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Introduction (Part 2)

Knowing God
Knowing GodSteve Gregg

Discover the importance of knowing God and how it goes beyond mere familiarity in Steve Gregg's enlightening discussion. Gain a deeper understanding of who God is by seeking points of contact and shared thinking, allowing for a better relationship. With a focus on the knowledge of God, Gregg explores the scriptures, emphasizing that true knowledge of God requires a genuine, wholehearted pursuit. Recognizing God in our lives and the community around us is an essential aspect of cultivating a meaningful relationship with Him.

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Transcript

Looking at some scriptures that made clear how important it is for us to know God. That Jesus said this is in fact eternal life. To know God, to know Him, and to know Jesus Christ whom He has sent.
I mentioned that knowing God requires in some measure likeness to God. This is because knowing God, as the Bible speaks of it, is not a matter simply of knowing about God. You could be very unlike God and still learn a great number of facts about God.
A certain number of theological propositions about God. You could accept them and believe them to be true and not know Him at all. To know Him in the sense that God desires to be known, in the way that confers eternal life upon the individual, is to interact with Him.
To have a relationship with Him. To not only know God but to be known by Him so that the knowing is two-sided. I mentioned last time that you can know about a historical character by reading about him, but he doesn't know you.
There's no relationship. It's simply you knowing information but there's no actual contact. If that person knows you and you know that person, then there's a relationship.
The Bible talks about both us knowing God and God knowing us. Interestingly, it indicates that God doesn't know everybody in the sense that we're talking about. He knows about everybody just like a lot of people know about Him.
But when he comes to be acquainted in a relationship with somebody and that person is in a relationship with him, then something supernatural transpires. We become imbued with the divine nature. We become partakers of the divine nature.
He's given us all things necessary for life and godliness through the knowledge of Him. So knowing Him confers life and godliness and therefore there's some spiritual transaction, a supernatural transaction that takes place in communion with Him. I mentioned that knowing God has an analogy in a man and a woman in marriage knowing each other in the sense that the Bible uses that term.
There is something, we would almost call it supernatural if it didn't happen so naturally all the time, conception. There is fruitfulness. There is reproduction that takes place in that kind of intimate knowledge.
And so also God intends that we, in our knowledge in relation with Him, that something is conceived and reproduced of Himself in us. Now I want to continue talking about prerequisites to knowing God. Last time I think we spent a lot of time discussing the fact that in order to really know Him well, we have to be more like Him.
The more like Him we are, the more we can really know Him, the deeper our knowledge of Him can be because there will be more points of contact, more points of similarity, more shared overlapping parts of our thinking and of our living with Him so that we can relate with Him the better. Actually, you know, even suffering brings us, or at least potentially can bring us, into a deeper knowledge of Christ because He suffered. And so Paul spoke in Philippians 3.10 of desiring to know Him in the power of His resurrection and in the fellowship of His suffering.
A person who hasn't suffered can't be as intimate, can't know intimately as much a person who has suffered as can two people who have suffered similarly. And so Paul desired to know Christ in the fellowship of His sufferings, that is in the sharing of mutual sufferings. So shared experience, things that people have in common with other persons, deepen or make potential the deepening of a relationship that is fruitful.
Now, knowing God cannot be done casually. There is probably nothing that insults God more than to be taken lightly. I have sometimes thought that the actual atheist who spends his whole career and energies resisting God, resisting the knowledge of God, that that person insults God less, perhaps, than the person who believes in God and takes Him lightly.
At least the atheist who commits himself to destroying belief in God is taking God seriously. And to take God lightly is to slight Him, is to insult Him. To acknowledge that He exists but He is not really important to you would be a great slight.
Therefore, God cannot really be known casually. God is only known by those who pursue, those who have a heart set to know Him. Persons who have this one obsession, to know God and to be known of Him.
How do I know that? Well, the Bible says so. On the one hand, the Bible indicates that God is the one who puts this heart in us to know Him. In the 29th chapter of Jeremiah, well, look at the 24th chapter first, we will look at the 29th, but I better take you first to the 24th.
24th chapter of Jeremiah, and verse 7. By the way, of the prophets, there are two, Jeremiah and Hosea, who more than any other make an issue of this knowing God. Jeremiah frequently speaks of knowing or not knowing God, people knowing Him or not knowing Him, and so does Hosea. The issue of the knowledge of God will be found to be much more prominent a concern in those two prophets than elsewhere in the Old Testament.
So we have a lot of scriptures that we can look at in Jeremiah on this subject. In Jeremiah 24, 7, God said, I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the Lord, and they shall be My people, and I will be their God, for they shall return to Me with their whole heart. Now notice, I will give them a heart to know Me.
But whom does He give such a heart to? He says, those who return to Him with their whole heart. Now over in chapter 29 and verse 13 of Jeremiah, it says, And you will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart. But then a couple chapters later, in Jeremiah 31 and verse 33 and 34, Jeremiah 31, verses 33 and 34, it says, But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord.
I will put My law in their minds. I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity and their sin, I will remember no more.
Now, if you notice in the three verses in Jeremiah, or the three portions we just read, there is a mixture of two different thoughts. On the one hand, there is the suggestion that persons will find Him and know Him when they seek Him with all of their heart. He does not imply that somebody who pursues the knowledge of God as a hobby, as a sideline, as a part-time way to entertain and amuse oneself, or to satisfy one's curiosity, that that person will ever come to know Him.
It is when a person seeks and turns to Him with their whole heart that he will be found of them and be known by them. And so there is our side, the need to pursue and seek the knowledge of God. But on the other hand, in these passages, we also read of God being the one who did a work in the heart, so that in chapter 24 we saw, in verse 7, I will give them a heart to know Me.
But He said that He will do that for those who have returned to Him with their whole heart. And in Jeremiah 31, which we just read, He said, I will write My laws in their hearts, I will put My words in their inward parts, and they will all know Me, from the greatest to the least of them. Obviously, the knowing of Him in that sense is a result of His having put His laws in our hearts, changing our hearts.
So a person, in order to know God, must have a heart to know God. And this heart to know God begins when we turn our whole hearts to God, and then He regenerates it. He does a work in it to change our heart and give us a heart to know Him.
Now, this seeking of God, as I say, must be total. We must be concerned that we have nothing before we have the knowledge of God. We may have, in addition to the knowledge of God, other things that He gives us.
But prior to all things, and most essential, we must desire to know Him. I already mentioned Philippians chapter 3. You might want to look there and see how obsessed Paul was with knowing Jesus and knowing God. He says in the first six verses of Philippians 3 that as a Jew, prior to his conversion, he had many things upon which to boast.
He could boast and commend himself for many things religiously. He was a very religious Jew in terms of his tribal pedigree and his performance of the law. He outdid just about everybody else.
But, he says in verse 7, but what things were gained to me, and by this he means those religious things, which he counted on to commend him to God, those things, he says, I have counted them as loss for Christ. Now, loss is the opposite of gain. The things he thought were a gain to him, he now doesn't see them as a gain but a loss.
For someone to gain means they take ground. For them to lose means they lose ground. Neither gain nor loss is just neutral.
He says his religious activities that he had before, he thought were getting him an advantage. They didn't just make him about neutral, but they actually put him ahead. They were a gain to him as far as he was concerned.
But now he considers it the other way. They were not nothing, they were worse than nothing. They were a losing of ground, they were a loss to him.
