Gain Through Loss

Think spring!

I’m wanting to know and enjoy God better, because the more I know Him, the more I want. The appeite is insatiable. Along with this hunger, the Bible challenges us to know God.

2 Peter 1:2LB Do you want more and more of God’s kindness and peace? Then learn to know him better and better. For as you know him better, he will give you, through his great power, everything you need for living a truly good life; he even shares his own glory and his own goodness with us. And by that same mighty power he has given us all the other rich and wonderful blessings he promised; for instance, the promise to save us from the lust and rottenness all around us, and to give us his own character.

Proverbs 9:10 LB For the reverence and fear of God are basic to all wisdom. Knowing God results in every other kind of understanding.

Hosea 6:6,3LB I don’t want your sacrifices, I want your love; I don’t want your offerings, I want you to know me. Oh, that we might know the Lord. Let us press on to know him, and he will respond to us as surely as the coming of dawn or the rain of early spring.

Jeremiah 9: 23-24 This is what the LORD says: "Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight," declares the LORD.

1 Timothy 6:21 LB They missed the most important thing – they didn’t know God.

A little girl drawing a picture was observed by her mother, who asked her what she was doing. “I’m drawing a picture of God,” the little girl said. Her mom replied, “No one knows what God looks like.” To which her daughter exclaimed, “they’ll know when I’m finished drawing.”

The Bible challenges us to know God and J.I. Packer in his book, Knowing God, concurs: “We are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing the God whose world it is and who runs it. The world becomes a strange and painful place, and life in it is a disappointing and unpleasant business for those who do not know God. Disregard the study of God and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfolded as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you. This way you can waste your life and lose your soul.”

And yet, Thomas Aquinas claims God is utterly unknowable." No thoughts can contain him, no words express him. He is beyond anything we can intellectualize or imagine."

Oswald Chambers adds to this thought: "What is God like? God is not like anything; that is, He is not exactly like anything or anybody. We learn by using what we already know as a bridge over which we pass to the unknown. It is not possible for the mind to crash suddenly past the familiar into the totally unfamiliar. When the prophet Ezekiel saw heaven opened and beheld visions of God, he found himself looking at that which he had no language to describe.

If, dear reader, you have any thoughts on this apparent dilemma, please email me at rburwick@mindspring.com.