Category: Faith

What It Means to Know God

God told us what it means to know Him. Do you know what He said?

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What do you think God would say it means to know Him?

Perhaps, knowing God means having a deep and broad understanding of theology and biblical doctrine. Perhaps, knowing God means feeling intimate with God, having our prayers answered, entering into worship so beautiful it causes goosebumps and tears to flow. Perhaps, knowing God means being able to hear that still, small voice.

How would you define knowing God?

Does it mean knowing Scripture inside out? Is that what it means to know God?

What about the people who don’t have access to written Bible translations? If the Bible is how they must know God, how do they know God without the Bible?

If He told us what it means to know Him, how would we respond?

Would you get a theology degree? Join a charismatic church? Pray more?

Martyn Lloyd-Jones said, “Our supreme need is to know God” (God’s Ultimate Purpose [Baker], p. 342) Paul prayed for the Ephesians that God “give [them] spiritual wisdom and revelation in [their] growing knowledge of him.” (Eph. 1:18) Do we pray to know God better?

Theoretically, our greatest goal should be to know God better and to increase in our knowledge of Him. But that presupposes that we know what it means to know God.

Frankly, I was a little surprised when I stumbled on a description of what it means to know God in my Bible reading recently. Not that I should have been surprised, as it is perfectly evident when we consider all of Scripture, including what Jesus said and did. Yet, I don’t think I would have answered the question correctly if someone had asked me. Would you?

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What Does it Mean that God Is a Person?

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An elementary truth claim of Christianity is that God is a “Person”. Not a thing. Not a force. Not a principal of reason or intangible construct, or a feeling.

But what does that mean?

We may smirk at the practice of people in the Bronze Age who constructed gods out of hand-made objects and worshiped them. We may think ourselves better than primitive people who worshiped the sun, moon,  mountains, and trees. We may not worship physical objects anymore (most of us), but are we any different than they?

When we conceive of God as a force indistinct from the universe, we are doing the same thing, albeit with more subtlety. Our concepts of God may be more sophisticated than most people in primitive cultures in the past, but only in degree.

When we approach think of God as an intellectual construct or a feeling, we may be walking in the footsteps of our primitive ancestors. The same is true when we view God as an abstract idea. An abstract idea, or ideal, is still a thing. Not a thing made of human hands, but a thing imagined by human intellect.

When we construct a god, whether by our hands or in our minds, or view God as indistinct from the universe, we are not perceiving God in the way He is revealed in the Bible. These are constructs are “idols” that are poor substitutes for the “person” of God.

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God Is Always Doing a “New Thing”

We need to be open to hear God’s voice and the direction He wants us to go in these present times

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I think many Christians, most of them, look a bit skeptically at the charismatic element of the Church universal. We conjure up images of the prosperity Gospel and “holy rollers”. The New Testament, though, reads like a charismatic diary.

 The dispensationalists will say that God worked like that only for a time, only until the New Testament was “codified” into a cannon. Now we don’t need God to speak to people directly through prophetic words and such. We don’t need signs and wonders because we have the Bible now.

They might be right, but maybe not. God doesn’t fit into the boxes we prepare for Him.

I have come to view all the movements in the history of the Church as various times in which God emphasized specific things to His people for specific purposes. The move to get the Bible in print in plain language for the masses enabled worldwide, grassroots growth of the Gospel. The move to emphasize that salvation is by God’s grace that we receive through faith was necessary to counter error in the notion of how salvation works.

In my view, denominations formed around these movements as people put down tent stakes and tried to camp on those things God was emphasizing at particular times, but God is always doing a new thing.

Not that God changes, or that the truth changes. We change, and the flow of history changes. God is always working through it all to accomplish the ends that He has planned from the beginning.

I think we can never go wrong asking the question: What is God doing now? What does God intend for a time such as this? What is God saying in these times?

So, I am open to the possibility, which I think is a probability, that God is still “speaking” in these times through people to whom God is willing to entrust His voice. There are disparate voices, of course, even in the Church, but it’s always been like that.

I don’t believe God will say anything that contradicts what He has said in the past, but He might be saying things that contradict what we believed in the past. God might be calling us to new ways of doing things.

When God became flesh and lived among the people to whom He had intimately and directly revealed Himself, they didn’t recognize Him. The disciples on the road to Emmaus were amazed as Jesus opened the Scripture to them to reveal all the ways it spoke of Him. They didn’t see it until He opened it up to them.

In the same way, we need to have the humility to recognize that we might have wrong ideas about things. Maybe they aren’t “wrong”, but they just aren’t effective any longer in this time. The last thing that I want is to remain standing still when God is moving.

We need to be open to God showing us “new things” that we didn’t previously understand or appreciate. We have to consider the possibility that we might not recognize God when He is speaking today in the same way that God became flesh, came to His own people, and His own people didn’t recognize Him.

