Gordon H. Clark: Quote of the Day: Knowledge and Sanctification

But an essential part of divine worship is to know God and to know him correctly. That is why God has given us a revelation. What good is a revelation if it does not give us understandable truths?  -- Gordon H. Clark

Perhaps it is not necessary to dwell on the nature and excellencies of Deity which not merely justify but which command our obeisance. These attributes have been largely examined in my book on the Trinity. Here it must suffice merely to mention omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence as reasons for acknowledging God’s transcendent glory by our worship. They are so overwhelming, when one pauses to consider them, and so awe-inspiring, that many theologians, for this and other considerations, stress God’s incomprehensibility. But in doing so, some of them distort the truth. If the divine incomprehensibility means that we do not know, and cannot know, everything that God knows, there can be no objection. This truth is all too comprehensible. But in an attempt to glorify God, some theologians exaggerate incomprehensibility and make God utterly unknowable. The mystics are the most consistent on this point: Barth makes God the “totally other”; but there are also some who even clearly assert that God can be known, and yet so emphasize incomprehensibility as to contradict their more orthodox assertions. One such theologian, who indeed uses the phrase “thinking God’s thoughts after him,” denies the phrase in another place by insisting that God’s knowledge and the knowledge possible to man do not coincide at any single point. Consequently if God knows that David was king of Israel, we cannot know it. Indeed, since God knows everything, we can know nothing at all, for there is not a single point of coincidence between his knowledge and what we call our knowledge. But an essential part of divine worship is to know God and to know him correctly. That is why God has given us a revelation. What good is a revelation if it does not give us understandable truths? How can we praise God by singing “Lord God Almighty,” if we do not know that God is Almighty? In a context where one would hardly expect a recommendation of intellectualism, Isaiah 33:6 says, “Wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times and strength of salvation.” One can never worship the God of truth by deprecating the intellect. Acceptable worship of God, as an important part of sanctification, requires knowledge.

Gordon H. Clark (2013-03-04T05:00:00+00:00). What Is The Christian Life? (Kindle Locations 1553-1568). The Trinity Foundation. Kindle Edition.