How Can We Know God?

Can we really know God? How much of God can we really know? If God is so far above us, and He is, and so unlike us, as He is, how can we hope to know and understand Him?

First of all, we have to realize that for us to know God, it is necessary for God to reveal Himself to us.
Even when talking about revelation through nature, Paul says in Romans 1:19, we only know God that way because He shows Himself to us like that.

This idea is even more explicit when talking about salvation. In Matt 11:27 Jesus says that no one knows the Father except the Son, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him. 1 Cor 1:21 reminds us that ‘in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom.’

The necessity of God revealing Himself to us is also found in the fact that man in their sinfulness distort the truth about God. We need scripture, therefore, if we’re going to interpret God’s natural revelation correctly. And scripture comes from God!

And so because of our sinful blindness to the truth, and the fact that we can not ‘work out’ God by ourselves, we rely on God to make Himself known to us.

We can never fully understand God.

Because God is infinite and we are finite, because He is perfect and we are not, we can never fully understand Him. In that sense the answer to our question has to be no, we can’t fully know God. It’s not the case, however, that God is unable to be understood rightly, but we can never know Him fully.
Psalm 145:3 tells us that God’s greatness is unsearchable. Psalm 147:5 tells us that his understanding is beyond measure.

1 Cor 2:10-12 says no one comprehends the things of God except the Spirit of God.
These verses help us realize that not only can we not know God fully, but we can’t know even one thing fully about God, not even one part of His attributes can we fully understand. We can know that God is love, but we can never fully understand His love. We can know about God’s wisdom, but we can never fully understand God’s wisdom, we can know about God’s power, but we can never fully understand God’s power. We can only say with David in Ps 139:6 such knowledge is too wonderful for me, it is high, I can not attain it.’

This should make us humble. We can never say that we have arrived in the knowledge of God, like we might with math or science. We will always have something new about God to discover. This is true even in Heaven, even when we are freed from the blinding presence of sin we will still have plenty to discover about who God is.

If this is true in eternity, it must still be true in this life. Col 1:10 tells us that we should be continually increasing in the knowledge of God. Because we can never know God fully we can be growing in our knowledge of Him throughout our lives.

If we want to make knowledge of God a matter of pride, if we want to impress people with how much we know, we might be frustrated by the idea that we can never know God fully. But the truth is that it’s a wonderful thing to always be able to grow in the knowledge of God. God is a subject that we will never master, and that we can never hope to master. This should mean that our study of Him is never broing, for it will never reach an end.

We can know God truly

Even though we can not know God fully, we can know true things about Him.
All that scripture tells us about God is true. God is love, as 1 John 4:8 tells us, God is Spirit, as John 4:24 tells us, and God is righteous as Romans 3:26 tells us. Even though we can not know God’s love or righteousness fully, we can know that those things are really true.

Even more importantly, we know God Himself, through the Bible, not just facts about Him. This is an important distinction. I can tell you things about Rachel, and you would know about her, or I can introduce you to her, and you would truly know her. The Bible tells us true things about God so that we would know God, not so that we would know about Him.

Just because we can not know God fully doesn’t mean that we can not know Him.  Jeremiah 9:23-24 says: ‘thus saith the Lord, let not a wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let a rich man glory in his riches, nor a mighty man glory in his might, but let him that glorieth, glory in this, that he understand and knoweth me, that I am the Lord, which exercise lovingkindness, judgement and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight, saith the Lord.’

The Lord says that our sense of importance and joy should not come from what we can achieve, but from the fact that we know the Lord. John 17:3 says the know eternal life is to know Jesus. The promise of the New Covenant in Hebrews 8:11 is that ‘all shall know Him, from the greatest to the least.’

The fact that we do know God Himself is further demonstrated by the fact that the Christian life is about having a personal relationship with Jesus. This is far greater and more meaningful than simply possessing facts about Him. This relationship is the greatest blessing of the Christian life.