Why? Because they provided a substitute for the real knowledge of God, and that's the danger of religion. I'm not saying that all things that can be called religion are bad. The Bible in the New Testament sometimes uses the word religion in a positive sense.
But when I say the danger of religion, I'm using the word religion in the sense of being part of an institutionalized religious system that has certain ritual activities associated with it, like attendance at a certain number of meetings, a certain ritual that's performed at the meetings, a certain moral code that is imposed as a basis of following the religious system. These things all seem good to people, and they must seem good because almost everybody on the planet is religious. With one religion or another, there are many great religions, and each of them have millions or billions of adherents.
Religion must be a very attractive thing to people. It must seem good to people. But Paul said it certainly seemed good to him to be religious, but that's the problem.
He thought of it as making him good. He thought of it as being his relationship with God, his connection to God. He realized later that none of those things are the things that connect a man to God.
And therefore, they didn't leave him neutral. They left him at a loss because they took from him the craving to really press in and know God because he lived with the assumption that he already knew. He lived with the belief that he was already okay.
A person is in some sense better off if they are not religious. They're much more convertible in some cases because they know that they don't have a relationship with God, and they may come to the point where they desire one, and they have to start from scratch and look for him. If a person is religious, he may also find God through the religion or in spite of the religion, but he might also substitute God with religion.
Religion, religious activity, can be a substitute for really knowing God. And that's what it was for Paul, so it really put him behind. It was a loss.
He now counts it as a loss to him to have those advantages.
Verse 8, he says, Now when he says the knowledge of Christ, it doesn't mean he just knows about Christ. It means knowing Jesus like you know another person.
For whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish that I may gain Christ. Now he says, I'm not just talking like I count these things loss. I have actually shown that I mean this because I've actually willingly suffered the physical loss of all things.
Any advantage I had, any prestige I had in the Jewish community, I've certainly lost that by being a Christian. I've given that up. I count that as worthless.
So much so that I have anything but acceptance in the Jewish community. They were his greatest enemies. They were the ones who despised him the most.
He gave that all up. Any favor in the sight of the religious community that he belonged to in order to follow Christ. He says he counted that rubbish or dung, I think the King James says, that I might gain Christ instead.
And to be found in him not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ Jesus. The righteousness which is from God by faith. Verse 10, that I might know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings being conformed to his death.
Now he says, I have suffered the loss of everything religious in my past in order to gain an actual knowledge of Christ. This has resulted in my suffering at the hands of my former religious associates, the Jews, but actually so did Jesus. Jesus suffered at the hands of the same people, so in a sense I fellowship in his sufferings.
And I draw near to him in that experience. The very sharing of his experience gives me another point of connection in my knowing him. I'm glad to have it because it results in an increase in my knowing him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings.
Look what Paul said in the next book, a couple pages hence, Colossians chapter 1. Colossians 1 verses 9 and 10, Paul said, For this reason we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you and ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, that you may have a walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing him, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God. Notice there's a connection between being fruitful and increasing in the knowledge of God, because knowing God is to be fruitful, is to produce something spiritually, something supernatural. It also results, according to verse 10, in having a walk worthy of the Lord and fully pleasing to him.
Now, Paul indicates that an increase in the knowledge of God is something that we should be pursuing. In 2 Peter 3 verse 18, we saw yesterday, 2 Peter 3 verse 18, But grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. So we're to grow in that knowledge, increase in that knowledge.
If you look at Hosea, I mentioned that Hosea and Jeremiah are the two prophets who have the most verses that are devoted to direct discussion of the issue of knowing God. It says in verse 3, Hosea 6 verse 3, Let us know, let us pursue the knowledge of the Lord. Let us pursue the knowledge of the Lord.
To pursue the knowledge of God, and as Jeremiah says, with your whole heart, is the only way that we can really know God. The knowledge of God will not come to you. You must pursue it.
Now, that doesn't mean God will not initiate things to a person who doesn't know him. A person cannot know God at all, probably can't have any real conviction of God's existence unless God convicts him about that initially. And therefore, I don't mean to say that God is not previous in all cases to our knowing him.
If he did not reveal himself initially, no one could know him. Job or one of his counselors said, can a man by searching find out God? By man initiating a search, without God's cooperation, without God's initiation, man would never find God. Because God's invisible.
How do you find him? Where do you look?
What instruments do you use to detect his presence? Well, obviously there's no way that man could detect or find or know God unless God decided to pull the curtains back and say, okay, here's who I am, and I will be approached by you. But once God has made himself approachable, it is up to the individual to decide, will I pursue the knowledge of God? Now, you might say, well, why would anyone not? Well, there's several reasons they might not. There might be some things that they value more than the knowledge of God.
Jesus said you can't serve two masters. The knowledge of God, in order to be an obsession, will take all of your energy to pursue. You can't pursue God with all of your heart and pursue other things with other parts of your heart, because as soon as you're pursuing something else with part of your heart, you're not pursuing him with all of your heart anymore.
Look at Jeremiah chapter 9. It's very clear that there are competitors for your heart competing with the knowledge of God. And Jeremiah says in the ninth chapter of his book, in verses 23 and 24, Thus says the Lord, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, Let not the mighty man glory in his might, Nor let the rich man glory in his riches, But let him who glories glory in this, That he understands and knows me, That I am the Lord, exercising loving kindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, says the Lord.
Now, notice, there are several options here. You can take delight in, you can take glory in, you can value, you can find your boast in knowing God. Or, there are other options.
If you're rich, you can find your boast in being rich. If you're educated and intelligent, you can find your boast in that. If you're physically endowed and mighty and strong, then you can take your boast in that.
Or if you're powerful in some other sense, politically or militarily, people get proud about those things and find their glory in that. But God says, don't find your glory in any of those things. Don't let the man who has that to boast of, boast of it.
Don't let him think that's important. Don't let that be an issue. Let the one thing needful be the issue.
That you know and understand me, He says. That is the one thing needful. Let me show you what David said in Psalm 27.
In Psalm 27, in verse 4, David said, One thing I have desired of the Lord, not two or several, but one. I've desired one thing, and that will I seek. How many things is David going to seek then? One, and only one.
And what is it that he's determined to seek alone? That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life to behold the beauty of the Lord and inquire in His temple. In other words, to commune with God. To know God.
To behold Him. To dwell in His house. To be in His presence.
That's the one thing that I desire and the one thing I will seek. Now a little later in the same chapter, in verse 8, David's speaking to God. He says, When you said, Seek my face, as God has said to us to seek His face, David said, When you said, Seek my face, my heart said to you, Your face, Lord, I will seek, but do not hide your face from me.
Do not turn your servant away in anger. Now, this is a very important thing. David had determined that he would seek God.
He would seek the beauty of the Lord. To inquire in the tabernacle. To dwell in the presence of the Lord.
And he had done so because he heard God saying, Seek my face. And his heart said, Yes, yes, Lord, I will seek your face. That's my heart's response.
But there's one little problem here. What if my seeking ends up being an exercise in frustration? What if I seek and don't find? What if I devote all my energy and you end up hiding your face from me? That's why he says, My heart said, Lord, I'll seek your face, but don't hide your face from me. How can I seek it if you're hiding? In other words, I will devote my energy to seeking if you will guarantee that you won't hide from me.
