How many of you had a kaleidoscope growing up? We all at least know what a kaleidoscope is, right? It’s usually a tube that you hold up to the light and see a beautiful picture made up of colorful pieces of glass or stones or paper. You turn the end of the tube and the mirrors rotate and the picture changes. There are potentially millions of patterns.
To me, that is a tiny snapshot of what God is like. You look at Him and you see this incredible, amazing, indescribable mosaic of love and power … and then you look again and it’s the same love and the same power but you see Him in a whole new way. And no matter how long you look … no matter how long you study Him … you never see the same picture twice. We can study Him for the rest of time. If we are Christians, we will get to gaze upon Him for all eternity … and guess what? His name … Yahweh … “I AM” … means that He is the constant, yet ever-changing, heart and soul of the universe. And, though we may gaze upon Him for all eternity … we will never get to know the height, the depth, and the breadth of our Creator and who He is. That may sound daunting and pointless to some, but to me it sounds … well … there are no words in the human language that could describe the joy that that thought, that idea, that truth gives me. So … if God is unknowable, why do we try to know Him?
Theologian and author J.L. Packer explains it beautifully in his book, “Knowing God.” “What makes life worthwhile is having a big enough objective … something that catches our imagination and lays hold of our allegiance … and this the Christian has in a way that no other person has … for what higher, more exalted, and more compelling goal can there be than to know God?” He asks. Amen!
Learning more about God IS the greatest intellectual pursuit of the human mind. As I said, the subject of God is transcendent … as vast as infinity. But studying God, to me, is the most satisfying, uplifting, edifying, expanding, and glorious task that we could ever undertake. Psalm 100:3 expresses it so beautifully: “Know that the Lord, He is God; it is He who made us, and not ourselves.”
If we simply evolved from primordial ooze through random mutations caused by improbable biological, climatic, and geological accident, we are as good as dead in a pointless universe devoid of hope. How do I know this is not the case? It’s pretty amazing and pretty unfathomable to me that a ball of slime would one day climb out of the ooze, sit on a rock, and begin to question its existence … how it came to be … and begin thinking, seeking, desiring to know, to understand, and have a relationship with that which created it. Since we do have an eternal Creator who made us in His image, nothing could be more important than learning all that we can about the One in whose image we are formed, amen? The more we learn about God, the more we’re awestruck with the majesty of His being.
“What were we made for?” Packer asks. “To know God. What aim should we set for ourselves? To know God. What is the best thing in life … bringing more joy, delight, and contentment than anything else? Knowledge of God. Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God,” says Packer, “most of life’s problems fall into place of their own accord.”
Yes … God is transcendent …. vast as infinity … but He is knowable. According to the Bible, He has revealed aspects of Himself in both nature and in Scripture. And we can know Him Who is Unsearchable through Jesus Christ … who, by His death and resurrection has given us access into His Presence.
In this series, we are taking a look at 12 of God’s attributes as He has revealed them to us through His creation, through His Word, and through His Son, Jesus Christ. While this series will clearly not be exhaustive, it is my prayer that it will be inspirational and will motivate you to engage in a life-long pursuit of knowing and growing in your love for God. May God stir us, inspire us, and strengthen us during this series. I hope that this series will inspire you to get to know Him more intimately and personally than you ever have before. As Charles Spurgeon puts it: “Nothing will so enlarge the intellect, nothing so magnify the whole soul of man, as a devout, earnest, continued investigation of the great subject of deity.”
Amazingly, the Bible teaches us that God can be known. The God of the Universe longs for us to know Him more fully, more accurately, more personally. As author and Bible teacher Jen Wilken puts it: “How should the knowledge that God IS change the way I live? In other words, what measurable change should occur in my life as a result of meditating on God’s immeasurable attributes?”
