Get to know God

One afternoon, a little boy sitting at his kitchen table was feverishly coloring in his notebook. His mother, curious at what had captivated her son, asked him what he was drawing. Without lifting his eyes from the page, the boy replied by saying, he was drawing God. Smiling at her son’s naïve nature and childish attempt at the impossible, the mother gently said son, “you can’t draw God, no one knows what He looks like.” To which the boy responded, “they will, when I’m done!”

We can’t help but smile at a cute story such as this. Yet, I would suggest to you that many people, in fact probably all of us, have done just like this little boy, and invented a god of our own imagination. No, not with crayons or pencils, but with our minds, we create an image of what we think God is like. Most often however, the god we envision is very different from the God of the Bible. It is human nature to think that God is a lot like us. But He isn’t. His ways are not our ways, nor are His thoughts, our thoughts. Isaiah 55:9 says this, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Truly God is far beyond the comprehension of mortal men.

My question to you is this, do you know God? By that I mean, do you know the One True Living God as revealed in Holy Writ. Do you have a saving relationship with the Only God who is God. If not, I plead with you to get to know God. But how? You might ask. How can I know God?

To begin with, don’t fool yourself into thinking you can figure out this “god-thing” by yourself, you can’t. Let me be clear, no one can capture an accurate idea of who God is, and what He is like without Divine revelation. God cannot be known by natural deduction or human reasoning. To truly learn of God, you must first become a Christian. Without apology, let me state that again, to know God you must become a disciple of Christ. Without saving faith in the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth, you will never rightly grasp the Godhead. Sure, you can go to church, you can listen as people describe God and you can even read the Bible, but without faith in the finished work of Christ, you do not know God, nor can you. 1 Corinthians 2:14 states, “the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” Simply stated, spiritual truth can only be understood by those with spiritual life. The Bible makes it clear that all people are born spiritually dead and do not have the ability to understand spiritual truth. Without the illuminating power of the Holy Spirit of God revealing divine doctrine to you, your sin-sickened soul will never grasp God. So first things first, to get to know God, you must believe that He is who He claims to be and has done what He has said He would do.

Having said that, if you are a Christian and you have been born-again, I challenge you to get to know God better. Don’t be satisfied, don’t ever be satisfied with your current knowledge of God. No matter how long you’ve been a Christian, there is more to learn. Some of the Apostle Peter’s final inspired words were these, “but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18). You hear that, Christian? GROW. Keep growing, keep learning. Never be content with your knowledge of God. Learn all you can of Him. Yet, I feel compelled to state the obvious, the only way, I repeat, the only way to learn of God is by saturating yourself with Scripture. Period.

If you want to know God better, you have got to dig deeper into His Word. With the dawn of this New Year, let me challenge you to commit to reading and studying the Bible as much as you possibly can. Did you know that in only 15 minutes a day, you can read the entire Bible in one year? If you truly want to know more of your God, you have got to read and study His Word. There simply is no other substitute. If you want to know Christ more fully, prioritize the reading, meditating and memorizing of the Bible.

Believer and unbeliever, I urge you to learn all you can about the God of the Bible. Not the finite fickle god we are prone to construct in our fallen minds. Instead, get to know the Sovereign Gracious God of the Bible. Who does as He pleases, when He pleases and to whom He pleases. I implore you to study the God that loves His people with an everlasting inseparable love. Dear reader, get to know the Triune God who made a way for wicked sinners to enter into a holy paradise. To truly do this, we must be ready to dismiss any preconceived notions we have that paints an image of God that differs from the Bible and we must saturate our lives with Scripture.

May 2023 be the year you come to know God, and come to know Him more deeply and meaningfully. Don’t rely on your own imagination and sketch a skewed view of God, turn to the Word and learn of Him. It will be well with your soul.

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