Knowing God
…the only true God…
Our Lord defines eternal life as knowing God and His Son Jesus Christ whom He sent. Eternal life, therefore, is more than immortality; it is something that involves the very life of the Father manifested in Jesus Christ, and it is eternal because He is eternal. The gospel offers us immortality, but we cannot limit it to a life that never ends; it is the perpetuity of a life that is pure, exalted, and incorruptible, as the life of God is, where life originates and there will never be death.
Eternal life is composed of the virtues of the divine person of the Father, of all His attributes. For example, God is eternal, His life is eternal; God is holy, His life is holy; God is just, His life is just; God is love, His life is love, so that everything that God is, including that He does not die, is His life. God is self-existent, He is the author of life, He is the very essence of life. He has life in Himself and gives life and upholds all creation by the word of His power.
Therefore, to know God is to have eternal life. Those who are able to draw near are able because He has given them of His life and nature. From the moment we believe, we enter into eternal life. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life. We Christians have been born again, of an incorruptible seed that lives and remains forever. The same thing that happened in the womb of Mary (Luke 1:35) is what happens in every believer when we are born again. The Holy Spirit comes into our lives and gestates in us the new man, created according to God, in accordance with Him, in righteousness and holiness of the truth (Ephesians 4:24). The new man bears the image of Him who created him (Romans 8:29; Colossians 3:10). So it is Christ formed in us. Hallelujah!!
Everything that proceeds from God is eternal.
We have received more than immortality, for eternal life is not the natural, or Adamic, life extended, but the life of Christ, which is the very life of God. In this way, God has given us the new man so that we may know Him, understand Him, believe Him, love Him, and overcome the world.
God is not known with the intellect, but in the Spirit, because God is Spirit and is revealed in the Spirit. In fact, from the moment we are born again, by faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, we begin to know the God who reveals Himself in His Word. And as we come to know God, we come to know eternal life, which is the essence of God, His heart, His mind, His thoughts, His wisdom, His knowledge, His understanding, all His virtues and attributes, but above all His love. That is why Jesus Christ was in the world, and though the world was made through Him, the world did not know Him, because it is not with the intellect that we know God, but by revelation.
There are people who think that by acquiring information and facts about God they will know God. For example, the Bible is a book that reveals God, but it has two aspects: the logos and the rhema. The logos is the written part of the Word, and the rhema is the illuminated part of that Word, that which cannot be understood unless it is revealed. These two Greek words are translated into English as word, and at times it is even hard to tell when the Bible is using one term or the other, but there is a great difference. Without diminishing the importance of the written word, a body without a spirit is dead, and so it is with the word of God: if we have logos without rhema, we are dead. There are many who are scholars of biblical information and possess many facts about God, but they do not know God.
One of the characteristics of the grace of knowing God is that the knowledge of God transforms us into His image. In fact, the word know in the Bible carries the connotation of becoming one with God, as in the case of sexual union between a man and a woman, for it says that Adam knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain (Genesis 4:1). Intimacy in the sexual relationship, to penetrate, is to know, which the apostle Paul describes as no longer two, but one flesh, and applying it he says that he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him. Therefore, to know God is more than having information about Him; it is to become intimate with Him, it is to become one with Him, and to the degree that we know Him, we are transformed from glory to glory into the same image, as by the Spirit of the Lord (2 Cor 3:18). So we are transformed; the knowledge of God makes us grow in God, and we keep growing into His likeness, His similarity. The knowledge of God is not mechanical, it is not filling the head with information about Him, but assimilating God in such a way that when we reach fullness it is because He has been absorbed into us by the Holy Spirit.
Christ is God’s instrument for making Himself known. No one has seen God at any time, but the only begotten of the Father came to declare Him. The writer of the epistle to the Hebrews says that God, having spoken many times and in many ways in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by the Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, and by whom also He made the universe (Hebrews 1:1-2). Jesus, moved in spirit, praises the Father and gives thanks because God hid the revelation of His person and the mysteries of the kingdom from the wise and prudent and revealed them to babes, that is, to the foolish and ignorant, to put to shame the wise and the strong. And “… no one knows the Son, but the Father; nor does anyone know the Father, but the Son, and he to whom the Son wishes to reveal Him” (Matthew 11:27). The Father has hidden all these things from the sight of human intellect so that no one may boast in His presence, and all haughtiness and all boasting may be brought low, laid in the dust; instead, He has revealed them to the humble.
Revelation is a grace of God.
No one can know God by himself. In fact, there is no such thing as claiming to discover God as a scientific find, because God reveals Himself. Let us take into account that God is Spirit and we are matter. God is omnipresent, He is in every place, but we, as matter, are limited to time and space, and even if we could travel at the speed of light, to astronomical distances beyond the solar system, toward galaxies and constellations of the universe with the aim of finding Him, we would not find Him. However, revelation says that He is certainly not far from each one of us (Acts 17:27). God drew near through our Lord Jesus Christ, because He wanted to make Himself known. And there is the marvel of the grace of God. The declaration of Simon Peter, when he answered Jesus about who His disciples said He was: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt 16:16), showed that this man was filled with the Holy Spirit, and Jesus realized that something had happened in Peter at that moment, that he had been blessed in receiving a knowledge that is known only by revelation.
Everything the Bible says about the gospel is by revelation.
God reveals Himself to whom He wants to reveal Himself. Just as you do not undress in front of everyone, but in front of a friend, or someone with whom you have intimacy, God also does not undress in front of everyone. God’s intimate communion is with those who fear Him; only to them does He make known His covenant, to those who love Him, to those whom the Father chose and knew before the foundation of the world. If God has revealed Himself to you through Jesus Christ, you must live giving thanks to God for His Son and for that revelation, because it is a grace of God. It is not by works, so that no one may boast, nor is it by the intellect, so that no one may brag. Eternal life is fusing with God, and its glory is knowing the Father. This revelation is a gift of grace through Jesus Christ and the word of His power.
Notes taken from the series “Knowing God” by Pastor Juan Radhamés Fernández.
To get the complete series visit: Knowing God
