Knowing God

To know Christ is to know God.

--Rita Ferrone: "Beyond All Words"

 

No one has ever seen God, but the Only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has made Him known (John 1:18).

 

The reason Jesus came was to make known the Father.  For us, as men, it is impossible to really "know" God in the Biblical sense of knowing -- that is, not head knowledge, but love knowledge -- the kind of intimacy between husband and wife.  People will proclaim that no one has all truth, as if to mean that no one really knows what God is really like.  But they are thinking of "truth" as a body of facts, as the compendium of science, for example.  And of course, no one knows all the facts there are to know about God -- even Jesus could not reveal all He knew to the disciples:  I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.  But the limitations of human knowledge do not have to describe our knowledge of God.

 

We are all at different stages of intimacy with God, because our intimacy is not related to our head-knowledge, but to our heart-knowledge.  And that knowledge continues to grow, increase, and reveal itself as love increases.  To know Christ Jesus in this way is the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, as He gradually pulls back the veil and allows us to 'see' the real Jesus.  For years, scholars have been trying to discover the 'historical' Jesus, as if archeology and documents could reveal to us the Son of God.  But the Holy Spirit does increasingly reveal more and more to us of who Jesus really is.  And to know Jesus is to know God, for "He is the exact image of the invisible God," and "... in Him is the fullness of the Divinity."

 

The world itself and all our earthly loves enchant us because they are reflections of the immense beauty, love, wisdom, and goodness of the Creator.  St. John tells us that the "world was made through Him [The Word/ Jesus], and for Him, and nothing that has been made was made without Him."  C.S.Lewis puts it this way:

 

When we see the face of God, we shall know that we have always known it.  He has been a party to, has made, sustained and moved moment by moment within, all our earthly experiences of innocent love.  All that was true love in them was, even on earth, far more His than ours, and ours only because His....by loving Him more than them, we shall love them more than we do now.

 

The earth itself is full of the glory of God, of His love outpoured and manifest.  How much more, then, the face of Jesus Christ, Who has "made known" (and Who continues to make known) the Father!  At the last supper, Jesus made it plain that he would continue to reveal truth to the disciples, as He and the Father would continue to dwell in us, and the Spirit would continue to "take from what belongs to Me and make it known to you."  Revelation is ongoing, and does not grow stale, just as love does not grow stale, but deeper and more meaningful with each of life's experiences.

 

Heaven -- and the Face of God -- should not be a surprise to us at the end of life.  Our knowledge of both should be constantly coming into clearer and clearer focus for us as we age and mature in love.  Just as we "know" Jesus from the Scriptures as breathed upon us by the Holy Spirit, so then we will know the Father even as He is revealed to us by the Son.