Knowledge of God

Don: We see in the story of Job the overwhelming desire of Man to penetrate the knowledge of God. In the dialog between Job and his friends two things stand out: One is Job’s particularly insistent questions about God engendered by the circumstances of Job’s life. We want to know and think we need to know why what is happening to us is happening to us. The other thing that stands out is the brassy boldness of his friends—who represent Mankind—in seeking to explain God’s intentions and plan, to be his spokesperson even (especially!) when they didn’t know what they were talking about. Like them, we would rather be wrong than admit to ignorance.

What do we, can we, and should we really know about God?

The claim to know God is the foundation of all religion. It is remarkable how forthrightly and unambiguously we declare our certain knowledge of God in our creeds, our fundamental beliefs, and in our foundational “truths” and doctrines. It is also remarkable that we have next to no capacity or method for modifying these “truths” once they have become established. Despite ever expanding scientific knowledge about the creation and history and nature of the universe and of our place in it, we have precious little capacity to integrate this knowledge with our established “truths” about God.

It is not really surprising given, as Solomon said, that:

It is the glory of God to conceal a matter,
But the glory of kings is to search out a matter. (Proverbs 25:2)

Throughout the ages people have expressed frustration that God keeps secrets. Job was one of them:

“Oh that I knew where I might find Him,
That I might come to His seat!
“I would present my case before Him
And fill my mouth with arguments.
“I would learn the words which He would answer,
And perceive what He would say to me.
“Would He contend with me by the greatness of His power?
No, surely He would pay attention to me.
“There the upright would reason with Him;
And I would be delivered forever from my Judge.

“Behold, I go forward but He is not there,
And backward, but I cannot perceive Him;
When He acts on the left, I cannot behold Him;
He turns on the right, I cannot see Him.
“But He knows the way I take;
When He has tried me, I shall come forth as gold (Job 23:3-10)

Solomon was another:

When I gave my heart to know wisdom and to see the task which has been done on the earth (even though one should never sleep day or night), and I saw every work of God, I concluded that man cannot discover the work which has been done under the sun. Even though man should seek laboriously, he will not discover; and though the wise man should say, “I know,” he cannot discover. (Ecclesiastes 8:16-17)

The desire to penetrate God’s secrets—especially in order to use them to our advantage—is one of the definitions of evil. Even so, it seems there is much about God that apparently can be known. Under the concept known as “general revelation” or “natural revelation” theologians seek to discover knowledge about God through natural means such as “observation of nature (the physical universe), philosophy and reasoning” (Wikipedia). One of Job’s friends asked him:

“Can you discover the depths of God?
Can you discover the limits of the Almighty?
“They are high as the heavens, what can you do?
Deeper than Sheol, what can you know?
“Its measure is longer than the earth
And broader than the sea.
“If He passes by or shuts up,
Or calls an assembly, who can restrain Him?
“For He knows false men,
And He sees iniquity without investigating.
“An idiot will become intelligent
When the foal of a wild donkey is born a man.
(Job 11:7-12)

The notion that we can know about God by observing Nature is apparent in scripture:

The heavens are telling of the glory of God;
And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.
Day to day pours forth speech,
And night to night reveals knowledge. (Psalm 19:1-2)

and

For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. (Romans 1:20)

So on the one hand there are some things about God that are secret but there are also some things that are revealed:

“The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may observe all the words of this law. (Deuteronomy 29:29)

And:

… you will seek the Lord your God, and you will find Him if you search for Him with all your heart and all your soul. When you are in distress and all these things have come upon you, in the latter days you will return to the Lord your God and listen to His voice. (Deuteronomy 4:29-30)

Despite the secret side of God, scripture seems to emphasize the need to seek him, as here for example:

… He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; … (Acts 17:26-27)

What, exactly, are we to seek? And why is God playing hide and seek with us? Paul wrote:

For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling, and my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God.

Yet we do speak wisdom among those who are mature; a wisdom, however, not of this age nor of the rulers of this age, who are passing away; but we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory; the wisdom which none of the rulers of this age has understood; for if they had understood it they would not have crucified the Lord of glory; but just as it is written,

“Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard,
And which have not entered the heart of man,
All that God has prepared for those who love Him.”

For to us God revealed them through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. (1 Corinthians 2:2-10)

Thus, the Spirit—the inner light—is the key to the revelation of God. The process of revelation is incremental:

“To whom would He teach knowledge,
And to whom would He interpret the message?
Those just weaned from milk?
Those just taken from the breast?
“For He says,
‘Order on order, order on order,
Line on line, line on line,
A little here, a little there.’” (Isaiah 28:9-10)

Revelation of God comes slowly, through thought and deliberation. It doesn’t come in the form of a tweet of less than 140 characters. To be sure, Jesus made a number of short declarative statements such as “I am the good shepherd” and “I am the bread of life”, etc., but they represent deep and rich metaphors that require painstaking, line by line contemplation in order to be fully comprehended.

