Knowing About God or Knowing God?

Think about a time when you had heard about someone and then later on got to know that person.  Maybe it was a "strict" or "mean" teacher by reputation that later turned out to be the best teacher you ever had.  The difference between hearing or knowing about someone and actually knowing that person is enormous.

Unfortunately, many people know about the Bible but don't really know the Bible, just as they know about God, but don't really know God.  To "know" in Biblical terms means "to experience," to "taste."  It is never "knowing about" but always first-hand experience, a deep-down truth that cannot be shaken. 

In the 4th chapter of John, when Jesus meets the woman at the well, she had heard about the Messiah, the one who was to come, but after her conversation with the One whose love transformed her, she knew (had experienced) Jesus Himself.  In the same way, the villagers who came out to meet Jesus because of her testimony said, We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.

If we take what people "say" about God as the truth, we are so missing the experience of knowing, experiencing, tasting God Himself.  And this experience is necessary to know the "real" God.  When people first begin to experience the real God, not just the God they have heard about all their lives, they become fanatic; they cannot help it.  They are like the woman at the well who left her water jar to run into the village to tell her neighbors about the Messiah. At the risk of "turning people off," they must share their experience with others.

Every story in the Gospel is about someone who experienced first-hand the dynamic and active love of God given to them in the person of Jesus Christ---the father whose daughter was healed, the woman caught in adultery, Nicodemus, the couple at Cana, etc.  All of these people had heard about God all their lives; now they met Him in a personal encounter, and they would never be the same again.

When someone who "knows about" God or "knows about" the Bible is facing a crisis of fear and "happens" to open the Bible to Is. 43 and reads

Fear not, for I have redeemed you;

I have called you by name; you are mine.

When you pass through the waters,

I will be with you;

and when you pass through the rivers,

they will not sweep over you.

When you walk through the fire,

you will not be burned;

the flames will not set you ablaze.

For I am the Lord, your God,

the Holy One of Israel, your Savior,

the chances are that that person has begun to really know the God Who reveals His love and care through the words of Scripture.  And that "knowing" has little to do with what that person has heard about God; for the first time, maybe, that person has encountered the living God who knows us and who speaks to us in a personal way.

The great St. Augustine had heard "about" God all the years of his life from his mother Monica, and as a learned man of his time, had studied Scripture in Greek and Latin, but none of all this "knowledge" had penetrated his soul until one day he heard a child playing and singing the garden: Tolle lege! Tolle lege! (Take up and read! Take up and read!)  Augustine could not remember any childhood game with any such words.  He took up Paul's epistles and began reading words that spoke directly to him at the moment.  Cut to the heart, he at once knew the God speaking directly to him through the Scriptures, and he cried out:

Too late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new, too late have I loved Thee!  Thou wast with me, and I was not with Thee.  I was abroad, running after those beauties which Thou hast made; those things which could have no being but in Thee kept me away from Thee.  Thou hast called, Thou hast cried out, and hast pierced my deafness.  Thou hast enlightened, Thou hast shone forth, and my blindness is dispelled.  I have tasted Thee, and am hungry of Thee.  Thou hast touched me, and I am afire with the desire of thy embraces.

Augustine was later to write his Confessions, not an autobiography nor a confession of sin, but essentially a book of reflections on the wonder of God's goodness to him, a confession of praise rather than a confession of sin.  His later commentaries on Scripture were written as meditations on God revealing Himself and His goodness through the words of scripture, rather than as scholarly treatises "about" the Bible.

As we read Scripture, let us pray for the hovering Spirit of God to open our minds and hearts to a real encounter with the living God who wants more than we want to reveal Himself to us.  He will never be satisfied with our hearing about Him; He wants us to hear Him speaking to us.  He will never be satisfied with our knowing about Him; He wants us know Him.  He is waiting even now for our hearts to open to the real God, to a real experience with the God Who loves us in a real and personal way.