Is God Even Knowable (John 17:1-8; 16:12-20) • Geoff Bradford

We're gonna transition to the sermon. If you want to find the passage for today on the screen behind me or in your own device, we're gonna be in John chapter 17 and then John chapter 16. We're reading these out of order, but as is our custom, we read God's word aloud together. So if you would join your voices with mine.

Jesus spoke these things, looked up to heaven, and said, "Father, the hour has come. Glorify your son so that the son may glorify you, since you gave him authority over all people, so that he may give eternal life to everyone you have given him. This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and the one you have sent, Jesus Christ. I have glorified you on the earth by completing the work you gave me to do. Now, Father, glorify me in your presence with that glory I had with you before the world existed. I have revealed your name to the people you gave me from the world. They were yours, you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you, because I have given them the words you gave me. They have received them and have known for certain that I came from you. They have believed that you sent me." — John 17:1-8

"I still have many things to tell you, but you can't hear them now. When the spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth. For he will not speak on his own, but he will speak whatever he hears. He will also declare to you what is to come. He will glorify me because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you. Everything the Father has is mine. That is why I told you that he takes from what is mine and will declare it to you. In a little while, you will no longer see me. Again, in a little while, you will see me." Then some of his disciples said to one another, "What is this he's telling us? In a little while, you will not see me. Again, in a little while, you will see me. And because I am going to the father?" They said, "What is this he is saying in a little while? We don't know what he's talking about." Jesus knew they wanted to ask him, and so he said to them, "Are you asking one another about what I said? In a little while, you will not see me again. In a little while, you will see me. Truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, you will become sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn to joy." — John 16:12-20

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Is God Knowable?

Honest question: Have you ever wondered if all our talking about God isn't a figment of our own imagination? There got to be more honest people in the church than this. Have you ever wondered if all of our talking and speaking about God isn't some bit of evolutionary hardware that's sort of working its way out of the gene pool over time, or our collective desires for there to be a divine being? Anybody?

Good. I would guess that just about every eight to ten year old who's grown up in church has sat in a church like this and said, "What are we really doing here? Is this real?"

There's a professor named William Lane Craig, and I like the way he puts this. He asks the question: Is all of our looking for God, trying to know God, like a person staring down a well on a sunny day? And they look all the way down the well, and they see a reflection of something that looks a lot like them. Is that what this is?

We're in a sermon series this winter called "No Bad Questions." It comes from my conviction that in the church, no matter what you feel about this, there should be no bad questions. You should be able to ask anything you want to. It should be fair game to say, "I don't know if I'm down for this, or if I believe this, or I'm not sure I can buy in. I need to understand."

Over the course of this winter, we're taking on a question a week, inviting you to submit questions. We have a schedule of the different topics we're covering in this topical sermon series. Each week on social media, I'm going to respond to a question that somebody sends in from our congregation. We did that the last two weeks and we continue to do so.

Last week, we asked this question: "Why isn't God more observable or provable?" And this week, closely related to that one, is this question: "Is God even knowable?"

At the heart of that question is a stance related to God that many people find themselves in—agnosticism, which comes from a Greek word, agnosis, meaning "not know." Even though a lot of people call it agnosticism, it's not really an ism. It's not really a belief system. It's a statement: "I don't know if God is knowable." It's not saying necessarily there is no God. There are agnostics who can be theists—you believe that there is a God in the universe, but we don't know it. You think about him, or her, or it. Or there can be a stance that's atheistic: "No, I don't think there is a God out there."

Agnostics appear in all kinds of forms, and I want to say this to all of us: Every person, Christian or not, has sort of an innate natural agnosticism. If you are a Christian who's professed Christ, there are days you wake up and you're like, "You know what? I don't know." And for honest, we wrestle with that. That's hard. So it's an important question for those who don't claim to know anything about God or say God's unknowable. Even for those who are Christians: is God knowable?

