What is knowing God?
THE KNOWLEDGE
OF GOD
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A Journey into Divine Revelation
Part One: From Recognition to Union
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"Let him that glorieth glory in this, that he
understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the LORD."
— Jeremiah 9:24
There is only one thing in the universe
worth boasting about.
Not wisdom. Not might. Not
riches. God Himself settles the question through Jeremiah in language that is
deliberately dismissive of every other human boast: "Let not the wise man
glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the
rich man glory in his riches: But let him that glorieth glory in this, that he
understandeth and knoweth me" (Jeremiah 9:23-24).
Everything else that human
ambition competes for — intellectual supremacy, physical power, material wealth
— is stripped of its glory in a single sentence. Not because these things are
evil in themselves, but because they are not ultimate. They are not the measure
of a life well-lived. They are not what God is paying attention to. What God is
paying attention to is whether you know Him.
This document is an
invitation — urgent, comprehensive, and unashamed — to pursue that one thing.
Not doctrine about God. Not theology concerning God. Not second-hand accounts
of God. The living knowledge of the living God Himself, in increasing depth and
intimacy, until the knowledge transforms you from the inside out and makes you
a walking revelation of the One you have come to know.
There are levels to this
knowledge. There are depths beneath the surface that most believers never reach
— not because God withholds them, but because the believer never pressed to
find them. This document maps those levels. But a map is only useful if you are
willing to travel.
Chapter One
Why Knowing God Is the Supreme Duty
The One Imperative That Governs
Everything Else
Before we examine the
levels of the knowledge of God, we must settle why this knowledge is not
optional — not a supplement to Christian life, not a pursuit for the
particularly devout, but the primary obligation of every human being who bears
the name of Christ.
"And thou, Solomon my son, know thou the
God of thy father, and serve him with a perfect heart and with a willing mind:
for the LORD searcheth all hearts, and understandeth all the imaginations of
the thoughts: if thou seek him, he will be found of thee; but if thou forsake
him, he will cast thee off for ever."
— 1 Chronicles 28:9
David's final commission
to Solomon was not about the temple he was to build or the administration he
was to govern. It was about God. Know the God of your father. Notice the
sequence: knowing comes before serving. Perfect heart and willing mind are the products
of knowing — they cannot precede it. You cannot serve well what you do not
know. You cannot love deeply what you have not encountered. You cannot
represent accurately what you have only heard about.
"Then shall we know, if we follow on to
know the LORD: his going forth is prepared as the morning; and he shall come
unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth."
— Hosea 6:3
Hosea's language is alive
with agricultural imagery — and deliberately so. The rain does not fall on the
field once and then leave the farmer to his own devices. It comes regularly,
seasonally, in the measure the crops require. This is the picture of the
knowledge of God: not a single encounter that is sufficient for a lifetime, but
a progressive, sustained following after Him that yields progressive revelation
of Him. Every step toward knowing God produces more of God coming toward you.
The Severe Consequence
of Rejecting Knowledge
Do not miss the other side
of this. Hosea 4:6 is among the most piercing declarations in all prophetic
literature — and it was spoken not to pagans but to priests:
"My people are destroyed for lack of
knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that
thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I
will also forget thy children."
— Hosea 4:6
Feel the weight of it. God
is not speaking to atheists. He is speaking to people who already believed He
existed, who already functioned in religious roles, who already carried the
vocabulary of the covenant. And yet they had rejected the true knowledge of Him
— the kind born of intimacy, obedience, and walking in His ways. And His
response is a mirror of their choice: since you have rejected knowing Me, I
reject you.
He rejected them. Not
reduced them. Not corrected them gently. Rejected. This should produce terror
in every believer who is comfortable with a surface-level, information-based,
theologically adequate but experientially empty relationship with God. The priests
already believed God was real. What they rejected was the deep knowing — and
that rejection was treated as the rejection of God Himself.
A question that cannot be avoided:
You say you believe in God. But do you know
Him? Not know about Him — know Him. Has He spoken to you? Have you encountered
Him? Has the knowledge of Him changed how you live, what you pursue, how you
treat people, what you fear, what you desire? Titus 1:16 is the diagnostic:
'They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him.' Is there a gap
between your profession and your works? That gap is the gap of knowledge.