One of the things that happens when we get to know God is “worship.” The more we get to know God, the more we want to “worship” Him. The root of the word “worship” is … “worth.” When we “worship” God we are praising God and proclaiming His worthiness of our time, our attention, our adoration, our praise, our love. Worship isn’t really the music … though the music is an outpouring of our worship. It’s not the melody … it’s not the rhythm … it’s not the lyrics. Worship is not whether we lift our hands or not … whether we clap or not. Worship isn’t the size of the choir. All of these things are expressions of worship. They spring from the love that we have for God.
Here is the key … the heart of worship. We can only worship someone we love … and we can only love someone we know. Worship fundamentally begins in the heart. If we really know God as He wants to be known by us, we will love Him. And if we really love Him, worship will be the explosion that takes place in our souls as we seek to understand and appreciate our Maker, our Defender, our Redeemer, our Friend. And as our understanding and appreciation grows deeper, we gratefully sing of His power and His love. Trying to manufacture that from the outside in … well, it doesn’t work.
You’ve probably heard this a hundred times before, but it bears repeating a hundred and one times: Worship isn’t something you do once a week on Sunday morning. It’s a matter of becoming a walking doxology … a living song of praise … all the time … doing everything for His glory.
Suppose the only time you communicated or interreacted with your husband or your wife … your boyfriend or girlfriend … significant other … or family was once a week on Sunday morning. To show them how special they are, you give them a box of chocolates. Even if the box were wrapped in 24-carat gold foil and contained the finest Belgium chocolate, it wouldn’t be nearly enough to maintain a meaningful relationship. If your entire relationship with your loved one or loved ones consisted of a box of chocolates every seventh day the relationship would wither … grow dim. That’s what some people do with God. They give Him a box of chocolates or a bouquet of flowers once a week, so to speak, and then wonder why their spiritual relationship never grows.
If we truly don’t know God, we’ll eventually create a god of our own understanding … one that’s convenient to us. When people don’t know the true God, they fabricate gods to fit their lifestyle. A.W. Tozier observed: “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.”
“What we think about God shapes our whole relationship with Him,” says pastor, author, and teacher Chip Ingram. In other words, a high view of God leads to holy living and a low view of God leads to low living. Dr. Paul Tripp, another author, pastor, and teacher, says that spiritual growth is all about recapturing our sense of awe of the Almighty. “We don’t have a contentment problem,” he explains. “We have an awe problem. Once the awe of God is lost,” he concludes, “the loss of heart to obey isn’t far off. If awe of God does not grip your heart, the anxieties of this life will likely influence how you live.”
The situation today is very similar to what was going on in Jeremiah’s day. The people were turning away from God and were trusting in themselves and in their own strength and abilities and wisdom. Thus, God, through His prophet, Jeremiah, pleads with the people: “Thus says the LORD: ‘Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches’.” (Jeremiah 9:23). The Hebrew word that God uses for “boast” means “to shout, to shine.” Just as in Jeremiah’s day, we are prone to “boast” … to “shout” and “shine” … about these three things … wisdom, power, and wealth. Just look at the people we tend to value most today … the scholar, the politician, and the very wealthy, amen? And what are the three most important areas of influence and leadership right now … science, government, and economics.
Listen to Jeremiah 9:23 again … but this time I’ll replace the word “boast” with the word “worship.” “Let not the wise man worship his wisdom, or the strong man worship his strength, or the rich man worship his riches.”
What should we boast of? What should we worship, says the Lord? He tells us in verse 24: “… but let the one who boasts boast about this: that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight.”
What we should boast of is our understanding of God … we should worship God. God names three of the more common pursuits of men and women in life: the pursuit of wisdom … the pursuit of strength … and the pursuit of riches … and these are all good. But the pursuit of understanding and knowing God should be our greatest pursuit, amen?
“… let the one who boasts boast about this: that they have the understanding to know me” (Jeremiah 9:24). The word that God uses for “understand” conveys the idea of having insight and the word that He uses for “know” goes far beyond the desire to have knowledge of Him or just getting to know Him. The word that He uses implies “intimacy.” It describes the “closest union” one can have with another person. God calls us to pursue an intimate and experiential knowledge of Him. Such knowledge … such an experience with God … will transform us. “And we all, with veiled face beholding the glory of the Lord,” says the Apostle Paul, “are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2nd Corinthians 3:18). Paul is creating a picture of Moses going up the mountain in Exodus and “beholding God” … spending time with God … getting to know God. When he came down from the mountain, his face was shining. In the same way, says the Apostle Paul, studying God, getting to know God, experiencing God is like going up on the mountain to see God. As we study His personality and His characteristics, it should transform us, make us look more and more like the object of our love and change us, as Paul said, “from glory to glory.”
