The God of the Signs - Conclusion
[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]
How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe
The Signs of Creation and the Necessity of Christ
As the Sign of the Heavens teaches perhaps more poignantly than any other, the Most High God, upon whom all men must believe to be saved, most assuredly did not leave the nations scattered across the earth and beyond the range of Scripture’s testimony without a profound and enduring witness to his Light. The lessons taught by the eight Signs of Creation are multifarious and luminescent.
First, the Sign of Beauty teaches that goodness is ever-present, objectively attractive, and always resilient. Though its fragile face may be disfigured by the beastly hands of man, the goodness of Beauty possesses absolute supremacy over deformity and ugliness except in the heart that consciously denies its right to rule.
Second, the Sign of Order instructs that immutable laws govern the cosmos with the grace of an iron fist, conveying to man the capacity to pursue the greatness of culture through art, science, mathematics, literature, and music and bringing to naught the dissolute aspirations of those who would flaunt their freedom in a manner contrary to Nature.
Third, the Sign of Consciousness teaches that the mind of man, by which he knows and reasons, could not have arisen from the slime of primitive earth without the genetic interposition of an original Mind, external to the cosmos, for knowledge and reason necessarily supervene the raw cosmological events of the natural world and require second-order channels by which free thought may be expressed contrary to the deterministic structure of natural law.
Fourth, the Sign of Conscience teaches man that he is subject to a moral order by which actions are, and ought to be, universally judged. Conscience, moreover, convicts the heart of man when he transgresses that moral order and inspires society to create systems of justice by which it may punish particularly egregious and destructive transgressions. Yet, too, Conscience, operating in tandem with Consciousness, instructs man that all such gestures at comprehensive justice are necessarily imperfect and remedially incomplete. Thus, Conscience cries out for a final Judgment where all wrongs will be redressed and righteousness rewarded.
Fifth, the Sign of Death and Rebirth instructs man in the beauty of process, that is, ordered change, and gestures at God’s participation in such change, at least insofar as He interacts with and intercedes in the play of Creation. Moreover, the Sign of Death and Rebirth, as expressed through the experiences of the dying, teaches man that he is a spiritual creature and that death, though ultimate in one sense, is in another sense merely a gateway to a different form of existence, which existence, given Near Death Experiences and the insistence of Conscience, must follow the pattern of reward and judgment, not the purely recapitulative path of reincarnation.
Sixth, the Sign of Love teaches that there is transcendent purpose in man’s existence and that such purpose is inextricably interrelated to the cause of relational affection expressed in feeling and faithfulness. Moreover, as the acquisition of requited Love is man’s greatest desire, Love commands a pursuit of satisfaction that, however blessed in the interim, is ultimately destined to fail, if nothing else of the disease of finitude. Thus, the man upon whom tragedy falls may either curse Love for its parsimony or believe in and seek its eternal and unfailing source.
Seventh, the Sign of Lament validates sorrow and anger as right and proper responses to the remorseless ravaging of Beauty and Love by the claws of crime and chance. Then, in the grace of consolation, Lament purges the broken heart of the poison of despair and replaces it with the unconquerable desire to live, to flourish, if nothing else to honor those who have perished. In purveying such a gift of temporal hope, moreover, the Sign of Lament teaches the ascendant heart to believe in its eternal counterpart—the restoration of all things.
Eighth and finally, the Sign of the Heavens depicts with elegant intelligibility the existence of an age-old conflict between good and evil which has engulfed the world. The Sign of the Heavens then blessedly prophesies that the forces of good will one day triumph ultimately and conclusively over the rebellious hordes of evil and thereafter banish the face of darkness from the Kingdom of Light.
Taken together, the eight Signs of Creation declare to man in a language accessible to every tribe and nation the world over a veritable smorgasbord of cornerstone truths about Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Consummation whose likenesses are both revealed and significantly expanded in the pages of Scripture. The astute reader will notice, however, that two elements of the Christian gospel are completely missing from the testimony of the Signs—a divine promise of mercy to the repentant heart and the Name of the Redeemer whose kingdom of Light will vanquish the rebellion of darkness at the end of all things. Here I must answer the ultimate objection I noted earlier: Even assuming that a man who has never before heard the Name of Yahweh or been exposed to the Biblical writings may reach out to God by way of the Signs and embrace a living faith in His goodness and beauty, how can such a one be saved apart from the gracious ministrations of Christ? In its essence my response is simple: One cannot. No man will pass through the flames of Judgment who is not covered by the atoning blood of Christ. Nevertheless, I maintain that the path to salvation by way of faith in the God of the Signs remains open. The real issue before us, therefore, is not whether the salvific work of Christ is requisite for the perfection of salvation (it is) but whether knowledge of Christ’s Name, per se, is the sole means by which a man or woman of faith may accept the supreme gift of divine absolution made available by Christ’s work. For the following reasons, I believe it is not.
Although the thought is not natural to us, it is nevertheless true that the concept of salvation apart from immediate knowledge of the Son of God is not unbiblical, only antiquated. Abraham is considered the father of faith, yet he never saw the face of Christ (at least not obviously) nor heard the New Testament message. He believed what God told him in a dream and such faith was credited to him as righteousness (Rom. 4:9). The same may be said of all the Old Testament heroes who by faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and shut the mouths of lions (Heb 11:1ff). The exploits of men such as Enoch, Moses, David, Jeremiah and Daniel, and of women such as Rahab, Sarah, Esther and Ruth roll of our tongues when playing Bible trivia, but rarely do we pause to contemplate the startling fact that none of them knew the name of the Messiah whose day they longed to see. As the writer of Hebrews put it, “[t]hese were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised (Heb. 11:39).”
