What Does It Actually Mean to Know God?

What Does It Actually Mean to Know God?

There is a verse in the Old Testimony-Hosea that has been sitting heavily with me.

God says: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” Hosea 4:6

And just two chapters earlier, He says: “Let us know; let us press on to know the LORD.” Hosea 6:3

I keep thinking about those two ideas together: Know God. Lack of knowledge destroys.

But what does it actually mean to know God? I understand how confusing this can be because I spent years believing that knowing God could mean many different things.

Maybe you know God through Buddhism, maybe you call Him the Universe. Maybe you experience Him through energy, vibration, manifestation, meditation, nature or another spiritual practice. Or truly you believe all spiritual paths eventually lead back to the same Source.

I understand that thinking because I once looked at God through a very different lens too, but something I've come to understand is that if God actually exists independently of us, then I don't get to decide who He is. Neither does culture, religion, spirituality, neither does my feelings.

God has to reveal Himself.

Christianity makes an absolutely extraordinary claim: God did reveal Himself.

Not as an energy, not through a wooden statue or an idol. Nor as an impersonal force floating throughout the universe. He revealed Himself through a Person.

His name is Jesus Christ.

Jesus said something incredibly bold: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” John 14:9

Think about what that means. If I want to know what God is like, I look at Jesus. If I want to know how God loves, I look at Jesus. If I want to know how God treats the rejected, I look at Jesus. If I want to know how God responds to suffering, sin, hypocrisy, brokenness, fear, pride, injustice and shame, I look at Jesus.

God made Himself knowable, and this is the part that amazes me. The One through whom creation was made entered His own creation. The Artist stepped into His masterpiece. He clothed Himself in the humanity He created. Jesus didn't enter earth protected from what it means to be human. He became hungry, tired, He wept, experienced grief, rejection. He was betrayed. He experienced physical pain, and experienced temptation. He experienced the limitations of a human body.

He walked dusty roads, He worked, He lived under human government, and He experienced suffering. He entered our humanity without ceasing to be who He was, and He didn't cheat.

He didn't arrive with some anti-pain, anti-emotion serum that kept Him from experiencing human life. Hebrews says that He was tempted as we are, yet without sin.

That matters, because Jesus didn't simply come to tell humanity what God was like. He came to restore something that had been broken between humanity and God.

We Have a Problem With Holiness

This is where Christianity started making more sense to me. God is holy. He is the source and standard of goodness, truth, justice and life.

Here's a very imperfect example. I have beautiful chestnut-wood floors in my house, and I love keeping them clean. One of the rules in my home is simple: Shoes off.

If you've been walking through dirt and mud, you don't walk across my clean floors with your boots on. Why? Because I hate you? Of course not! The boundary exists because of what I'm protecting. Now multiply that concept infinitely. God isn't merely cleaner than us. He is holy.

And holiness isn't something human beings manufacture through meditation, enlightenment, good works or spiritual knowledge. We cannot make ourselves the Source.

I can plant a tree, water it. I can study its biology, learn how sunlight, water and soil affect it, but I cannot truthfully say: “The tree came from me, I created the tree” I am simply interacting with something I did not create. That's one of the things that changed how I look at the language of “becoming God” or recognizing ourselves as the Source. We aren't the Source, we came from the Source.

Creation itself points beyond us. Look at the sky, oceans, plants and the mathematical order of nature. Life itself.

Romans 1 says God's invisible qualities have been perceived through what He has made.

Creation can point us toward God. But creation is not God.

Jesus Took God's Law Even Deeper

This is another reason Jesus fascinates me. Most of us can look at the Ten Commandments and say: I've never murdered anyone, great. Then Jesus comes along and exposes something much deeper. He essentially says, You have heard that it was said, “You shall not murder...” but I'm going to show you what is happening underneath your outward behavior. He takes us into the heart. The way we speak about another human being matters, because you can destroy someone without ever touching their body.

Think About Words.

I remember having social media and YouTube and receiving so many encouraging comments. People could say one hundred wonderful things. Then there would be one negative comment. Guess which one followed me to bed? That one. I could replay it, analyze it, feel it. Meanwhile, the hundred beautiful comments somehow disappeared into the background. That's how powerful words can be. Proverbs says death and life are in the power of the tongue.

Jesus was showing us that God's laws aren't merely about controlling external behavior. God is interested in what is happening inside the human heart,  and suddenly the standard becomes much harder. Because maybe I've never physically murdered anyone, but have I hated? Have I wished someone harm? Have I torn someone apart with my words? Have I lied? Have I worshiped something above God? Have I made myself my own god? Now I have a problem, actually, we all do.

And This Is Where Jesus Becomes More Than a Teacher

If Christianity were simply: “Here are God's rules, follow them perfectly,” we would all be in trouble, because none of us has. That's why Jesus didn't merely come carrying another spiritual philosophy. He came to do something for humanity that humanity could not do for itself. He lived the life we could not perfectly live, and then He willingly gave His life.

