Tag: Knowledge of God

Is God an Ancient Elitist?

God and His message are hidden to so many people, but it isn’t a mystery. It is “hidden” in clear sight!

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Some people seem to think God is an elitist. Some people believe that God can only be understood by people who crack God’s code and discover access to His secrets. Another, label for this kind of thinking about God is the occult, though we sometimes put a more acceptable sheen on this kind of thinking.

This kind of thinking even creeps into churches and personal views on God. Christians sometimes give into temptations to divine the future or hidden truth in numerology, astrology, tarot cards, palm reading, tea leaves, etc.

Other people find in the “hiddenness” of God reason to doubt His existence. They argue that God shouldn’t play hide and seek with the world, that God should be obvious to all, and the fact that He isn’t obvious to all people means that God doesn’t exist.

I don’t find truth in either proposition. At the very least, neither proposition describes the God of the Bible. I have addressed the hiddenness of God several times in my writing, I don’t recall addressing the occult, much. Today this view on spiritual reality that I am describing here as the elitist view of God comes by way of inspiration from Dr. Michael Guillen.

My inspiration for this post comes specifically from a podcast episode titled, Numerology, Gematria & Kabbalah, in which Dr, Guillen spent most of his time talking about the cult of Pythagoras, numerology, gematria and Kabbalah in a thoughtful, objective way. Did you know that Pythagoras worshipped numbers? Especially the number 10?

You probably have heard of claims that the Bible is full of hidden wisdom and truth that can be uncovered with the right application of a numerical code. You will learn some interesting things if you go to the link and listen to whole podcast episode.

Michael Guillen has a personal history with numbers. At UCLA, he earned a B.S. in physics and mathematics. He went on to Cornell University, where he earned an M.S. in experimental physics and obtained a Ph.D. in physics, mathematics and astronomy. Guillen’s own “affection” for numbers gives him unique perspective on mathematics and the love of numbers.

If anyone with religious inclinations might be tempted to worship numbers, Dr. Guillen would be a likely candidate. He even wrote a book titled Five Equations that Changed the World: The Power and Poetry of Mathematics.

One might doubt that a legitimate scientist would be so ignorant as to be religious at all, but history is full of scientists and great thinkers with particular religious leanings. Pythagoras, who headed up a cult that worshiped numbers, is an example. Not all religious leanings are the same, though.

As a young seeker and avid learner in college, I encountered religious thought for the first time in a World Religion class. Though my professor described all religions as roads to the top of the same mountain, I saw a difference in one religion and one religious text.

If you listen to Dr. Guillen tell his own story, which he does at various times in his podcast episodes, he saw the same thing. One religion and one religious leader stands out, and one aspect of that difference can be understood with the observation that Guillen makes: God is not an elitist.

We are tempted as human beings to think that truth is something that only the smartest and most clever people are able to figure out. Perhaps, this is why we are fascinated with books like The Da Vinci Code. The less religious among us might say that only those people with privilege, means, and a good education are able to know and understand truth; the rest of us are doomed to ignorance.

My thoughts today are on the former group of people. Guillen challenges the claims of people who believe that the Hebrew Scriptures contain a hidden, numerical code that can be deciphered with the right “key”. Guillen asserts that the truth of the God revealed in the Bible and Jesus, who claimed to be God in the flesh, are not hidden behind a code in the text that needs to be deciphered, and I agree with him.

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What Does It Mean to Be Known By God

What does it mean that the Lord knows the way of the righteous?

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“Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.” Psalm 1:5‭-‬6 ESV

What does this mean? The Lord knows the way of the righteous. Doesn’t God know everything? Doesn’t God know the way of the wicked also?

God sees everything, and He knows everything. God numbered the stars. (Ps. 147:4) God doesn’t just number the stars; He knows each star by its own name! (Is. 40:26) He can count every hair on every person’s head. (Luke 12:7)

God knows our thoughts, our paths and our ways, and He even knows the words we speak before we say them. (Ps. 139:2-4) Why does Psalm 1 say God knows the way of the righteous (and not the wicked also)?

He certainly knows the way of the wicked. Nothing is hidden from God. (Luke 8:17 & Heb. 4:13) The statement that God knows the way of the righteous doesn’t necessarily mean that He doesn’t know the way of the unrighteous. I think He certainly does.

