Understanding and Knowing God

By Roan Rickard

Though unseen and unheard, the God of the Bible exists. Religious wars and atrocities in the history of the Christian West may cause many to disbelieve in God or see Him in a negative light. God did not cause these horrors, nor is He responsible for these or any other sins of man. God is in fact love as John described Him. Much of popular culture today reviles God based upon spiritually naïve opinions. What of pain, suffering, inequity, and injustices? How can we say that God is love in the face of this reality? Understanding such difficult questions requires development of a spiritually informed perspective. Consider if the God of the Bible exists, God Almighty, our creator, surely He must be competent to reveal Himself to us. Indeed, He is competent, and biblical scripture reveals God to mankind. Yet God is an elegant personality, and scripture is an elegant message. Knowing Him and comprehending His scripture require effort. The mendicant seeking God and studying scripture must yield heart and mind to renewal, unlearn many biases, learn new and astonishing ideas, and become susceptible to God's Spirit, informing, retraining, and transforming us. Spiritual objectivity is possible. This book is the product of one adult life spent tenaciously seeking God. The author declares that the biblical God does exist. He is understandable and knowable. Life with God, with God dwelling with us and within us, is our greatest birthright. By God's design, we are all children of God. As children of God, we have a glorious spiritual inheritance available to us if only we can lift our eyes upon it and make it our own. This book has been written to help people everywhere cut through the philosophical, theological, social, cultural, and spiritual static of our times that they might walk with God as Enoch, Abraham, Moses, David, or Elijah walked. Our intimacy with God can and should be as vibrant and constant as any Bible hero we could name. To this end, bringing people into not only relationship but also spiritual intimacy with God, this book was written.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781641910941

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Spiritual Human Condition

Our Dilemma

Consider this situation into which we are born. Naked and without knowledge, we enter the world. Given enough years of life, questions arise that demand our attention. Parents, peers, and mentors present their ideas and beliefs, their religion, and reasoning to us when we are children. From these, we receive some explanation for life’s great mysteries. We grow up, form opinions, and draw our own conclusions about religious and philosophical questions.

Thoughts of these questions are peripheral to the concrete issues of the day as we live day by day, but they are always there. They whisper in our soul. They assert influence as we mature through childhood. They bear upon formation of our conscience and character. They cry out in moments of difficulty and crisis. Their relevance may be most keenly felt in times of danger, despair, or desperate need or as death approaches. We may lack poetry or narrative to describe questions that stir in our hearts and minds. Nonetheless, deep within ourselves, we are all philosophers.

Our first mentors, usually our parents, feed us their understanding of life. We absorb their mental and emotional state. We learn their views and opinions, certainty of conviction, lack of conviction, attitudes, fears, faith, and beliefs. We learn much by domestic association with our families from those with whom we share deep emotions in the intimacy and friction of family life. We also, typically, learn secular and or religious curriculums in formal deliberate education, depending on the laws, beliefs, and customs of our family and our culture. Teachers present us with knowledge, important ideas thought to be necessary wisdom and enlightenment. This knowledge swirls in our minds. Our pliable childish reasoning and emotions absorb a barrage of ideas and impressions.

After a brief childhood, we make our way through puberty and adolescence and endure our metamorphosis into adults. We contend for our social and cultural standing as we pass through life’s phases. We deal with making money and supporting ourselves. We grapple with our sexuality. Most of us date and mate according to the pattern of our native culture. Beyond these issues, the spiritual part of our nature and our higher reasoning struggles with questions. We ponder good and evil, right and wrong, truth and justice, politics and economics, sexuality, morality, promiscuity and marriage, war and murder, life and death, wisdom and folly, equity and equality, love and hate, eternity, infinity, divinity, and existence. To help us with our private inner becoming, we have available to us massive amounts of thought recorded in books. The religious, historical, and philosophical acumen of the ages, on every conceivable subject, are available to study. To whose voice shall we listen? Where do we find truth and wisdom? The sheer weight of ideas available is daunting. We triage the issues from time to time and pursue that which is compelling. We draw conclusions and form perspectives. Pragmatism, appetites, issues, emotions, imagination, religion, and philosophy dance together in the soul’s theater. Through contemplation of many things, we learn to live with ourselves and others.

