It's Not What You Know

I graduated, at long last! And I busted out that degree with gusto, because a middle-aged Masters is a far cry from an 18-year-old undergrad who doesn’t know their butt from their elbow but still they’re yelling at you, “Pick a degree and the rest of your life!” I loved school this time around, and I finally know what I want to do with the rest of my life. Guess it takes half a life to figure out the other half. Fine. My greatest takeaway from seminary, as I’ll tell anyone who will listen, was being able to see the larger story that the Bible is telling. It is One Author, telling one unfolding story of redemption, but as I’ve written before, it is not exactly easy to pick up the Bible like a breezy beach read and grasp this metanarrative. The Bible is a collection of writings compiled over 1,500 years, for one thing, and it helps to know the original audience and purpose of each book. However, with just a bit of digging, the story comes alive with real people engaging with the real God, in real time and history! When we gather to worship on a Sunday, we are the continuing chapter of a story God started writing thousands of years ago; and you’ll find there’s a lot less distance between those “ancients” and us than you might think. They lived and laughed and loved and screwed things up just as royally as we do.

Human questions stay the same throughout the Story, too, which can be comforting in its dull repetition. Broken, bored, and brutal humanity beats on life’s door with the same ol’ frustrations, and I love that literature from 3,000 years ago speaks more sharply into my struggles than a swag bag full of shallow tweets and throw-pillow truths. As someone who is forever asking, “What’s the point?” of life, there’s my beloved Ecclesiastes, the emo kid of the Old Testament, bursting onto his first page with, “Meaningless! Meaningless! All things are vapor, a chasing after the wind!” (We hold hands across the ages.) I am no less a seeker of life’s mysteries after four years of seminary, but a deep dive into Scripture has helped me shift the center of gravity for these familiar broodings. The Bible claims to be the Word of God, and it turns out there’s a Main Character in this Book of Books, and it turns out that it is God and not you, me, or that TikTok’er blocking traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. We feature big in the story, don’t get me wrong, but human strivings and struggles are viewed through the lens of God’s purposes, not my own Main Character schemes for success and my needs and my Instagram feed. The more I studied the Bible, the more I began to reframe this ageless question, “What’s the point?”, as if all questioning starts with me at its center. If the Author of this story of redemption is God, I began to ask a new question: “Well, God, what’s the point of all this for you?”

Now, I won’t claim to know God’s secrets, but he has revealed a good chunk of his purposes to us in his word, and in perusing those valuable pages, I found a repeated theme. The God of the Bible is a very relational being; and one purpose he gives for creating the heavens and the earth is that he desires to be known by his creation. All of creation speaks to the reality of a Maker—both the Old and New Testament make clear that nature daily declares the existence, the transcendence, and the sovereign power of this Creator God (Rom 1:20; Ps 19). However, the natural world could never tell you the name of the Supreme Being, much less how to find your way to relationship with Him, if that were even possible. Still, Man cannot escape the witness of the stars and trees to something beyond the material world. I wrote a Master’s thesis on ancient idolatry and was astonished to see how early cultures were haunted by this awareness of an unseen world of divine forces. Much time, labor, and capital was expended trying to appease these gods and gain their favor. Pagan worship became a sophisticated guessing game, throwing ritual darts at the temple dart board as priest and prophet aimed to divine the will of the gods; but to expect a god to show up and introduce himself was beyond the ken of polytheism. The gods had better things to do than come to earth and reason with people.

The Bible, however, tells the opposite, almost incredible, story—that the Real God behind All Creation wasn’t avoiding man, or exploiting man like the pagan gods, but wanted to connect with man so much that he took on flesh in order to speak and eat with them. Heck, mankind was his idea in the first place—he had made them in his image, to walk with him and run his world. Adam and Eve knew God directly; but through rebellion, they lost the knowledge of God, and the memory of him faded through violent, idol-drenched generations. But God had a plan from the Garden to restore mankind to fellowship with him and stretch his knowledge to the ends of the earth. Instead of dropping a theological tome from heaven, or sending angel-manned airplanes to strafe the peoples with pamphlets, he chose the slow and painstaking work of using humans to reach other humans. He invited one man out of the godless nations to birth a nation to birth a Savior to bring his salvation to the entire earth. God is no distant clock maker of Deism, winding us up and letting us go—he’s been all up in earth’s business from Day One, drawing people back to him. This theme of “knowing God” saturates the Hebrew Scriptures: in Exodus alone, God repeats that his purpose in rescuing the people from Egyptian slavery and teaching them his ways is “so that they will know that I am the LORD your God” (Exod 6:7; 16:12; 29:46). Ten dramatic plagues and one exodus later, both Israel and Egypt could say they knew a thing or two about the All-Mighty God!

