You can’t know God unless you also know about God
What do you know about your best friend? I don’t mean personal knowledge, like how funny he is or how kindhearted she is. Certainly you know that. But what information do you know? Probably their birthday, where they live, where they work. You know their likes and dislikes, most likely their opinions on various issues. You know their passions. You probably know a lot of their history. You probably know about a lot of the things that interest him (even if they don’t interest you all that much).
What do you know about your parents? In addition to the above information, you probably also know how they live day-to-day, their hobbies and interests. You know what qualities they consider desirable for their offspring, and what qualities they don’t.
What do you know about your boss? You know the way he likes you to work. You know how she directs her employees — hands-off or micromanager, flexible or rigid. You know the rules he sets in place and probably why he sets them. You know her goals and ambitions for the workplace (and work there on the basis that to some extent you share them), and probably herself as well.
If you have a teacher or pastor, what do you know about them? If he’s employed in that kind of profession, he’s acquired a pretty vast compendium of knowledge. What you hear is what makes it through the filter of what he deems most important to communicate to you. And so, if you know your teacher or pastor well, you probably know that information which he thinks is important.
God stands in all these roles in relation to us. He is our friend, our Father, our Master, our teacher and shepherd. Do we know him in these ways? Do we know about him what we know about the people who play these earthly roles in our lives?
There’s a common attitude these days that we don’t need to know about God; we just need to know God. We need to experience God, connect with God, and follow what he’s calling us to do. But the details — those aren’t important, many of us say. We don’t need to know the Greek words and the creeds. We’ll just leave those up to the pastors and teachers and theologians. Some go so far as to view this kind of in-depth study and questioning as a waste of time.
I think I see where this line of thought is coming from. It seems to be a sort of backlash from the previous generation, where a high emphasis was placed on learning information and doctrine but not as much connecting with God himself. However, it seems that in my generation we’ve swung the other way and elevated experience, rather than knowledge, to the level of our primary guide. On the surface, that sounds better, because it’s actually real life and not some tired information out of big old books.
But the fact is: You don’t know someone unless you also know about them. You can spend all the time you want making experiences with someone, but if you don’t know their passions and opinions and habits and interests, you don’t really know them. (And if you have a lot of experiences with someone, were those experiences of very good quality if you still don’t know much about them?) It’s the same with God. He designed us to have an intimate, close relationship with him. We are meant to know him, even more than we were meant to know other people.
The more you want to get to know someone, the more questions you’ll ask about them. Now, with earthly relationships, there is a boundary which we don’t cross. We can’t know everything about a person. We can’t be too probing in our questions about their lives. Otherwise it’s a little weird and borders on obsession or even stalker-ish. But God sets no such boundary. He reveals himself to us in the Bible, the collection of knowledge he thought it most important for us to know about him. In it, he tells us, among other things, who he is, what he’s like, how he speaks, what he’s done in the past (and often, why), what he expects of us, what his plans are, and what is most important to him. We ought to know these things about the important people in our lives. How much more should we try to know these things about God?
Most of the complex theological questions that too many people dismiss today as irrelevant are the result of people trying to get to know God better in these very ways. For two thousand years, people, wanting to get to know God better, have asked in-depth questions about …
Who he is.
How do we understand that God is a Trinity? (The early church convened numerous intercontinental councils about various aspects of this question.)
How is Jesus both God and human? (This question produced a concept called the hypostatic union— a human and divine nature in one person).
What his attributes are.
Does God know everything? What does that mean? (i.e. Can God know everything if he doesn’t know what it’s like to sin?)
Can God do anything? (Most say not technically, he can’t do logical paradoxes like create married bachelors.)
Is God present everywhere? (Even in a bacterium? What about in the bread and wine at communion?)
Is God “all-loving”? (He hates sin, so what/who exactly are the objects of God’s love and hatred?)
What does it mean that God is good? (Does he meet some higher standard of goodness, or does he decide what is good, or is he himself the standard of goodness?)
How is God perfectly just and also merciful?
Is God outside of time or in time with us?
What other attributes of God exist that we can define and explain?
Does God feel emotions like we do? (is he “impassible,” not feeling raw emotions like we do?)
How he speaks.
How did God bring about the production of the Bible? (And how do we know what should be in there?)
How does God speak through the Bible? (To what extent is it God’s words and to what extent is it human words? Is the Bible inerrant and/or infallible?)
What other evidence did he leave of his existence and character? (Leads to the realm of natural theology, how we can find God through the sciences)
Does he speak to us today through visions or revelations?
What he’s done.
How did God create the universe? (Young-earth, old-earth, or evolutionary creationism)
Why did God relate differently with people in the Old Testament than in the New? (From here arises the idea of different covenants throughout time between God and his people)
Why did Jesus have to die for our sins? (Is it the sins of everyone, including babies and children? Leads to the idea of original sin)
What exactly happened when Jesus died and rose? (Numerous “theories of the atonement” have been proposed, such as the ransom theory, satisfaction theory, and penal substitutionary atonement)
How he works.
How is God both in total control and also gives us free will? (This question has generated the three schools of thought known as Calvinism, Arminianism, and Molinism)
How does God save us, and whom does he save? (Doctrine of justification, one of the main doctrines that split the Catholic and Protestant churches)
How does God change us? (Doctrine of sanctification)
Why does God answer some prayers and not others?
What he expects of us, and why.
How does God expect us to pray?
How does he expect us to worship?
To baptize? (Immersion or sprinkling? Infants or believers?)
To witness? (Be street preachers or quiet influences people via relationships?)
To meet together? (How should the church service be run? How should the church itself be run?)
How has he equipped us to carry out what he expects of us? (Leads to the study of spiritual gifts)
What his plans are.
How is God going to bring the world to an end? (Study of eschatology, leads to the positions of futurism and preterism)
What is heaven like? (Physical or immaterial? What will it be like? What will we do there? Who will be there?)
What is hell like? (Is it eternal like heaven is? What kind of torment do people suffer? Why did God create hell?)
What’s most important to him.
Because the Bible speaks about all these things, directly or indirectly, we can gather that these things are important to God. Because they’re important to God, they should be important to us, too. Indeed, the fact that God, drawing from his infinite, limitless, bigger-than-the-universe knowledge and condensing it into a thousand-page book for us, saw these things as worthy of mention at all, means that he thinks they are very important for us.
If we really want to get to know God, won’t we want to know the way he does things? The reason he does things? Even if we can’t understand it completely, why should that stop us from trying if we really want to get to know God better? Or will we stay at the surface level and only get to know what we personally experience — which is arguably putting our focus on us instead of on God?
I’m not saying everyone needs to intensely study scholarly literature or know all the terminology. Some people are more gifted in that area, and get closer to God through that kind of study, than others. But I think these are all good questions to ponder, and questions we should want to know if we really want to know God. And believe it or not, I think every one of them has practical application for our everyday lives. (I’ll probably make future posts about some of them.)
But the importance of knowing about God is this: If you don’t know anything about the God you’re connecting with, how can you be sure that when you have an experience with God, you’re having an experience with God and not an experience with your own emotions? (The reverse is true, too; if you know about God but don’t know God personally, you can be having an experience with your own thoughts and not with God.)
God didn’t just give us the Bible so we can give it a surface-level reading, and he didn’t give us our intellect so we could dismiss it. He wants us to get to know him, and that means probing both the intellectual and emotional depths of his words. That means asking the hard questions and finding answers.
