GOD, BILLY GRAHAM AND SHAKESPEARE.
January 31, 2024
In 1991 Larry King interviewed Billy Graham on CNN, and asked him, “What will happen when you die?” Billy did not miss a beat, supposedly quite ready to give a quick answer. So, what did he say? How did the great evangelist, the pastor to presidents, phrase his reply? How did this preacher, always seen with an open Bible in his hand, ready to explain the intricacies of the Christian religion, answer this secular interviewer, who was married eight (8) times, and feared neither God nor his laws?
You’ll never guess. Billy Graham did not quote the Bible. Billy Graham did not look for a Bible passage such as Daniel 12: 13: “As for you, go your way till the end. You will rest, and then at the end of the days you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance.” None of that. No, Billy, the bold Bible pusher said, “When I die, Jesus will take me by the hand and bring me to God.” Wow. Wouldn’t that be something! A private audience with the God Creator, much grander than a visit with the Pope!
Billy, his voice like thunder, “Thus says the Lord!”, could not have been more wrong. “Jesus,” says Colossians 1: 15, “is the image of the invisible God.” Even more striking is Paul’s description of God – see 1 Timothy 6: 16: “(God) alone is immortal, who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see”. “Billy Graham, the great deceiver?”
God and Shakespeare: profound parallels.
Shakespeare: we know nothing of his age, his place of birth, where he died, how he looks like. His life-details are a mostly a mystery: we do know that he died in 1618; we do know that this most talented, and most celebrated playwright in the history of the literary world wrote 38 plays; we do know that his literary talents have mesmerized the theatrical world for centuries.
But, why do I compare him to God?
Well…. Just like Shakespeare, the greatest bard in the last 500 years, we know God only by what he did: The saying goes, ‘by your actions we shall know you’. Of William Shakespeare nothing physical is known. Maggie O’Farrell, in her HAMNET, a book one of my granddaughters gave me, beautifully surmised the life of the great poet, but, brilliant as it is, it is fiction at its best.
So, I repeat, how do we know God?
“How to know God”, asks the Belgic confession. “How to know Shakespeare”, ask the professors of English, where a play of the hero of Stratford and the Globe Theatre is required study in any university syllabus. “How to know God”, is also our perennial question, asked and explained in a million synagogues or church buildings or mosques in the world every Saturday or Sunday Morning.
With Shakespeare the answer is simple: thousands of teachers and millions of students study the multiple plays written by this inspired man, and every year new dissertations are written, exploring a minute aspect of some play to gain a greater understanding of this literary giant, of which no photograph, no picture, no accurate biography can be found, but whose plays are better known than the Bible, which has become a forgotten book.
The simple explanation for Shakespeare’s life is through his works, his legacy, his handiwork, his oeuvre, his portfolio.
So, back to the perennial question: How do we know God? You have guessed the answer: By and through his works. That’s why the Belgic Confession categorically states:
We know God by two means:
First, by the creation, preservation, and government
of the universe,
since that universe is before our eyes
like a beautiful book in which all creatures,
great and small,
are as letters
to make us ponder
the invisible things of God: God’s eternal power and divinity,
as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20, “Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been seen and understood through the things God has made.
So, they are without excuse. All these things are enough to convict humans
and to leave them without excuse.
Second, God makes himself known to us more clearly
by his holy and divine Word.
Simply stated: We know only about Shakespeare through his literary output. We also know only about God through his works in creation, which is his Direct and Primary Revelation, through his Son, Jesus Christ. The church basically has diluted THE MESSAGE, by intellectualizing God, through solely concentrating on the Bible, God’s Indirect and Secondary Revelation.
No wonder the church and the world are in rapid and in inevitable decline.