KNOWING GOD – WHAT IT MEANS

Where do we begin our journey toward knowing God better? I suggest that we start by clarifying exactly what it is we want to do.

Do we mean, for example, that we want to learn more about God – about his existence, attributes, character, purposes and ways? There’s nothing wrong with doing that, but is this all that there is to “knowing” him? Isn’t this the kind of knowledge that devils have (James 2:19), and that academics who study theology have? Yes it is!

Or again, do we simply want to experience the immediate presence of God? Mystics over the centuries have searched after this kind of knowledge. Disillusioned with arid intellectualism they have pursued an immediate experience of God – a sense of meeting him and being swallowed up in his essence to the point where they have lost consciousness of who they are and what they do. Is that what the Bible portrays as true knowledge of God?

It certainly isn’t. From the first chapter of the Bible men and women have known God in a personal, interactive way much as they have known one another. Adam and Eve, for example, heard God speak to them and spoke to him in turn (Genesis 1:28-30; 3:8ff.). More than that they responded to him (or failed to so!) in terms of what he said to them. The same is true of other men and women in the Bible. Abraham knew God as a friend; Moses spoke with God face to face; David poured out his heart to God in prayer and praise as though he were a personal being who could hear, feel and understand; the prophets in the centuries that followed did the same thing.

The personal, relational character of knowing God is most clearly seen in the incarnation – in the coming of the Son of God in human nature. In Jesus, God revealed himself as a personal being. He demonstrated that he could relate to us by speaking, serving and blessing. And he showed that we could serve, love, obey, worship and talk to him as well. There was nothing abstract and theoretical about knowing God in Jesus, nor was there anything essentially mystical in it. Knowing God through Jesus was something relational and practical.

The same is true in this age of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit lives in us as a personal being capable of love, joy, sorrow and purpose. He is a Helper who can speak to our hearts, comfort and lead us. Knowing God through the Holy Spirit is not essentially about feelings and sensations, but about intimate, interactive personal relationship.

Jim Packer describes knowing God as “a matter of personal dealing, as is all direct acquaintance with personal beings. Knowing God is more than knowing about him; it is a matter of dealing with him as he opens up to you, and being dealt with by him as he takes knowledge of you” (Knowing God, p. 34).

John Frame says something similar when he writes, “Man’s knowledge of God… is very similar to God’s knowledge of man. To know him is to be involved with him as a friend or an enemy…” (The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, p. 47).

That, then, is how we should think of knowing God. We should see it in terms of an intimate personal relationship with the Triune God in the light of all that he reveals of himself in his works and words, and supremely in the person of his Son.

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