Ever hear of the phrase “summum bonum”? It’s Latin and means “the highest good.” It’s short hand for: “The highest good out of which all other good flows” … summum bonum. In the Bible … and for us Christians … the ”summum bonum” … the “highest good” out of which all other good flows is God.
What good flows out of our knowing God? The first benefit is eternal life. We know this from Jesus. “Father, the time has come,” Jesus prayed, “glorify Your Son, that Your Son may glorify You. For You granted Him authority over all people that He might give” … what? “Eternal life.” “Now this is eternal life: that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent” (John 17-13).
Jesus said that eternal life comes from knowing God. Eternal life is not primarily about the length of life for everybody will live eternally in one of two places, am I right? We’re all gonna live forever. The question is where, amen? It is not only about the length of life but the quality of life. The more we know God … the more we understand and build a relationship with Him … the more our quality of life increases. We start to live life the way it was meant to be lived.
Life can never be what it was meant to be apart from the knowledge of God. In the beginning, God walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But when sin came into the world, their relationship with God eroded. Intimacy with God was no longer their primary pursuit.
Pursuing God through Christ restores us to what was lost in the Garden. This is the reason that Christ came to earth and died on the cross for our sins. He did this in order to grant eternal life to those who accept Him as Lord and Savior. We study God to have life and to fulfill the purpose that God created us for.
Though eternal life does not just refer to length of time, it should be pointed out that it does include eternity in the Kingdom of Heaven with God. Listen to what Jesus said in Matthew 7:21-23: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven but only he who does the will of my Father. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’” Now listen closely … “then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never KNEW you. Away from me evil doer.” Christ said that the reason these people would not enter the Kingdom of Heaven was because they never knew Him. They didn’t have an intimate relationship with Him through faith. Salvation is not accomplished just by saying a prayer. It may start with a pray, with confession, but it comes through a vital relationship with Christ.
There are two ways in which we can get to “know” God. One is through our imagination. Each of us carries around a mental picture of God. That picture is a collage of experiences, impressions, and assumptions that we have acquired over our life time. The process began in our lives as we observed our parents … those seemingly all-powerful, all-knowing, ever-present beings who ruled … for better or for worse … over the cosmos of our home and our very limited world. As we grow, we automatically or unconsciously project the views that we that have of our parents on to God … and then we have out-grow our infantile impressions of God … modifying our understanding as our experience and knowledge of God expands through church, movies, music, literature, and our own observations about life and how we see God fitting into our ever-evolving picture of the world and God’s role in it and in our lives. As we grow and mature in our understanding of God, we are constantly updating what I like to call our “Deity Database.”
All of us have an image of God that we worship and carry around in our heads and in our hearts. Some of us worship “Officer” God, who patrols the universe looking to arrest and punish any and all law breakers. Some of us worship a “Mr. Goodwrench” God, who goes around fixing all the problems of the world. Some of us worship “Grandfather God” … a kindly old man who hugs us and showers us with compliments and candy. And there are those who worship the “Vending Machine” God, who will give us whatever we want so long as we pray long enough and with enough sincerity.