You Are Already a
Priest
You may wonder: I am not a
priest — why should the warning of Hosea 4:6 concern me? The answer is that
every believer who has received Christ has been brought into the economy of
priesthood and kingship. Revelation 1:6 establishes it plainly: Christ "hath
made us kings and priests unto God and his Father." The moment you
accepted Christ, you were not merely saved from something — you were installed
into something. You are a priest. And priests carry the obligation to know the
God they represent.
No believer has an excuse
not to know God. The access has been purchased. The Spirit has been given. The
Word has been revealed. The only remaining question is whether you will use
what you have been given to press into the knowledge it was designed to produce.
Chapter Two
Three Dimensions of Knowing God
His Personality, His Essence, and His
Will
To truly know God is not
to accumulate facts about Him. It is to know three inseparable dimensions of
who He is: His personality — the character and heart He has revealed through
His dealings with humanity; His essence — who He is in His fundamental nature;
and His will — what He requires of us and desires in relationship. Without all
three, the knowledge remains partial, and partial knowledge produces
misrepresentation.
His Personality — The
Heart of God Revealed
God's personality is the
cumulative revelation of how He has chosen to relate to His creation. The
single most comprehensive disclosure of His character in all of Scripture comes
in Exodus 34:6-7, where He proclaimed His own name to Moses:
"The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and
gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for
thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no
means clear the guilty."
— Exodus 34:6-7
Nine attributes in that
single declaration. Merciful. Gracious. Longsuffering. Abundant in goodness.
Abundant in truth. Mercy-keeping. Forgiving of iniquity, transgression, and
sin. And — refusing to leave the guilty unchallenged. His personality is not one-dimensional.
He is simultaneously tender and just, patient and holy, forgiving and
righteous. A theology that knows only His mercy without His justice, or only
His love without His holiness, has not yet known His personality. It has known
a fragment of it.
His Essence — Who He
Is in His Fundamental Nature
God's essence is what He
is at the level of His being — beneath even His attributes, at the most
fundamental level of His existence. Scripture uses three devastating simplicity
statements that carry infinite weight:
"God is light, and in
him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5). Absolute purity. No corruption.
No shadow. No compromise. No self-contradiction. Unapproachable in holiness,
yet freely offering His light to those who come to Him.
"God is love" (1
John 4:8). Not merely loving — love itself. He does not have love as an
attribute He exercises selectively. Love is what He is. Everything He does
flows from this essence — including His holiness, His judgment, and His
discipline.
"For thy pleasure they are and were
created."
— Revelation 4:11
This verse from the
twenty-four elders before the throne is among the most theologically
significant in Scripture: everything exists for God's pleasure. Not for our
comfort. Not for human flourishing as the ultimate end. For Him. This is the
most disorienting truth for a generation raised on a consumer Christianity that
places human happiness at the center of the universe. God is the center. We
exist for Him. And discovering what pleases Him is the practical content of
knowing His essence.
His Will — What He
Requires and Desires
Micah 6:8 compresses the
will of God into three requirements that are so simple and so comprehensive
that every generation of believers has found them simultaneously obvious and
devastating:
"He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good;
and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with thy God?"
— Micah 6:8
Do justly. Love mercy.
Walk humbly with your God. These are not three separate tracks. They are three
inseparable expressions of a single life shaped by the knowledge of God. The
person who knows God's will does justice not as a social obligation but as the
natural expression of a heart shaped by God's own righteousness. They love
mercy not sentimentally but as the overflow of a soul that has received it in
abundance. And they walk humbly because they have seen enough of God to know
how small they are and how vast He is.
But underneath all of this
is the ultimate expression of God's will: to dwell in us. To have fellowship
and communion with Him. 1 John 1:3 declares: "truly our fellowship is with
the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ." God's deepest will is not that
you perform for Him — it is that you know Him. The doing flows from the
knowing. The service flows from the fellowship.
Chapter Three
Christ: The Fullness of the Knowledge of
God
In This Dispensation, God Is Most Fully
Known in His Son
Every previous revelation
of God — through law, through prophecy, through the tabernacle, through the
sacrificial system — was real but incomplete. It was a shadow pointing forward
to the substance. In this dispensation, the substance has come. The veil has
been torn. The fullness of God's self-disclosure has arrived in a Person.
