Can We Know God Has Spoken?: A Biblical Case for Revelation Before Argument

By Phillip James, MDiv

Introduction – Revelation and Apologetics

Apologetics is often pictured as a search: humanity reasoning its way toward the possibility of a Creator, assembling arguments from cosmology, morality, or fine-tuning in the hope of closing the distance to a God who has otherwise stayed silent.

Psalm 19 will not let that picture stand unquestioned. The apologetic question it presses is not whether we can reason our way to God, but something logically prior to that: has God already spoken?

David does not write as a man searching the heavens for a hint of the divine. He writes as a man who already knows the heavens are talking — and who then turns to a second, clearer voice besides.

Creation Declares (Psalm 19:1–6)

1) The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
 
-Psalm 19:1 (KJV)

This is general revelation, and David’s language is emphatic: day and night, without interruption, creation is speaking (Ps. 19:2).

Psalm 19:3 is notoriously difficult in the Hebrew, and translations differ on whether it affirms or denies that creation’s testimony is “heard” in the ordinary sense.

What is not in doubt is the verse that follows, which grounds the point far more securely: this testimony is not confined to human speech or national boundaries. Its reach is universal — “their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world” (Ps. 19:4).

Paul will later draw the same conclusion in Romans 1:20: what may be known of God is manifest, because God hath shewed it unto them.

Psalm 19 does not argue for this. It assumes it, and moves on — which is itself a claim worth noticing.

The psalm does not treat the existence of a Creator as the conclusion of an argument still to be built. It treats the Creator as the given, spoken plainly enough that Psalm 19 presses a question beyond whether God exists: whether we will honor the God who has already made Himself known.

“The psalm does not treat the existence of a Creator as the conclusion of an argument still to be built. It treats the Creator as the given.”

David presses the picture further still. In them, he says, God “hath set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race” (Ps. 19:4–5).

The sun does not merely rise. It runs, joyfully, on a course set for it, “from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof” (Ps. 19:6).

“He (David) has not stopped to defend the claim that the sun’s motion testifies to a Maker; he has simply described it that way, as the only description that fit what he saw.”

Notice what David has not done. He has not stopped to defend the claim that the sun’s motion testifies to a Maker; he has simply described it that way, as the only description that fit what he saw.

For David, creation was never a neutral text requiring an apologetic argument before it could count as evidence.

It was already, on its own terms, a sermon — wordless, but unmistakable to anyone willing to listen.

Scripture Speaks (Psalm 19:7–10)

At verse 7, David turns from the wordless testimony of the skies to a second and more precise revelation:

7) The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.
 
-Psalm 19:7 (KJV)

He continues without pause: “The statutes of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart: the commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the LORD is clean, enduring for ever: the judgments of the LORD are true and righteous altogether” (Ps. 19:8–9).

Six times in three verses David names God’s revealed Word — law, testimony, statutes, commandment, fear, judgments — and six times he pairs it with a quality: perfect, sure, right, pure, clean, true.

“General revelation tells us a Creator exists and is to be honored. It was never meant to tell us how sinners are converted, made wise, or enlightened.”

Creation declares God’s glory in a general way, available to every observer under the sky.

Scripture speaks with a precision creation was never designed to carry — converting the soul, making wise the simple, enlightening the eyes.

General revelation tells us a Creator exists and is to be honored. It was never meant to tell us how sinners are converted, made wise, or enlightened.

For that, David does not reach for more careful observation of the heavens. He reaches for a word God has actually given.

David even weighs the two side by side: God’s judgments are “more to be desired… than gold, yea, than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb” (Ps. 19:10) — more valuable, in David’s own estimation, than anything the created order he has just finished praising could offer him.

The Servant Responds (Psalm 19:11–14)

This is where Psalm 19 stops being merely a doctrine of revelation and becomes something more exposing.

Having praised God’s word as perfect and true, David does not close by admiring it from a safe distance. He lets it turn on him:

11) Moreover by them is thy servant warned: and in keeping of them there is great reward. 12) Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults.
 
-Psalm 19:11-12 (KJV)

The move from verse 9 to verse 12 is the whole argument of the psalm in miniature. Revelation is not simply information to be evaluated. It is address — a word spoken to someone, which means the one who receives it is now accountable to what it says, whether or not he can see all his own errors clearly enough to name them himself.

David’s closing line is not a plea for more evidence. It is a prayer:

14) Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.
 
-Psalm 19:14 (KJV)

The psalm that opened with the heavens declaring God’s glory ends with a man asking that his own words be found acceptable to the God who has been speaking all along.

Revelation, rightly received, does not terminate in intellectual assent. It terminates in a changed relationship to the One who spoke.

Revelation Before Argument

This gives Christian apologetics a different starting point than is often assumed. Christian apologetics, therefore, need not begin by treating God as absent until an argument makes Him plausible.

“Revelation, rightly received, does not terminate in intellectual assent. It terminates in a changed relationship to the One who spoke.”

It can begin by recognizing what Psalm 19 assumes from its opening line: God has already made Himself known — through what He has made, available to every observer without exception, and through the Word He has given, sufficient to convert the soul and make the simple wise.

What remains is not to construct a bridge across a silence, but to clear away what keeps people from hearing a voice that has, in fact, never stopped speaking — and then, as David does, to let that voice do what it was always meant to do: not merely inform the hearer, but call him to account, and finally to prayer.

David’s prayer ends where the psalm’s deepest need surfaces: “O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer” (Ps. 19:14).

“Christian apologetics, therefore, need not begin by treating God as absent until an argument makes Him plausible.”

Psalm 19:14 does not present a developed Christology, and we need not claim more of the text than David gave us. But the Christian reader is not left to wonder where God’s self-disclosure ultimately leads.

“God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (Heb. 1:1–2, KJV).

“The revelation David celebrated in the heavens and treasured in the law finds its fullest voice not in a text alone but in a Person.”

The revelation David celebrated in the heavens and treasured in the law finds its fullest voice not in a text alone but in a Person.

For the Christian, that revelation ultimately directs us beyond the created heavens, and even beyond our own ability to keep God’s perfect law, to the Redeemer David himself confessed — the God who has made Himself known supremely in Jesus Christ.

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Image Credit: Stage Fort across Gloucester Harbor by Fitz Henry Lane (formerly Fitz Hugh Lane), American, 1862. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 1978.203.

Thank you for reading this article about revelation and apologetics.