Or Rather, Known by God

What this is about

The author of this site heard a sermon and wrote down how it went. As he reports it, the sermon kept returning to the question “Do you know God?” Its answers were to “get to know God,” to pursue an “intimate relationship with God,” to spend time alone with God, to hear God, and to discover God’s individual “project” for one’s life.

The preacher is not named here. This is a listener’s summary and not a recording, and a preacher may put things more carefully on another day. The page tests the idea. It does not judge the man.

The author set down a thesis to be tested: “Knowing God is something God gives through objective means, not an individualized quest for a deeper private experience.”

So there are two ways to think about knowing God. On the first, it is a gift. God makes himself known. He does it in Jesus Christ, and he hands Christ to us through things outside us: the Bible read and preached, Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, forgiveness spoken aloud in church. We receive it by believing it. On the second, it is a quest. Each believer must build a relationship with God and make it deeper. The test is how close he feels, how long he spends alone with God, and what he hears. Both ways tell a Christian to pray. They disagree about where to look and about what counts as the measure.

The short answer

What “know” means, and who does the work

In everyday English, “I know him well” is about closeness, and closeness comes in degrees. The Bible uses the word differently.

There were two priests named Hophni and Phinehas. They worked at God’s house and handled the sacrifices. Few people knew more about God. Yet the Bible says: “they knew not the LORD.” Then it says how they lived. They took the best of the offerings by force, and slept with the women who gathered at the door of God’s house. In that passage, not knowing God is a way of behaving.

Later God speaks about a good king, Josiah: “He judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well with him: was not this to know me? saith the LORD.” Being fair to the poor is called knowing God. And John writes, “hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments.”

So to know the LORD, in the Bible, is to have him as your God and to live as his. It is about belonging and loyalty. It is something other people can see.

Now look at the Bible’s greatest promise about knowing God. It is in Jeremiah 31. God says: “I will make a new covenant.” “I will put my law in their inward parts.” Then: “they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

In those four verses God says “I will” five times. The people do one thing: they know him. And the verse gives the reason. They know him for he forgives them. The least are named first. Nobody is left out for not being spiritual enough.

Jesus used Jeremiah’s words at the Last Supper. He took the cup and said, “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.” “Testament” means covenant. The new covenant is put into people’s hands with a cup.

Here are six lines from that promise and from the New Testament. Who is acting in each?

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Or rather

Paul wrote to Christians in Galatia who were drifting back to a religion of rules. He reminds them what they have become: “But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God.”

He says they know God. That is true. Then he changes it. “Or rather” is what a person says when he wants to put the deeper thing. The deeper thing is that God knows them.

A famous preacher named John Chrysostom explained it about the year 390: “It was not by your own pains that you found out God, but while you continued in error, He drew you to Himself.” Luther and Calvin read the verse the same way more than a thousand years later.

Paul does this more than once. “But if any man love God, the same is known of him.” “Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” An apostle’s knowledge of God is “in part.” God’s knowledge of him is complete. Another letter says, “The Lord knoweth them that are his.”

There is one more place. Jesus describes people who will come to him at the end and say, “Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name?” They had done wonders. They would have said yes at once to “Do you know God?” His answer is: “I never knew you.” He does not say, “You never knew me.” The last word on a person is whether Christ knows him.

“Know” here does not mean “is aware of.” God is aware of everyone. It means “own as mine,” the way God said to Israel, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth.”

“Shew us the Father”

If God makes himself known, where does he do it? The New Testament’s answer is: in Jesus.

On the last evening, the disciple Philip asked for something more. “Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us.” He wanted to see God directly. He thought there was something beyond Jesus still to be had. Jesus answered: “Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”

There is nothing of God kept back behind Jesus for advanced Christians to go and find. Paul says, “in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. And ye are complete in him.”

The Bible is also clear about direction. At the tower of Babel, people tried to build up to heaven. “And the LORD came down.” Moses asked to see God’s glory. He was told he could not see God’s face. Instead, “the LORD descended in the cloud,” and spoke his name: “merciful and gracious … forgiving iniquity.” When Jesus was born, the shepherds were told where to look: “Ye shall find the babe … lying in a manger.”

Paul makes it a rule: “Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? … The word is nigh thee … the word of faith, which we preach.” Nobody has to climb. Christ has come down. What God has put within reach is a message that one person speaks to another.

Luther put it simply: “Begin with Christ. He came down to earth, lived among men, suffered, was crucified … Thus we shall be kept from climbing into heaven …”

Known in the breaking of bread

Jesus is not walking about in Galilee now. So how does he reach us? The book of Acts shows how the first people came to know God. Watch what happens to each one.