"God, who at sundry times and in divers
manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last
days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by
whom also he made the worlds; Who being the brightness of his glory, and the
express image of his person."
— Hebrews 1:1-3
Express image. Not a
representation. Not an approximation. The exact imprint — the precise,
faithful, complete reproduction of God's nature in human form. When you look at
Jesus, you are looking at what God looks like when He takes on flesh. His
compassion for the sick is God's compassion. His anger at hypocrisy is God's
anger. His weeping at the grave of Lazarus is God weeping. His embrace of the
outcast, the sinner, the broken, the seeking — this is God drawing near.
"In whom dwelleth all the fulness of the
Godhead bodily."
— Colossians 2:9
All. Not most. Not a
significant portion. All the fullness of the Godhead dwells in Christ, bodily.
This means that Christ is not a window through which you peer at God from a
distance — He is the full manifestation of God in tangible, knowable, approachable
form. And to know Christ — truly, personally, intimately — is to know God.
There is no knowledge of God deeper than the knowledge of His Son.
The disciples who
walked with Jesus did not merely learn about God. They watched God eat
breakfast, rebuke a storm, heal a leper with a touch, weep over a city. When
they knew Jesus, they knew God.
And this is the staggering
privilege of every believer who lives after Pentecost: we do not merely have
the record of Jesus' life to study. We have the Spirit of Jesus within us. 2
Corinthians 4:6 establishes it: "God, who commanded the light to shine out
of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of
the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." The light of the knowledge
of God shines within your heart. Not merely around you. Within you.
The Inward Christ and
the Yielded Vessel
This is where knowing God
becomes intensely personal and intensely challenging. Because the Spirit of
Christ within you is not passive. He is not content to occupy a corner of your
interior life while you govern the rest. He seeks fullness of expression. He
seeks a yielded vessel.
The urgent word for this hour:
You call Me Father, yet you will not yield your
heart. You profess My name, yet My throne is vacant within you. I have redeemed
you not to dwell in the corner of your life but to reign in the whole of it. My
Spirit seeks a yielded vessel — yet many shut Me out with their own will, their
own plans, their own rule. 'My son, give Me thine heart' (Proverbs 23:26).
Until I sit as King within you, you will live beneath the measure of My glory.
Yielding to the Holy
Spirit is not a one-time event. It is a daily, deliberate surrender — the
emptying of self-rule and the embracing of His rule — so that the life of
Christ is expressed through you. This is the practical meaning of knowing God
in this dispensation: not merely understanding doctrines about Him, but
allowing His Spirit to operate freely within you, shaping your thoughts,
directing your choices, expressing His character through your conduct.
Chapter Four
From Shadows to Fullness
The Dangerous Error of Surface Knowledge
in an Hour of Deep Darkness
The earth is full of
darkness. Isaiah 60:2 is not prophetic poetry — it is a description of the
present hour: "Darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the
people." And into this darkness God is looking for a people who know Him —
not the God of their pastor, not the God of their parents, not the god
constructed by prosperity theology or the comfortable God of a self-serving
Christianity, but the living God who dwells within them.
Because a church that does
not know God is a church that cannot navigate the darkness it was commissioned
to penetrate. And the darkness is not navigable with second-hand information.
The Strange Doctrines
That Fill the Vacuum of Ignorance
When believers do not know
God, they become vulnerable to every substitution that presents itself in God's
name. And the substitutions have multiplied. Men intoxicate their followers
with doctrines birthed from error and, in some cases, from the pit itself:
fasting to the point of physical death as a mechanism of accessing heaven; the
endless chasing of so-called prophets as though they were saviors whose
blessing is the only pathway to God; sermons so saturated with material
blessing that the congregation has learned to worship the gift rather than the
Giver.
"My people are tossed
to and fro by every wind of doctrine" (Ephesians 4:14). The tossing is not
accidental. It is the predictable consequence of a church that has been fed
information about God without being taught how to know God. And the person who
has not learned to know God for themselves becomes perpetually dependent on
others to mediate their relationship with Him — and therefore perpetually
vulnerable to whatever those others choose to tell them.
