I’ve spent a lot of my life knowing about God but not actually knowing Him.
I was raised with a pretty common religious belief that God didn’t speak to us anymore and that relationship with God now meant learning facts about Him by reading the Bible and trying really hard to follow all the rules.
It’s laughable how unrealistic that thinking is!
Imagine applying these ideas to approach any other relationship in your life such as a husband, wife or friend.
What if you tried to function in your human relationships by attempting to just work hard, sacrifice, conform, or serve and please them? What if you just came to them and begged to be used a lot?
What if you came to them begging for them to fix you and make you clean?
Those would sound like red flags of a dysfunctional or abusive dynamic, not a healthy relationship.
Yet these are the many of the same religious catch- phrases I hear regularly in the church to describe relationship with God, and have prayed in the past as if this was normal.
The Hebrew word yada means “to know”.
It does not just mean intellectual knowing. From the passages where this word is used, we can also see that it’s used to express experiential knowledge with the five senses.
That is why the word yada is used in Genesis 4:1 where it says “Adam knew Eve.” Or Adam experienced Eve with his five senses.
That is why the same word yada is used in Exodus 33:13 when Moses asks God to show him His ways so he can know, or experience him.
Paul expresses his longing in Philippians 3:10 in the same way, “That I may know him, and the power of His resurrection.” We can clearly see that just like Moses, Paul is longing to experience the Lord, not just know more facts about Him.
In Western religious culture that is heavily influenced by Ancient Greek thought, a common teaching is that experiences, senses, and emotions are meant to be denied; but we were created with emotions, we were created with our five senses, and using them is exactly how we were meant to experience relationship with others, and also relate with God.
Just as a relationship with a spouse or friend would never work if we tried to deny our emotions and senses, a relationship with God will never work as it’s designed when we try to function without them.
When I first got married, our relationship began to be built on shared experiences.
Trust was built as I experienced my husband’s ability to always do what he said he would do. I was constantly in his presence, learning his habits, personality and character by experiencing them.
And while learning facts about my husband was important, learning those facts is not how I know him and who he is.
In the same way, our relationship with God is not about “living right” or following the rules we’ve learned in order to be right with Him, it’s about a relationship being built by shared experiences, as we constantly come into an awareness of His presence, learning His habits, personality and character and experiencing Him for who He is.
True relationship with God is what ultimately changes and transforms us as we go from knowing facts about Him to experiencing His nature with our five senses, the way we were created to.
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