On the first Easter Day two disciples walked for miles beside the risen Jesus and did not recognise him. First he explained the Bible to them. Then at supper “he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him.” They said afterwards that “he was known of them in breaking of bread.” Their hearts did burn. But they say when: “while he opened to us the scriptures.”

Jesus was standing in front of them the whole time. He chose to be recognised through the Bible explained and bread broken. Those are the same two things Christians have every Sunday.

Now try four people from the New Testament. What happened to each one next?

Notice the pattern. Saul saw Christ himself. Cornelius saw an angel. Neither vision gave them the knowledge of God. Each was sent to a human being who spoke God’s word to him, and then to water. The inward work is real: Luke says of a woman named Lydia that “the Lord opened” her heart. And what her opened heart did was listen to “the things which were spoken of Paul.”

Peter heard God’s own voice from heaven on a mountain. Later he told his readers about it, and then said: “We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed.” The man who heard the voice points people to the written word.

God is not tied to these things. He can work without them, and every church quoted on this page says so. But he has told us to look there. And none of it helps a person who does not believe what is said.

What the churches have said

The older churches wrote this down. In 1530 the Lutherans told the Emperor: “through the Word and Sacraments, as through instruments, the Holy Ghost is given, who works faith.” Luther later gave the opposite idea a name. He called it “enthusiasm.” He did not mean being keen. He meant the belief that God gives his Spirit straight into the heart, apart from the Bible, preaching and sacraments. He said it began in Eden, when the serpent drew Adam and Eve away from what God had said.

Luther’s catechism says: “neither you nor I could ever know anything of Christ … unless it were offered to us and granted to our hearts by the Holy Ghost through the preaching of the Gospel.”

Others say the same in their own words. The Reformed catechisms speak of “the outward and ordinary means … the Word, sacraments, and prayer.” The Anglican Prayer Book thanks God “for the means of grace,” and prays to the God “in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life.” The Catholic Catechism speaks of “intimate union with Christ” and says it comes “through the sacraments.” In the Orthodox service, after receiving communion, the people sing: “We have seen the True Light!” And John Wesley, the great preacher of heart-religion, said in 1746: “all who desire the grace of God are to wait for it in the means which he hath ordained; in using, not in laying them aside.”

These churches disagree about real things. They differ on what the sacraments are. They differ on how sure a believer can be: the Catholic Council of Trent said that nobody can be certain he is in God’s grace, and the Reformers said he can. But none of them tells a person to look for God in the strength of his private feelings. On where to look, they agree.

Where “intimacy” came from

The author’s brief said that “intimacy” language is modern. That is half right, and the full dossier corrects it.

The words “intimate,” “intimacy” and “relationship” are not in the King James Bible at all. And the exact phrase “intimate relationship with God” was almost never printed before 1900.

But the language of closeness to God is very old. About the year 397 Augustine wrote to God, “You were more inward to me than my most inward part.” About 1420 a monk named Thomas à Kempis wrote of Christ’s “intimacy wonderful indeed.” The Bible itself calls Abraham “the Friend of God.”

So what is new? Look at where the old writers put the word. Augustine was baptised and found God in “that Mediator,” Jesus. The monk’s book ends with a whole section on Holy Communion. The Catholic Catechism says the intimate union comes “through the sacraments.” For them, closeness to Christ grew inside the Church’s life of Word and sacrament. Nobody was told to get it somewhere else, and nobody was graded by it.

Three things are recent. Intimacy is now sought apart from the Church’s means. One well-loved writer said in 1948 that it “does not come through the body of believers, as such.” It is aimed at directly, by method: so much time, such a way of listening. And it is used as a test for every Christian.

The words in print tell the same story. In English books of the 1830s, “means of grace” was printed about 235 times for every one time “intimacy with God” was. By the 2010s the two were nearly level.

The quest has an old ancestor too. In 1647 George Fox, who founded the Quakers, said he wanted the knowledge of God “without the help of any man, book, or writing.” He had been badly let down by the churches of his day. Movements like his usually begin that way.

Enough?

“Do you know God?” sounds like one question. It is really two. The first is a question of fact: do I belong to him? That has a yes or a no. The second is a question of degree: how well do I know him? That has only “more” and “less.” The sermon asks the first and answers with the second.