This passage is not talking about bare knowledge. Clearly God is all knowing. This is not a statement contrary to the omniscience of God. God must know the way of the wicked to judge them, which this verse says He will do.

This statement is about a different kind of knowing. It is a statement of familiarity and identification. God is familiar with and identifies with the righteous because the righteous have adopted God’s ways. God knows them in the sense that he knows his own ways. 

It is a statement of intimacy. God is intimate with the righteous. The righteous turn to God in good times and bad. They have opened themselves to God, and God knows them as someone knows a confidant.

It is a statement of connection. God connects with the righteous. The righteous are aligned with God in their ways. Thus, God knows them. Jesus prayed that we would be one with him as he is one with the Father. (John 17:20-23) God establishes connection with the righteous.

What connection does this knowledge have with judgment, perishing, or eternal life? (Which is the focus of the majority of this passage ) God’s knowing is somehow tied into the judgment, the wicked perishing, and implicitly the righteous not being judged and not perishing.

God is eternal. He always is, always was, and always will be. If we are aligned with God, connected with God, we partake with God in his eternal life through Christ. This was the good news (Gospel) that Jesus preached.

Abraham was counted righteous by the grace of God because of his faith (trust and commitment to God). Through Abraham’s seed came Jesus, his seed, who blessed all the nations of the earth.

In Jesus was God incarnate, emptying Himself of His glory and privilege (Phil. 2:5-7) to “connect with” us on our level. In Jesus, God demonstrated His love and character for us to see and connect with. (1 Jn. 1:2)

That blessing God promised to Abraham is the right to be called sons of God (Jn.1:12), to be born again (Jn. 1:13 & Jn. 3:3-8), to die with Christ and to live eternally in him in connection with the Father. (Rom. 6:6-8)

I think of Paul’s great words, “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” (1 Cor. 13:12) These are words of intimacy and personal connection. “Then we shall see face to face.” (Id.) This was God’s desire and his plan all along that we might have personal intimate connection with him and He with us.

God not only desires to “know” us – to have intimate connection with us; He desires to be known by us!

God the Father can seem distant and unapproachable. but He became one of us to connect with us and invite us to connect with Him in the form of Jesus. Jesus, in turn, leaves us the Holy Spirit, who is God who remains with us in intimate form who connect with us, and provides a way for us to connect with Him.

The Spirit is God’s guarantee that he will give us the inheritance he promised…. (Eph. 1:14)

[He] has given us the Holy Spirit in our hearts as the guarantee of all that he has in store for us. (2 Cor. 1:22)

The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God…. (Rom. 8:16)

Some Thoughts on Miracles and God’s Presence in the World

Reasonable, intelligent people with impressive degrees, credentials and accomplishments exist on both sides of the God equation

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NT Wright commented recently on the modern, western notion that God is largely absent and distant from the world He created. Every once in a while He “reaches in” and does something extraordinary, and we call that a miracle.

There are people in the west who still believe that God is active in the world, but western society is more characterized by a view that is God aloof, if He exists (and the western world is more or less aloof toward God). We tend to forget that much of the rest of the world does not share our view.

I believe this view of God and of miracles goes back to the Enlightenment and Deism that gained popularity in the last three centuries or so. Deism is the theology that grew out of the Enlightenment, applying Enlightenment ideals of rationalism, order and a reliance on scientific method. Deists believed that God exists, but He does not intervene and is not active or present in the world.

Deist thinkers conceived of the world like a watch that is wound up and left to run on its own. This thinking harmonized well with trends in scientific thought at the time. Darwin and others before him began to see no need of God to explain the laws of nature because scientific inquiry revealed those laws of nature to be true, dependable, and capable of explanation without reference to supernatural agency. Deism kept God in the picture, but relegated Him to bystander status.

Many Enlightenment thinkers worked consciously and intentionally to shrug off any implication of the supernatural in the study of the natural world. Science, after all, is the study of the natural world. With the discovery of laws like the law of gravity, there was plenty for scientists to do without contemplating a Law Giver.

The definition of science now excludes inquiry of or appeal to anything other than “natural” explanations. Though “science” once meant knowledge, generally, it now means only knowledge of natural things and natural processes (which by definition excludes consideration of supernatural things).

