Let me ask you a question: How do you know who your parents are? Think about all the trust you put in various people and things just to determine who your own parents are. You trust your parents to know who their child is (and not to lie). You trust that the hospital didn't make a mistake and give your parents the wrong baby. You trust that a DNA test will give the right result. You trust that DNA science is not just a sham made up by scientists to get funding; you trust the scientific community to check itself and be honest about that. You trust that the specific scientist administering the test didn't mess it up or mix it up with something else. You trust them to interpret the results truthfully. And it's not that you just trust one of these things: you trust them all, as a system of fail-safes, to provide the truth to you, the poor person who doesn't know who their parents are.
Let me ask another question: how do you know your parents love you? There's no DNA test for that. Really, all you can do is watch their actions (to see that they're loving) and trust what they say when they tell you they love you (after all, their acts that you think are love might just be part of some big scam or experiment). You can't really know someone's heart - you have to trust what they tell you about it, and measure it against what they do.
Neither of these questions can be solved purely by logic. You have to trust other people, and trust a system that provides you with information. Dealing with God is almost exactly the same - except for two things that I'll get to shortly. But basically, in order to know who God is we need to trust people, and we need to trust a system. And to know how he feels about us, we need to look at what he does, and trust what he says. This is the point of what Peter has written for us in 2 Peter chapter 1.
Now, I should point out before going any further that what Peter has to say about all this isn't a gospel tract. It's not an evangelistic piece written to non-Christians to prove God's existence. If you go to a non-Christian and say, "Hey, here's a list of reasons why you should believe in God and why you should trust that he loves you," they are quite likely to just say, "Yeah, no." There are logical reasons for that: for instance, the more likely a piece of information is going to change your life, the more thoroughly you might scrutinise it. So climate change being real means some huge changes, and a government wouldn't want to make the changes without checking to make sure it's real. But there are also non-logical reasons for it: for instance, you don't want to change your life. Also like climate change: some governments just don't want to do the work to fix things, because other things are more important to them, like giving a billion dollars to a coal mine.
Proving that God exists is not like proving your parents exist. If I asked the question, "How do you know your parents existed?" you could just point to yourself. Logically, a child requires biological parents. There isn't another place for a human to come from. But if someone were to ask, "How do you know God exists?" and I were to answer, "Because everything else exists," that isn't as satisfying, because people aren't prepared to accept that logic. And this is where it's important for us to understand the first big difference between believing your parents exist, and believing that God exists. God doesn't exist in the same way that your parents exist: God's existence is before all other things. Everything but God was created by God. In terms of existence, he's different. So it's not surprising that discovering his existence will be different too.
What does that all mean? Well, to try and boil it down into something a bit simpler, let me put it like this: from a human position, if we try to discover God by first assuming he doesn't exist, our system is broken and we're likely to think God doesn't exist. If we assume that God does exist, then the system suddenly works very differently. God has to be part of the system that reveals him.
Now, that's all a bit of a tangent, because 2 Peter isn't about that. It's written to Christians who according to Peter "already know the great and precious promises of God and are firmly established in the truth". And it's because they know these things that Peter wants to make sure they never forget them. He wants them to know what undergirds these promises of God, what makes them reliable and trustworthy, so that the promises themselves are remembered. This is stuff that Christians need to know; that we need to be reminded of. Peter gives two reasons why we need to know what undergirds these promises: firstly, God's "great and precious promises" are the basis of our ability to participate in the divine nature with God. So that's pretty important. Secondly, as Peter goes on to explain in chapter 2, this knowledge protects us from false teaching, which would so readily pull us away from God and see us vulnerable to exploitation by liars. Mark will talk about that more next week.
So last week you looked at what those great and precious promises are that God has made to us. These are the foundation of the good news about God: obviously that he exists, but also that he loves us, he has come to earth as Jesus to save us, and we can participate in the divine nature with him because of that. That participation in the divine nature to Peter looks like the ability to escape the world of evil desires and to live a life of faith, goodness, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, mutual affection and love.
And these great and precious promises are so great, so precious, that Peter devotes his whole life to making sure not just that his audience knows them, but that they never ever forget them! And so Peter wants to address how we can know that these great and precious promises are true, because he knows that even strong Christians can have times of doubt.
There's nothing wrong with doubt in the Christian life. It's not something to be ashamed of. We're humans, not robots - we don't just live lives of logic, we live lives of emotion and trouble and forgetfulness and pain and hurt, and these things can make us doubt, even doubt God. Peter knows that all too well. He turned his back on Jesus at his arrest three times! And this is Peter, who as he points out saw Jesus at the Transfiguration - saw Jesus in all his heavenly god-splendour. If Peter could turn his back on Jesus after seeing that - the crowning visual expression of Jesus being God - none of us are safe from doubt.
