He Still Speaks: The Message Like No Other

By Gregory V Hall

God is not silent. He has a message He knows we cannot live without. He is speaking through His Word, His Son, and His Spirit. He speaks through His creation and in all His glorious attributes, with clarity and majesty. His message may be denied, but He will not let it be ignored. In His sovereign love and grace, He provides the most important message the human family ever encounters. The message is clear, and our eternal destiny is determined by our attention to it. He still speaks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9798892436670

Book preview

cover.jpg

He Still Speaks

The Message Like No Other

Gregory V Hall

ISBN 979-8-89243-666-3 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-89243-667-0 (digital)

Copyright © 2024 by Gregory V Hall

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

All biblical citations were taken from the New King James Version of the Holy Bible.

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

He Still Speaks in His Word

He Still Speaks in His Son

He Still Speaks in His Spirit

He Still Speaks in His Creation (Part 1)

He Still Speaks in His Creation (Part 2)

He Still Speaks in His Sovereignty

He Still Speaks to Our Generation

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

About the Author

Notes

He Still Speaks in His Word

I want to know one thing, the way to heaven…God Himself has condescended to teach the way…He has written it down in a book. O give me that book: at any price give me the book of God.

—John Wesley

I will worship toward Your holy temple and praise your name for Your loving kindness and Your truth; for You have magnified Your word above all Your name.

—Psalm 138:2

It's in the Bible. Look in the book.

—Charlie Cook, age 5

The B-i-b-l-e, yes, that's the book for me. I stand alone on the Word of God, the B-i-b-l-e.

—Trey Hall, age 6

God has spoken in His Word, the Bible. The Bible is God's self-disclosure. It is the revelation of His own nature and character. It contains the description of all His attributes. It is the explanation of the origin of all that exists and of all living things. It is the explanation of how the world went wrong and the extreme measures God has taken to correct it. It alone offers hope for a world to come that is promised to be the full expression of God's purpose and plan for all He has made. He unveils His design for eternal life that will be perfect in every way. It shows us how to reach for Him and how to live with Him and for Him in this life and in the life to come. It is the path to human flourishing. In these and many other ways, His book is absolutely unique.

God has spoken, and we, His creatures, are the beneficiaries. He speaks every time the book is open, and it is read or proclaimed, whether in private or public. It always completes the purpose for which God gave it. The Bible is profound enough to study it for a lifetime, as many do as scholars, and it is simple enough to engage a child. It is, at times, mysterious and provocative and takes considerable effort and prayer to comprehend. It is though, as the reformers said, perspicuous, clear, and open to understanding.

I have encountered those who consider the Bible impossible to understand and therefore unable to be applied in any meaningful way in everyday life to say nothing of being able to address the great questions facing humankind. They claim it is outdated, unrelatable, esoteric, and a document of antiquity with no apparent relationship to the world as we know it today. This is, however, untrue as can be attested by those who have seen firsthand what the Word of God is and can do. These are the men and women who have experienced life transformation in this book. What we find is this: the problem (as some call it) with the Bible is not that it is old, outdated, antiquated or unrelatable. The so-called problem with the Bible is not that it is esoteric (secretive). The real issue of the Bible is that it is clear. And in its clarity, it makes claims upon the human family that must be addressed and absolutely cannot be avoided. These claims include Do you believe in the God described in this book? What do you believe about Him? Will you honor Him as the God with whom you have to do? Will you accept the plan He devised through His Son, Jesus, and Him alone so that you can have life with Him forever? Or, if you refuse to believe, will you be able to bear the consequences? The stakes in these existential questions could not be weightier or more dramatic. Eternity, for all of us, lies in the balance.

In its clarity, the Bible claims for itself that it is trustworthy and true. Those are the very descriptors that come from the Bible itself. The challenges to this claim are as old as humanity itself. It was the serpent of Genesis 3 that came to the first woman to entice her to turn in the wrong direction with a question that cast aspersions upon the word of God. The attacks, in humanity's long war against God, are most often related to getting us to altogether deny or cast aspersions upon the teaching and commands of God given in Scripture. So the serpent began his assault: Did God really say you shall not eat of every tree of the garden.? And notice this: the serpent misrepresented what God had really said to the first couple. The deception was on. And the woman knew enough to call the serpent on this.

The woman made the correction: We may eat of the fruit of trees of the garden but of the tree, which is in the midst of the garden. God has said, ‘You shall not eat of it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.'

The serpent persisted in his attack on what God had said. He made the move to get the woman to disbelieve or at least minimize the word and command of God. It was an attack upon God's truthfulness: You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. The long war against the trustworthiness of what God has said was now engaged. That war has not abated since that day.

The interaction between the serpent and the first woman became a monstrous foray into a terrible blasphemy. The woman traded in her relationship with her creator God for an idol of her own making. She followed the tempter's deception and took all of humanity into the realm of crass idolatry, which is always the destination when the Word of God is not believed. She had replaced the Word of God for her word and that on the basis of the evil one's deception. We cannot be too hard on her. We do the same with regularity.

The result of the Genesis 3 account has been an unmitigated catastrophe. Ever since the Word of God is replaced by any other idea of human origin, the result is the same—an idol. A God replacement is substituted for a relationship meant to be caring and enduring. Fellowship with God is broken.

It is so important to understand that those who fight against the trustworthiness and truthfulness of God's Word do so to great peril. The fight against the Word of God is not the assault on an ancient text, but it is rather an attack on the very nature and character of God. When one is positioned poorly in this battle, the result is never good. God will not give His glory to another. He will not tolerate forever those who denigrate His word. His holy character is at stake.

If the Genesis 3 passage teaches us anything, it should be that the Word of God has its origin in the character of God. To read and understand the scripture is to encounter God Himself. The scripture teaches us about the source with the claim it is inspired by God. This inspiration is described in 2 Timothy 3:16, All scripture is given by inspiration of God. The word inspiration is better translated as expiration, according to scholars, and this is a simple yet profound distinction. To inspire is to breathe into. To expire or expiration is to breathe out. The word expiration is intended to give us intent of the source of scripture. God breathed it out. It came from Him, and it expresses His nature as the source of scripture. Here is the importance of the distinction being made. If the Bible is the word of men, like some suppose, that will inform the reader as to how it should be understood or valued. If the Bible is the Word of God, then everything about it changes. It reaches us with an entirely different message based on the authority of the sovereign God, who tells nothing but the truth and can bring to pass everything described in His book. Now, secular culture is confused about the source of the Bible, and that has always been the case. What is also the case and should never be