I've cracked open a book called Feeling Like God by Chris Tiegreen. Lots of good stuff... it talks about the emotions of God as outlined in the Bible and tries to help the reader understand God on a more human level. This is supposed to help us build a stronger relationship with Him, which is a good deal, since we are God's children, after all. Everything we are is a dim, dim, dim shadow of Him....
But something stood out to me in the first chapter of the book that bugs me. It mentions "knowing" God as in studying Him through a book. Chris Tiegreen then goes on to say that it's not enough to know Him through the Bible, we must feel like God as well. Feeling like God is what helps us build a deeper relationship with Him. This shocked me because since coming into my own faith, I have always thought it was obvious that to know God is to feel God, and it has nothing to do with the Bible at all.
Let me ask a question: can you claim to know someone just by reading a few letters they sent you in the mail? If Angelina Jolie sent you a letter telling you about what she bought when she went shopping yesterday, does that mean you know her?
Can you know someone if you have never met them in person but talk to them on the phone every day? Perhaps a bit better.
Can you know someone if you've never been involved in a deeply romantic relationship with them? Especially a long marriage, including sex, children, and the whole nine yards? After a lifetime together, you can claim to know someone much, much better....
But knowing God, when you really know God, is much deeper than all of these things, because God first and foremost resides inside of you.
Knowing God is what real salvation/revelation is. In this book, Chris Tiegreen starts out by speaking of "knowing God" as though it has to do with humanly study and knowledge, but that's impossible. We can never truly comprehend God in our minds... and for God's sake, don't base your "knowing God" on "knowing the Bible." The Bible is nothing like God, not when it is taken as a whole.That's where the essential flaw lies in studying the Bible. Everything that comes before Jesus' teachings should really be thrown out, because all that stuff about "jealousy" and "rage" is simply not true.
When you really know God and you know God's presence in all things, you also realize that religion has very little to do with it. Imagine for a moment that your brother walks into the room. You know it's your brother; you can see him, hear him talk, maybe even smell him if he hasn't showered. Now imagine that you can know God in just the same way. You sit down in a room and you are silent, and suddenly you can feel a love, connection, and consciousness humming through everything. Knowing is an emotion, but it's more real than that. The faith of the saints and prophets is a feeling, it's an experience and a "knowing" that is absolutely incorruptible because it cannot be challenged. God walks into a room and you see Him. You can't know God much more than that.
You can know God on earth. God isn't sitting somewhere out there on some Heavenly throne. Even Christ said "The Kingdom of Heaven is inside of you." God is here and now. You know God when you can see God here and now.
Amen.
ReplyDeleteThere is no doubt that the Bible is inspired by the Holy Ghost. But we know about God by reading the Bible. If we want to know the Lord intimately, we need the Word engrafted into our spirit (the Lord Jesus Christ: The Word of God) through faith.
The more we die to self, the more God flows through us. I (self) must decrease and He (Christ) must increase.
Many Christians suffer from Bible-verses-on-the-brain sydrome. They think they have eternal life because they know the Scriptures. Some of the most satanic people I have ever met had their brains filled with Bible verses.
Do you know Jesus personally? Do you know Jesus intimately? Jesus is not some theological concept that theological aesthetes play with in their brains (theological hair splitting).
"We worship Him in Spirit and in truth."
It's a hard nut to crack. How do you tell people that the basic mindset they were raised with is, in fact, detrimental to their own relationship with God?
ReplyDeleteMaybe God knows how to crack a walnut without using force.
"The understanding of His words and the comprehension of the utterances of the Birds of Heaven are in no wise dependent upon human learning. They depend solely upon purity of heart, chastity of soul, and freedom of spirit."
ReplyDeleteYou must obey God's commandments because of your love for His Beauty.
Jesus was the Living Word. The Manifestations of God are the Living Word.Their Knowledge is the knowledge of being. They are divine Physicians Who have the remedy for an ailing humanity. They are the Perfect Man. The Unknowable Essence, God, the Infinite, is beyond the capability of His creatures to understand, but He has sent His Manifestations to reveal Himself. So when They say that when you see Them you have seen God, They say the Truth. And when They say They are but men and nothing before God, They speak the Truth. They are pure and perfect mirrors. I would be blinded if I tried to look at the sun. But a perfect pure mirror held up to the sun reflects the sun and its light and heat and I say I see the sun. And the sun does not descend into the mirror but has a connection to the mirror just as the soul has a connection to the body.