On the other hand, in the end Job came to appreciate something about God even though his knowledge about God was no more than it had been to start with. Does his experience help us? What do we need to know about God? Why are we so willing to speak for him? Why do we seem to need certainty about God—to walk by sight rather than by faith? Why does God play hide and seek?

Donald: The Bible expects us to spread the gospel. It therefore assumes we know what the gospel is. But why do we have to contain God’s message in the context of our own religion? Why proselytize? Why not, instead, tell what we know about God and about our own faith journey, with the emphasis on how faith (as opposed to religion) has affected our lives? Teachers establish their authority through their knowledge. If we are to teach God’s message we have to be able to say “This is what God has revealed about himself” but we ought not to embellish beyond that point.

Kiran: If God revealed too much to us, would we—fallen creatures that we are—appropriate the power it would give us for evil purposes, including controlling access to the knowledge thereby denying others access to God? We must not be given the means to obstruct his revelation, which should be freely available to everybody.

Jay: I wonder if it is not we who initiate the game of hide and seek with God, not God who initiates it. The revelation of God is that he is “I Am”—he is omnipresent, he is everywhere. Can we understand even that? We think he is hiding things from us but is it simply a matter of our (in)ability to understand the complete reality of God? I don’t see a relationship between the gospel message and our understanding of God. The former is the simple message of love for God and for one’s fellow human. We have taken that message and made it about what God is, but it does not explain why God does what he does what he does. When we try to force more into the gospel message than is there, we complicate the message. We don’t need to understand the completeness of God in order to love him and our fellow human.

David F: Some type of revelation or exploration or hide-and-seek has to occur for one to know that God is love.

Jay: The inner light—light that God created before he created the stars—is part of our essence; it is the foundation of life, of Creation. I think this light is Goodness, Love, the Essence of Life.

Anonymous: The gospel—the good news—the bottom line—is:

…that repentance for forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in His name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. (Luke 24:47)

This is the simple message to give to those depressed, burdened, weighed down by their sin: Forgiveness through repentance. That tells me God is Good, God is Love.

Don: Some messages such as that just described are crystal clear. So why all the mystery about God? Is there pedagogical value in learning by exploring in the dark?

David F: While it is clear, there remains some ambiguity in the message. Repentance has to be accompanied by faith, which is a form of knowing, of being connected with someone or some thing spiritually. Repentance alone won’t cut it.

Anonymous: If one does not believe the message then one does not believe one’s sins will be forgiven then there is no point in repentance. In that case, one continues to live burdened by guilt. So belief is crucial.

Donald: The blessing of our group is that we converge from different perspectives toward a central point, as we are trying to do with this gospel message. Sharing our perspectives on faith helps us mutually understand the things that stem from faith. There is an unfortunate tendency to skip over the faith/belief part and proselytize the religion rather than the Good News.

Jay: To me, God dwells in the abstract realm. His essence is in the abstract. Love, faith, grace are not quantifiable, not measurable, and arguably not even observable. Why we love our children, why we love one another, are mysteries. They are not scientifically describable or provable. When God tells us there are mysteries, that there are parts of him that we cannot wrap our intellects around, he is not telling us something we don’t know. Goodness and Evil are in an abstract realm our intellects are not capable of fathoming. But we sense them and we want to concretize them. We do that through religion, which gives us sets of rules to follow in order to live the essence of God. But that is very treacherous ground. Jesus warned the Sadducees and Pharisees that this was an area they should not be dabbling in, that they should be very careful in talking about about who was worthy of forgiveness and love and so on, because they were not equipped to measure such attributes in people and were likely to make mistakes.

Anonymous: That is why, to me, religion is a personal matter, not a group matter.

Donald: The reason we gather on Sabbath morning is our shared faith.

Anonymous: We gather also because we are social humans who like to share our relationship with God, to be among people, to listen to them and share our own thoughts with them. Perhaps that helps us to grow in God but to me growing in God is largely a matter of personal effort, not group effort. As a social group, church does not have to be one religion—it can consist of multiple religions since the participants would all share a loving heart with God inside it. We can love anyone, not just those who share our particular religion. It is enriching in many ways, not only spiritual.