That I will find you. Now, we have that guarantee, of course, as we saw a moment ago in Jeremiah 29, 13. You will seek me and you will find me when you shall search for me with all your heart, God said.
And therefore, there is that guarantee. God says, Seek my face. If you make that the one thing you do, then you will find him.
Anything less than a total raging thirst after the knowledge of God is really unworthy of us. We are made to find our all in him and in the knowledge of him, to find our life in communion with him. And other things, riches, reputation, education, whatever, these things kind of become priorities in life and they crowd out.
They actually become substitutes for God. He is our life and yet these things become the lives of people if they allow them to. In Psalm 42, though, Psalm 42, verse 1, it says, As the deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God? Now, you can see that David, or the writer, whoever he may be, has this craving to appear before God, to know God. He thirsts for him like an animal thirsts when it's dying from lack of water.
In Psalm 63, there's a similar statement that clearly does come from David. It is a Psalm of David. Psalm 63, verse 1, O God, you are my God, early will I seek you.
My soul thirsts for you. My flesh longs for you in a dry and thirsty land where no water is. So I have looked for you in the sanctuary to see your power and your glory.
He is seeking God, thirstily, craving, early will I seek you. He's not going to put that last or down the list of his to-do list. He's going to do that first.
He's going to make that the priority. Like Jesus said, seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. All these other things will be added to you.
You won't have to seek them separately. They'll be added. Now to seek God with all your heart requires a pressing in, a desire to fight off resistance because the devil and your flesh and the world will provide great resistance to you pressing in to know God.
There's too much danger to the devil in the possibility of you finding God. And when I talk that way, you might say, Steve, you're talking like we're a bunch of pagans, like we don't know God. Well, I think we're all in the same boat.
I mean, we're not pagans and we have found God, but there's more of him to find. There's more of him to know. I'm not saying that I have found him and you need to find him like I have.
I'm saying that all persons need to press in continually, deeper into God. And in Jeremiah 9, I believe it is in verse 3, speaking of the wicked in Jerusalem, it says, Like their bow, they have bent their tongues for lies. They are not valiant for the truth on the earth, for they proceed from evil to evil, and they do not know me, says the Lord.
These people do not know the Lord. Why? Well, they're not valiant for the truth. God is known through truth.
He is truth. And to know him requires that we know the truth. But the truth doesn't just come wafting our direction on the wind either.
One must be valiant for it, one must be willing to sacrifice for it, to fight for it. When I think of the word valiant, what do you think of when you think of the word valiant? Courageous. Fighting off obstacles.
A valiant warrior is one who is undaunted by opposition and challenges. He just keeps pressing on courageously toward the goal. And to be valiant for the truth is absolutely necessary, so that if the truth lies in some place that is an uncomfortable place to acknowledge, the person who is valiant for the truth will nonetheless go with truth, irrespective of what the cost may be.
But God complains that many times people don't seek the truth, they don't care about the truth that much. You know, there is a statement about Josiah, the godly king, made in Jeremiah 22. The prophecy is actually uttered to Jehoahaz, the son of Josiah, because Jehoahaz, or Shalom as he is called in verse 11, Jeremiah 22, Shalom was another name for Jehoahaz, but God is complaining that Jehoahaz does not have the same spirit as his father Josiah had.
And it says in verse 15 and 16 of this chapter, Shall you reign because you enclosed yourself in cedar? Did not your father, meaning Josiah, eat and drink and do justice and righteousness? Then it was well with him. He judged the cause of the poor and needy. Then it was well.
Was not this knowing me, says the Lord?
It's interesting. He says, Josiah, he did justice and righteousness. He judged the cause of the poor and needy, which means he vindicated them against their legal adversaries.
He took their side and gave them justice instead of following the bribes, following the money trail. But actually, he said, this is what knowing me is. Was this not knowing me? Being committed to truth, being committed to justice, being committed to righteousness.
That is what Josiah did. And God says, that is in fact what knowing me is. Now, of course, we realize that though we seek after God and we thirst after God, there is nonetheless a limit to how deeply we can know God before we see him face to face.
Because Paul said in First Corinthians chapter 13 and verse 12, for now we know in part, but then we shall know as also we are known when we see him face to face. But that being the case, that just means there's more always ahead. It's like a carrot on the stick.
The full knowledge of God is like a carrot on the stick to draw us forward in that direction.
Not to frustrate us, because it's not like a carrot on the stick either, because there's more like there's carrots strewn along the way. And we chase the big one on the stick and all along the way, someone's throwing us sugar cubes, you know.
And these are tidbits of knowing God. We can know him more and more and enjoy him all the while. But there's always an as yet unattained degree and level of finding and knowing him.
I want to talk to you in the rest of this session, I think, about three kinds or degrees of knowing God. My first inkling of this particular trichotomy, I must confess I got years ago from reading A.W. Tozer, though he didn't develop it fully, I just got the inkling of the idea from reading him, and I pursued it further. And that was that in the tabernacle, God was known.
But the tabernacle was a very symbolic structure.
Every feature of it had some symbolic correspondence to some spiritual reality. And this is true in the minute details, but it's also true in the general gross structure of the thing, in the macro.
It served as a lesson in approaching and knowing and worshipping God. And what Tozer pointed out was that there were three compartments in the tabernacle, and these, it would appear, correspond to three kinds of knowledge of God. There was the outer court, and then within the outer court there was a building, and that building was divided into two portions.
As the priest walked into the building at the east end, he found himself in the first larger portion, which was called the Holy Place. But if he walked to the far west end of that place, there was a veil he could pass through there to the other smaller compartment of the building, and that smaller compartment was called the Holy of Holies. Now the interesting thing is that each of these three parts, the outer court, the Holy Place, and the Holy of Holies, each had its own type of illumination.
Now I think I brought this particular point up earlier in the year to you, but I want to develop it a little more than I had time to then. Illumination, or light, in the Bible is often an emblem of knowledge, or of revelation, of apprehension, of truth. And so light is found in the tabernacle, but different kinds of light.
As a person approached the tabernacle, initially he came into the outer court, and that was simply a wall of curtains without a roof. It was an open air courtyard. The only light that was available there was the light of the sun, or what might say the light that nature provides.
The sun is part of nature. It was natural light. But as you went into the Holy Place, there was no natural light because there were no windows.
There was a thick veil that covered the doorway once you passed through, and there was no natural light there. But there was light. There was what we might call artificial light.
There was a candlestick in there, a lamp stand more properly, an oil lamp that had seven lamps on it on one stand. These provided the whole light. Now the light was somewhat increased over what would normally be because all the walls, or at least much of the furniture, was gold-plated.
And so the gold would reflect a lot of this light too. So it was probably quite bright in there, but it received no natural light. It was lit another way, and that is by the lamp stand.
But as one went into the Holy of Holies, there were no windows there either. And therefore there was no natural light there. But furthermore, as you went through the second veil, even the light of the lamp stand could not get into the Holy of Holies.
There was no lamp stand in there. There was no natural or artificial light in the Holy of Holies. There was only the glory of God to lighten it.
And therefore the priest who went in there once a year had no natural or explainable means of light except for the glory of God, the direct appearance of God himself in a form of Shekinah glory. Now these three compartments that are lit differently resemble three degrees of knowing God. In the outer court, there is the light of the sun, the light of nature.
