As Christians, we pump a lot of time and energy into knowing God. In fact, the book Knowing God has sold over a million copies, and still remains as a bestseller.
Bible studies examine the names of God as a way of knowing Him more.
Although knowing and appreciating God through His names is a wonderful exercise, I still question whether knowing someone’s names and titles is as deep an exercise as marketers try to tell us it is. Names and titles tell us about a person, and may even share some of their traits with us, but do they truly tell us who a person is?
If you know my name is Valerie Limmer, that I was trained as an engineer, and that now I’m now working as a cross-cultural worker in Japan—do you really know me? Would it help to know that I’m (sometimes) a kind person?
I could point you to a dozen other kind engineers who are doing cross-cultural work.
How well do you really know me if you have a shopping list of my traits and trainings?
No, we cannot know God through an arm’s length description. Knowing the names of God may nurture our knowledge, but the truest knowledge—relational knowledge—is experiential.
I was challenged in devotions this morning by a little verse in Jeremiah 22:
[Your father] pled the cause of the afflicted and the poor,
Then it was well.
Is that not what it means to know Me?”
Declares the Lord.
—Jeremiah 22:16
Standing up for the afflicted and poor—this is what it means to know God.
If we’re not doing that, if we’re not finding ways to stand up for justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God (Micah 6:8), we don’t really know Him at all.
If we’re standing up only for our own, applying ourselves to only increasing the profiles and portfolios of our selves and other “Christian” personalities—we are not being humble. If we’re unwilling to reach out to those who are maligned and unpopular, who don’t look or sound like us, who are foreigners, widows, and orphans (groups very close to the heart of God!); if we’re unwilling to care for those who don’t stroke our egos, who return acid for kindness, who make us less palatable by association—we don’t really know God at all.
Pleading the cause of the afflicted and poor.
Doing justice.
Loving mercy.
Walking humbly.
Jesus humbled Himself by giving up up heaven to come to earth, submitting His desires to God’s, and associating with outcasts, with sinners and the unclean. He did this for all of humanity, not just the people who were attractive, rich, or popular. He had mercy on those who were ostracised and victimized, just as He applied a wisdom and justice that far exceeded human understanding, just as He showcased the poor widow and her gift as being greater than the gold of the wealthy—and pled the cause of the afflicted and poor in dozens of other situations.
These are the things that recommend us to God; these are the things that align with His heart. And when we do them, we experience a little of what He experiences when He does them. In doing so, we have fellowship with Him. Just as eating together fosters our human relationships, so doing the will of God fosters our relationship with Him (see John 4:34). Knowing God is pivotal to our experience of eternal life (John 17:3)—and that’s what makes this verse in Jeremiah so vital.
NOTES
Unless otherwise indicated, all scriptures are taken from the NASB.