Life feeds, mauls, wounds, and molds us. We emerge as adults, formed and driven by our unique gifts, temperament, education, and socialization. We become people on a tiny planet, drifting through enormous unfathomable space prepared in some sense to think, feel, and live for a time. We are spiritual beings capable of abstract thought and reflection. According to the Christian faith, we are eternal souls living in mortal bodies in a temporal world. Within that faith, we bear the gifts, opportunities, and responsibilities of beings made in the image of God. Given this strange and remarkable life, with so many religious and philosophical alternatives available to us, what do we do with this bizarre opportunity? How do we now understand our context and our circumstances?

What if we want to verify the religious ideas and opinions of those who trained and indoctrinated us? Can we go beyond the understanding we received from others? Yes. Of course, we can. God has intended that each of us, according to the gifts He has given us, would take our unique opportunity and supply a measure of personal spiritual initiative and responsibility to seek Him. We may search for more qualified mentors to help us find God and truth. God has seeded the world with spiritual laborers. These individuals have varying gifts and degrees of spiritual competence, but we still need them. The following famous Proverb succinctly tells us of our need for human interaction if we are to learn and grow.

Iron sharpens iron, So one man sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)

Our objective is to develop intimacy with God—to spiritually discern and enter the kingdom of God. In seeking after God, there is work to do. No one else can do this seeking—this work is for us. Jesus spoke in Matthew chapter 9 of the harvest being plentiful but the workers few. Spiritual mentors supplied by God in each generation labor in the plentiful harvest. What is this metaphorical harvest? It is people, made in the image of God, struggling with the philosophical, theological, historical, and cultural static of the world, wondering, What is truth? We are part of the harvest as we begin to learn of God. We become laborers in the harvest as we spiritually develop in the grace and knowledge of God. All spiritual growth and development comes from God as He places His hand on us and within us. God gives the growth so that no one in the field may boast. So not only do we have humility because all things come from God, but also we have great confidence because all things come from God.

Jesus taught His disciples to seek, knock, and ask. Divine advocacy for this attitude is obvious throughout the Old and New Testament scripture. God wants us to seek and grope after God as the Apostle Paul put it in his speech to the philosophers in Athens (see Acts chapter 17). The biblical admonition that we should seek after God is given to all people. Life’s God-given spiritual opportunities are not reserved for a subset of people who are somehow superior and elite. We are all children of God, and we are all brethren. We are all eternal beings. As such, we are all spiritually elite.

Our Imperative

To get along socially within our native culture and, spiritually, mentally, and emotionally within ourselves, we need to decide what we think and what we believe about religious and philosophical questions in a broad and deeply personal sense. We build the fabric of our personality, in part, out of our living ideas and beliefs. We need to handle our deepest questions thoughtfully, carefully, and deliberately to coexist in our native culture. We are social animals. There is a natural communal pressure to adapt and conform to family and native culture. We also need to be true to ourselves. Our best effort to conform to our native culture and family may conflict with our best effort to resolve life’s most difficult and ponderous questions. God exists, and we must handle these questions well to develop intimacy with Him.

Consider the example of Abraham, the father of God’s chosen people, the Jews. We know from a passage near the end of the book of Joshua that Abraham came out of a family that worshiped idols, false gods, in his hometown of Ur in Mesopotamia.

Joshua said to all the people, "Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘From ancient times your fathers lived beyond the River, namely, Terah, the father of Abraham and the father of Nahor, and they served other gods. (Joshua 24:2)

The scripture does not tell us how Abraham came to know and worship the one true God when he came out of a family and a culture that worshiped idols, but he did. That may suggest a quality in Abraham that caused God to choose him to be the father of the Jews through whom the Messiah would come into the world.

We can choose to live in concert with or in resistance to our native culture and heritage conforming to or resisting accepted ideas. Developing intimacy with God must be our highest priority. Consider how God has arranged the exquisite privacy of our minds. We can think anything we choose without revealing thoughts, and we can reveal and discuss thoughts as we please. Our mental faculties as spiritual beings and our opportunity to use them are a marvel of creation. God equipped us for both inner privacy of thoughts and outward expression of ideas. These are mechanisms of communal peace and spiritual striving. We see the divine wisdom and genius of God in this arrangement.

