"Knowing God" [I]

- The Study of God -

"As it would be cruel to an Amazonian tribesman to fly him to London, put him down without explanation in Trafalgar Square and leave him, as one who knew nothing of English or England, to fend for himself, so we are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God whose world it is and who runs it. The world becomes a strange, mad, painful place, and life in it a disappointing and unpleasant business, for those who do not know about God."

The Five Basic Truths About God. "(1) God has spoken to man, and the Bible is His Word, given to us to make us wise unto salvation. (2) God is Lord and King over His world; He rules all things for His own glory, displaying His perfections in all that He does, in order that men and angels may worship and adore Him. (3) God is Saviour, active in sovereign love through the Lord Jesus Christ to rescue believers from the guilt and power of sin, to adopt them as His sons, and to bless them accordingly. (4) God is Triune; there are within the Godhead three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost; and the work of salvation is one in which all three act together, the Father purposing redemption, the Son securing it, and the Spirit applying it. (5) Godliness means responding to God's revelation in trust and obedience, faith and worship, prayer and praise, submission and service. Life must be seen and lived in the light of God's Word. This, and nothing else, is true religion."

"We need to ask ourselves: what is my ultimate aim and object in occupying my mind with [the study of God]? What do I intend to do with my knowledge about god, once I have got it? For the fact that we have to face is this: that if we pursue theological knowledge for its own sake, it is bound to go bad on us. It will make us proud and conceited. The very greatness of the subject-matter will intoxicate us, and we shall come to think of ourselves as a cut above other Christians because of our interest in it and grasp of it; and we shall look down on those whose theological ideas seem to us crude and inadequate, and dismiss them as very poor specimens... To be preoccupied with getting theological knowledge as an end in itself, to approach Bible study with no higher a motive than a desire to know all the answers, is the direct route to a state of self-satisfied self-deception."

On Meditation. "[Meditation] is a lost art today, and Christian people suffer grievously from their ignorance of the practice. Meditation is the activity of calling to mind, and thinking over, and dwelling on, and applying to oneself, the various things that one knows about the works and ways and purposes and promises of God. It is an activity of holy thought, consciously performed in the presence of God, as a means of communion with God. Its purpose is to clear one's mental and spiritual vision of God, and to let His truth make its full and proper impact on one's mind and heart. It is a matter of talking to oneself about God and oneself; it is, indeed, often a matter of arguing with oneself, reasoning oneself out of moods of doubt and unbelief into a clear apprehension of God's power and grace. Its effect is ever to humble us, as we contemplate God's greatness and glory, and our own littleness and sinfulness, and to encourage and reassure us... as we contemplate the unsearchable riches of divine mercy displaying in the Lord Jesus Christ." 

- The People who Know their God -

"[Not many of us would] ever naturally say that in the light of the knowledge of God which we have come to enjoy past disappointments and present heartbreaks, as the world counts heartbreaks, don't matter. For the plain fact is that to most of us they do matter. We live with them as our 'crosses' (so we call them). Constantly we find ourselves slipping into bitterness and apathy and gloom as we reflect on them, which we frequently do. The attitude we show to the world is a sort of dried-up stoicism, miles removed from the 'joy unspeakable and full of glory' which Peter took for granted that his readers were displaying (1 Peter 1:8)."

"If anyone asks us how men may know God, we can at once produce the right formulae--that we come to know God through Jesus Christ the Lord, in virtue of His cross and mediation, on the basis of His word of promise, by the power of the Holy Spirit, via a personal exercise of faith. Yet the gaiety, goodness, and unfetteredness of spirit which are the marks of those who have known God are rare among us--rarer, perhaps, than they are in some other Christian circles where, by comparison, evangelical truth is less clearly and fully known... A little knowledge of God is worth more than a great deal of knowledge about Him."

"The question is not whether we are good at theology, or 'balanced' (horrible, self-conscious word!) in our approach to problems of Christian living; the question is, can we say, simply, honestly, not because we feel that as evangelicals we ought to, but because it is plain matter of fact, that we have known God, and that because we have known God the unpleasantness we have had, or the pleasures we have not had, through being Christians does not matter to us? If we really knew God, this is what we would be saying, and if we are not saying it, that is a sign that we need to face ourselves more sharply with the difference between knowing God and merely knowing about Him."

Four Marks of Those Who Know God. "(1) Those who know God have great energy for God; (2) Those who know God have great thoughts of God; (3) Those who know God are bold for God; and (4) Those who know God are content in God."