Many modern scientists are materialists, meaning that they believe that nothing exists but the natural world – space/time, matter and energy (whatever that is). They believe nothing exists beyond the natural world, and, therefore, they say that science is the study of all reality. They assume, therefore, that nothing exists that cannot be explained by science.

In this worldview, they conflate the facts that science reveals with reality. On the Deist and Enlightenment view, miracles are an aberration. Indeed, the very definition of a miracle is something that is highly improbable or extraordinary, something unexpected and inexplicable on the basis of natural or scientific laws.

Deism is largely a theology of the past, but the Enlightenment lives on in the modern, materialist who makes no room whatsoever for a transcendent God or anything supernatural (beyond nature). God is excluded from the materialist worldview by definition. Any apparent aberration to natural laws and material things is an unknown merely awaiting a natural explanation.

Miracles in a Deistic world are so rare as to be highly unlikely. Miracles in a modern, materialist worldview are impossible. They simply don’t happen.

This is the faith of the modern materialist – that every phenomenon known to human experience has a natural explanation. We stopped looking for God because we saw order in nature and that God is of no consequence to the study of natural laws. from a determination that God is aloof it’s a short walk to the conclusion that God does not exist.

Wright makes the observation that the Bible has no word like miracle. The closest we get to it might be the phrase, “signs and wonders”. People in the Ancient Near East saw God (or gods) in everything. The Enlightenment posited that this was due to a lack of explanation for most things that we now observe in natural laws, which we now view as random colocations of molecules.

Scripture reveals a God who is far from aloof, and that is increasingly a foreign concept in the modern, western world. The God revealed in the Bible is known both by His “faithfulness” and His presence, investment and activity in the world.

The idea that God is faithful has been replaced with the understanding of natural laws. We believe our understanding of the way natural laws work has supplanted God. God was a construct we invented when we didn’t have explanations for natural phenomena, but now that we understand natural phenomena we have no need for the concept of God.

Even as a Christian, a person who believes in God, I have been influenced by the western world in which I grew up. NT Wright’s observation that the concept of a miracle is a western concept, not a biblical one, leads me to put my thoughts into print as I work out the tension between biblical revelation and my western mindset.

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Sizing Up God

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Depositphotos Image ID: 147545805 Copyright: kamchatka

In ancient times people saw gods in the rocks and trees, idols they made and volcanoes and lightning and thunder. These were gods that were larger than they, but they were accessible. Their gods lived in their environment. Their gods were arbitrary, but they tried to appease them anyway.

Roman and Greek gods were larger than the material world, and they manipulated the material world for their own ends. They controlled volcanoes and earthquakes and lightning and thunder, but they were human-like, even in their imperfections. People could approach them. People could reason with and try to appease them.

Buddhist, Hindu and Eastern gods are not defined by the rocks, trees, lightning and thunder. They do not simply manipulate the material world. They are intimately and intricately part of the material world, and the material world is an extension of them, and the entirety of the material world is all ultimately one and the same in its essence.

Many scientists, like Einstein, who stood in awe of the universe, saw “god” in this way. People can fathom these gods/this god and understand them/it and seek to become one with them/it because these gods are made of the same stuff as people and all of the universe ultimately. These gods cannot be appeased. We can only hope to understand them.

But these gods are too small.

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We Know God by Looking at Jesus

God has not given us abstract proof. He has not given us an inner compass. God has given us proof in the Person of Jesus.

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Depositphotos Image ID: 31681491 Copyright: DesignPicsInc

I listened to a Tim Keller sermon about John 1 in which he focused on the revelation that “the Word was in the beginning; the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and God’s Word became flesh and dwelt among us”. You can follow the link in the last sentence to read a summary of the beginning of the message.

In the sermon, Keller made the following statement that is the subject of this piece:

“Jesus is the supreme revelation. If we are to know God, neither rationalism nor mysticism will suffice. For God chose to make Himself known finally and ultimately in a real historical human being.”

Keller doesn’t break that statement down, but he provides an illustration of how both rationalism and mysticism are insufficient to know God. I will summarize Keller’s illustrations and provide my own take on the subject of knowing God. Neither rationalism nor mysticism are sufficient, alone, to enable us to know God, and the reason why is that God revealed Himself in the person of Jesus.

Continue reading “We Know God by Looking at Jesus” →