A question of degree can never be closed. However close a person feels, he could feel closer. And how does he measure it? By his own feelings, which change with sleep, health and grief. The Psalms have a man crying, “How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” On the quest’s measure, he did not know God that week.

Jesus told a story about two men praying. One fasted twice a week and spoke to God with confidence. The other stood “afar off” and could only say, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” Ask them both whether they have an intimate relationship with God. The first would say yes. Jesus says the second “went down to his house justified.”

The Bible does test the claim to know God. But look at its tests. “Hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments.” “He that loveth not knoweth not God.” They are about how a person treats God’s commands and the people around him. Anyone can check them. None of them is about time alone or strength of feeling.

Christians are meant to grow in knowing God. “Grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord.” But growing is not the test of belonging. A girl of five knows her father less well than she will at thirty. She is every bit as much his daughter.

So what did the old churches give a doubting person to hold? Things that were done to him and said to him. Luther wrote that when conscience attacks, a Christian should say: “Nevertheless I am baptized; but if I am baptized, it is promised me that I shall be saved.” Notice the grammar. “I am baptized” is something done to me, on a date, with witnesses. It does not go up and down with my mood.

Here are six things a Christian might say. Is each one a fact he can point to, or a place on a scale with no top?

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A project for your life

The sermon also said that each person should discover God’s “project” for his life. Many Christians now take that for granted. Where does it come from?

The well-known phrase is from a small booklet written in the 1950s: “God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life.” Its writer meant salvation and a full life in Christ. Over time the phrase came to mean something more: a set of right choices about job, marriage and place that God has made in advance and that you must find.

The verse usually quoted is Jeremiah 29:11, “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you.” It is a line from a letter to the Jews who had been carried off to Babylon. “You” means the whole people. The line before it says they will be there seventy years. They were told to build houses and plant gardens. It promised the nation a future. It did not give each person a secret plan to discover.

When the apostles say “this is the will of God,” they mean things like these. “Your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication.” “In every thing give thanks.” Doing good. It is the same for everyone, and it is stated openly.

On the choices people most want a private word about, the Bible leaves them free. A widow “is at liberty to be married to whom she will; only in the Lord.” Paul says of his own travel plans, “it may be that I will abide … if the Lord permit.”

What the Church taught in place of the “project” is called vocation. It means that God has already placed you. You are somebody’s son or daughter, husband or wife, worker, neighbour. His commandments tell you what to do there, and you can start today. Paul says, “let every man, wherein he is called, therein abide with God.” The person in front of you is where your knowledge of God shows.

What about praying alone?

The sermon had strong verses on its side, and they should be heard.

Jesus commanded private prayer: “enter into thy closet … pray to thy Father which is in secret.” He prayed alone himself. A Christian who never prays alone is disobeying him. But notice the word Jesus uses. “Thy Father.” The person who goes into the closet already has a Father there. And when the disciples asked how to pray, Jesus gave them words: “When ye pray, say, Our Father.”

“Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you.” Read the rest of the verse: “Cleanse your hands, ye sinners.” James is calling unfaithful people to repent. He is not giving faithful people a method for getting closer.

The Psalms long for God. “My soul thirsteth for thee.” Read the next line: “To see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary.” The man who thirsts in Psalm 42 remembers going “with the multitude … to the house of God.” Their longing is real and personal. It is aimed at the place where God had promised to meet his people.

And feelings? They belong. The hearts at Emmaus burned. But they burned “while he opened to us the scriptures.” Joy follows the gift. It also comes and goes, so it cannot be the measure.

Nothing the sermon told people to do is lost. Pray alone. Read the Bible. Long for God. Grow. But do it as someone God already knows, and stop keeping score.

Check it yourself

Five things. The first takes ten minutes. The last is the one that matters.

1. 1. Read Jeremiah 31:31–34 and Luke 22:14–20. Underline every verb. Who is acting? Where does Jesus use the words “new testament”?
2. 2. Read Galatians 4:1–11, 1 Corinthians 8:1–3 and Matthew 7:15–23. Find the three places where the sentence ends with God’s knowing and not ours.
3. 3. Read John 14:1–11 and Romans 10:1–17. What did Philip want? What does Paul say is near?
4. 4. Read Luke 24:13–35, Acts 9:1–19 and Acts 10. For each person, write down what he saw and where he was sent.
5. 5. Listen to one sermon, and find one date. Do this one. In the next sermon you hear, or the next three songs you sing in church, count the verbs. How many have God as the one acting, and how many have “I”? Then find out the date of your baptism, and write it somewhere you will see it.