And the knowledge of God can be known somewhat from nature. The Bible tells us this, and I'm sure you know some of the scriptures that say this. Two of the most well-known are, for example, Psalm 19.
And there we read in the opening verses of Psalm 19, The firmament in the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork. Day unto day utters speech. Night unto night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. This is a universal knowledge of God. Every day that passes, every night that passes reveals knowledge of God.
The glory of God is shouted about from the heavens. They declare the glory of God. And with the passing of day and night, an observation of the creation of God provides knowledge that there is a God.
And possibly even some knowledge of what kind of God he may be, although this is difficult, because very few things about the character of God can be known with certainty from nature alone. You could get mixed messages. On the one hand, there is certainly evidence that God is a good God.
In one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Sherlock Holmes goes over to a planter box and calls attention to those with him in the room to a flower. And he says the flower is proof of the Creator's benevolence. Because in terms of function, the flower did not have to be as attractive.
It didn't have to grace our lives as much as it does. In fact, the world would get along well enough if there were no flowers, in all likelihood. We don't eat them, and the animals that do could probably be dispensable.
Basically what he's saying is that the purpose of a flower is simply to brighten our lives in an aesthetic way rather than to perform some essential function. And he deduced from that, being the great deducer that Sherlock Holmes was, that God must be a God who takes delight in beauty and in beautifying our world. And that tells you something about his kindness, something about his character.
But one could argue similarly from many things in nature that God's a cruel God, because there's so much cruelty in nature. There's so much predator and prey activity that goes on. We don't see it very often where we live.
It's one thing that watching National Geographic videos can really bring home to you. We don't sit around watching predators. Well, you might watch your cat catch a bird or a mouse once in a while, and you see that happening, and you think, ooh, that's kind of sad, kind of gross.
But if you watch nature videos from National Geographic, something that comes home to you very clearly is every single day probably millions of antelopes and wildebeests and rabbits and mice and all kinds of animals, deer and so forth, get torn to pieces by predators. It happens millions of times a day the world over. And once that aspect of reality dawns on you, you think, wow, could God really be all that good and allow that to be part of nature? But, you see, the problem we're trying to deduce very much about the nature of God from nature itself is that although there is certainly His handiwork seen there, it is not as it was.
When God made all things, all things were good, and there were no predators. There was no death. There was no pain.
And it is the fall that has not only marred human nature but nature itself. And therefore, when we look at nature, we're not looking at it the way God made it. You can still see much of His genius in it, but in terms of looking at it and saying, this is the way God likes things, that's not necessarily possible to do.
So there are limits to what can be known about God from nature. Now, Paul makes it clear that some very important things can be known about God from nature. Perhaps the most rudimentary, most basic things can be known, can be deduced from nature.
In Romans chapter 1, verses 18 and following, Romans 1, 18 through 21, Paul says, For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.
Now, I just said some of His attributes can be seen and understood by the things He's made, but certainly not all of them. And Paul is not saying that all things about God can be known from what He's made, but he does name some. He says, Even His eternal power and Godhead, or deity, we could say, so that they're without excuse.
Now, Paul places certain limits on what he's willing to commit himself to saying people can know by nature about God. Nature itself tells you at least this much. A, there's a God.
There is simply no explanation of reality without the postulate of there is a God. You may have many different theories about who that God is or how many gods there are or what kind of a God we're talking about, but no one can sensibly argue that there is not a God. And there are many laws of science that have made that.
We know the laws of cause and effect, for example. For every thing which is an effect of some cause, it must have an adequate cause. And when you see complexity in life and design and so forth, the only adequate cause for such would have to be an intentional designer.
And as soon as you begin to postulate that there's an intentional designer of nature, you've got something that you call God. You may know very little else about Him, but you know there's a God. And Paul says that much is clear from the things He's made.
You might as well find an arrowhead in a stream that's been beaten out by some ancient warrior and lost after he'd done his hunting with it. And you can see all the little marks where it's been hammered out. And it's perfectly shaped to be at the front end of an arrow with barbs and all.
And you might as well find that in streams and say, look at this stone that nature has formed here. Obviously, you know the difference between an arrowhead, which is made of stone, and a pebble, which is maybe made of the same stone. Both could be found in the same river, but you'd have no difficulty discovering the difference between the two, knowing that one is the shape that nature has made it.
The other is a product of design. And if this is true at the most basic level, some of the most rudimentary things that have the least human effort involved in designing them, how much more is such a deduction possible when you see a computer or a house or something like that? Where there's design, there must be designer. And therefore, Paul says anyone is without excuse who claims to be an atheist, because the things about God, some things about God can certainly be seen, one of which is that he is God, his divinity, his deity, his Godhead.
That is clearly seen. There is a God. And secondly, his eternal power.
And that, too, could be deduced. Again, that doesn't tell us much about his character, whether this eternal power is on our side or against us, or what he may choose to do besides create worlds with it. You can know very little about God from nature.
Once you know from other sources about God, you can see in nature much. I mean, Jesus used nature. Solomon used nature as ways of illustrating things about God.
But neither Jesus nor Solomon learned them from nature. Both of these learned them from God himself and then saw the connection in nature. And you might think that it's more easy than it is for people to see what kind of God there is by looking at nature, because you can see in nature much of the character of God.
But you do that because you know God from other sources, and then you can superimpose your already known things into what you see in nature. Yeah, nature provides some knowledge of God, but not very deep knowledge of God. Even someone who's not even close to being saved can know from nature that there's a God.
And this corresponds to the kind of knowledge of God that would be found in the outer court of the tabernacle. The light of nature illuminates those who are there, but it's very rudimentary. However, passing into the holy place, not the Holy of Holies, but the holy place, which was illuminated by the lampstand, that represents knowing God at a different level, at a deeper level.
If you remember how the tabernacle was set up, a person, when they were in the outer court, would first come to an altar where a sacrifice was offered, and then to the labor where hands were washed. The sacrifice represents the sacrifice of Christ. The labor of cleansing represents, apparently, baptism, and also cleansing of another sort, which we won't have time to get into right now, but basically these are preliminary to getting into the church.
When I say the church, I don't mean joining an organized church. I'm talking about being part of the body of Christ, being part of the community of the redeemed, part of that humanity that is in Christ as opposed to that humanity that is in Adam. Humanity in Adam can know God in nature, but they can't know Him savingly that way alone.
They have to know more. Just to know there's a God and to walk away knowing that doesn't help. Now, if they just know that much and they set their heart to know God more, to pursue Him, that's another story.
But just knowing about God's existence isn't enough to save anybody in itself. But when a person enters into the body of Christ, into the community of the redeemed, and has access to the pool of shared knowledge of God through testimony, through prophecy, through revelation that God gives to members of His body, that revelation includes the scriptures. The scriptures are simply preserved, in preserved form, revelation that God gave to members of His community.
In the Old Testament, the Jewish prophets, part of His remnant there. In the New Testament, it's written by the Christian community. We have in scripture the witness in part of the redeemed community.
And as we come into that community and have access to the additional knowledge beyond what nature provides, that additional knowledge that God has made known within the community, that's like being in the holy place. There is the lampstand giving us light, the seven lamps as a matter of fact. You remember in Revelation, there were seven lampstands and what did they represent? The seven churches.
Revelation 1.20 says the seven lampstands are the seven churches. The light of the lamps is the light of the church. And therefore, in the holy place, there is light.