David F: Jesus said that the mark of his church would be people who loved one another. He didn’t talk about the Sabbath or other doctrinal items. Since God is love and created love within all of us, it makes sense that we should have a fellowship of love together.

Don: In the story of Job, we see his friends (ourselves) falling all over one another in their attempts to explain God. Job was at a loss for answers, but his friends had all the answers and were so ready to supply them. We are so easily led to believe that we know what God wants and can therefore speak for him. Shame on God if he fails to support his spokespersons! Yet God not only failed to support Job’s friends; he condemned them outright. It’s a sobering thought that the more we think we can represent God the less, in fact, we do so.

Anonymous: I find fault not in the content of the friends’ answers—they said the right things—but in their judgmental attitude: They seemed to assume that Job was guilty of sin. This was why Job could not accept their answers. He knew he was guiltless.

Jay: Judgment is part of the abstract realm. Jesus specifically warned the Sadducees and Pharisees who condemned him for healing—forgiving—someone on the Sabbath not to dabble in judgment. Judgment was not their realm, he told them essentially. This was also God’s message to Job’s friends—to us. Yet we persist in dabbling. Why? Perhaps because the stakes—salvation for eternity—are huge. We want to count God as being on our side, therefore we seek to insinuate ourselves into knowledge of him so we can make sure he will judge us rightly!

Anonymous: The uncertainty of not knowing our fate causes us problems. Perhaps this is what God wants!

Jay: God did not want us to know. He did not want us in this business of judgment. He did not want us to discriminate between Good and Evil. To me, true faith means not judging, not discriminating. It means trusting in God (or Goodness, or Love—whatever we want to call it) to do the judging and discriminating. If I can overcome the intellectual desire to understand, I can be at much more peace.

Anonymous: The order is: 1. Gospel; 2. Faith; 3. Repentance; 4. Forgiveness.

Chris: In the Garden, we were not supposed to understand God. We were supposed only to have faith in him. We sinned in wanting to know more, but we lived in a place where we did not need to know more.

Michael: After eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve were supposed to become like God and be able to know Good and Evil. But that does not seem to have happened. They merely knew that they were naked. Perhaps the sin is not knowing—we don’t—but thinking that we know. Thinking that we know makes us think that we are gods.

Don: Only God could know that they were naked, hence his question: “Who told you that you were naked?” Their self-assessment, their judgment, was already open to question, it seems.

Chris: Jesus came to take us back to where we were before. The process is simply one of having faith in God as Love and as Judge. When we do, we are back where we were.

Don: We seem to have arrived at two competing concepts, one of which is that there is value in seeking to know more about God, the other is that there is value in divesting ourselves of our supposed knowledge about God. Are these reconcilable?

David F: The key is:

“But from there you will seek the LORD your God, and you will find Him if you search for Him with all your heart and all your soul.” Deuteronomy 4:29

There are indeed notions we must divest ourselves off. This passage does not say “Search for me using you cognitive abilities.” I don’t think we would ever find God by trying to analyze scripture in a cognitive way. We don’t know the context, and without that  knowledge there is too much ambiguity and contradiction, leaving us worse off after reading the Bible than before—if we read it cognitively. That’s why atheists have such a field day with us, because without faith the Bible indeed does not make much sense. So the issue is the difference between processing the Bible cognitively and processing it through the heart and soul. It seems to me the passage is telling us that our relationship with God is personal and that we connect to him through an emotional experience. All the experiences with God in the Bible can be seen as connections made through the heart. The hide and seek is not a mental process but one that happens in the heart. Let your mind explore the universe but let your heart explore God. It’s not a scientific process.

Jay: The contradiction is because we seek understanding of God, which is a cognitive process; rather than the love of God, which is a process that takes place in the heart. We need to divest the former and invest the latter.

David E: The Dao De Jing says:

He who knows the Dao [I interpret “the Dao” as “God”—David E] does not talk about it; he who talks about it does not know it. He who knows it keeps his mouth shut. (Chapter 56)

and

Who can (make) the muddy water (clear)? Let it be still, and it will gradually become clear. (Chapter 15).

Taken together with several other pronouncements within the Dao De Jing regarding knowledge of the Dao (which I will reproduce as an addendum to the transcript of this discussion) I take these to mean “Be still, and know God from the inside, not from the outside.” It inevitably (and I think not coincidentally) reminds one of Psalm 46:

“Be still, and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10)

The Dao De Jing agrees that knowledge of God is intensely personal.

* * *

ADDENDUM

Below are select chapters from the Dao De Jing that have a bearing on knowledge of God (the Dao). I have removed parentheses used by the source to denote interpolated words since and added comments of my own in square brackets–David E. 

