to manifest Himself today through the Holy Spirit in the Church. He is present in the
Church’s preaching the truth of Scripture, in its witness of loving service, and in through the celebration of its
Christ-given Sacraments Through his Church, the people of God, united in his name. “The one mediator, Christ,
established and ever sustains here on earth his Holy Church, the community of faith, hope and charity, as a visible
organization through which he communicates truth and grace to all men” (LG 8). The Church herself receives
Christ’s revelation. She regards “the Scriptures, taken together with sacred Tradition, as the supreme rule of her
faith”. For they present “God’s own Word in an unalterable form, and make the voice of the Holy Spirit sound again
and again in the words of the prophets and apostles” (DV 21; CFC 80).

In the church today we have a life, a culture and traditions based on the life of Jesus and an interpretation
of that life by succeeding generations. We have statements of belief (creeds), we have prayers and ways of praying
(e.g., liturgical ceremonies), we have sacraments, and we have a code of moral behavior. All of these take part in
revelation. God speaks to us in and through the whole life of the church. God speaks to us through the lives of holy
people who have evidently taken Jesus’ message to heart and serve as an example to all. As we participate in the
life of the church we participate in revelation.
The word of God lives and grows as we constantly struggle to live the life that we learned from Jesus within
the changing time and circumstances of our world. This means that revelation is not a once-and- forever thing, but
is ongoing. The word of God is not static. God is always present in the church to be a revelation, opening us up to
new ways of understanding and acting on God’s message to us (Knox, I., 2011).