It is not the light of nature. A person who has gone to the holy place is going beyond a dependency on nature alone for light. But now that person has additional light.
It is the light of the Holy Spirit, the oil lamp that burns the oil, which in Zechariah's vision in Zechariah chapter 4 represented the oil of the Holy Spirit feeding the lamp light. The testimony of the community of God sustained by the work of the Holy Spirit within them. Thus we have scriptures.
Thus we have the living witness of current testimony
and of current insight that God gives to Christians in our fellowship with other Christians and our access to what they have written and what they have said and what they currently write and say. That is a tremendous stride forward in our knowledge of God from what we could have from nature alone. So that in the holy place, we gain the knowledge of God.
We could call this knowledge by hearsay in a sense. Because the knowledge of God that is known from nature alone, we could call knowledge by inference. You could infer that there is a God from nature.
It is a knowledge that you don't have any testimony for except that you infer it. But when you come into the church, you have the knowledge of testimony, the knowledge we could say by hearsay. Someone tells you what they saw, what they heard, what God showed them.
That is the knowledge of God available through the church. When you say, God showed me this, God spoke to me that, God gave me this insight. Or when the authors of scripture wrote down such things.
We are receiving additional knowledge, not by inference, but by testimony, by hearsay. It is second-hand knowledge for us unless we become part of that testimony. But that is just the point.
When we enter the Holy of Holies, it is there that there is knowledge by direct revelation from God. In the Holy of Holies, there was no lamp, there was no sunlight. There was simply God's glory.
And by immediate knowledge of God, by immediate contact with God, that is where a person has a testimony for the church outside. If you are only in the church, but don't have immediate first-hand knowledge of God, you will know a lot more about God from the church than you would know if you were not in the church. But you become a lamp, as it were.
You become a light to those in the church. You become part of the testimony by knowing God Himself, by having immediate exposure to His glory. Remember when Moses said, God, show me Your glory.
He said, I can't do that, but you couldn't live if I did that, but I will stick you here in the crevice of this rock. I'll put my hand over you, I'll pass by. After I pass by, you can look out and see my hinder parts.
So he did. He looked out and he saw the afterglow after God had passed by. And what happened to Moses? He became a lamp.
Exposure to that much of the glory of God caused His face to glow also, and people saw it on Him. And so also, when you receive light by hearsay, when you receive light from the lamps in the holy place, the testimony of the apostles, the testimony of the prophets, the testimony of Christians who know and who have met God in the holy of holies themselves, they are giving light to you. But when you go to the holy of holies, you become a light too.
You become, this is knowledge by immediate communion, direct revelation. Now of course, all of that has been construed in the imagery of movement in the tabernacle. Of course, the reality which it represents does not require actual motion.
It's all done in the heart. And what we need and what God desires for all persons to have and what really saves is the knowledge by direct and immediate contact with God, direct communion. Now, we're talking about a cultivation of a knowledge of God that is like the knowledge of another person with whom you are a friend.
It is possible to say you're acquainted with somebody without really saying much about your degree of knowledge of them. Virtually everybody who goes to church or who is raised in a Christian family has an acquaintance with God. They know who He is.
There are people that I have met. People sometimes say, well, I heard you were a friend of Keith Green's. Well, kind of.
Great claim to fame, you know. But the fact of the matter is I was acquainted with him. I was not a close or regular communicator with him.
He and I had brief and occasional contact with each other. We knew each other by name and we knew a fair number of things about each other from several conversations. But I would be saying too much to say I knew Keith Green in the sense that I could say I know even any of you here, probably.
Because I've spent more time with most of you here than I've spent with him. And as you spend more time with someone, your friendship moves from mere acquaintance, mere familiarity, to shared interests, shared life, shared... That's what communion means. There's a sharing.
Communion comes from the Greek word koinonia, which is also translated fellowship. Do you know what fellowship means? Think about it. What is a fellow? Well, we don't use that word by itself so much as they used to in older English.
Fellow used to be used probably more often. We sometimes talk about that fellow, but that's really an old-fashioned way of speaking. We don't usually call somebody a fellow anymore.
But we still have the word in the form of things like a fellow worker, a fellow soldier, or something like that. What's that mean? The word fellow means one who is in the same state as another. They are fellows.
They are partners. They have a sharedness of their experience. A fellow garbage collector.
We use the word fellow that way as a hyphenated portion of a word rather than as a word by itself very much. What it suggests is there is a fellowness, a fellowship, is a union and a sharing of a commonness of experience. That's what the word communion has to do with.
Fellowship, koinonia means common, is having some things in common. To know God requires more than just basic acquaintance. It requires developing common ground with God and making that the priority so that we pass beyond the stage of just being in the holy place of knowing God by hearsay.
Because someone else we know knows Him. Someone else we know heard from Him. Somebody I read about knew God.
But that's knowledge of God by hearsay merely. And that's not what God desires. He wants us to go beyond that into the holy place, holy of holies, and to know Him intimately.
Now, in winding up this session, I want to talk to you about the recognition of God, recognizing God. This is one of the most important things in the knowledge of God. An aspect of knowing somebody is that you recognize them.
When I walk in this room every day, you don't have a big question mark going on in your head. Well, who that is? You recognize me. You're acquainted with my features.
You've seen me enough. Now, if you'd only seen me once, and that a long time ago, and you saw me again, you might think, he looks familiar, but I can't quite place who he is. Because the recognition factor is at a lower level.
You don't know me so well. You don't recognize me as readily. Now, you've heard me speak so much, so many hours a day, that if you were listening to the radio and you didn't know I was broadcasting, but you heard my voice, you'd think, that's Steve.
I know that voice. You'd recognize me because of long exposure. You recognize somebody that you know well.
And the more you know them, the more readily you recognize them. Recognition is a feature of knowing somebody, being acquainted with somebody. And I believe that we need to learn how to recognize God.
And it's not, I just think it's part of our knowing God, is that we recognize Him. Now, He's invisible. So, how do you recognize Him? Well, there are ways to recognize Him.
Remember I said, back when I was 16, someone asked me, what's God doing in your life? And I didn't know. It's not just I didn't know the answer to the question, I didn't know what the question meant. I not only didn't know what God was doing in my life, I didn't even know what it meant for God to do something in anyone's life.
That was not... Now, by the way, had my eyes been open earlier, I could have probably told them, well, God's doing this and this and this in my life, because God was doing something in my life. I just didn't know it. I didn't recognize it.
I had to have my eyes open to realize, oh yeah, these things have been happening. Now, looking back now, to the months and weeks before that question was asked me, I can see easily what God was doing in my life. I mean, my family had lived in one town, Covina, California, from the time I was in kindergarten until I was a junior in high school.
All of my friends were there, all my acquaintances, most of the neighbor kids were... I'd had the same neighbor kids and had gone to school with them from kindergarten through high school. All my relationships were there. And my father gets transferred in the middle of my junior year to Orange County.
Now, Orange County was only about 40 miles away from Covina, but that could have... might as well have been 4,000 miles away since I didn't have a car. And therefore, moving to Orange County was like moving to a foreign country. I mean, I was going to have to establish new relationships, except for those with my family, and establish them all from scratch.
I was not eager to do that. And I greatly resisted the move. I made many attempts to find some way to avoid making that move.
I asked my parents for permission to stay with one of my friends until I graduated from high school, at least, so I wouldn't have to make the move in the middle of high school. But nothing worked out. And quite against my wishes, I ended up going, against my will, to Orange County.
