no escape from God’s wrath, from judgment and hell. How vitally important it is that with the symbol we understand by “God”—“God in His revelation” might be made particularly clear at this point. To believe in God may and must—if we are content to understand God in the sense of the symbol—mean: to believe in God’s kindness. This is not that fictitious value, the summum bonum, not that maximum of what we consider good. It is that which, apart from all human opinions about good and evil, constrains the believer to thankfulness. Recognisable by faith as divine truth, it also is the counterpart to the action of God in His revelation.
4. He who believes in God in the sense of the symbol stands under God’s commands. That he resists them, that he keeps transgressing them, that he fails to give honour to God and that he cannot stand his ground before Him, that also is true. But it is still truer that he stands under God’s commands, that in his total foolishness and wickedness he is claimed by God, God’s prisoner, that he must again and again make a fresh start with the commands of God, and return to them. True, he has no starting-points and no aims in which he could independently, i.e. of himself, know God’s will. He could see in that only an arbitrary breaking loose into a freedom which does not become him. The freedom that becomes him is freedom from all other bonds. Believing in God, he is directed to God’s word, only to God’s word. Out of this bond he cannot completely escape either to please himself or others. It continually judges him, but it also holds him. Just because it is imposed on him without and indeed against his choice and volition, it is also comforting to him. In placing him in the ultimate responsibility, it takes from him the ultimate responsibility for his life, it is geniune guidance. To believe in God means to believe in God’s holiness. Even God’s holiness is not a truth that can be ascertained as such by an observer. A merely observable divine holiness would most certainly be no more and nothing better than the ideal of an ethical world-view. God’s holiness is apprehended in the fight of faith, in the sanctification of the believer through God’s revelation. Being counterpart to what God does, faith apprehends that God is holy.
We have given several answers to the question, Who and What God is for him who believes in God in the sense of the symbol, who therefore believes absolutely and exclusively in God in His revelation. They were, if you will, formal answers, because we have not yet entered upon the great theme of the symbol itself, “God in His revelation,” but have so to speak only touched it from outside from the point of view of its exclusiveness in relation to that theme that is very remote from the symbol, the theme “God in general”. But what is the meaning here of “formal” and “material,” “outside” and “inside”? In referring to the exclusiveness of this theme we have perhaps already caught a glimpse of the theme itself: the reality of God that has to do with man, the majesty of that God Who is Father, Son and Holy Ghost and Who cannot yield His honour to another. The indicative in the first commandment is indeed of a certainty no merely formal statement!
“FATHER” and “Almighty”: these two first designations of God—each singly and the two in their interconnection—lead us at once into the fullness, into the light, and also into the darkness of the prophetic-apostolic testimony to revelation which is summarised in the symbol.
In the sense of the symbol and in line with what was worked out in the last Lecture towards an understanding of the Christian conception of God, we shall have immediately to make it clear to ourselves that the conception “Almighty” receives its light from the conception “Father” and not vice versa. And that, although it is undoubtedly God’s revelation, and therefore an act of divine omnipotence through which God makes Himself known to man as Father; although we undoubtedly know God the Father in the exhibition of His omnipotence. But an act, and that an act of divine omnipotence is the revelation of God’s Fatherhood. God’s omnipotence is not some power that we might be inclined to regard as omnipotence. It is the power of the Father that does not make itself known to us as omnipotence in abstracto but only as the omnipotence of the Father, and that means—in the Father’s revealing Himself to us. This first article of the Creed and, in particular, these initial constituents are in no respect a playground for Natural Theology. It is not as if we already of ourselves knew what “omnipotence” is, in order then to have to learn from revelation only this in addition—that God is the Almighty and that the name and character of “Father” fit him. On the contrary, the revelation of God the Father is as such also the revelation of His omnipotence, and it is from this revelation that we have first of all to learn what real omnipotence is.
But according to the passages in Scripture where the conception “Father” gets its most pregnant meaning, the revelation of God the Father is the revelation of God in His Son Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. Scripture explicitly calls it the sole revelation of the Father. Therefore it is exclusively in this place that we shall have to seek to understand decisively and finally the conception “Father”. Let us start, however, from the fact that the revelation of the Almighty God and therefore of what in the sense of the symbol is called “omnipotence” is identical with the revelation of the Father of Jesus Christ through the Spirit, it being here that we have to learn what real “omnipotence” is.
With these words, “revelation of God the Father,” we at once push into the sphere of faith’s deepest mysteries. These words, “revelation of God the Father,” contain a remarkable contradiction, so far as God as Father is just not manifest to us in revelation itself, or is manifest only as the God Who remains hidden from us even in His revelation and just there, Who, in disclosing Himself, conceals Himself, Who, in coming near to us, remains far from us, Who, in being kind to us, remains holy. “No man hath seen God at any time” (John 1:18). “He dwelleth in a light which no man can approach unto” (1 Tim. 6:16). That, according to the Scriptures, is God the Father. God wants a faith in Himself as Father that expresses itself in obedience, i.e. He wants to be known under the condition that His hiddenness is recognised, to be known in the act of His revelation, which means—in His Son through the Holy Spirit. God’s revelation in His Son through the Spirit is a revelation which, far from excluding, includes within itself a remaining hidden, indeed a profoundest becoming hidden on the part of God. God’s revelation in His Son, so far as we understand by that concretely the—to us quite comprehensible—human existence of Jesus Christ, is, as the second article of the Creed will show us just as strikingly as is in keeping with the New Testament, a way into the darkness of God; it is the way of Jesus to Golgotha. If as such it is a way into the light of God, and is therefore really God’s revelation, then that is because this Jesus on “the third day rose again from the dead, He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God.” But that is said of Jesus the Crucified. Actually the hidden God here becomes manifest; we are here led right to the limit of what we can conceive in order that here (here, where Jesus Himself cries: “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”) we may catch the words, “Behold, your God!” God the Father, as Father of Jesus Christ, is He Who leads His Son into hell and out again. And in so far as He, as Father of Jesus Christ, gives Himself through the Holy Spirit to be known as our Father, we learn that we can follow Christ only by taking up our Cross, that our Baptism in His name is Baptism into His death and that we must die with Him in order to live with Him (Rom. 6:3 f.), that our life, as the life of all His own, is a life that is hid with Him in God (Col. 3:3). Here, too, we are led right to the frontier where our appropriate attitude can only be an obedience that marches out into the darkness and a faith that steps out of the darkness into the light. Not more and not less than the Lord over life and death becomes manifest to us in the revelation of the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. This Lord over life and death is God the Father.
And it is just His lordship over life and death that is the omnipotence