Beyond the immediate demands of our physical and communal life, we do well if we invest effort in our inner spiritual life. Our souls have a deeper urge, a spiritual longing to understand who we are and why we exist. The spiritual hunger for understanding springs from our spiritual constitution as beings made in the image of God. In Ecclesiastes, Solomon wrote of the God-given spiritual and philosophical curiosity that lives within us. He described it as follows:

What profit is there to the worker from that in which he toils? I have seen the task which God has given the sons of men with which to occupy themselves. He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end. (Ecclesiastes 3:9–11)

God has made everything appropriate in its time He has also set eternity in our hearts is a poetic way of describing how God has orchestrated this life for us with concern for our spiritual development. It expresses the full breadth of our God-given spiritual curiosity installed within us by God. God fashioned us to ponder eternity and infinity. God set eternity in our hearts to point us toward a sense of a higher reality. God gives us this choice, to give thought and effort to this spiritual imperative and to seek God and truth or consciously set the matter aside and ignore it. How shall we ignore eternity set in our hearts?

How shall we understand Solomon’s assertion so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end? Our knowledge of transcendent spiritual existence beyond time and space, matter, and energy may have physical limits. However, we can learn important truths about God, our Father, and our host in this reality. Eternity set in our hearts reaches out to seek God knowledge. The soul’s God-given spiritual inclination heeds and enforces this longing. Our souls yearn to learn transcendent spiritual truths—to learn about God. Science may never be able to explain creation and existence. However, we can spiritually understand the divine character of God our Father. God made us in His image. In grasping God as our Father, we come to understand ourselves, our context and spiritual life. God has given us spiritual curiosity, eternity set in our hearts that we might develop spiritually as His children. God wrought this for our benefit.

Human life is a multifaceted equation, an abstraction that people of good will attempt to calculate according to the uniqueness of their gifts and circumstances. Our lives are an elegant riddle, a journey through a maze, an exquisite existential opportunity, given to us by God, handled a bit differently by each of us. How do we draw reliable religious and philosophical conclusions in this mysterious context? What do we make of it all?

Mortality and Transcendent Meaning

Our higher spiritual consciousness knows God exists. If we reflect on our mortality and listen to the spiritual voice whispering within us, we realize life is more than vain and temporal pursuit of passion, possessions, or power. What then do we make of eternity and infinity? How shall we understand our own existence? What do we make of souls, spirits, and thoughts of an afterlife? How shall we settle what our hearts and minds may wonder or believe about heaven and hell? How shall we face death and the certain decomposition of our frail bodies? How shall we prepare to meet God beyond this life?

We may wonder if religious notions of immortality and afterlife are merely our way of soothing the unbearable thought that we are mortal. Are we only flesh, only temporary beasts of the field? When we subdue our God sense, we increasingly doubt the existence of God. We lose connection to God’s reality. We may then wonder: Are we no more significant than an insect or a microbe? We wonder if our flickering consciousness is merely a cosmic aberration, a pointless irrelevant pulse of energy. These are spiritual questions. They whisper of eternity set in our hearts. We must answer these questions to our soul’s satisfaction. The writer of the book of Hebrews tells us the following:

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the men of old gained approval. (Hebrews 11:1–2)

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Judeo-Christian faith is confidence in the reality and promises of God. Intellectual striving alone cannot develop this confidence. We must employ spiritual faculties difficult to define or explain. Faith is that leap to certainty of the divine reality.

God expects people to grasp His reality based on spiritual faculties. Developing faith involves spiritual cognizance. Spiritual cognition has a quality of certainty of divine reality not seen by the senses. God designed this circumstance. We must know God in spiritual sensitivity, rather than by sight or mere reason. As the scripture says, For we walk by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7). Knowing God in this way substantiates our value and purpose. It fulfills our souls longing for transcendent meaning. It is a fulfillment of our inner person far beyond passion, possessions, or power gained in this fleeting life. It satisfies our questions of mortality and eternity. The knowledge of God responds to these, our soul’s higher spiritual needs.

Identity Crisis

We may experience a shock to our sense of identity when we consider that we live our lives on our tiny home planet floating through unfathomably vast seemingly endless space and time. We know we are small creatures, and our little lives brief like sparks flying up from a campfire in the grand scheme of all that is. Yet our soul wishes to believe we matter and that our lives have transcendent value. We need a foundational understanding of what we are in a transcendent spiritual sense. Our soul’s demanding that we find that foundation can be maddening.