So what does Peter want us to know? He wants us to know how we can trust who God is, and that God loves us. And humanly speaking, that's no easy thing. Think back to parents. The information you would turn to to find out if your parents are your parents is part of a system that is much bigger than just yours parents. It involves doctors, nurses, scientists, a body of learning, a culture of truth-telling - all much bigger than your specific parents. There's a system of fail-safes aimed at getting you the truth. And as for whether they love us, we can only trust what they say and what they do.
But here's the second thing that's different about God: when it comes to learning about God, God is the system, and God made the system. There is no system bigger than God we can refer to. Logic, science, reason - these things are all products of God. God is outside them and prior to them. They're not useless, just limited. Who God is can't be verified against something outside himself because not even truth is outside God: God IS Truth. From a God position, God is the one revealing himself, and the truth about himself, and his love for us, both on a grand level but also on an individual level to people.
Jesus reveals his nature as God at the Transfiguration. More than his birth, more than his death, more even than his resurrection, the Transfiguration is the one time that shows without doubt that Jesus isn't just a prophet, or a teacher, or a miracle worker - he is God incarnate. And that most important revelation is seen by only three people in the whole of history, because that's how God wanted it. You don't get to see it. Neither do I. Nor did the nine other apostles. But Peter saw it. That's the system God chose - a system where three people get the proof, and everyone else gets to hear about it second-hand.
And that's enough. It's enough to put a stamp of approval on everything Jesus says and does as expressing who God is to us. If we need to know who God is, we have Jesus - God as a human being - doing God for us in a way that we can understand because he's doing God as one of us. We can participate in the divine nature because God participated in what it means to be human. That's the great and precious promise - and we can know it to be true, because Jesus was Transfigured, and Peter saw it. Yes, we have to trust Peter. Peter knew he was going to die soon, so he wrote it down. So yes, we have to trust tradition handing down this story to us as written in the Bible. Yes, we have to trust scholars like Penny who translate it from Greek into English. But God is part of that system - the one who Transfigured Jesus in front of those three apostles is the one who brings us Peter's message.
And God reveals himself to us in the Old Testament. The transfiguration speaks to the truth of the Old Testament - Elijah and Moses appear representing the Law and the Prophets! The Old Testament tells us who God is by showing us his power in the creation of all things, by showing us his dealings with humanity, particularly Israel, throughout history - he is a God who makes promises, and keeps them; who gives warnings; who mourns over his people's sins and failures, and yearns to bring them back to himself. It paints a picture for us of the kind of person God is. It's the things that God has done and said that help us judge whether he really loves us or not.
But it's also more than that. Peter tells us that God speaks through the writers of the Old Testament by inspiring them through his Holy Spirit. The Old Testament is a story of how over thousands of years God has spoken into individual people's lives, relating to them, transforming them, speaking through them to others - loving them. Sometimes God is a pillar of fire and cloud, sometimes he's a burning bush, sometimes he's a booming voice from the heavens; and sometimes, he's a small voice in the wind, he's in people's dreams, he is convicting people through his written word, and he is sometimes just in their hearts, telling them what to say or write.
That Holy Spirit, who guided the pens that wrote the Old Testament, is inside each of us. It is the key that unlocks God's word to us - it's like the Holy Spirit from back then talks to the Holy Spirit inside us now and says, "Hey, remember when David was in the wilderness scared and alone, and we spoke that psalm into his mind? That would really help Ben now. Let's unlock it for him." "You remember how full of love Boaz was when he married the widow Ruth? Matt's about to get married; let's increase his understanding of that love." "You remember what Jesus meant when he said 'Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven'? Those Christians in Egypt are getting persecuted pretty badly. Let's connect them with God there."
When times are tough, when things are hard, when you're struggling and suffering and doubt arises, remember that. Remember that God's Holy Spirit is in you. The same Holy Spirit that was with the prophets in the Old Testament; the same Holy Spirit that was with Peter and the New Testament authors; the same Holy Spirit that was with Jesus. How can you trust that God is who he says he is, that he loves us and will keep his great and precious promises? Because God has revealed himself through Jesus Christ to all humanity; and because God speaks to us in the written Bible, inspired by God the Holy Spirit, and God the Holy Spirit inside you will connect you to the truth of God's great and precious promises.
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