3 Therefore the sage, in the exercise of his government, empties their minds, fills their bellies, weakens their wills, and strengthens their bones. [Does this sound like the Garden of Eden?] He constantly tries to keep them without knowledge and without desire, and where there are those who have knowledge, to keep them from presuming to act on it. When there is this abstinence from action, good order is universal.

10 The Dao produces all things and nourishes them; it produces them and does not claim them as its own; it does all, and yet does not boast of it; it presides over all, and yet does not control them. This is what is called ‘The mysterious Quality’ of the Dao.

14 We look at it, and we do not see it, and we name it ‘the Equable.’ We listen to it, and we do not hear it, and we name it ‘the Inaudible.’ We try to grasp it, and do not get hold of it, and we name it ‘the Subtle.’ With these three qualities, it cannot be made the subject of description; and hence we blend them together and obtain The One. Its upper part is not bright, and its lower part is not obscure. Ceaseless in its action, it yet cannot be named, and then it again returns and becomes nothing. This is called the Form of the Formless, and the Semblance of the Invisible; this is called the Fleeting and Indeterminable. We meet it and do not see its Front; we follow it, and do not see its Back. When we can lay hold of the Dao of old to direct the things of the present day, and are able to know it as it was of old in the beginning, this is called unwinding the clue of Dao.

15 The skillful masters of the Dao in old times, with a subtle and exquisite penetration, comprehended its mysteries, and were deep also so as to elude men’s knowledge. As they were thus beyond men’s knowledge, I will make an effort to describe of what sort they appeared to be. Shrinking looked they like those who wade through a stream in winter; irresolute like those who are afraid of all around them; grave like a guest in awe of his host; evanescent like ice that is melting away; unpretentious like wood that has not been fashioned into anything; vacant like a valley, and dull like muddy water. Who can make the muddy water clear? Let it be still, and it will gradually become clear. Who can secure the condition of rest? Let movement go on, and the condition of rest will gradually arise. They who preserve this method of the Dao do not wish to be full (of themselves). It is through their not being full of themselves that they can afford to seem worn and not appear new and complete.

17 The state of vacancy should be brought to the utmost degree, and that of stillness guarded with unwearying vigour. All things alike go through their processes of activity, and then we see them return to their original state [The Garden of Eden]. When things in the vegetable world have displayed their luxuriant growth, we see each of them return to its root. This returning to their root is what we call the state of stillness; and that stillness may be called a reporting that they have fulfilled their appointed end. The report of that fulfillment is the regular, unchanging rule. To know that unchanging rule is to be intelligent; not to know it leads to wild movements and evil issues. The knowledge of that unchanging rule produces a grand capacity and forbearance, and that capacity and forbearance lead to a community of feeling with all things. From this community of feeling comes a kingliness of character; and he who is king-like goes on to be heaven-like. In that likeness to heaven he possesses the Dao. Possessed of the Dao, he endures long; and to the end of his bodily life, is exempt from all danger of decay.

25 There was something undefined and complete, coming into existence before Heaven and Earth. How still it was and formless, standing alone, and undergoing no change, reaching everywhere and in no danger of being exhausted! It may be regarded as the Mother of all things. I do not know its name, and I give it the designation of the Dao (the Way or Course). Making an effort further to give it a name I call it The Great. Great, it passes on in constant flow. Passing on, it becomes remote. Having become remote, it returns. Therefore the Dao is great; Heaven is great; Earth is great; and the sage king is also great. In the universe there are four that are great, and the sage king is one of them. Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven takes its law from the Dao. The law of the Dao is its being what it is.

56 He who knows the Dao does not care to speak about it; he who is ever ready to speak about it does not know it.
He who knows it will keep his mouth shut and close the portals of his nostrils. He will blunt his sharp points and unravel the complications of things; he will attemper his brightness, and bring himself into agreement with the obscurity of others. This is called ‘the Mysterious Agreement.’ (Such an one) cannot be treated familiarly or distantly; he is beyond all consideration of profit or injury; beyond all consideration of nobility or meanness: – he is the noblest man under heaven.

67 I have three precious things which I prize and hold fast. The first is gentleness; the second is economy; and the third is shrinking from taking precedence of others.

71 To know and yet think we do not know is the highest attainment; not to know and yet think we do know is a disease.
It is simply by being pained at the thought of having this disease that we are preserved from it. The sage has not the disease. He knows the pain that would be inseparable from it, and therefore he does not have it.

72 …the sage knows these things of himself, but does not parade (his knowledge); loves, but does not (appear to set a) value on, himself.

Source: Chinese Text Project