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| “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” |
| —John 14:11a |
“Knowing God” seems like a pretty important part of spiritual formation. In fact, you may have read J. I. Packer’s excellent book by this very title. If you haven’t, I urge you to obtain a copy and read it carefully. Packer’s insights into such spiritual subjects always provoke soul-searching thoughts and motivate appropriate actions.
How do we go about knowing God? We should begin by recognizing at least two very different kinds of “knowing.”
The first kind of “knowing” principally begins as an exercise of our minds, and only later sinks into our hearts. We observe the creative handiwork of God in nature. As the Apostle Paul writes in Romans 1:18-20:
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
So, in this first kind of knowing, we know God because we see His hand in all creation. Once we see the hand of God in His creation, in this first kind of knowing, we also begin to know God as we see God the Father through His precious Son Jesus.
Because Almighty God exists as a single entity expressed in three distinct persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—though this remains a great mystery to us humans, we can know God by examining how He reveals Himself in each of these persons. Because we have the greatest amount of information regarding Jesus, we can know God the Father by closely examining His Son, Jesus.
In John 14:8-11, the Apostle John records this exchange:
Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”
Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.
“How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me?
“The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work.
“Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves.”
Therefore, we come to know God by seeing Him in Jesus. We also know God by seeing God in His written Word, the Bible. All throughout Scripture, which is God-breathed, we see God revealing Himself to His created human beings. By carefully studying and meditating on God’s written Word, we can know Him.
In each of these cases, we know God through the faculty of our mind. And, using our intellect that interconnects with our other human modalities—heart, soul, mind, and strength, or emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and physical—the more we know of God, the more we will want to truly know Him.
And that kind of knowing, dear ones is the second kind of knowing. I will gladly share more about that second kind of knowing in the next blog post.
Based on a blog originally posted on Monday, July 6, 2015