Now, of course, you can know a lot about God. There are a lot of people who know a lot about theology, about the lives of famous Christians throughout the centuries. There are a lot of people who know a lot about godliness, how you're supposed to behave. And yet the word "know" in the Bible is a heavily weighted word which means intimacy. We read in the first chapters of the Bible that Adam knew his wife. There's a level of sexual intimacy implied there. So knowing in the Bible, let's just be really straight on this, is not knowing about—knowing facts and figures about, familiarity, cursory knowledge. It is knowing in the way that we talk about: "I want to know someone else in a deep friendship." It's knowing.

So, can we really know God? Today, we're going to look at a section of teaching—some of the longest parts of Jesus' teaching right before he went to the cross in the gospel of John. We're going to look at this passage, and here's what I want you to hear from the text. Three things: that God is relational in his being, that we can know God, and that God wants us to know God.

A Relational God

Let's look at this together. Now, you may think I'm completely crazy here to try to tackle one difficult topic by introducing another one, but I'm going to talk about the Trinity—which nobody really understands. So let's just dive in. Maybe a little crazy, but the Trinity is a foundational doctrine of Christianity: that God is three and God is one. God exists in three persons, and Jesus is teaching here in his prayer and highlights these three members of the Trinity. Jesus is praying to his Father. He refers to himself as the Son. He talks about the Spirit.

So look, what does he say about each of these? The Father is the one who gives authority, withholds authority, gives glory, withholds glory. He seems to be the source. The Spirit is the Spirit of truth—the individual personal presence of God in the life of individual Christians who guides in all truth, who speaks, who declares what Jesus has done and says to individuals. And then Jesus refers to himself as the Son. He's situated here in this passage to us as a historical person who existed in a particular time and place, who spoke a particular language. He says he's about to go away, which is clearly revealed here as language about his imminent death on the cross to be with the Father.

Now, there have been lots of kinds of attempts at depicting—especially in Vacation Bible Schools—what the Trinity is and how it works. You know, there's the water example. There's the ice version. There's the water vapor version. There's the liquid version. That's actually a heresy called modalism because what's pictured here is not God changing forms but three persons, one substance. Some people have said peanut butter, jelly sandwich. You got your bread. You got your peanut butter. You got your jelly. That's a little better. But all of those in our attempts to wrap our heads around the fact that God is revealed in Scripture as three in one—three distinct persons and yet they're still one.

Now, why am I bringing this up? How does this help us get to the knowability of God? It helps us immensely because we understand that in his very essence, God is relationship. God is in relationship with himself from all eternity. God is at his very core, as he's revealed in his essence, apart from creation. He is in relationship. He is relational. God didn't create the universe in order to start having relationships. God didn't make us in order to take a first stab at relationship. This is the very fabric of what it means when we talk about who God is in Christian theology.

Now, one writer—Michael Reeves, who's a British writer—he says the problem actually with the other alternatives out there on the market, the single-person deities out there, is that they don't have this great benefit: they are not in their being relational gods. There's no ontological reason for relationship. He says this way: "No single-person gods, having spent eternity all by themselves, are inevitably self-centered beings, so it becomes hard to see why they would ever cause anything to exist. Wouldn't the existence of the universe maybe be an irritating distraction for a single-person god whose greatest pleasure is just looking in the mirror? Creating just looks like a deeply unnatural thing for such a single-person deity to do."

And if such gods do create, they must do so out of an essential neediness or desire to use what they've made for their own ends. Everything changes though when you get a Trinitarian god. Father, son, and spirit who's essentially not lonely from all eternity but essentially loving and being loved and enjoying and being enjoyed from all eternity. That's at the root of who he is. So, when he creates, he does so to share in that, not to get something from it.

You see how the relational nature of the trinity makes possible for relationship with god but also tells us something about what the Christian faith is for. What your faith, if you're a Christian, is for. What is your Christian life like? What's the shape of it? In the end, it depends on what you think god is like. Who god is drives everything.

So, what is the human problem? Is it that we've strayed away from some moral code? Or is it that we have strayed away from a god who loves us? What is salvation? Is it merely that we're brought back to being law abiding citizens? Or is that we're brought back as loving loved children? What is the Christian life about? Is it about behavior or is it about relationship?

