Event: Call to Prayer 2021
God can be known
All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Matthew 11:27
One of the great mysteries of God is though he is above our understanding and comprehension, yet we can know Him. As the theologian Herman Bavinck wrote, ‘The unsearchable riches of the Divine Being form a necessary and important part of our knowledge of God’. Though we can never know God fully, yet we have the God given ability to know our eternal and majestic Creator. We have been created in His image and we have been created to know Him – this is an awesome truth.
The tragedy is that we have forfeited that ability and right to know God in a personal way. Through our sinful rebellion there is a great divide between us. Adam and Eve were thrown out of the garden when they sinned, and a fundamental change took place in their hearts – they became dead in their trespasses and sins. This effected all mankind, and we are all sinners who have fallen short of the glory of God. Our natural state is one of alienation to God, and left to ourselves, at best we are left scratching around searching and guessing as to God’s character and nature. We see glimpses in creation, but we end up creating gods in our own image that are pitiful and nothing like the true and living God.
Our only hope is that God would reveal himself to us.
God is so loving and full of grace that He has done just that! Through the Holy Spirit He reveals himself to us through creation and through a book (the Bible), yet it is through becoming a man like us that we see Him most clearly revealed. The wonder of the gospel is that Jesus reveals the Father to those He has chosen, as explained in today’s verse. Through the regenerating work of the Spirit, and by Jesus’ work on the cross we see and experience God in holiness, love, and grace – we get to know God!
As Christians we should never take this for granted, and it should be a most treasured privilege. Let it sink in … we can know the One who is eternal, who created everything and is incomparable in every way. When we were reborn, we entered a relationship with Him and this involves more than just knowing things about Him (though this is part of it), we can talk to Him and are able to walk with Him. He is knowable in a real sense to every Christian.
At the heart of this knowing is a relationship, and as a husband is filled with hope and expectation on his wedding day as he looks forward to a lifetime of getting to know and love his wife, let us be filled with the great hope of knowing that we have eternity to love, worship and get to know our God!
We can hope in God because He is knowable.
Questions
- Do you take for granted the amazing truth that we can know God?
- In what ways would you like to know God better?
Further Reading
- Jeremiah 9:23-26, John 17
Prayer
- Thank the Lord and worship him for making Himself known to you.
- Pray that you would grow in your knowledge of the Lord.
- Pray that the Church in our land would prioritise knowing God above all else.
- Pray that God would reveal Himself to people in Wales today through His Spirit.