Knowing God is No Small Matter
Dr. John Snyder is the pastor of Christ Church New Albany, director of Media Gratiae, host of The Whole Counsel podcast, and author of multiple multimedia Bible studies including the Behold Your God series, Living with the True God: Lessons from Judges, and Behold Your God: Seeking Him Early.
In this passage, adapted from The Sermons of Behold Your God: Rethinking God Biblically, Dr. John Snyder explains 4 truths you can’t miss if you want to truly know the God of the Bible.
To set our hearts toward a right pursuit of the one true God, there are four basic truths that we must master. These truths will help us to understand and benefit from the Scriptures that contain God’s self-descriptions. These are truths that we want to get a grip on, but they are also truths that we want to get a grip on us.
The most significant thing about you is what comes to your mind when you think of the word God. This truth applies to all people and not just to those who claim to be Christians. Every man, woman, and child will make choices based on his or her general idea of what God is like. Even an atheist has a type of religion based on the thought that God doesn’t exist. And, based on his belief in the nonexistence of God, the atheist will make certain decisions. He makes certain decisions in his home; he makes decisions at work. The Muslim makes decisions based on his view of his god. The Christian makes decisions based on his view of his God. What you think of God is the most distinguishing thing about you. Education, ethnicity, age—none of these are so distinguishing as what you, deep down, really believe about God because that belief affects everything. All desires, thoughts, and actions will flow from it.
So, what is your view of God? I’m not asking you what your official view of God is. I don’t want a Sunday school answer. I don’t want you to ask yourself, “What does my church say I’m supposed to believe about God?” I don’t want you to ask, “What does my denomination say I should believe about God? What do the books on my shelf say I believe about God? What do my parents say that I should believe about God?” The question is: What do you really believe and think of when you think of God? Your true view of God is not as easy to spot as your denomination’s views, creeds, or confessions. Your true view of God might remain hidden under a huge pile of rubble made up of phrases you picked up from church or Christian podcasts. Your true thoughts of God may be hiding behind the words you say that sound good but mask what you actually believe. If you are going to really understand what you think about God, it will take a courageous and determined search of your heart.Knowing God is the great jewel of Christianity. Though we are thankful for the many other gifts that have come from the cross of Christ, those gifts all lead back to this great source—the knowledge of Christ Himself. Currently, even in churches, the idea prevails that knowing God is a casual and easy thing! Knowing Him is on the same level of relationship as bumping into a stranger and acknowledging his existence. For example, a child comes to the pastor and says, “I don’t want to go to the hell that you’ve talked about. I want the heaven you talked about. I want the friends you talked about. I want the happiness you talked about.” Those are all good things, and the pastor says (depending on the church tradition), “You need to join the church,” “You need to get baptized,” or “You need to repeat these words after me and ask Christ into your heart.” These steps are taken, and the child is told that he or she now knows God. The implication is “Well done, child. That’s it. That’s the end of the journey.” But this is an unbiblical view.
Because of the mistaken belief that knowing God is the easiest thing in the world, we take for granted that everyone in our church knows God. We sit down. We look to the left and to the right, and we see cleaned up, nice people. They are our friends and family. We really have a hard time imagining that anybody on the pew next to us, anyone in our small group, may not know God. Some of the consequences of this wrong view are the flippancy in our worship, the casualness with which we stroll up to God in our prayers, and the boredom that we display with the Bible unless the preacher is giving us four steps to happiness. In reality, knowing God is no small matter. I wonder, are we so casual with God because we in the twenty-first century know Him so well? Or is it because we hardly know Him at all?Today, the truth that the knowledge of God is the great treasure of the Christian life has been replaced by pursuits of secondary matters. The early days of the twenty-first century have been days when (especially in the West) there has been a very aggressive rethinking of many aspects of Christianity. There has been a rethinking of worship styles, rethinking of inner-city church plants, rethinking of how we raise a family. It was good to rethink these issues. The changes that have occurred because of this rethinking are extreme, but the problem is that these changes are not truly radical. Radical means foundational or root level. No matter how much you change the worship style, no matter how differently you approach inner-city missions, no matter how differently you raise your family, no matter how extreme the changes in these external areas, they are not radical because we are not actually getting to the root problem that must be dealt with before the fruit of change can be lasting and pleasing to God.
In our day, we have been told, even by the church, that we are the center of the universe. Me, my spiritual needs, my eternal destination—that is what is important. My family, my town, my friends, our church, our denomination, and our nation are the center of all creation. We must lovingly and humbly go back and say, “It’s a lie.” Everything in church, everything at home, and everything in the individual life must orbit God. We need a Copernican revolution. We need to see that in God’s universe, planet earth is not the center. We are not the center. You are not the center. We need to go back to the Bible and see God for who He until His spiritual mass pulls every area of our life into His orbit.
Knowing God is costly. Don’t fool yourself. If you want to know Him, you will have to lay all that you are, all that you plan to be, and all that you have on the table. If, at any moment, you pull it back, the process of getting to know God comes to a halt. There will be no progress. He will reveal Himself to His children, but He will not reveal Himself unless He has access, full access, to you. It is costly, but oh, it is worth it!
Although biblical Christianity is not all about us, nothing benefits us more. Nothing is more directly beneficial than knowing God. Nothing is more practical. Nothing is more relevant. Nothing is more exciting. Nothing is more satisfying than knowing the uncreated Being through His son.The last of the four truths is a warning. If you are to know God as the believer longs to know God, you must, at all costs, avoid counterfeit versions of knowing God. There are ways of appearing to know God, which (like a counterfeit) from a distance seem to be a real knowing. They look genuine, and you may even get praised by people in your church. Despite these appearances, God knows that you don’t know Him, and you know that you are not satisfied. Something is wrong. There are three counterfeits I want to mention:
Knowing God by hearsay. Though it can be good to learn from other people, when it comes to knowing the one true God, don’t you want something other than second-hand knowledge? Don’t you want something other than hearsay? If you only know God by what you read in someone else’s book, if you only know God by what you heard in someone else’s sermon, then it is all second-hand.
Textualism. Textualism can be defined as mistaking an allegiance to a text for the possession of what the text teaches. For example, you own a Bible, and you’re a conservative Christian. As a result, you say, “I give my allegiance to this book. And whatever is inside this book, I agree with it. Now, I’m not saying I know it. I haven’t said I’ve studied it carefully. But if it’s in this book, I’m for it.”
True truths. This occurs when truths are so familiar to us, so obviously true, that instead of making an impact on our life, we shuffle them to a back cabinet in our mind and leave them there untouched. They no longer make any difference in the way we live.