If knowing God, then, is a driving purpose for God’s creation and action in the world, I am working on developing a new framework for the enigma of life. From the Bible’s POV, it would seem that the goal of every man’s orbit around the sun is that he might come to know the God who set the universe in motion. You could enjoy every blessing or endure every sorrow, claw and be clawed by the rat race, gain everything under the sun and build a rocket to the moon, but if you leave earth without knowing God, you’ve missed the whole point. To know God, and to know him better every day—that is our success or failure. This also helps me reframe the choices I face in life. Instead of asking whether this decision benefits me or makes me happy or soothes my bumpy ride as I gnash my existential teeth, what if I asked, “Does this help or hinder myself or others in knowing God?” I think a community or society might ask the same question: “Will my neighbor know God better through this [legislation/action/value system]?” God’s Law for the Israelites required that they treat each other with justice and mercy; the people were not allowed to obscure the knowledge of God’s character by mistreating each other! Even if the choice is a personal matter—“it’s not hurting anyone!”—is my action hindering my own ability to know God better? Does God want to walk with me in this hidden or hardened area of my life, but coping is all I really care about? Or am I avoiding going deeper with him, hoping that maybe if I’m “good” enough, he will be satisfied and not demand any hard thing of me? Even with a decent ethical framework, I might make choices with a clear conscience and not be any closer to walking with the God who wants to draw me nearer.

Coping, keeping my nose clean, avoiding trouble—these are not the same thing as knowing God. Some of God’s most faithful friends in both the Old and New seemed to feel the burns and thorns of life more dearly—but saw God more clearly. Knowing God is an active and at times unexpected journey, taken one step at a time through reading his word, talking to him, and learning his ways as he walks us through life. It is not the esoteric chanting of mantras and emptying our minds, it’s filling our minds with his word and our hands with his will. To share the knowledge of God with others, we have to know him ourselves; and to know him, we have to spend time with him. It’s amazing how many people assume they know “What Would Jesus Do” without ever reviewing his life and teachings for themselves! (This is why I began teaching a class on the Gospel of Matthew—it’s called “Meet the Messiah!” because there is always more to meet in our Savior!)

This frame also helps me wrestle with the dilemma we face when God tells us to pray—hard!—and then doesn’t answer in the way we hoped. It can be confusing, disheartening, tempting us to just shut down or roll up our own sleeves. But what if instead we asked—is God inviting me into deeper waters as I wait on his answer? The God we are learning to walk with is too great and complex to know just in one day, or through one experience. I’ve heard couples say they’re still learning things about their spouse after decades of marriage! Why should it be any different with God? He has welcomed us into communion with himself, but like any long-haul relationship, that common-union is going to go through some stuff! We should never give up praying fervently for miracles, healing, for blessings and favor, just as he commands us to do; but maybe faith means staying flexible and following our Shepherd around new bends of understanding. He may not answer the same way twice; he is not a math formula. I have faced sickness where I knew God immediately as Healer; yet in the very next season of distress, he seemed out to lunch. Of course, it is in those long seasons of darkness that we come to know and rely on him as Sustainer and Comforter. No one likes to feel pain or confusion; but we have signed on to know a Person, not a candy machine. I don’t get to deposit the coin of faith and pick my prize! That’s not how a relationship works. (Just ask any husband if input/output is a reliable wife-operating system.)

Uhhhh E=MCsquare meals

Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

What if in all the crises and tedium and cliffs and pits, it’s relationship with us that God is after? What if he doesn’t rush to fix everything right away for his children because he wants us to stop panicking and come pour out our hearts to him? We sing songs in church about how we just want God, but when troubles come, we find that we really just want a fairy godmother: show up, save the day, and give me a gown and a prince while you’re at it. We want God to wave his blessing-wand, but he wants our hearts and our trust, not lip service and fair-weather faith. He complained about his people’s lack of desire to know him: “They honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” What if God is looking for his kids to grow up a bit, practice some patience and grit so we can gain treasured knowledge of him? But we give up so easily. Nah, Netflix easier.

The point of life on earth is not “arriving,” getting the life I want, or even hoping to be so “good” that God won’t ever bring me grief. It’s about the privilege of knowing and walking with God whatever life lobs at us. That’s why it’s crucial that a church who knows him would keep getting to know him, like a well-worn marriage. This might serve as a corrective to our modern tendency to see Jesus as merely an insurance salesman, just checking to make sure you’ve got your “salvation card” before moving on to the next house. Knowing God and walking with him is the reason he redeemed a people to begin with; and on Judgment Day, Jesus’ most sobering rebuke will be, “I never knew you!” (Matt 7:23). We’re not the mail-order bride of Christ—we shouldn’t just be meeting him at the altar! As God spoke through the prophet Jeremiah, “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, nor the strong man in his strength, nor the wealthy man in his riches. But let him who boasts boast about this, that he understands and knows me” (9:23-24). A godless world will go on sweating for riches and reputation, boasting about what it “has and does.” But at the end of the Day, it isn’t what you know…