- Knowing and Being Known -

"The world today is full of sufferers from the wasting disease which Albert Camus focused as Absurdism ('life is a bad jopke'), and from the complaint which we may call Marie Antoinette's fever, since she found the phrase that describes it ('nothing tastes'). These disorders blight the whole of life: everything becomes at once a problem and a bore, because nothing seems worth while. But Absurdist tapeworms and Antoinette's fever are ills from which, in the nature of the case, Christian are immune, except for occasional spells of derangement when the power of temptation presses their mind out of shape--and these, by God's mercy, do not last. What makes life worth while is having a big enough objective, something which catches our imagination and lays hold of our allegiance; and this the Christian has, in a way that no other man has. For what higher, more exalted, and more compelling goal can there be than to know God?"

On Conversion. "What happens is that the almighty Creator, the Lord of hosts, the great God before whom the nations are as a drop in a bucket, comes to him and begins to talk to him, through the words and truths of Holy Scripture. Perhaps he has been acquainted with the Bible and Christian truth for many years, and it has meant nothing to him; but one day he wakes up to the fact that God is actually speaking to him--him!--through the biblical message. As he listens to what God is saying, he finds himself brought very low; for God talks to him about his sin, and guilt, and weakness, and blindness, and folly, and compels him to judge himself hopeless and helpless, and to cry out for forgiveness. But this is not all. He comes to realise as he listens that God is actually opening His heart to him, making friends with him, and enlisting him a colleague--in Barth's phrase, a covenant partner. It is a staggering thing, but it is true--the relationship in which sinful human beings know God is one in which God, so to speak, takes them on to His staff, to be henceforth His fellow-workers (see 1 Cor. 3:9) and personal friends."

"Knowing God involves, first, listening to God's word and receiving it as the Holy Spirit interprets it, in application to oneself; second, noting God's nature and character, as His word and works reveal it; third, accepting His invitations, and doing what He commands; fourth, recognising, and rejoicing in, the love that He has shown in thus approaching one and drawing one into this divine fellowship."

"The Bible puts flesh on these bare bones of ideas by using pictures and analogies, and telling us that we know God in the manner of a son knowing his father, a wife knowing her husband, a subject knowing his king, and a sheep knowing its shepherd (these are the four main analogies employed). All four analogies point to a relation in which the knower 'looks up' to the one known, and the latter takes responsibility for the welfare of the former. This is part of the biblical concept of knowing god, that those who know Him--that is, those by whom He allows Himself to be known--are loved and cared for by Him." 

"[When] the New Testament tells us that Jesus Christ is risen, one of the things it means is that the victim of Calvary is now, so to speak, loose and at large, so that any man anywhere can enjoy the same kind of relationship with Him as the disciples had in the days of His flesh. The only differences are that, first, His presence with the Christian is spiritual, not bodily, and so invisible to our naked eyes; second, the Christian, building on the New Testament witness, knows from the start those truths about the deity and atoning sacrifice of Jesus which the original disciples only grasped gradually, over a period of years; and, third, that Jesus's way of speaking to us now is not by uttering fresh words, but rather by applying to our consciences those words of His that are recorded in the gospels, together with the rest of the biblical testimony to Himself."

"If the decisive factor [in knowing God] was notional correctness, then obviously the most learned biblical scholars would know God better than anyone else. But it is not; you can have all the right notions in your head without ever tasting in your heart the realities to which they refer; and a simple Bible-reader and sermon-hearer who is full of the Holy Ghost will develop a deeper acquaintance with his God and Saviour than more learned men who are content with being theologically correct."

"Knowing God is a matter of grace. It is a relationship in which the initiative throughout is with God--as it must be, since God is so completely above us and we have so completely forfeited all claim on His favour by our sins. We do not make friends with God; God makes friends with us, bringing us to know Him by making His love known to us."

"[God] knows me. I am graven on the palms of His hands. I am never out of His mind. All my knowledge of Him depends on His sustained initiative in knowing me. I know Him, because He first knew me, and continues to know me. He knows me as a friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when His eye is off me, or His attention distracted from me, and no moment, therefore, when His care falters... There is tremendous relief knowing that [God's] love for me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench His determination to bless me. There is, certainly, great cause for humility in the thought that He sees all the twisted things about me that my fellow-men do not see (and am I glad!), and that He sees more corruption in me than that which I see in myself (which, in all conscience, is enough). There is, however, equally great incentive to worship and love God in the thought that, for some unfathomable reason, He wants me as His friends, and desires to be my friend, and has given His Son to die for me in order to realise this purpose."