When I came of age, my adolescent soul was spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually empty. My imagination during childhood was rich and vivid. I preferred my imagination over books, so I did not read much as a boy. I was a poor student in school, an ignorant boy with no clear idea of reality beyond immediate daily life in my little hometown. I grew up a secular humanistic heathen at home and in public school. Common sense is a strong work ethic and belief that obeying civil law produces happiness characterized my family values. We did not go to church. We did not discuss spiritual ideas in our home. My formative training lacked a spiritual foundation. I came of age spiritually and intellectually destitute when as an adolescent, my spiritual dawn broke. Waves of questions challenging my self-concept began to crash on the shore of my soul. A sense of deep spiritual need I scarcely understood overwhelmed me. When I was seventeen, my God sense, eternity set in my heart, asserted itself within me. Unprepared for these irrepressible thought convulsions within, I suffered a massive identity crisis. Philosophical, theological, and cultural static shrouded my naïve soul. This identity crisis produced an agony in my heart and mind, demanding focused attention. This God-given pain triggered a process within me. The process led me out of the darkness and into the spiritual light of faith.

Each of us has a unique developmental story. Mine involved childhood ignorance, emptiness, and lostness and a colossal adolescent identity crisis that led me to God. Your story may be very different. Nonetheless, God is mindful of us all. He loves us. Before our conception, God knew us. Before our formation in our mother’s womb, God saw us. He permitted us to come into being. Through every moment of our lives, God holds us in His hand. He administers our existence. Personally, that thought is glorious and mortifying—glorious because God intimately attends to me; mortifying because God saw every sin, failure, and flaw in my character and actions. God knows every vile, foolish, and shameful thing I have done, said, or been. Nonetheless, He loves me. He has also seen me cry out in repentance, beg for forgiveness, and read Bibles until one after the other they fell apart trying to understand God and this life.

My adult life has been an odyssey of learning, studying history and philosophy and discussing ideas with people from all over the world as I have made my living in information technology. Associating for over twenty-five years with bright foreign nationals from Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, and Islamic backgrounds gave me rich learning opportunities. To learn, grow, mature, and improve myself, I dared discuss religious and political questions in the workplace, often treading upon political correctness. I willingly accepted humiliation, revealing my ignorance that I might learn. I have labored to make amends for my ignorant, spiritually failed youth. Seeking God through many avenues, I pursued a quest to become a better man. God sustained me through this striving. We all have a developmental story. We all have a spiritual career and a spiritual résumé. If you are going to read my writing, I felt the reader had a right to know why reading my ideas might be worth your while.

God knows all people as He knew Enoch, Moses, David, Jeremiah, and many other biblical heroes. He knows Roan, and He knows you. Our opportunity and biblical heroes’ opportunities for relationship with God are not different. True, God related intimately with selected individuals in biblical history to accomplish specific purposes. However, God loves us all. God is our Father. We are all His children. This is the larger message of scripture. That mythical enlarged view of biblical characters is an illusion. David poetically described God’s providential intimacy with his life, his being, in what we call Psalm 139. David did not write Psalm 139 to exalt himself telling of his special importance to God. By the inspiration of God, David wrote this Psalm to tell us that we are all known and important to God.

My identity crisis was a phase I had to go through to propel me out of ignorance and darkness toward seeking and finding God. It must be that we each come to moments where our God sense urges us to seek Him. The author is not so self-centric as to believe all people must experience an identity crisis or developmental process like mine. It is an individual odyssey, but God is God to all of us. It is truly glorious and astonishing to consider that God almighty is mindful of you and God almighty is mindful of me.

Jesus exhibited a sense of humor explaining to His disciples God’s concern for each of us and His attention to the details of our lives.

Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. "So do not fear; you are more valuable than many sparrows. (Matthew 10:28–31)

Jesus tells His disciples with tongue-in-cheek humor, You are more valuable than many sparrows. He must have been grinning or maybe chuckling when He said that. God has a sense of humor. The very hairs of our heads are all numbered. God gives us freedom to live our lives, but He is intimate with every detail of our lives even while remaining unheard and unseen by us. He remains invisible to us that we might respond to His reality according to spiritual sensitivity rather than by compulsion of His physical presence. He upholds and minutely manages our existence yet remains silent and out of sight, giving us the opportunity to choose to live our lives in Him. Those who choose to diligently seek God, responding to the quaking spiritual urge latent within all of us, will find the glory and the joy of life lived intimately with God. God is closer to us than the blood in our veins. God is pleased when we choose God, that is, we choose to seek Him. God supplies the circumstances of life that will make it possible for the soul that chooses to seek Him to find Him. Our unique gifts and circumstances require our developmental process to be unique. What God will do within the privacy and uniqueness of our lives to bring us toward Him no other person can predict or prescribe. Consider what Jesus told Nicodemus about the impact of the Spirit of God upon a person.

Nicodemus said to Him, "How can a man be