The Understanding Of God

“Long ago God spoke many times and in many ways to our ancestors through the prophets. And now in these final days, he has spoken to us through his Son. God promised everything to the Son as an inheritance, and through the Son he created the universe.” (Hebrews 1:1, NLT)

“Philip said, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.’ Jesus replied, ‘Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and yet you still don’t know who I am? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father! So why are you asking me to show him to you?’” (John 14:8-9, NLT)

“This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses, for he faced all of the same testings we do, yet he did not sin. So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most.” (Hebrews 4:15-16, NLT)

Zeus, whoever he is . . .

Hear, Lord, whoever you are . . .

These quotations are examples of how some ancient Greeks opened their prayers. For all their knowledge of Zeus and others in the pantheon of deities, the pagan worshipers still found the gods to be mostly a mystery.

The pagan gods seemed content to leave humanity in the dark about their nature and their expectations. The gods expected mortals to guess what they wanted, which shrouded the deities in persistent mystery. This drove the pagan worshipers to exert enormous amounts of energy trying to predict what the gods wanted from them. This kind of religious guesswork became a key feature of paganism, a collection of practices called divination. There were many forms of divination, including astrology, the consulting of oracles, and dream interpretation. Behind all this was the assumption that the gods were mostly unknowable.

The freeing truth is that God is knowable. God chose not to remain a mystery. He acted in history to reveal himself to Israel and then became one of us so that he would be as knowable as possible. It’s accidental paganism to assume that we can’t know God.

But there’s an opposite pitfall: assuming God could never understand us.

In paganism, the gods were incapable of understanding what it’s like to be a mortal human. In the myths, the gods and goddesses routinely disguised themselves as humans—often to trick mortals in some ghastly way—but they could never actually understand how it felt to be human. Pretending to look like a human was the best they could do.

We Christians can slip into the same thinking about God: he could never really understand us. Perhaps we acknowledge that God has some level of understanding us because of Jesus’ life on earth. Even still, we may place limitations on the depth of those experiences. We mostly associate Jesus’ humanity with biology: He felt pain, fatigue, hunger, etc. But we don’t always recognize that he shared real human emotions and experiences. Or if we do, there might be an unspoken assumption that it wasn’t quite as hard for him because he’s God. We discount Jesus’ humanity, so we doubt that he truly understands us. This hinders our relationship with him, because an unrelatable God can seem distant.

The freeing truth is that God understands us completely – both because of his omniscience and because of Jesus’ real human experiences. Unlike the pagan gods of ancient myths, our God—the one true God—comprehends us to a deeper degree than we can probably even imagine. You can trust that he understands you far better than you understand yourself.

As you now turn to the Bible to discover the truth about knowing God (and being known by him), reflect on these questions:

• In what ways have you felt that you can’t understand God? How might your life change if you begin to recognize that he made himself known and wants you to know him?
• In what ways have you felt that God can’t understand you? How might your life change if you recognize that Jesus, though fully divine, also lived a fully human life with experiences similar to yours?