A Matter of Theology!
Recently I was teaching a bible class at a local bible college and the discussion somehow turned to, how we can know anything at all and how we can ever understand anything? This is the philosophical category known as epistemology, and it really is important for all people to wrestle with it. However; for the Christian, this shouldn't be a difficult question for us to answer. God has spoken, and everything we know, we only know because He has revealed it to us. But what was really interesting, was how easily we abandon what God has said and resort to making up our own categories and definitions.
For example, in this specific conversation we were talking about what it means to be truly free. The students gave me pretty typical responses such as, to be free is to do whatever you want, or it means having nothing to hold you back and not be under the control of something or someone. But then, I followed it up with this question, "Is God free?" Everyone immediately answered "yes" of course he is. God is completely free! To this I would have to completely agree, God is free, Psalm 115:3 tells us that "Our God is in the heavens; He does all that He pleases." But the next question I asked them was this, can God sin? To that they answered no, which I also agreed with. Scripture tells us that "in Him there is no sin." 1 John 3:5b and in 2 Corinthians 5:21 it tells us that "for our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God". James tells us that God cannot even be tempted with evil. But here lies the dilemma, if freedom means doing whatever you want, and having nothing hold you back, how can God be truly free if there is something He cannot do?
Enter the question of epistemology and where we, as sinful creatures often fall short! You see, the issue here is that as soon as we hit an apparent barrier, we abandon our ultimate authority for another authority, that of the human mind, and quite frankly, it’s usually our own mind that we make an authority. We do this with many other categories as well, take the word love for example. Our world has one definition of it, and when we read in scripture that God is love, we read into that the human definition rather than allowing love to be defined by who God is. The simple answer to the question of God’s freedom is, God is free and whatever it is to be free involves not being able to sin! The answer to how we define anything always has to come back to what God has said, and this means for Christians every conversation is always theological in nature, because words have meaning according to an ultimate authority.
For Christians we are never that ultimate authority, the world is never that ultimate authority, Christ always is. We belong to Him, this world belongs to Him and therefore He gets to define everything. If we wish to be consistent we must seek to first know Him, because it is only then that we will truly begin to be wise, as proverbs tells us "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom". Man can know nothing apart from God, no... thing... Christians need to stop fearing man, and stand firmly on the word of God, recognizing this is all His and therefore, everything is always a matter of theology.