The indispensable correction:
This is the hour to know God for yourself. Not
through the second-hand witness of deceivers. Not through the filtered theology
of someone whose agenda you cannot fully read. Through the Spirit's direct
unveiling of Christ to your own heart. Because it is written: 'And they shall
not teach every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the
Lord: for all shall know me, from the least to the greatest' (Hebrews 8:11).
The new covenant was specifically designed to produce direct, personal, unmediated
knowledge of God. You have no excuse for outsourcing it.
Only those who know their
God shall be strong and do exploits (Daniel 11:32). Not those who know a great
deal about God. Not those who can quote Scripture accurately. Those who know
their God. The knowledge is the source of the strength. The knowledge is the
source of the exploits. This is not an inspirational statement to be
appreciated — it is a strategic reality to be pursued with everything you have.
Chapter Five
The Four Levels of the Knowledge of God
From Recognition to Perfect Certainty —
The Greek Map of Divine Knowing
Scripture uses at least
four distinct Greek words for knowledge in the New Testament, each describing a
different depth of knowing. These are not merely academic distinctions — they
are a map of the spiritual journey, from the first moment of awareness to the
final certainty that anchors the soul. Understanding where you currently stand
on this map is the first step toward pressing deeper.
Gnosis
· BASIC KNOWLEDGE
The Starting Point —
Awareness and Information
Gnosis is the beginning of
the journey. It is the most common word for knowledge in the New Testament and
refers to awareness, information, intellectual grasp of truth. At this level, a
person knows facts about God, understands doctrines, may study Scripture
diligently — yet still relates to God primarily through information rather than
through encounter.
This level is essential
and must not be despised. "Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the
word of God" (Romans 10:17). You cannot begin the journey without gnosis.
You cannot have faith without first hearing. You cannot encounter what you have
never been told about. The disciples who followed Jesus in the early period of
His ministry operated largely at this level — they knew facts about Him, they
witnessed His miracles, they heard His teaching. But they had not yet come to
know Him.
"And they feared exceedingly, and said one
to another, What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey
him?"
— Mark 4:41
"What manner of man
is this?" — that is gnosis without ginosko. They had knowledge about Him
sufficient to follow Him and to be astonished by Him. But the question itself
reveals the gap: they did not yet know Him. They knew what He had done. They
did not yet know who He was.
The danger of gnosis alone:
Paul warns in 1 Corinthians 8:1 that 'knowledge
puffeth up.' Gnosis without deepening into experiential knowledge produces
pride rather than transformation. It creates theologians who debate God rather
than servants who know Him. It produces people who can defend the faith in
argument but who have never been broken by an encounter with the Person their
arguments are about. Gnosis is the door, not the house. Do not set up residence
in the doorway.
But gnosis was never meant to be the destination. It is
an invitation to go deeper.
Ginosko
· EXPERIENTIAL KNOWLEDGE
From Hearing to Touching —
The Knowledge That Changes You
Ginosko is the word that
changes everything. It is the Greek word used for the most intimate forms of
knowing — the word used in the Septuagint for a man knowing his wife (Genesis
4:1 in the Greek Old Testament). It is personal, experiential, relational, and
living. It is the word Jesus uses in John 17:3 when He defines eternal life:
"this is life eternal, that they might know (ginosko) thee the only true
God."
Eternal life is not
primarily a destination — it is a quality of knowing. And the knowing Jesus
describes is not intellectual recognition. It is the knowing of encounter, of
ongoing relationship, of the kind of intimacy that is built through sustained,
personal, lived experience with the Person of God.
"I have heard of thee by the hearing of
the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee."
— Job 42:5
This is the transition
from gnosis to ginosko. Job had heard of God — he had gnosis. He had doctrine,
tradition, the testimony of others. He could recite what God was like. But in
the whirlwind, he encountered God directly — and the encounter so overwhelmed
everything he thought he knew that the only thing he could say was: now my eye
sees You. Hearing and seeing are not the same. Gnosis is hearing. Ginosko is
seeing — encountering God directly in a way that cannot be confused with
information.
Thomas declared "My
Lord and my God!" (John 20:28) not because he received new information but
because he was invited into direct contact — to place his hands in the wounds.
