Encyclopedia of Spiritual Theology

How Do You Know God?

How Do You Know God?

1. A common saying goes: “They knew God by reason.” But our knowledge of God through reason is not complete.
   The intellect—if sound and thinking correctly—can lead you to the shores of knowledge, but it does not take you into the depths. Undoubtedly it has a role, but it is not everything. Sometimes, even when the mind knows something about God, it cannot express it.
   The vocabulary of language is limited in expressing divine matters—how much more so when speaking of God who is beyond comprehension. Moreover, intellectual knowledge is theoretical; it lacks the practical and experiential aspect. It is knowledge in which the spirit and the emotions have not yet entered. Therefore, we wish to speak to you about the more perfect and deeper knowledge, namely:

2. The knowledge of fellowship and experience, about which it is said in the Psalm: “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps. 34:8). You may read about the delight of food in books, but there is a great difference between reading about it and tasting the food yourself and savoring it. So it is with knowledge.
   Here we remember a phrase spoken by righteous Job after he entered into a life of practical experience with God. He said: “I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You” (Job 42:5). There is a great difference between hearing and seeing, or between information and experience. Information comes to you from outside; experience you feel within yourself. In this article we want you to move from the level of “I heard of You” to the level of “my eye sees You.”
   You cannot know God while you are distant from Him—without meeting Him, without accompanying Him, without mingling with Him, without experiencing His work with you and His work for you. You must walk with God in order to know Him. You move from theoretical theology to practical theology.

The Samaritan woman knew some information about the Messiah, but after she met Christ, she moved from the mind to the heart. She was stirred inwardly and went to the people of her town saying: “Come, see a Man who told me all things that I ever did” (John 4:29).
Yet even her mind did not help her express all her inner emotions, so she said, “Come and see; come and experience for yourselves.” When they experienced, they saw more than what the ear hears. Truly, the mind is sometimes incapable of expression and even of understanding.

Suppose you are moved by a beautiful piece of music. Can you explain to someone the nature of your emotion? Music may shake you from within and implant certain feelings that you cannot explain. Neither your mind nor your tongue can do so.

Consider the thief on the right—was he able to express his feelings and his being moved by being beside Christ on the cross for three hours? All we know about what was inside his heart is merely the result he reached when he said: “Remember me, O Lord, when You come into Your kingdom” (Luke 23:42). As for his knowledge of the Lord—his inner, heartfelt knowledge—it remained among the secrets of history, the Holy of Holies.
The Lord said to the Father: “The world has not known You” (John 17:25). The world, with its reason, its heritage, its traditions, and its concepts, did not know You, because it did not enter into fellowship with You, into a personal relationship with You. It did not taste and see that the Lord is good. And when the world tried to understand You by reason, it turned religion into philosophy, as Plato did, or into myths, as some peoples did. “But I have known You.”

Thus said the Son who is in the bosom of the Father: “No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him” (John 1:18). He came to make known to us who the Father is.
Would that we involve God with us in our lives, so that we may know Him.

We do not work alone; rather, we invite Him in our prayers to work with us, and we see how He works, and thus we know much about Him. The problem of King Saul was that he became independent of God and began to work alone; therefore, he did not know God, and God rejected him (1 Sam. 14, 15).

As for Enoch, the seventh from Adam (Jude 14), his entire life was concentrated in one verse—very deep and very beautiful: “And Enoch walked with God; and he was not, for God took him” (Gen. 5:24). I do not know how he walked with Him—this too is the Holy of Holies. Yet I delight in imagining Enoch walking with God, finding delight in God, and God finding His pleasure in him. Then God says to him: Come with Me, Enoch—above—to one place where we walk together, away from this noisy world.
Truly, how much Enoch knew about God. Those who experienced God had their lives changed.

Each of them said: From the day I knew You, my life gained taste, a new meaning, a new flavor, and a purpose. The mind was renewed (Rom. 12:2), and it acquired a mind—the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2:16). It took on Your image, so I knew You, as one who looks in a mirror (1 Cor. 13:12).
When you walk with God, do not focus only on the good that comes to you from Him so that you rejoice in it; rather, rejoice also in trials and tribulations.

Knowing God through trials

3. Through trials, you can know God.
   Trials, problems, and tribulations are a beautiful opportunity in which we see how God intervenes and how He works. Do you think that the prophet Daniel knew God before being cast into the lions’ den as he knew Him while in the den, when he said: “My God sent His angel and shut the lions’ mouths” (Dan. 6:22)?
   Through this trial, King Darius also came to know who God is (Dan. 6:26–27). The casting of the three young men into the fiery furnace made them know Him more, when He walked with them in the furnace: “And the form of the fourth is like the Son of God” (Dan. 3:25).
   Through trial they knew God’s power, His care, and His protection—knowledge that books cannot express. It resembles the knowledge of Jonah when the great fish swallowed him, and it also resembles, to some extent, the knowledge of the Apostle Peter of the Lord when he walked with Him on the water, and when He caught his hand as he doubted and began to sink (Matt. 14:24–31).

This knowledge also benefited Mary and Martha when their brother Lazarus died. Before that, they were certain that the Lord was able to prevent his death (John 11:21). But that He would raise him after he had been in the tomb four days and it was said that he stank—this was something new to their knowledge and increased their faith.