I know sacrifice can sound barbaric to modern ears, but sacrifice is actually woven throughout human life. We sacrifice one thing for another constantly. Time for our children, money for something valuable, comfort for someone we love. Our desires for a greater purpose. But the cross is sacrifice on an entirely different level.

Jesus wasn't sacrificing convenience, He was giving Himself. The consequence of humanity's rebellion against the Source of life is death, and Jesus stepped into that consequence. The innocent for the guilty. The righteous for the unrighteous.

God did not stand at a distance demanding that humanity somehow climb its way back to Him. He came to us. That is the Gospel.

Body, Soul and Spirit

I've thought about this deeply because I watched my mother die. We had the incredible privilege of caring for her at home during her final days. I remember sitting there watching her. Her body was shutting down. Her awareness was fading, and yet she was still breathing. There was still life. That experience made me think deeply about what a human being actually is.

There is our physical bod, the part through which we touch, taste, hear, see, hurt and experience this physical world. There is our inner life, our thoughts, emotions, desires, memories and personality. Then Scripture also speaks about our spirit.

I can't put a human spirit underneath a microscope and show it to you, but Christianity says that human beings are more than biological machines, and Jesus wasn't merely concerned about making our physical lives more comfortable. He came to reconcile us to God and give us eternal life. Not simply endless biological existence. Life with God.

“But How Can I Trust the Bible?”

I understand this question too. How do I know any of this happened? One comparison I've thought about is September 11. My children weren't there. Future generations certainly weren't there, yet they can know that two planes struck the Twin Towers. Why? Because historical events leave evidence.There were witnesses,  records. There were people whose lives were permanently changed because of what they saw. We don't normally say, “I wasn't personally standing there, therefore it didn't happen.” We examine the evidence.

The same principle should apply when examining Jesus. The New Testament didn't begin as one leather-bound “religious book” dropped out of the sky. It contains Gospels, letters, historical narrative and testimony produced within the world of the earliest Christian movement. And something happened that transformed a terrified group of followers who had watched their leader be publicly executed. They began proclaiming that they had seen Him alive. Not as an idea, or  as an energy. Alive!

They ate with Him, talked with Him, touched Him, and then they spent their lives telling people what they believed they had witnessed.

You don't have to blindly accept Christianity.Investigate it, ask difficult questions, study the historical claims. Study archaeology and study the manuscripts. Read the Gospels yourself, but please don't reject Jesus without first discovering who He actually claimed to be.

Maybe This Is What Hosea Is Warning Us About

“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” Notice something else in Hosea 4. God doesn't merely say they didn't have knowledge. He says: “Because you have rejected knowledge…” There is a difference between never knowing something and being presented with something you refuse to examine.

That's why I'm writing this. Not to condemn you or to win a religious argument, and certainly not because I believe I have figured everything out. I'm writing this because I spent years looking for God through lenses that I now realize were distorting the One I was trying to find. I understand the attraction of spirituality, wanting something tangible. I understand talking about energy, vibration, the universe and consciousness. I understand wanting all religions to somehow fit together because it feels peaceful and inclusive, but eventually I had to ask myself a harder question: What if God isn't whoever I want Him to be? What if He has actually revealed Himself? And what if I've been looking everywhere except where He told me to look?

Jesus said: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”  John 14:6

That's an enormous claim. You can reject it, but first, understand it, because Jesus isn't saying: Find the right vibration, raise your frequency, become your own source, discover the god within you. He's saying: Come to Me.

To know Jesus is to begin seeing what the Father is like. So if you've never really studied Jesus, not the Jesus someone used to frighten you with, not the Jesus distorted by religious people, not the Jesus you heard about secondhand, I want to challenge you to do something.

Read Him for yourself.

Start with one of the Gospels. Watch how He treats women. read how He confronts religious hypocrisy, how He touches the rejected, how He responds to enemies,  how He speaks about God. Read how He suffers, and how He forgives. Watch what He says about Himself.

And then decide.

Because if Jesus truly is who He claimed to be, then knowing God isn't about finding the right spiritual practice. It isn't about discovering the correct religion or energy high enough to reach Him. God came down to reach us.

The Creator entered His creation.

The Artist stepped into the masterpiece, and He gave us a face through which we could finally understand the Father. His name is Jesus.

So when Hosea says, “Let us know; let us press on to know the LORD,”

I hear those words differently now. Know Him, don’t assume. Don't inherit someone else's opinion. Don't reject Him because of what religion did. Don't replace Him with the universe He created. Don't spend your entire life searching for the Source while refusing to look at the One who said He came directly from the Father. Seek Him, and Study Him. Know Jesus, because perhaps the greatest tragedy isn't that God has hidden Himself from humanity.

Perhaps it's that He revealed Himself, and we never took the time to look.

Gabby Rodriguez 🍓