The encounter produced the confession. The seeing produced the knowing. This is
ginosko: God becomes more than a doctrine — He becomes your encounter, your
reality, your personal testimony.
By the time Peter declared
"Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Matthew 16:16), his
knowledge had moved. Not from false to true — but from surface to deep, from
reported to encountered. Jesus responded: "flesh and blood hath not
revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven." That is the mark
of ginosko: it is not produced by human intellect. It is given by God to those
who have pressed beyond the surface.
The invitation of ginosko:
Psalm 34:8 says: 'O taste and see that the LORD
is good.' Tasting is not hearing about. Tasting is direct encounter. You taste
by going to the table, opening your mouth, and receiving. Ginosko comes to
those who stop talking about the table and sit down to eat. Have you tasted? Or
are you still only reciting the menu?
But even this is not the summit. Ginosko matures. And as
it matures, it becomes something more.
Epignosis
· FULL AND ACCURATE KNOWLEDGE
Experiential Knowledge
Ripened into Transformation
Epignosis is ginosko
brought to maturity. The prefix epi intensifies the root — it means upon, over,
fully, accurately. Epignosis is not a new kind of knowing that replaces
ginosko; it is the same relational, experiential knowing deepened, refined, and
made precise through sustained walking with God. It is where revelation ceases
to be occasional and becomes habitual. Where God's character ceases to surprise
you and begins to shape you. Where the knowledge has permeated every layer of
who you are.
"For this cause we also, since the day we
heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled
with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding."
— Colossians 1:9
Paul uses epignosis for
what he prays the Colossians will be filled with — not partial knowledge, not
surface knowledge, but the full, precise, all-pervading knowledge of God's will
in all wisdom and spiritual understanding. Note the comprehensiveness: all
wisdom, spiritual understanding. Epignosis is not a narrow specialty. It is the
flooding of God's knowledge into every dimension of your life and thinking.
Paul's own burning
aspiration, recorded in Philippians 3:10, is the most personal expression of
epignosis in his letters: "That I may know him, and the power of his
resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto
his death." This is not a new desire for someone who had already
encountered the risen Christ on the Damascus road. It is the cry of someone who
had tasted ginosko and was hungry for epignosis — the full, mature, costly
knowing that includes not just resurrection power but the fellowship of His
sufferings, conformity to His death. Epignosis costs more than ginosko. It
requires more surrender, more consecration, more willingness to be shaped by
what God reveals rather than merely delighted by it.
The transformation that epignosis produces:
Peter after Pentecost was a different person
from Peter before it. Not different in personality — the boldness was always
there. But what had been unanchored boldness became anchored authority. What
had been confident opinion became settled revelation. When the council saw 'the
boldness of Peter and John' (Acts 4:13), what they were observing was epignosis
made visible. They had been with Jesus — and the sustained encounter had
changed them into living epistles (2 Corinthians 3:2-3), known and read of all
men.
The disciples after
Pentecost were described from the outside: "These that have turned the
world upside down are come hither also" (Acts 17:6). This is what
epignosis produces. Not merely personal transformation — world-disturbing,
empire-shaking, history-altering effectiveness. Because they had moved from
gnosis (hearing of Christ) through ginosko (experiencing Christ) into epignosis
(being formed into the image of Christ), they were no longer merely believers.
They were living demonstrations of what knowing God does to a human life.
But there is yet one more level — the highest — that
consummates all the others.
Oida
· PERFECT CERTAINTY
The Settled, Unshakeable
Knowledge That Cannot Be Taken Away
Oida is the crown of the
knowledge journey. Unlike gnosis, which grows through learning, and unlike
ginosko, which deepens through relationship, oida implies a settled, complete,
unshakeable certainty. It is not the process of discovering — it is the state
of knowing in full. It is not "I am coming to understand" — it is
"I know. It is settled. It is certain. Nothing can take this from
me."
"For I know (oida) that my redeemer
liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though
after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God."
— Job 19:25-26
Job spoke these words from
the lowest point of his human experience. Everything had been stripped from
him. His children were dead. His wealth was gone. His body was covered in
boils. His wife had told him to curse God and die. His friends were accusing him
of secret sin. He was at the absolute nadir of human suffering.