And the very first day that I arrived at Orange High School, because I was new, I didn't have the P.E. gear to put on, I wasn't suited up for P.E. I noticed another guy who wasn't suited up, because it was his first day there, too. His name was Michael Moore. And later, because I noticed him, I got around to talking to him and got acquainted with him.
Initially, I didn't know this, but it turned out he was a Christian, too. He didn't tell me that initially. I didn't tell him that initially.
We got talking about other things at first. Eventually, I found out he was a Christian. And when he told me he was a Christian, he told me he was going to church in a certain place, a really neat place called Calvary Chapel, and I should go sometime.
They had meetings every now and then, so I agreed to go sometime and went with him. And when I went to Calvary Chapel, that was the first time I went there. There was one that this hippie guy said, well, what's God doing in your life? Well, I didn't know at the time.
But now, in retrospect, I can say God was getting me out of my dead religious complacency in Covina, where I lived. I dread to think where I would be today if I had never moved at that time. You see, what happened is that against my will, against all my protestations and efforts to prevent it, God literally dragged me to Orange County and stuck me right in the middle of the Jesus movement, which I didn't even know existed until that moment.
And it was the change in my entire life. In my whole direction in life, my whole career, everything, all my convictions, everything I do, everything I hold dear, is changed. And is a result of that move.
Yeah, I can definitely see what God was doing in my life, but I didn't recognize it at the time. I just saw it as my way. I wasn't getting my way.
I was being moved in an uncomfortable situation into a new place I didn't want to be and so forth. Now, the Bible indicates there's a number of ways in which God can be recognized. First of all, you just have nowhere to look, God can be seen in people.
It says in James chapter 3 in verse 9 that there is an incongruity in the behavior of certain religious people. He actually says of the tongue in James 3, 9, he says, With it, with our tongue, we bless our God and Father, and with it we curse men who have been made in the similitude of God. Now, he says, out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing my brethren, these things ought not so to be.
He says the problem here is that we don't recognize the similitude of God in people. So we treat people differently than we treat God. We bless God and we don't realize the inconsistency in turning around and cursing people.
In fact, you cannot do that because in cursing people you are cursing the image of God. You must recognize in people the image of God. Now, if you want to get acquainted with God, then his image, his likeness is something you want to acquaint yourself with.
Now, people are not God, and people bear a marred and soiled image of God, but they still are in many respects the way God reveals himself to us. And there are many ways in which people acquaint us with God, or God can be known through people. In the 10th chapter of Hebrews, verse 24 and 25, Hebrews 10, 24 and 25, it says, And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembly of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the day approaching.
Now, we as human beings can stir up to love and good works and exhort one another. Presumably, if we are doing that in the Spirit, then that person that we are doing that to can learn something of the mind of God through what we have to say to them. And it follows that we can learn something of God's will and God's mind from what people say to us, exhorting us, stirring us up to love and good works.
This is the influence of people in drawing us near to God. And there are quite a few different ways that I'd like to point out to you in which people are instrumental in revealing God to us. In 2 Samuel, chapter 16, verse 7 and following, we read about how when David was driven out of Jerusalem by his son Absalom, it says Shimei, who was part of Saul's family, who had been ousted by David.
Shimei said thus when he cursed, Come out, come out, you bloodthirsty man, he said this to David, you rogue! The Lord has brought upon you all the blood of the house of Saul, in whose place you have reigned, and the Lord has delivered the kingdom into the hand of Absalom your son. So now you are caught in your own evil, because you are a bloodthirsty man. Then Abishai, the son of Zeruiah, said to the king, Why should this dead dog curse my lord the king? Please let me go and take his head off.
And the king said, What have I to do with you, you sons of Zeruiah? So let him curse, because the Lord has said to him, Curse David. Who then shall say, Why have you done so? Now what David said is, Listen, it may be that Abishai, all you can hear from this man is a bunch of false accusations. Obviously I didn't do any bloody deeds against the house of Saul, as he is accusing me of.
But I hear God's reproof in this. This man is calling me a bloody man, a bloodthirsty man. And I know darn well, that one of the reasons my son has risen up against me, is part of the judgment that is upon me because of my killing Uriah, the Hittite, and taking his wife.
Nathan the prophet said, The sword will never depart from my house because of this. This is God reminding me, God reproving me. It is because I am a bloodthirsty man, that this has happened.
He recognized, in other words, in this empty headed man's reproof, who didn't even know what he was talking about, he recognized that God was reproving him through that man. My children have heard this story, I don't know if I told it to you, but back when I was about 16 or 17, my father and I used to argue a fair bit. He's a Christian, and I was a Christian, but we had a lot of arguments over spiritual things.
But sometimes they became rather heated because of our disagreements, and he was strong headed, and I was strong headed. And at times I would be angry at him for being so dull, for not seeing things my way. I no longer get angry at him, I take it for granted he's not going to see things my way now.
And I think he realizes that I'm not going to see things his way sometimes. But after one particularly heated exchange with my father, I left the house to cool off and go for a walk. And I was very hot, I mean hot in terms of anger, that he couldn't see my point and so forth.
And I went for a walk down the street, and there was a, I thought it was a grammar school, but these children couldn't have been more than kindergarten age. And they were out playing in the field, and I walked past them. And I had long hair at the time, that's one of the things my father and I argued about too.
But I had long hair, and I dressed a lot like a hippie, and looked a lot like a hippie, though I had never really been a real hippie. But as I walked by, I saw these children in the distance, and they saw me in the distance, and one of them said, look at the hippie, look at the hippie. And that didn't bother me so much, I mean I knew I looked like a hippie, and it didn't offend me that people would mistake me for one.
In fact, that was part of what I hoped they would mistake me for. But kind of hard to explain the mentality these days, but it made sense then. Anyway, the point is, these little children somehow took a fascination in me.
I can't understand why, because hippies were a dime a dozen. They must walk down the street hundreds of times every day. And these kids were way far away.
Why they'd take any notice of me, I couldn't say.
But they began to say, hippie, hippie, and then one of them began to say, hippie crit, hippie crit. I'm sure this child had absolutely no idea what the word hippie crit meant.
I mean, the child didn't know there was no etymological connection between hippie and hippie crit. But he began to say, hippie crit, hippie crit. And these kids didn't know who I was at all.
And they probably didn't even know whether hippie crit was a good or a bad word. In fact, I'm sure where they'd heard it, I had no idea. At age five or something like that.
But I realized that even though these children didn't have any idea what they were saying, that it's like God speaking to Balaam through a dumb ass. Donkey didn't know what it was saying either, but it reproved the madness of the prophet. To recognize when God is speaking to you, and I did, I saw that as, I took that as a reproof.
That, you know, I thought myself to be occupying the spiritual high ground vis-a-vis my father and myself. And yet my anger and my lack of honor in my father was obviously inconsistent. I mean, when they said hippie crit, I knew I wasn't hippie crit.
At least I felt convicted that I was. But you can recognize God in people's reproofs, even if they don't know what they're talking about. And if I had time, I could enumerate other cases, and I have a feeling if you reflect a little bit, many of you could remember times when someone was talking about something totally unrelated to you.
They might have even been talking to a third party and you weren't even in the conversation. But something you overheard struck you and convicted you, because what they were saying wasn't about you, not intentionally anyway, but God spoke to you. I've had this happen many times, overhearing conversations, where people were talking about something they didn't even know I was there and weren't talking about me.
