We do not live in a silent universe. By God’s grace, our world is filled with music and laughter and speech. We take these things for granted, but they are some of God’s greatest gifts to us. And yet, while music and laughter and speech are wonderful, they are not the most important reason I say that we do not live in a silent universe. Far more important is the fact that God himself has spoken to us.

Throughout the Old Testament, we see that God is a God who speaks. He creates the world simply by speaking it into existence. “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Gen. 1:3). After creating Adam and Eve, he spoke to them before they spoke to him: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply…’” (Gen. 1:27-28). Language itself and our ability to speak is a gift from God and a reflection of that fact that God is a communicative God. He created mankind in order to give of himself to us, to communicate himself to someone outside himself. By his very nature, God is a giving God, a communicating God. He delights in revealing himself to us so that we can know him.

Throughout the Old Testament, God at times communicated directly with his creatures, although he usually communicated with his people through prophets, men specially commissioned by God to speak on his behalf without in any way lessening the authority or truthfulness of the message and without overriding the creativity and personality of the messenger. And the culmination of that recurring theme of God speaking is seen in the arrival of the Son of God himself, who is God and comes and speaks the very words the Father gave him to speak. “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son…” (Heb. 1:1-2). The God who spoke the universe into existence, who spoke to Abram in the land of Chaldea, and who spoke to Moses on Mt. Sinai has spoken to us through his Son. It is God’s greatest self-revelation. The revelation through Jesus explains and clarifies all previous revelation, and is the subject matter of all successive revelation through the apostles and New Testament prophets. 

Because we do not live in a silent universe, but one in which God has spoken, you and I are confronted with one very important decision: will we listen to God or will we refuse to hear his voice? There is no neutral option. We either welcome his voice, or spurn it. The universe is not silent. God has spoken. Will you listen to him?