Knowing God

There is a little phrase I have heard many times, “Maybe I don’t know the Bible, but I know the Author real well.”  I think it is a great comment when understood correctly.  Let me make some further comments and bring some additional light on this statement.

How do we know God?  How can we know God?  We know him as he is revealed to us personally.  How can we know for certain that he is revealed to us personally?  If what is revealed to us personally is in the Bible.  The Bible is the plumb-line that we follow in building our churches and our lives.  To verify our experiences and our lives we search through the Scriptures.  But we don’t search to just find abstract ideas.  We search to find Jesus Christ.

For example, if your “experience” with God leads you to sleep with your neighbors wife, we can say your experience is faulty because it is contrary to the nature of God as revealed in the Bible.  So you can say that you know God and you love God; but if your knowing of Him does not line up with the Bible, then you don’t really know Him.

The other day I was reading an article and this really struck me.
Clinton Stockwell wrote regarding Emil Brunner, 20th Century Swiss Theologian, “It was in the early church that the Christian understanding of revelation was obscured by Greek intellectualism.  As a result, the church doctrine of revelation was denigrated from its ‘Thou-form’ to its present ‘It-form.’”  The understanding of God’s revelation was transformed from a “truth as encounter” form to a “truth as idea” form, a revelation of the Son to a revelation of eternal truths about the Son.  For Brunner, God’s revelation must be understood as the revelation of a person.  It was the self-communication of God Himself as the Incarnate Word.  God’s word is “He Himself, not something that can be grasped in words, something that can be thought, an idea in the mind.”1

Jesus Christ brought us truth as an experience, not merely truth as an idea in the mind.  God’s revelation is a person, not merely an idea.  So you can know an idea about Jesus without knowing Jesus personally.  Jesus wants to reveal himself personally to us.  The Word of John 1:1 is a person.  Not merely the Bible or an idea, but it is Christ Jesus.  The Word is the self-revelation of God and that Word is a person, not just a theological truth.  To know the Word is to know a Person.

The view of the early church is that the Word is a person, a person that is the revelation of God to us individually.  We know the Word as we experience HIM, not as we learn about IT. This is rooted in the meaning behind the word “to know” in Hebrew.  It means to experience intimately. This is the Judeo-Christian way of knowing God, by personally experiencing Him who is Truth.  The Greek philosophical way of knowing God is through abstract knowledge and reasoning. We know the Word who is a Person, the revelation of God.