• I’m working on an essay on knowing God this week and haven’t had time to write a note. So here’s the first part of the essay. The “tools” I’ll suggest in the next section (not included) will be the means of grace: word, sacraments and prayer. A man can take only so many editors, but I’m open to your comments.
To know and love God is to be alive in the original sense of the word (Gen. 2:7), not entirely free from sin, pain, and death, but restored to the Creator of life, and so restored to purpose and meaning. To live without knowing and loving him is to live a kind of parody or caricature of life. All the parts and appearances are present, but the essence is missing. No amount of activity and achievement, no effort to dress-up and rearrange the exterior, can fill the void. So the Apostle Paul said, “ Christ… who is your life” and “ to live is Christ” (Col 3:4; Php 1:21). In the same way, it was the state of being truly alive, not so much a life after this one, that Jesus meant when he said, “this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (Jn. 17:3).
As selfish creatures, our tendency is to love God for his benefits, rather than for who he is in himself. So Bernard of Clairvaux began his great work On Loving God, “You want me to tell you why God is to be loved and how much? I answer, the reason for loving God is God himself; and the measure of love due to him is immeasurable.” Calvin, who admired Bernard, added his own corollary, “it is certain that man never achieves clear knowledge of himself until he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself” (Inst. 1.1.2). Once we know and love God for who he is, we begin to understand ourselves as we are.
Knowing about God is not the same as knowing him. Many of us have spent years in Bible studies building an arsenal of information on God and his word, yet we are not much closer to the person of God, no nearer to looking upon his face, than we were when we began. Any doubts that this is possible are swept away by John 5:39-47 in which Jesus tells the Jewish leaders, “ you search the Scriptures… and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.” It may seem odd that knowledge could lead to ignorance, yet it does. As T.S Eliot wrote, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?/Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” and “All our ignorance brings us nearer to death/But nearness to death no nearer to God.”
One way to correct for this, suggested by J.I. Packer and others, is to make sure we have knowledge of God by both acquisition and acquaintance: the former, generally speaking, means knowledge gained by knowing the Word and related preaching and teaching, the latter implies personal dealings with God, soul-to-soul. As Packer says, “ you can have all the right notions in your head without tasting in your heart the realities to which they refer” (KG p.39). Packer may have been rephrasing one of his favorite Puritan theologians, John Owen, who wrote, “It does not suffice that the enmity between God and us be taken away; we must also have acquaintance given us with him” (CWTTG, p.217). And Owen may have been rephrasing Paul who, clothed in the “righteousness from God that depends on faith,” still longed for something more, namely, “that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (Php. 3:9-10). Paul knew that Christ had atoned for his sin, he had what theology calls “saving faith,” yet it only increased his longing to know Christ in a more intimate and costly way.
When our knowledge of God is by acquaintance only, our faith is prone to all the errors of subjectivity and mysticism; when it is by acquisition only, it’s prone to cold and shallow dogmatism. But if we have both personal and acquired knowledge, we love him with the entirety of our being; not just our heads, not just our hearts.