On Knowing God

When people ask me, "What's the best argument for God?" my reply now is, "Best for whom?" A grieving parent is not comforted by the fine-tuning of the cosmos. People need different kinds of reasons: intellectual coherence, existential purpose, and emotional solace.

Our picture of God is inevitably shaped by feelings and culture. Even the American atheist is, in many ways, a Christian atheist — still operating with moral categories inherited from Christendom. His mockery is often just a wound wrapped in a worldview. Whether we embrace God or reject him, we do so through a mesh of emotion, relationship, and reason. The person who claims to be operating on pure reason is not seeing clearly. We all carry background beliefs, unquestioned assumptions, and old hurts. All of it shapes how we see God.

Knowing about God is not the same as knowing him. Christianity is not a set of data you plug into the computer of your soul. It is an experience.

The Apostle John calls Jesus the "Word of God" (John 1:1). John is not inventing a term; he is seizing one freighted with meaning in Jewish and Greco-Roman thought, and baptizing it in Old Testament theology. In Genesis 1, God brings a universe to life through speech: "And God said, 'Let there be light.'" In the prophets, "the word of the LORD came to Isaiah... to Jeremiah... to Amos" — God's mind laid bare. In Isaiah 55, God's word goes out and accomplishes what he desires. The Word is God's personal self-expression in creation, revelation, and deliverance.

Having laid that cosmic groundwork, John unleashes a thunderclap: "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us" (John 1:14). "Became" does not mean he exchanged deity for humanity, as though swapping uniforms in a locker room. The eternal Son added a human nature to his divine nature — fully God, fully man, one person with two complete natures. And "made his dwelling" translates a word that literally means "tabernacled." John's Jewish readers would immediately recall the wilderness tabernacle, where God's glory was veiled by canvas and animal skins. Now, John says, the fullness of divine glory is veiled in human skin — bone and sinew, tear ducts and hunger pangs. God in the flesh, taking on our frailty.

Decades after seeing Jesus, John writes in his first letter: "We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ" (1 John 1:3).

The gospel never stops at historical assent. It invites living interaction with God himself — what Scripture calls knowing him. Jesus prays in John 17, "Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent." The Greek word for fellowship, koinonia, pictures mutual participation, not a monologue. Intimacy with God is possible and intended. Fellowship is not a one-way street where you rattle off requests and walk away. God can be experienced.

Think of marriage. A certificate proves I am wed, but the heart of marriage is shared laughter, shared tears, shared years.

In Good Will Hunting, Robin Williams's character sits on a park bench with Matt Damon and tells him, in effect: you can quote Shakespeare on war, but you've never held a dying friend in your lap. You can recite sonnets on love, but you've never been leveled by someone's eyes. You've read about Michelangelo, but you've never stood in the Sistine Chapel and looked up. And just because William's character has read Oliver Twist doesn't mean he knows the first thing about being an orphan.

That is the difference between knowing about and knowing.

When I spend time with my wife or children, I'm not calculating what I'll get from it. I'm not there to have a need met. I'm there because it is the most natural expression of love. That is what fellowship with God looks like.

What a staggering privilege — to know the living God. To discover that the Maker of the universe loves you, has called you out of darkness, and has adopted you as his own. A God who comes in weakness and does not wield your weakness against you.

The barriers are almost always on our side. God is not trying to stay away from anyone here. God does not take on flesh to make himself hard to find. He wants to be in fellowship with you.