Thus, in trials we know God more: we know His power and ability, and we know His love and tenderness. We know how His hand is extended to work and to preserve. We also know when He works—perhaps we know His long-suffering, and that He may not come except in the fourth watch of the night (Mark 6:48). Yet, nevertheless, He must come.
Therefore, the beloved of God rejoice in trials and tribulations through which they know God more. As Saint James the Apostle said: “Count it all joy, my brethren, when you fall into various trials” (James 1:2).

They touch God’s hand in those tribulations and gain new experience and new knowledge of God. The result is this: God is no longer merely a religious doctrine for them, but a living reality—a reality they have touched in their lives, which has entered into practical faith, not theoretical or inherited faith. It becomes stronger and gives the soul hope, confidence, and joy in God’s work no matter how severe the hardships. They sing with the psalmist: “If it had not been the Lord who was on our side when men rose up against us, then they would have swallowed us alive” (Ps. 124:2–3).
“Our soul has escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken, and we have escaped. Our help is in the name of the Lord” (Ps. 124:7–8).

There is a great difference between reading about God’s preservation and touching God’s preservation in your practical life. Undoubtedly, practical knowledge is deeper and more truthful. This leads us to another source of knowing God, namely:

4. Tracing the hand of God in history and events
   We grow in knowing God when we continually remember His work and do not forget.
   The miracle of God’s parting of the Red Sea is remembered daily by the Church in the First Canticle of the Midnight Prayer, so that we may remember and not forget, and so that our knowledge of God may be firmly established.

Would that each of us had a journal in which he records God’s works with him, with his relatives, his loved ones, and his acquaintances—indeed, also God’s hand and what it has done in history and in the public events we have passed through. We read this journal continually so that our knowledge of God may be renewed in our minds, for He says: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hos. 4:6).

Shall we not take a lesson from the kings of Media and Persia, how they recorded events in “the book of the chronicles,” and read it from time to time (Esth. 6:1)? As King Ahasuerus did—by reading the events of the past, Mordecai was saved from the sword of Haman, and the whole people were saved.

You may know something beautiful about God and forget it—and this is not to your spiritual benefit. Therefore, your knowledge of God should be firm, not erased by forgetfulness. Remind yourself of it from time to time. The people who saw God’s miracles with their own eyes in the wilderness and in Egypt before that forgot them when they bowed down to the golden calf (Exod. 32).
If their knowledge of God was erased by forgetfulness, do not you be like them. Rather, place the knowledge of God before you at all times. Repeat it continually in your mind lest you forget.

5. You can also know God by keeping His commandments
   Saint John the Apostle says in his First Epistle: “By this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments. He who says, ‘I know Him,’ and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him” (1 John 2:3–4). He also said: “Whoever sins has neither seen Him nor known Him” (1 John 3:6). Therefore, it is said of the wicked person that he does not know His commandments.

What, then, is the relationship between keeping the commandments and knowing God?
By keeping the commandments, a person enters into God’s realm and deals with Him on the basis of obedience. By keeping the commandments, we draw near to Him. As we practice the commandments, we find in them and in a righteous life a delight; we love these commandments, and consequently we love their Giver. Thus we reach the love of God and thereby know Him, becoming worthy of this knowledge, and He reveals Himself to us.

By keeping the commandments, we live a life of the Spirit and are able to know God, because “God is Spirit” (John 4:24). By keeping the commandments, our hearts are purified, and we become worthy of the blessing spoken by the Lord: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matt. 5:8).
As for the sinful person, he is far from God—indeed, separated from Him—because “what fellowship has light with darkness?” (2 Cor. 6:14). As long as he is far from Him, how can he know Him?

Yet keeping the commandments should not be done in a Pharisaic manner. The Pharisees were concerned with the letter of the commandment, not its spirit. Despite their meticulousness in commandments, they were far from God and His purposes; they neither knew Him nor knew His ways. Keeping the commandments is linked to loving God, as the Lord said: “If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love” (John 15:10). “He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me” (John 14:21). This leads us to another point, namely:

6. You know God if you love Him
   In this the Apostle says: “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:7–8).
   Truly, the one who is far from love is far from God and does not know Him. If he loves Him, he knows Him; and if he knows Him, he increases in love for Him. God possesses all perfections and all beautiful attributes that can be loved. If you love these attributes, you will inevitably love their Owner. If you are a lover of goodness and righteousness, you will certainly love God and thus know Him, for He is the source of all goodness.

If you know love, you will know God, because God is love. If you know the truth, you will know God, because He is the truth: “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me’” (John 14:6).
If you walk in the light, you will know Him, for He is “the true Light which gives light to every man coming into the world” (John 1:9). God is light, and whoever walks in darkness has no light and does not love Him. The wicked loved darkness rather than light.

The one who knows God and loves Him does not love the world or the things in the world (1 John 2:15), for the love of the world is enmity with God (James 4:4). Whoever loves the world has not yet known God. For if he had known God, he would certainly not have preferred the world over Him.

As for the holy Apostle who desired to know Christ, he said: “But what things were gain to me, these I have counted loss for Christ. Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil. 3:7–8).
He also said: “While we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal” (2 Cor. 4:18).

He who clings to material things is pulled downward by them and cannot rise upward to know God. As for the spiritual who know God, they use the world as though they did not use it (1 Cor. 7:31). They live in it without the world living in them. The Spirit of God rests in them, and by their holiness they know Him, for without holiness no one will see the Lord.
By a life of the Spirit they have eyes that see—like the eyes of the prophet Elisha, who saw what his servant Gehazi did not see (2 Kings 6:16–17).

I would like to stop here for now; these lines can no longer contain more. I hope to complete this subject in the next issue, if the grace of the Lord wills and we live.