And from that place — from
the ash heap, with nothing left — he declared: I know. Not "I hope."
Not "I believe there is a possibility." I know my Redeemer lives.
This is oida. The certainty that circumstances cannot touch. The knowledge that
suffering cannot erode. The settled fact that does not require the confirmation
of favorable conditions to hold.
"And we know (oida) that the Son of God is
come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know (ginosko) him that
is true; and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is
the true God, and eternal life."
— 1 John 5:20
John weaves both levels of
knowing into a single verse with precision: oida (we know — with settled
certainty — that the Son of God has come) and ginosko (that we may continually
know — in ongoing relationship — Him that is true). This dual reality is the
heartbeat of Christian maturity: to live in unwavering certainty while never
ceasing to grow deeper in fellowship. To be anchored in what is settled while
pressing forward into what is deeper.
The fruit of oida is rest.
Unshakeable rest. The end of wavering. The collapse of the anxiety that comes
from uncertainty. The soul anchored to the immovable Rock of Ages — not because
the storms are absent but because the anchor holds. This is the certainty that
allowed Paul to write from a Roman prison: "For I am persuaded, that
neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things
present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature,
shall be able to separate us from the love of God" (Romans 8:38-39). Not
hoped. Not believed with some degree of probability. Persuaded. Oida.
The partial foretaste and the full consummation:
On earth, we taste oida in part. The disciples
experienced it after Pentecost — the fearful men who hid behind locked doors
(John 20:19) became men who stood before the Sanhedrin without trembling. But
Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 13:12 that the fullness awaits eternity: 'For
now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part;
but then shall I know even as also I am known.' The complete knowledge —
knowing as we are known — is the destination of the eternal journey. We pursue
it now in increasing measure. We will inhabit it fully then.
The Call
Press Through — Until You Know
The Invitation to Move from the Shore
into the Deep
Why are you still standing
at the shore? Why are you drinking drops when a fountain flows without limit?
Why are you eating crumbs when a feast has been prepared and the table is set?
The veil is torn. The Spirit is calling. The access is open. And the God who
measured out every ocean by the hollow of His hand is inviting you deeper into
the knowledge of Himself.
This is not an abstract
invitation. It is specific, personal, and urgent. And Scripture names exactly
what this pursuit looks like — not passive waiting, but active, determined,
passionate pressing:
"That I may know him, and the power of his
resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto
his death."
— Philippians 3:10
Paul had been a Pharisee
of Pharisees — trained at the feet of Gamaliel, zealous for the Law, competent
in theology beyond virtually all his contemporaries. He had encountered the
risen Christ on the Damascus road. He had been to the third heaven. He had
written much of the New Testament. And still he cried: that I may know Him. The
cry is not the cry of a beginner. It is the cry of someone who has tasted
enough to know that there is more — and who has decided that "more"
is the only acceptable destination.
"My soul thirsteth for God, for the living
God: when shall I come and appear before God?"
— Psalm 42:2
This is David's thirst —
not for the gifts of God, not for the blessings of God, not for the protection
or provision of God. For God Himself. For the living God. Make this your
thirst. Bring it with you into every prayer, every reading of Scripture, every
worship gathering, every quiet hour. Not the thirst that says "give me
more of what You can do" — but the thirst that says "I want more of
You."
Hosea's instruction in 6:3
is the most direct: "Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the
LORD." Follow on. This is continuous, progressive, deliberate pursuit. Not
the casual interest that checks in occasionally. The pursuit that does not stop
until the knowledge is deepened, that does not rest until ginosko has become
epignosis and epignosis has produced the settled oida of a soul that has been
so thoroughly shaped by the knowledge of God that it cannot be unformed.
Press on until gnosis
becomes ginosko.
Press on until ginosko
ripens into epignosis.
Press on until
epignosis produces the settled certainty of oida.
Press on until knowing
becomes burning, and burning becomes living,
and living becomes
Christ in you — the hope of glory.
✦ ✦ ✦
"And this is life eternal, that they might
know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent."
— John 17:3
Part Two of this series
continues the journey — into how this knowledge is pursued, what it costs, and
what it produces when it reaches maturity.
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