But something they said, you know, when they talk about how, you know, when they criticize somebody's behavior, and you recognize, well, that's my behavior too, you know, I do that too. And you feel convicted. And that's God speaking.
David said, God has sent Shimei to reprove me and curse me. Now, you might say David was just a little overly morose and depressed and he was wrong. Of course, he was just too self-flagellating, too self-condemning and feeling too down.
He wrongly said that God had sent Shimei. Well, I don't know. I don't know that David was wrong.
Shimei was saying, you're a bloodthirsty man, and this is happening because you're a bloodthirsty man. There was an element of truth in that, and David knew it. And he said, no, this is God's reproof.
And maybe it was. There's another way we can see God or must recognize God in people, and that is seen in Matthew chapter 25. In Matthew chapter 25, Jesus told the oft-rehearsed and repeated story of the sheep and the goats.
And you recall that all of humanity at the Day of Judgment is divided into two classes. On one side, the sheep, and on the other, the goats. And to the sheep, Jesus says to them in verse 35, For I was hungry, and you gave me food.
I was thirsty, and you gave me drink.
I was a stranger, and you took me in. And so forth.
In verse 37, the righteous will answer him, saying, Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you? Or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and take you in? And so forth. And his answer is in verse 40, he shall answer and say to them, Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me. Now, they didn't recognize that they did it to him.
And he goes on, and the goats have just the opposite testimony. They saw him hungry and didn't feed him, and so forth. But they didn't know when that was either.
And he said, well, when you didn't do it to the least of these my brethren, you didn't do it to me. What's this mean? It means that God confronted them in the persons of needy people. And they didn't recognize him.
In the needs of people, God can be known. God can be seen, can be recognized, if you know to look there. I remember there was a member of the Charles Manson cult.
His name was Bruce. I don't remember much. I don't remember his last name.
Charles Manson, I don't know if any of you are too young to remember his name. He's gone down in infamy like Adolf Hitler. I think probably all generations remember the name of Manson.
He was, of course, a cult leader who was responsible for the murder of something like over 40 people. But most notoriously, a movie actress and her houseguests were murdered by two of his henchmen, one of whom was named Tex Watson and some others. It was a bloody, horrible, grotesque ritual killing.
It made a worldwide scandal. Manson was put in jail and he's rotting there and will be there until he dies. Tex Watson was thrown in prison in California and he's still there.
He became a Christian in prison and so did a couple of the girls that were part of the cult, became Christians in prison. Also a guy named Bruce, who was in the cult, became a Christian in prison. Manson didn't.
I, of course, bonded with him and I once almost paid him a visit, but I was wearing the wrong clothes. They wouldn't let me in the prison, though he was prepared to see me. I didn't get to talk to him.
But I did. Tex Watson, who actually performed the murders of Sharon Tate and the others, the actual murderer who held the knife and did it was Tex Watson. He's in prison in San Luis Obispo, last I heard.
And uses our tracks a great deal. We've shipped him cartons of growth books because he was heading up something called the Dynamic Prison Church there after he got converted and they go through growth books and tracks like the Grown Ups style. So we've had some contact with him.
Well, I was informed when I lived in Santa Cruz by these guys that one of their members who had gotten saved and had been with Tex Watson in San Luis Obispo was being transferred to another prison, was temporarily being housed in a jail in Santa Cruz. And so I went to visit him and talk to him and so forth. And he was a true believer, a true brother.
He was pretty depressed, but he was still genuinely converted. And I paid several visits to him. And he once said to me, you know, you're the only person who comes and visits me.
He says, I really appreciate the fact that you come. It's really, I'm sure, a great sacrifice since we're not friends and we don't even know each other and so forth. And I remember I said to him what had really come to my mind earlier that day.
I said, you know, it's not really like I have a choice. Because Jesus said I was in prison and you visited me and in as much as you do it to Felice, she's my brother and you've done it to me, I feel that by visiting you I can have contact with Jesus in a way that I cannot if I don't visit you. Because what I do to you I'm doing to him.
He's here, your needs are his needs. And that's what Jesus said. And he said he had never thought of it that way.
But I hadn't always thought of it that way either. But it had occurred to me just actually before that visit, before he brought that up, I remember thinking, you know, visiting him is really visiting Jesus. Now the man was very imperfect, had great crimes in his past and so forth.
But he was converted. He was a believer. And he loved the Lord.
And he had need of encouragement and so forth. And God just kind of opened my eyes that visiting him, I couldn't visit Jesus if I didn't visit this man. I couldn't visit him in prison.
And so in people's needs we need to be able to recognize God. If you know God, you'll recognize him. In people's rebukes and their exhortations and their reproofs, you'll recognize him in their neediness also.
Another way you'll recognize him is in their authority. There are authorities that God has ordained. And those who know God and recognize the fact that he has ordained authorities recognize his authority in the authority of those that he has delegated it to.
In Ephesians 5, in verse 22, speaking to wives, it says, Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. And similar statements are made to wives elsewhere. Submit to the husband as to the Lord.
Also, we are told to submit to kings and rulers. And we're told this to children are told to submit to their parents or obey their parents in the Lord. Now, the reasoning here is that God has ordained in human society structures which have authority within them.
And he has put parents in authority over children. He's put husbands in authority over their wives. He's put rulers in authority over their citizens.
He's put employers in authority over their employees. He's put leaders of the church to have some spiritual authority over the people, over the sheep. Shepherds have authority over sheep.
And to submit to proper authority as unto the Lord, because you recognize that God is the one who's given it, is to recognize his commands, his authority in those of another. Now, recognition of God needs to be discerning. Just as you can see, you can find and recognize God in the needs of other people, you've got to realize that not everyone who's in need is, you know, the satisfying of needs has got to be done with discrimination.
I don't mean racial discrimination or something like that. I just mean with caution, with discernment. Because there are people who are in need because of things they are doing, which they have not repented of, and their behavior keeps them in perpetual need.
There are limits the Bible places upon us as to how much assistance we should give to people who will not turn from their sin and will not, you know, take care of their own responsibilities. Likewise, when it comes to recognizing God in the authorities that he's ordained, there are limits to that too. There are people who are in positions of authority, but who exercise a pseudo-authority beyond that which they're authorized by God to do.
So, knowing God and recognizing God in these areas means not that we just are gullible and say, every time anyone reproves me, every time somebody in authority tells me to do something, every time somebody is in need, that's God. No, that's not knowing God, that's just substituting people for God. Knowing God means you can recognize God in people when he is there to be recognized in them.
But you don't mistakenly and simplistically say, every time somebody in authority says something, that's of God. That's not always true. People who are ordained of God in authority may say things that God has not authorized them to say.
And therefore, knowing God is not as simple as just saying, okay, whatever people say, that's God. But it does mean that if you know God, you will recognize his voice. You'll recognize his authority, you'll recognize his reproof.
You'll recognize his need in those of people as well. Now, more than that, there's other places to recognize God besides in people, and that is in circumstances. To see God in your circumstances is a tremendous essential aspect of knowing God.
God can be working in your circumstances and you not know it at all. Remember the servant of Abraham who didn't really know God. He spoke of God as the God of my master Abraham.