We become what we behold. Tell me what you’re beholding … what you are worshipping … and I’ll tell you what you’re becoming. “Our distorted view of God is at the root of all our problems,” says Pastor Chip Ingram. “We’ve created a god in our minds who only faintly resembles the God of Scripture. These mental idols,” Ingram explains, “comfort our emotions, but they are powerless to deliver us from evil or transform our lives. Left to ourselves, we tend to reduce God to manageable terms.” In other words, we shrink God down to fit into our world view, our understanding and fail to see and encounter the awesome, all-knowing, all-powerful, holy God in the process. We try to stuff God into our understanding instead of constantly expanding our understanding to fit who God really is. “We invent a new deity who will submit to our wishes,” says Ingram, “instead of falling down as servants before this awesome God.” Sadly, says Ingram, “we try to get him to be our servant so that we can use Him for our purposes. We make God accountable to us rather than humbly realizing that we are completely accountable to Him.”
More than likely, our imaginary God is partly fact and largely faulty, so God, in His infinite wisdom and unfathomable love, attempts to correct and up-date our “knowledge,” our “picture,” or understanding of Him by revealing Himself to us in various ways … and thank God, literally, that He does.
One way that God reveals Himself is through His creation. Romans 1:20 says: “For His invisible attributes, namely His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.” As Psalm 19 professes: “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims His handiwork” (v. 1).
God reveals Himself through His Word … the Bible. “All Scripture is breathed out by God,” says the Apostle Paul, “and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (1st Timothy 3:16). The Bible is filled with God’s self-revelation. If you want to increase your knowledge, your understanding of God, look at His creation and read about Him in His inspired Word.
And the most powerful and intimate way to get to know God is through His Son … God incarnate … the Word … with a capital “W” … made flesh. “He is the reflection of the glory of God and the exact imprint of God’s very being,” says the writer of the Book of Hebrews, “and he sustains all things by His powerful word” (Hebrews 1:3). “If you knew me,” says Jesus, “you would know my Father also” (John 8:19). Once we get to know Jesus, we get to know the Father. “And this,” says Jesus, “is eternal life, that [my disciples] know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3).
There is something else that happens when we encounter God. We begin to rightly evaluate ourselves and others. Studying God is like looking into a mirror. We see our faults, our problems … and our virtues. This happens in order that we may be changed … transformed. Isn’t that what happened when Peter first came into contact with Jesus? Peter’s response was: “Depart from me for I am a sinful man” (Luke 5:8). The same thing happened when the Prophet Isaiah stood outside of God’s throne room and saw the hem of God’s robe. “Woe to me!” I cried, ‘I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty” (Isaiah 6:5).
Many people have a tendency to wrongly evaluate themselves because they judge themselves by looking at other people. “I’m really smart … compared to him.” “I’m really beautiful … compared to her.” “I’m really holy … compared to them.” They are looking at themselves or at one another instead of at God.
Knowing God not only helps us evaluate ourselves but it also helps us to evaluate others. After seeing God, Isaiah said that not only did he have unclean lips but that he lived among a people with unclean lips. He saw the people and the world around him differently because he was looking at the glory of God. Listen, you will evaluate the music you listen to, the TV programs that you watch, your friends, and society differently when you are living in the Presence of God. This explains why we continually date the wrong person. We don’t know God and therefore cannot properly evaluate ourselves or others. This explains why we take in ungodly music and unedifying TV … because most of us can’t properly evaluate. This is why the world exalts drug dealers, murderers, alcoholics, cheaters, thieves, etc., who talk about … even brag … about their crimes in the music they write or the movies they produce. Without knowing God, we cannot properly evaluate ourselves or others.
Listen to Isaiah’s warning: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter” (Isaiah 5:20). As our society turns from God … as it gets to know God less and less … the more it will become common for society to praise evil and hate good.
Knowing God helps us to value humanity. When we look at our society today and see the killing of innocent babies, sex trafficking, the growing murder and suicide rates around the world … it is clear that we are valuing human life less and less. When we don’t know God, we don’t value human life. We were made in the image of God and therefore we all have value, amen? I have value … and you have value … even though we sin … because we bear the image of God. Having God as my maker and having been created in His likeness gives me innate value. Listen to how David thought of himself because of his knowledge of God: “I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful, I know that full well” (Psalm 139:4).
