Lent: We Can Know God With Immediacy
“The Bible assumes as a self-evident fact that men can know God with at least the same degree of immediacy as they know any other person or thing that comes within the field of their experience. The same terms are used to express knowledge of physical things. ‘O taste and see that the Lord is good.’” (A.W. Tozer, Ch. 3 “Apprehending God,” in The Pursuit of God).
We can thank the effects of the Enlightenment, and the subsequent rise of rational thinking within modernity as the superior form of knowledge, for our vastly truncated understanding of knowledge from a Biblical perspective. Even the dictionary program on my laptop has a more holistic sense of knowledge than my first thought, defining “know” as the process of “being aware of [something] through observation, inquiry, or information,” as in “I know what I’m doing.” Observation takes place through seeing, while inquiry takes place through listening, talking, and investigation, among other things. Information? Perceived using all five of the human senses; often simultaneously, I might add.
Which is an obtuse way of saying that although God is mysterious, He isn’t unknowable. Not in the least, in fact. I’m not sure where so many Christ-followers embraced the idea that God isn’t self-revealing, not wanting to be known. My hunch, if I sift through my own internal dialogue, is that we have confused knowing God with a desire to make sense of God’s ways. As I approach my fourth anniversary of being married, I realise now that marriage has cleared up that confusion for me, as my wife desires for me to know her intimately, even as I seek to understand her, but that understanding her is not a barrier nor an excuse to knowing her at all.
Tozer’s claim that the Scriptures assume as self-evident the reality that human beings can know God with an intimate degree of immediacy, much as we know other human beings, is astoundingly hopeful when deeply considered. God wants to be known, and the Scriptures record the story of a community of people fumbling towards that end, frailties and failures deeply prevalent in their attempts to know God. Maybe it isn’t as hard as I often make it out to be.
If God wants to be known, and I “want to want Thee,” that desire illuminates the reality that I do in fact want to know God, and to know Him right now.
That is good news indeed!