Given such biblical precedent, it simply cannot be argued that extra-Christian faith is necessarily insufficient to defer the wrath of God. To hold otherwise would unjustifiably exclude from the New Creation every person who delighted in the love of God prior to the Day of Pentecost and the instantiation of the Church Age. No, grace has been a constant feature of God’s relationship to man across all historical epochs and stages of progressive revelation. Having said that, the author of Hebrews makes absolutely clear that it is Christ alone who is the lynchpin of God’s entire redemptive enterprise, without whose offices as Lamb of God and Light of the World man would remain in the bleak darkness of his sins. It is Christ and no other Savior who walks upon the waves where the currents of righteousness, justice, mercy and love converge and declares the captives free. Whatever the ancients might have gathered about him from the hints and impressions visible in their native world, Jesus is unquestionably the archetypal subject, the sine qua non, of God’s revelation to man. It matters not, in an eternal sense, therefore, whether Methuselah possessed the Law of Moses, whether Rebekah understood Paul’s gospel, or whether Elisha saw the risen Christ; it matters only that their debt and ours has been paid by the very same blood of the very same Lamb before whose throne all of us will bow on the Day of his appearing.
Once one grasps this truth, one need only contemplate again the substance of faith imparted by the Signs of Creation to appreciate its potential for redemptive sufficiency in the eyes of God. The God of the Signs is not merely an amorphous “Creator God” who wound up the universe like a child’s top, released it with a certain amount of kinetic and potential energy, and then abandoned it to its own devices. The God of the Signs is a deity whose specific attributes merit man’s worship and teach his heart to believe. Consider: The God of the Signs is a God of transcendent glory, for the illimitable majesty of Beauty is his handiwork. The God of the Signs is consummately benevolent and patient with the waywardness of man, for the resplendence of Beauty is imparted to the righteous and wicked alike and sustained without price. The God of the Signs is a God of Order whose peaceful touch restrains the reign of chaos, who fixed limits for the sea and set its doors and bars in place, saying, “This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt (Job 38:11).” The God of the Signs is a God of surpassing wisdom whose work is intelligible to the mind of man but whose sovereign Genius is beyond searching out.
The God of the Signs is a God from whose righteous hand dangles the master keys to the moral order, whose judgment is always near to the Conscience of man, and whose capacity for unlimited justice, and concomitant restoration, is desperately awaited by all who understand, intimately, the sorrows of social, jurisprudential and rehabilitative imperfection that leaden the world’s gilded promises of utopia. The God of the Signs, moreover, is a God whose imprint of Light is never still yet always constant, like the sky whose face knows countless expressions yet whose horizon never changes shape. The God of the Signs is a God of now and forever, a God who breathed into man a temporal life that metamorphoses with the seasons and a longing for eternity that will be satisfied, whether by judgment or reward. The God of the Signs is a God who delights in that special unity of souls which is born of relational diversity, who created man to desire the kind of love that can only be fulfilled in the sacrifice of commitment, and who is himself the only Lover whose kindnesses never fail. The God of the Signs is a God whose image is expressed, on the one hand, by human sorrow in the face of tragedy and rage at the madness of evil and, on the other, by the gentle rhythms of consolation and comfort and the sonorous refrains of hope. Finally, the God of the Signs is a God of victory, who promises ultimately to defeat the Scorpions, Snakes, and Dragons of darkness by a Lion-like Warrior whose glimmering archer’s bow is drawn and whose arrow of light will one day be loosed to bring an end to the reign of death and chaos.
My ultimate thesis, dear reader, is this: Take off the mask by which Creation shadows his face and the God of the Signs is none other than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Jesus. It follows, therefore, that the man who believes in such a God, whether in accordance with the testimony of Scripture or through the illustrations of the created order, is a man who, by operation of the munificent grace of Christ, will be counted among the righteous and granted entrance into the Kingdom. Again, I grant that, given the rampant idolatry and depravity that has plagued the post-Fall world, the number of men and women saved by the path of the Signs may turn out to be few. Yet I firmly believe that when the roll is called up yonder all who once dismissed as hopelessly “heathen” and “godless” the billions throughout history (and to this very day) born into cultures devoid of Scripture’s Light will be confounded by the extraordinary ambit of the redeeming love of Jesus Christ. Such a conclusion, I believe, is both logically required by the first two chapters of Romans and Paul’s apologetic in the seventeenth chapter of Acts and entirely consonant with the character of a God who is “slow to anger and abounding in love (Exo. 34:6)” and who “desires all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2:4).” Accepting the witness of the Signs requires no concession to a universalism devoid of judgment; it merely ratifies the dignity of Old Covenant faith and extends its redemptive potential beyond the confines of Israel to the whole world for whose sins Christ died. As Galileo sagaciously supposed, the God of the Heavens, who in love purposed the creation and redemption of man, revealed himself in two Books, Scripture and Creation. Blessed is the man who knows and believes the wisdom of both; but for one who knows not the former, praise be to the Most High God that there yet remains a path of Light by which his face may be seen.
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