It is this understanding of human value that has led Christians around the world and through the ages to be the ones to start hospitals, orphanages, crisis pregnancy centers, and universities. Why? Because we have a proper view of God that affects our view of humanity. If we are all made in the image of God then there is a great dignity in serving humanity, building up our neighbors, caring for the sick and poor. Can you imagine a society that sees the true beauty and value in each human because they know God? Can you imagine how that would decrease the rates of murder, suicide, human trafficking, and even plastic surgery if everyone knew that they were fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God?
What else comes from God? Peace and serenity. Listen to what Isaiah says in Isaiah 26:3: “You keep in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You.” A person whose mind is always thinking about God stays at peace in the storms of life. They know that even if they die, they will spend eternity in Heaven. They know that even if they fail, it is all part of God’s sovereign plan that He is working out for their Good (Romans 8:28). Where others panic, get depressed, or run to protect themselves, the one who knows God has peace and serenity. As J.L. Packer explains it: “There is no peace like the peace of those whose minds are possessed with the full assurance that they have known God and God has known them and that this relationship guarantees God’s favor to them in life, through death, and on forever.”
As I said earlier, the word “worthy” comes from the root word “worth.” When people look at a Christian’s life, people should be able to tell how much God really means to them … His “value.” They should be able to tell God’s value to them by how much they invest in their relationship with God through church, service, and devotion. They can tell by the cost. A Christian’s life should properly reflect how much God is “worth” to them.
According to the Bible, our God is the Everlasting Father … the God of hosts … the Lord of Heaven and Earth … the Author and Finisher of our faith … He is the Comforter … the Counselor … the Creator … He is the Great Physician ... and the God of All Grace. His name is “Yahweh” … I AM … the Alpha and Omega … the Holy One of Israel. We can call Him Jehovah … the Most High ... and the Lord of the Living and the Dead … He is Maker … Mediator … and Man of Sorrows … He’s our prophet … priest … and king … our Redeemer … Refuge … Rock. He is Ruler of Heaven and Earth … Hs is the friend of sinners … He is wonderful.
While the Bible claims that we can have a true and personal knowledge of God, we will never totally understand Him. Remember … God is like an eternal, cosmic kaleidoscope … the constantly ever-changing heart and soul of the universe. As King Solomon once professed: “Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain [God]; how much less this [temple] that I have built” (1st Kings 8:27). “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,” claims King David in Psalm 139, “it is high; I cannot attain it” (v. 6). “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised,” claims the poet in Psalm 145, “and His greatness is unsearchable.” “Behold,” Job commands, what we know of God is but “the outskirt of His ways, and how small a whisper do we hear of Him! But the thunder of His power, who can understand?” (Job 26:14). The Apostle Paul concludes His glorious exposition in his letter to the Christian community in Rome by declaring: “Oh, the depth of riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and how inscrutable His ways!” (Romans 11:33). Pastor and author Jen Wilken sums it this way: “God is infinite – immeasurable, unquantifiable, uncontainable, unbound, utterly without limit. God is incomprehensive. This does not mean that He is unknowable,” says Wilken, “but that He is unable to be fully known.”
What then should we do? Listen to the challenge found in Hosea 6:3: “Let us know; let us press on to know the LORD; His going out is sure as the dawn; He will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth.” The word that the Prophet Hosea uses for “press on” means “to move toward the goal with undiminished vigor.” What Hosea is saying is that our goal is to “pursue” and “chase after” God … to focus on getting to know God more and more and more … and not let anything get in our way as we pursue God. “What comes into our minds when we think about God,” says pastor and preacher, A.W. Tozer, “is the most important thing about us … the heaviest obligation upon the Christian church today is to evaluate, purify, and elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him … the gravest question before the church is always God Himself,” amen?
I want you to know the God you don’t know as well as you should. The study of God, as He reveals Himself in Scripture, is the supreme study of a lifetime. You can know more about God than you do now and you can be closer to Him than you are now.
What were we made for? Say it with me: “To know God.” What aim should we set for ourselves in life? Say it with me: “To know God.” What is the best thing in life? Say it with me: “To know God.” And when we know God, we worship God, amen?
Let us pray …