But he was sent to find a wife for Isaac, and he prayed to the God of Abraham and even called him, O God of my master Abraham. He prayed to God not as his own, but as Abraham's God. He didn't know God.
But he prayed to God to guide him to the right person. And when he finally was guided to her, you remember what he said in Genesis 24, 27? He said, Blessed be the God of my master Abraham who has led me to the house of my master's brethren. For I being in the way, meaning on the way, in root, he led me to the house of my master's brethren.
It's Genesis 24, 27. He suddenly recognized that God had guided him to that circumstance. The circumstance was such that it was like he woke up all of a sudden and said, Wow, I've been guided by God all this time.
Now that means that God was with him all along the way, he just didn't recognize it. He didn't know it. He only recognized it after the divine appointment was clearly unveiled.
And there are times, no doubt, that you have had similar experience. That something that has happened, some remarkable circumstance, you suddenly realize, Wow, only God could have orchestrated that. But then you realize, for him to have done that, he must have been involved in this back here, and back here, back here, and back here, over here, and not in my... You know, every divine appointment, and everyone, I'm sure, who's a Christian has recognized divine appointments in their life.
Where God had you meet somebody at the right time, the right place, a significant encounter, important maybe for the rest of your life in some cases. And that being so, you recognize that God had to be directing you and that other person through many prior decisions and movements and turns that were taken to get you into that place at that time, at that moment, at the same time as they were. And to see God operating through circumstances this way is just part of, you know, knowing God.
Knowing his activity and recognizing what's going on is something God is doing. If you are hoping to call somebody, and you try ten times in the day, and you either get a busy signal, or they've just left, or you get the answering machine, and then you call them again, and you've got the busy signal again, and you try ten times, and the quirkiest things prevent you from getting through to them. Oh, they just left again, you know? I just missed them.
You know, for you to say, well, maybe God doesn't want me to reach this person. I mean, to recognize in the circumstance God's leading and what God's doing. God can also be seen in other kinds of circumstances.
God can be seen in our sufferings. God can be known and recognized in suffering. When we're suffering, we can see it as from God.
Remember that the apostles, when they were beaten for their testimony, were told that they went away rejoicing. They went away from the beating rejoicing that they had been counted worthy to suffer shame for Jesus' sake. That's in Acts 5, verse 41.
They didn't see it as just a bit of bad luck that they got beat up. They saw it as God counting them worthy, and putting them in that situation where they could bear testimony and suffer shame for Jesus' sake. In their sufferings, they saw God's hand.
They saw God's activity.
Joseph did too. You know, Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers.
He suffered a great deal, and what did he say afterward? What did he say to them? He says, you intended evil against me, but God meant it for good. In Genesis 50, verse 20. So in his sufferings, he saw God's hand.
That is really an essential part of knowing God. I don't know, it might be the highest point of knowing God, really. I don't know for sure, but where you suffer, and you instantly see God in it.
You see, seeing God in suffering is the hardest place to see Him. You know, if you're praying for money, and you receive an unexpected check for $500 in the mail, and it's just the amount you need, it's easy to see God in that. Say, wow, that's the Lord, look at that.
But when you suffer, and it doesn't seem to make any sense at all, that's harder to see God in that. But when you can see God even in your sufferings, that's the height of it. I have been at different times in my life, more and at other times less, aware of God's presence in my sufferings and certain circumstances.
But I remember specifically when my wife was killed, and I saw her dead on the road, and the paramedics said she's dead, I remember in my mind, I thought, God is in this. I remember thinking, God has a purpose for this. I wonder what He's going to do.
I wonder why He's doing this. I wasn't challenging Him, I was just wondering. I know God's up to something here.
And to realize that, to see God in everything, is really the height of knowing God. Knowing that even if you don't understand what He's doing, or why He's doing it, that He's still in there, He's doing something there. And whatever it is, it's going to be good.
You don't have that conviction if you know God only by hearsay, or only by inference. You have to know God Himself to be able to see God in your circumstances completely. There are certain times when God can be recognized in characteristic works that He does that are just like Him.
When John and Peter and five other apostles were out on the boat on the Sea of Galilee in John chapter 21, they had fished all night and hadn't caught anything. They saw someone on the shore, they didn't know it was Jesus, but it was. And he said, why don't you throw your net on the other side of the boat? And they did.
And when they did, they found their net was full to breaking. And John said to Peter, it's the Lord. Now they'd seen Him in the distance, but didn't recognize Him.
They heard Him. He said, children, have you caught anything? They said, no, try over there on the other side of the boat. They heard His voice, but didn't recognize Him.
But when they got to catch a fish, they recognized Him. You know why? Because He did something like that before. When they were first called from their fishing, He'd done exactly the same thing.
And they came to recognize it was Him by the fact that He did something that was familiar, characteristic of Him. The men who walked on the road to Emmaus with Jesus didn't recognize Him until they sat at the table and He broke bread. And in the breaking of bread at the meal, they recognized Him.
And then He went away. But in some characteristic action, probably Mary Magdalene came to recognize Jesus when He said Mary, because there was probably some characteristic way that He always spoke her name. She recognized it.
So in our lives also, you will see things that will happen. You'll say, that's just like God. God's in that.
I can see God in that.
Because that's just the kind of thing He does. And so knowing God requires that we be able to recognize Him.
For one thing, knowing God will result in us recognizing Him. But also recognizing Him more often in our lives will cause us to know Him better. We'll learn more of Him.
We'll become better acquainted with Him through the recognition of His presence and activity in people and in our circumstances. Well, we're out of time for this. Our next session, we're going to be talking about the attributes of God.
And then we'll talk about the character of God in separate sessions.

Series by Steve Gregg

God's Sovereignty and Man's Salvation
God's Sovereignty and Man's Salvation
Steve Gregg explores the theological concepts of God's sovereignty and man's salvation, discussing topics such as unconditional election, limited aton
Joshua
Joshua
Steve Gregg's 13-part series on the book of Joshua provides insightful analysis and application of key themes including spiritual warfare, obedience t
Survey of the Life of Christ
Survey of the Life of Christ
Steve Gregg's 9-part series explores various aspects of Jesus' life and teachings, including his genealogy, ministry, opposition, popularity, pre-exis
1 Thessalonians
1 Thessalonians
In this three-part series from Steve Gregg, he provides an in-depth analysis of 1 Thessalonians, touching on topics such as sexual purity, eschatology
Romans
Romans
Steve Gregg's 29-part series teaching verse by verse through the book of Romans, discussing topics such as justification by faith, reconciliation, and
Genesis
Genesis
Steve Gregg provides a detailed analysis of the book of Genesis in this 40-part series, exploring concepts of Christian discipleship, faith, obedience
Some Assembly Required
Some Assembly Required
Steve Gregg's focuses on the concept of the Church as a universal movement of believers, emphasizing the importance of community and loving one anothe
Gospel of Mark
Gospel of Mark
Steve Gregg teaches verse by verse through the Gospel of Mark. The Narrow Path is the radio and internet ministry of Steve Gregg, a servant Bible tea
Haggai
Haggai
In Steve Gregg's engaging exploration of the book of Haggai, he highlights its historical context and key themes often overlooked in this prophetic wo
Spiritual Warfare
Spiritual Warfare
In "Spiritual Warfare," Steve Gregg explores the tactics of the devil, the methods to resist Satan's devices, the concept of demonic possession, and t
More Series by Steve Gregg

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