Jay: The Bible has much to say on the topic of God seeking Man and Man seeking God, and on God knowing Man and Man knowing God. For example:
“For affliction does not come from the dust, Nor does trouble sprout from the ground, For man is born for trouble, As sparks fly upward. But as for me, I would seek God, And I would place my cause before God;…” (Job 5:6-8)
God has looked down from heaven upon the sons of men
To see if there is anyone who understands,
Who seeks after God. (Psalm 53:2)
For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. (Matthew 6:32-34)
“So I say to you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and he who seeks, finds; and to him who knocks, it will be opened. (Luke 11:9-10)
When David the king went in and sat before the Lord, and he said, “Who am I, O Lord God, and what is my house, that You have brought me this far? And yet this was insignificant in Your eyes, O Lord God, for You have spoken also of the house of Your servant concerning the distant future. And this is the custom of man, O Lord God. Again what more can David say to You? For You know Your servant, O Lord God! For the sake of Your word, and according to Your own heart, You have done all this greatness to let Your servant know. (2 Samuel 7:18-21)
After there had been much debate, Peter stood up and said to them, “Brethren, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you, that by my mouth the Gentiles would hear the word of the gospel and believe. And God, who knows the heart, testified to them giving them the Holy Spirit, just as He also did to us (Acts 15:7-8)
“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” declares the Lord.
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways
And My thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9)
They profess to know God, but by their deeds they deny Him, being detestable and disobedient and worthless for any good deed. (Titus 1:16)
But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how is it that you turn back again to the weak and worthless elemental things, to which you desire to be enslaved all over again? (Galatians 4:9)
Is there a difference between seeking and knowing? If so, who should be the seeker and who the knower? And what role does technology play in seeking and knowing? Does it help or hinder?
David: Doesn’t Babel tell us that God does not want us seeking; certainly not with technology (the Tower)?
Jay: Was it the goal of the Babelonians to seek God, or was it to know God? Or are these synonymous? I see a potential distinction which, if I am right, is significant.
David: God seemed concerned that by getting to know Him the Babelonians would discover the secrets of His power and would be able to usurp it.
Chris: I see “seeking” as the journey and “knowing” as the destination. The question is whether we can ever reach the destination, or does the journey never end? Is what we find (after “Seek, and ye shall find”) complete knowledge and understanding of God or just enough to be assured of His existence and to understand His key attributes of grace, love, mercy, etc.?
Donald: We “know” our human acquaintances, but not totally. We can’t know their thoughts, for instance. Human relationships begin with mutual awareness and progress to mutual seeking of one another until we can say we know one another as (for example) best friends. The challenge in the spiritual relationship with God is to feel God reciprocating. If we don’t or can’t feel Him, can we really claim to know Him?
Don: What is our motive for seeking, and/or for knowing, God? To seek Him is no casual business. Our motive seems to be a selfish one: To improve our own position in some way, by harnessing God’s power. The belief that somehow life will be better if we know God is buried deep in our psyche. When Job said he “would seek God” (see the passage above) he evidently did so because it would somehow make life better for him; but it may be, given Job’s high stage of faith, that he meant something different than people at lower stages of faith might mean by “seeking God.”
I would just note that the quote from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6) alludes to seeking the kingdom of heaven, which might be different from seeking God.
Donald: The fundamental question then is our motivation in seeking God. True, we are told to; but there are other motivators, such as a better life here on earth, eternal life in heaven, and so on. These do seem selfish, compared to seeking God purely for the purpose of knowing Him.
David: To the Daoist, the Way (the Dao, which equates to God in my opinion) is not something to be sought. It is something that Is. It is everywhere, and it is to be followed, not sought for. If one has to seek it, then one would by definition be off track—off the Way—but the exercise would be meaningless, because the Way is there, whether you know it, like it, seek it, or not. There is no point to fighting against the Way, but there is some point (peace of mind) to simply accepting it and going with it. Like the Buddhist, the Daoist (at least, this one!) seeks enlightenment, which is why I participate in this class. I think the enlightenment sought is not to understand God’s ways and thoughts but to be able to see things, as best we can, from His perspective.
Don: Job and Isaiah suggest it is arrogant and futile to think that we can know the mystery of God. But we can’t seem to let mystery alone and will not stop building towers to to try to penetrate it with all the technology at our disposal. In his sermon on Mars Hill, Paul seems to suggest that this may not be necessary. He talked about our “groping” for a God so close as to be practically palpable, a God with us in spirit, as our inner light. So in that sense, perhaps there is no seeking to be done.
David: I worry that the search for God is a cop-out. We already know perfectly well where He is: Inside us. We know because we hear the voice of the inner spirit, we see its light. But we don’t like its message—essentially, to live the life of Jesus—so we create mysteries to justify our spending time doing anything but live the life of Jesus. In that sense, we not only know where God is, but also we know Him—at least, we know enough of Him to satisfy the enlightenment we seek, of seeing things through God’s eyes. If we must seek something, let it be to seek a way to live the life of Jesus.
Donald: All this from a personal perspective. What of the corporate—the church—perspective?
Jay: Personally and corporately we believe that seeking to know one another and God leads to better knowledge of one another and God. Is this a proper spiritual perspective?
Don: Several parables—the Lost Coin, the Lost Sheep, the Prodigal Son—illustrate that God actively seeks sinners of all kinds: Those who know they are lost, and those who don’t; those who take no responsibility for getting lost, and those who wantonly get lost. But the parable of the Lost Treasure suggests that the seeking can be left to chance:
“The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. (Matthew 13:44)
Chris: Seeking started in the garden of Eden, after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. They hid, so God had to seek them.
Don: There are many more instances in Scripture of God seeking Man than of Man seeking God. Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Paul… all were sought out by God.
Ebenezer: We don’t know God, so we seek Him; but God knows us, yet still He seeks us.
David: Adam and Eve did know God. They walked with Him every day n the garden. So what were they seeking by eating the forbidden fruit? It cannot have been God, so it must have been something beyond God—but surely there can be nothing beyond God. I feel (arrogant as it may indeed sound, or even be!) that I know God through the inner light. It requires no intellectual effort; there is no need to wonder about it. This was the case for Adam and Eve before the fall. In a way, by forbidding the fruit, God set Adam and Eve up to fall. He gave them something to wonder about, something beyond Him and therefore impossible to reach. But they—we—are not content just to know God: We seek to know His limits. But there aren’t any!
Don: Are you saying we should get off our prayer mats and head out to find and help someone in need?
David: Yes.
Jay: Scripture says they sought to be like God. If that is not a valid goal, what is?
David: God knows where we are. We can’t hide from Him (as, clearly, Adam and Eve failed to do in the garden). What he seeks is our return to the spiritual state we were in before the fall. This, to me, is the message in the Prodigal Son. But until we hit skid row and lose our iPhones, we seek desperately to avoid dad. Sure, we pretend to search for him through complex Boolean searches on a spiritual Google, rather than simply going back home—to him—knowing full well where he lives, where home is.
Don: I think we may not recognize the voice of God calling us.
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