By R. Albert Mohler, Jr.
If divine revelation in terms of speech means anything, it implies among other things that God need not have thus disclosed Himself. God might indeed have remained silent and incommunicative in relation to His creatures. His revelational speech to mankind is not an inescapable or inevitable reality. It’s instead a demonstration of His own character. It is not to be likened to the mathematically quite predictable spurting of the geyser Old Faithful. Instead, like an enigmatic weather pattern, His performance cannot be charted in advance and in crucial ways. It is once for all rather than merely sporadic. Even God’s extended and ongoing speech in general or universal revelation is moment by moment, precept by precept, a matter of voluntary divine engagement and addressed to mankind that carries ever and on the utmost urgency.
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God mercifully lets His people hear. It is all by mercy, and thus intellectual pride is the enemy of any true theological education. Because there is nothing we can figure out. There is nothing we can discover. There is no “aha” moment where, in some theological laboratory, a new element is discovered. We know by grace and mercy.
If God has spoken, we too must speak.
That’s interesting. Israel is given this order again and again, and so is the church. We preach and we teach and we speak because God has spoken. Because God has spoken, we dare not remain silent. There is a task here; there is an urgency here. And so we teach preaching and we teach teaching and we teach speaking, because we are to be the speaking people of a speaking God. The people of God are not to be marked by their silence, but by their speech.
There is a command here to preach, of course, and a command here to teach. Skip two chapters forward to Deuteronomy six, and there Israel is reminded of the responsibility of parents to teach children. Throughout the fabric of Scripture, the teaching mandate is a constant. And of course, for the church, it’s just as clear. As Paul writes in 2 Timothy chapter four, kerusso ton logon, preach the word! We are not just to have heard it; we are to teach it and preach it and share it.
The importance of this was made clear even in the Old Testament in a text like Nehemiah eight, where Ezra and his colleagues read the text aloud and then explained its meaning to the congregation. We are to set it out and make it plain, because if God has spoken, then we too must speak.