Trees that look like heads

Knowing About vs. Knowing?

Pastor Scott Downing



Knowing about God.

Knowing God.

Which statement is superior? Which statement is more important?

I was thinking about this recently because I heard these sentences pitted against one another, as I have done in the above questions. The first reaction is immediate: to know God is the superior statement to knowing about God.

This seems somewhat reinforced when Jesus is challenged by religious leaders regarding the healing of a man on the Sabbath. Part of Jesus’ response includes a contrast of knowing about or knowing: “You have your heads in your Bibles constantly because you think you’ll find eternal life there. But you miss the forest for the trees. These Scriptures are all about me! And here I am, standing right before you, and you aren’t willing to receive from me the life you say you want.” (John 5:39-40, THE MESSAGE)

Jesus challenges the leaders’ method and thinking: in searching Scriptures eternal life can be found. No, eternal life stands right before them. If they will not embrace Him, all their knowledge will result in loss, not life.

By analogy, we even see Jesus saying a similar thing about His teaching: “But if you just use my words in Bible studies and don’t work them into your life, you are like a stupid carpenter who built his house on the sandy beach. When a storm rolled in and the waves came up, it collapsed like a house of cards.” (Matthew 7:26-27, THE MESSAGE)

The emphasis can appear to be on living, not the knowing; on the practice, not the pondering.

In fact, there are many who would argue that God cannot be known; only experienced. The thought: our knowledge about God leads us to rely on our intellectual processes to objectify God – and God, the Ultimate Being, will not be objectified. God created and redeemed us so we could live in relation to Him – not turn Him into a philosophical topic of study.

Others, seemingly to protect God from being diminished (or humanity exalted), claim that God is way beyond understanding. Only a brash person of self-importance could possibly think they really know anything about such a majestic, powerful Being. If He could be understood, known about, He wouldn’t be God. How can the finite comprehend the infinite?

This sounds like the objections of agnostics, those who claim that knowledge of God is impossible. But it is from the rank and file of the faithful I hear this – those who claim to be known by Him.

To respond to my initial questions, “Which statement is superior? Which statement is more important?” I would say I refuse to answer given the underlying assumption of the questions. I believe the questions force a false conflict.

While I understand that knowledge about God is not the same as knowing God, I cannot imagine knowing God without knowing about Him.

Is it possible there is confusion between the purpose and the process? Certainly, the purpose of Scripture is to testify of Jesus. Jesus says this in the above cited John 5:39-40. He also affirms this when he spoke to some of His followers who were traveling to Emmaus: He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself. (Luke 24:25-27, NIV)

The response of His followers was clear: They asked, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32, NIV)

Searching the Scriptures and knowing about God, about Jesus, is part of the process to know Him. When the Scriptures were properly opened to them, they could put together their knowledge about the Messiah with knowing the Messiah.

This is the tragedy of the religious leaders in the time of Jesus – when the very purpose of the Scriptures stood before them, they would not receive Him. It is the same tragedy of Pilate’s famous question to Jesus, “What is truth?” Truth stood before Pilate and he could not see it.

It is true that knowing someone can precede knowledge about them: the nurtured infant lives in relationship to her parents before she learns about them; the infatuated teenager has strong emotions of love even before really knowing about the person they see across the room.

I have been married to Janet for over 32 years – but my desire to know her and know about her has not diminished. I still delight in discovering things about her that I did not know. Knowing about her helps me to know her at a deeper level, a more intimate level. I cannot imagine separating the “informational” knowledge from the “relational” knowledge.

Moreover, we serve a God that has chosen to be known. He has manifested Himself in creation; in an ethnic tribe, in a ceremonial foreshadowing, and ultimately in the Person of Jesus Christ.

To propose that God cannot be known is to deny His own self disclosure to us. To humbly state that we are too small to know someone so big is to avoid the truth of the incarnation: Jesus came to make God known to us and to make a way to know Him for eternity.

In a startling statement that shakes me to the core, Jesus tells his disciples: “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.” (John 15:14-15, NIV)

Again, in speaking to His disciples, Jesus says, “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you.” (John 16:12-15, NIV)

You can see the heart of God, expressed in Trinitarian involvement of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to be known about and known personally.

Jesus embodied the disclosure of God so much that he responds to Philip’s request about God with a degree of amazement:

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 are not just my own. 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 . . .” (John 14:8-11a, NIV)

The incarnation is ‘God among us,’ Emmanuel. Jesus teaches us about God, but also engages us to encounter, to know God. He does this by being God in the flesh.

Can we fully comprehend God? No, I don’t understand all of God’s ways. The Bible is clear about this in Isaiah 55:8-9 (NIV): “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

I gladly confess my finitude and throw open the doors of my inability to encompass the greatness of God. But this must not become my rationale for dismissing what He has revealed about Himself and pursuing Him at all levels.

The apostle John knew he must proclaim both the Person of Jesus and the message of Jesus; knowing Him and knowing about Him:

From the very first day, we were there, taking it all in — we heard it with our own ears, saw it with our own eyes, verified it with our own hands. The Word of Life appeared right before our eyes; we saw it happen! And now we’re telling you in most sober prose that what we witnessed was, incredibly, this: The infinite Life of God himself took shape before us.

We saw it, we heard it, and now we’re telling you so you can experience it along with us, this experience of communion with the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ. 4 Our motive for writing is simply this: We want you to enjoy this, too. Your joy will double our joy!

This, in essence, is the message we heard from Christ and are passing on to you: God is light, pure light; there’s not a trace of darkness in him. If we claim that we experience a shared life with him and continue to stumble around in the dark, we’re obviously lying through our teeth — we’re not living what we claim. But if we walk in the light, God himself being the light, we also experience a shared life with one another, as the sacrificed blood of Jesus, God’s Son, purges all our sin. (1 John 1:1-7, THE MESSAGE)

So, what’s the point?

The Maturity Ministries of CCC care vitally about two aspects: your knowing about God and your knowing God. Around these two principles we align everything we’re doing. We respect the process of your need to know about God in order to come to know Him. We also understand that God can make Himself known to you in Jesus Christ at His timing and in His own way.

We are called to set a place where you have the opportunity to discover all about what God has for you. The apostle Paul affirmed the need of both aspects of knowing when describing the very purpose of God gifting the church with apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastors/teachers:

“to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” (Ephesians 4:12-13, NIV)

May it be so at CCC. Take full advantage of all the opportunities from SDS classes to the Campus; from small groups to Sunday Gatherings; from seminars to missions’ trips; from transformed thinking to transformed living.

I pray you discover that vast richness of His grace and mercy even as you are brought deeper and deeper into the whole measure of His fullness.

Scott Downing