I say these things only as a preface to talk about an article, Continue reading “God Is Always Doing a “New Thing”” →

Jesus Wept with Mary, Though He Knew the Joy to Come

We live in a world in which Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus, knowing that he was going to raise him from the dead.

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NT Wright commented to Justin Brierley in the 39th episode of Ask NT Wright Anything, “We live in a world in which Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus, knowing that he was going to raise him from the dead.”

Jesus was able to identify with and feel the crushing sorrow and the intense grief that the family and friends of Lazarus felt. When Jesus saw Mary, the sister of Lazarus weeping, he wept too. (John 11:32-33) Jesus felt her grief, and it moved him to tears.

Jesus weeping at the tomb of his friend, Lazarus, of course, reveals his humanity, his empathy and the fact that he felt the range of human emotions that we feel in our own lives. Imagine God taking on our form and experiencing what we experience!

The most remarkable aspect of this story, for me, is that Jesus felt the grief of the loss of a loved one and was moved to tears even though he knew he was going to raise him from the dead. He wept with grief though he know that joy would follow the raising of Lazarus from the dead.

In this way, we see that God doesn’t minimize our grief and suffering. He is able to identify with it because he felt the crush of it as we feel it.

He felt the crush of human grief even though he knew the miracle he was about to perform.

Perhaps, Jesus was weeping for all the people who feel grief without assurance or confidence or hope. Surely, Jesus had more than merely hope. He knew that he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead, but he also realized that his friends, the friends and family of Lazarus, didn’t know or appreciate what he was about to do.

Even though Jesus told the friends of Lazarus that he was doing “to wake him up” (John 11:11), and he told Martha, “Your brother will rise again,” they didn’t fully understand or appreciate what Jesus was saying. (John 11:23) They didn’t feel the assurance or confidence or hope that Jesus had.

I imagine Jesus also thought in those moments of all the people in the world who mourn without assurance, confidence or hope in the face of death. This is the human condition, and Jesus fully embraced it. He fully felt the weight of it, and it caused him to weep with them.

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At the Curve of a Waterfall: Matter Flowing Through Us

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Harrison Wright Falls at Ricketts Glen State Park by Chris A. Fraley

A person posed this question to N.T Wright: “If my body decays, and goes on to become reconstituted into plants and animals and things, what remains? What is essentially me?” NT Wright responded by noting, first, that Tertullian and Origen discussed this question in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, and CS Lewis picked up the same theme in the 20th century in his book, Miracles.

CS Lewis observed that fingernails, hair, skin and the entire the human body are in a constant condition of flux. “Bodies change their entire molecular kit once about every seven (7) years”, Wright noted.

I am not the same person physically that I was when I was born, or graduated from college at age 22, or graduated from law school at age 31 or when my last child was born when I was 39. I am not the same person, physically, at 60, as I was when I was 39.

All of the molecules in my body have switched out many times over those years, yet I am still recognizably me. Maybe a bit larger, with gray hair and visibly aged from my mid-twenties, but I am still me even though none of the same molecules exist in my 60-year body.

NT Wright re-phrased the question in different ways: If a ship goes into a port and one year later, after all parts of it have been replaced, it goes into port again, is it the same ship? If my grandfather has a spade, and replaces the blade and handle several times, is it the still the same spade?

I don’t know about a ship or a spade, but as for me, I know that I am still me even though I don’t have a single molecule left over from my 22-year old self. I have more experiences; I have gained more memories. People can see in my body and mind some resemblance of the “me” they might remember.

Though memories aren’t physical things I can show anyone, I can describe them, and people who share those experiences with me can recognize them. Those nonphysical memories are undeniably “part” of “me” – things I have picked up along the way in addition to the extra weight in my physical body.

CS Lewis says that people are like the curve in a waterfall. They have continuity of form but discontinuity of matter. Matter pours through us. The “us” matter pours through is the real thing – not the matter.

On this day six (6) years ago, Facebook informs me that I posted this quotation from CS Lewis:

“You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.”

I don’t know if CS Lewis is exactly right, but he is getting at the same idea – that we are something more than our physical selves. We aren’t reducible to our physical selves. Our physical selves aren’t even made up of the same molecules that once existed in us. Not one molecule remains from my 22-year old self – yet my self remains.

This mystery is extended in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Through Jesus, God promises to give us new bodies. Our bodies will be changed, Scripture says, but each one of us will remain the same person and be recognizable. Biblical scholars say we will be more fully us then we were before.

In a sense, it’ will be the opposite of the saying about a sick person who is “just a shadow of himself.” Except, the perspective will be reversed. We will see that our bodies were just a shadow of what we will become. Wright says there is a “real you” that is much more like you, vividly more like you, then you are now.

Getting around to attempt an answer to the question posed, NT Wright says, “Nowhere in the New Testament does it describe a soul leaving a body and going to heaven.” What does he mean?

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