Part 4: Knowing God and Knowing Self (1.1)
Most systematic theological presentations of Christianity begin with a study of the character and attributes of God. Calvin begins with a bigger question: How do we know anything about God? Without this first step, nothing else will make sense to us!
1. Grasping personal misery (1.1.1)
To start, we must wrap our minds around the misery and sinfulness of our own hearts. 
Calvin will not let us jump into the Institutes on an intellectual mission. Our hearts must be prepared to learn eternal truth, and we will not learn about God until we see the depth of our own blackened hearts. Remember piety is the foundation for all knowledge of God.
A humble self-understanding leads us to seek after God. Calvin writes “We cannot seriously aspire to him before we become displeased with ourselves … The knowledge of ourselves not only arouses us to seek God, but also, as it were, leads us by the hand to find him” (p. 37). Our own nakedness, ignorance, vanity, poverty, infirmity, depravity and corruption – when rightly understood – will both humble us and grab us by the hand to flee for refuge in Him! Theology is learned when a sinner runs towards God for mercy.
In one word, only when a sinner is “so stung by the consciousness of his own unhappiness” will he flee to God (p. 36). So where do we find such knowledge?
2. Looking upward, looking outward (1.1.2)
Naturally we think of ourselves as righteous and wise. For Calvin, hypocrisy is an “empty image of righteousness” rather than a true righteousness that “abundantly satisfies us” (pp. 37-38). The prayer of the hypocrite is, “God I thank you that I am not like others.”
The solution is to stop looking around at other sinners. Calvin says, first look directly into the blazing sun then look around at the world. After looking at the sun, our vision is clouded and skewed but this clouded vision is actually the greater clarity with which we can actually discern the things of this earth. Everything on earth looks differently after staring into the sun directly.
God is the sun. Look at His perfect righteousness and glory and then, “what [was] masquerading earlier as righteousness was pleasing in us will soon grow filthy in its consummate wickedness” (p. 38).
It’s by staring into the sun that our vision changes and we see, with our spiritual eyes, the depth of our depravity. This depravity becomes foundational in our search to understand God and His motives.
3. Nothing compares (1.1.3)
Scripture teaches us that when sinners see God, they unwind like a cheap sweater.
Job was a favorite book for Calvin. For him, the fact that God’s purity and glory “overwhelms men with the realization of their own stupidity, impotence, and corruption” was a major theme of the book (p. 39).
But it’s not just Job. It’s Abraham (Gen. 18:27), Elijah (1 King 19:13) and Isaiah (Isa. 6:5). The common theme of sinners who see the glory of God revealed is to face certain death! See Judges 6:22-23 and 13:22, Isaiah 6:5, Ezekiel 1:28 and 2:1 (read them all here).
We sinners are confounded and humbled when we compare ourselves to Him! We can only be rotten worms (see biblical passages here).
Thus we read in Isaiah, “Enter into the rock and hide in the dust from before the terror of the Lord, and from the splendor of his majesty” (Isa. 2:10). It’s when we are face-down in a cave that we truly understand God, and rightly understand ourselves. This fear is the beginning of theological wisdom (Ps. 111:10; Pro. 1:7; 9:10).
Calvinistic meditations …
It’s not that we don’t look outside of ourselves to understand ourselves. In school we look at the grades of others to gauge our intelligence. We look at the appearance of others to gauge our beauty. We look to the houses and cars of others to gauge our status in the world. We naturally look outside ourselves. The problem for Calvin was not that sinners fail to compare themselves to outside standards, but that we naturally compare ourselves to a hypocritical worldly standard. We must not only look outward, but upward. To learn who we are we must lay in the dust under the cliff rocks and expect sudden death because of God’s glory!
Calvin says look directly at the sun and be undone by God’s majesty. Be undone by His perfections, His unapproachable-ness, His justice. And for preachers and teachers who want to communicate God’s truth, Calvin says to us, “Preacher, you must start here. You must be concerned, not merely to ‘prove’ truth to the unregenerate but point sinners to look at the sun.” Until sinners are undone they cannot know God! We must first become “displeased with ourselves.”
Our goal is not to write theology to intellectually prove God exists, our goal is to see sinners doubled over under their sinfulness, hiding in a cave, clothed in filthy rags, likening themselves to dust and worms. By God’s grace let your hearers see God’s full majesty of God! Let them first stare into the sun and then help them to drink Grace and mercy from the Cross!
If there was one message contemporary American evangelicalism needs, it’s this one. Without fear of God there is no knowledge of God (Ps. 111:10; Pro. 1:7; 9:10). Theology built without a fear of God is a temple of straw built to an unknown god on a foundation of sand.
So this is where Calvin begins. If the first 5 pages do not grab us the last 1,400 wont either. This is the beginning of understanding God and his motives. If we do not personally start here, frightened worms of God’s glory laying face-down in a cave, we can stop reading and slide the Institutes back on our shelves. We will not understand God because we will have fundamentally misunderstood ourselves.
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Tony Reinke 