Christianity is not about a lifestyle change. It's about knowing a god who is himself relationship. There's a theologian named J. I. Packer. He puts it this way in his book, Knowing God: What are we made for? To know God. What aim should we set for ourselves in life? To know God. What is the eternal life that Jesus gives? To know God. What is the best thing in life? To know God.

Can We Really Know God?

I got a great question a couple weeks ago. What's the mechanism by which we know god? How do we say we can do this? Some of you would say, well, this is all well and good, but this is abstract theology. Thanks, preacher guy, but it's no use. I can't know god like the people in the Bible knew god. I can't walk and talk face to face with Jesus. If I could, that would be a game changer. But that's not where I live. I can't really know god.

Well, here are a couple of personal testimonies. First from scripture, then from current. All over the Bible, we read the personal testimonies of those who did not know god face to face, knew him only by faith, and yet would say, I know god.

There are people like Moses, Enoch, Adam, Eve, the 12 disciples who did know god face to face. But here's one who didn't: King David. If you listen to the Psalms, David would say things like:

Taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the one who takes refuge in him. I sought the Lord, and he answered me and rescued me from all my fears. — Psalm 34

And again:

I will bless the Lord who counsels me. Even at night when my thoughts trouble me, I always let the Lord guide me because he's at my right hand, I will not be shaken. You reveal a path for me. In your presence is abundant joy. At your right hand are eternal pleasures forevermore. — Psalm 16

And another:

God, you are my God. My soul longs for you. My body faints for you in a land that's dry and desolate without water. I gaze on you in the sanctuary to see your strength and your glory. My lips will glorify you because your faithful love is better than life. — Psalm 63

Or take Paul. Paul had a one-time vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus. He didn't walk with him, didn't have conversations with him regularly. Yet he writes:

I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord. — Philippians 3

God is a speaking god. God is a relating god. Humans can know god—not just data about god or studying god from far off—but these and so many more people in scripture saying, I know god. I know god.

Well, some of you are like, well, of course that's what they say in the Bible. What do we expect? So here's a modern testimony for you.

If you're a reader, one book that I would highly recommend as I was studying for this series is a book that came out in the last couple of years by a British writer and journalist named Francis Spufford, called Unapologetic. Just a little word of caution: he's a Brit, so his language is not very clean. This is PG-13. And I don't agree with everything in this book, but it's a helpful book.

It's about how he is a believer in England, modern-day England. He's embarrassed by how embarrassing the church is, and how embarrassing it is in a culture that's way less Christian than ours, that's filled with a rise of new atheism, which is everywhere in England. He's like, it's super embarrassing to go to church. And when I say, I am a believer in God and the Lord Jesus Christ, people look at me as if I've lost my mind completely.

But the subtitle of this book says this: "Why despite everything Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense?" In the book, he's describing his journey from agnosticism to belief. The book doesn't try to prove that god exists with silly platitudes, but it's like this.

He says, "I know God. I really know the God of the universe as he's revealed in the Bible." And he's writing to not churchy people. He's writing in a journalistic tone. And like I said, it's rough and ready. But it's really helpful because this is a lot of what we wrestle with. Not whether God is real in some ultimate sense out there, but can I know God? Is that possible?

Of course, knowing God is really different from knowing anything else or anyone else. J.I. Packer puts this in his book Knowing God. He says there's a difference between knowing an abstract concept like a foreign language, or an inanimate object, or a person, or God. So let's walk through each of those.

Inanimate object: You can say, "I know the North Carolina Museum of Art." You've been there. You may be familiar with and can even identify by sight some of the paintings from there. You can tell me about the layout of the galleries. How you know the North Carolina Museum of Art is by experience. You've walked around. You can read a book on the North Carolina Museum of Art, the history of it. That's how you know that.

Knowing a foreign language: You learn an abstract idea by taking a class over and over, applying yourself to the learning. These things are on the simpler level of knowing.

What about a horse? Knowing a horse is exponentially more difficult because it's not just saying, "I know the concept of a horse. I can identify a horse." It's saying, "I also know how a horse might react in various situations. I understand what horses do and how they behave—not just what they do normally but what they do when they're spooked, what they do when they're tired or sick." It's exponentially harder.

Exponentially more difficult is knowing a person. So let's take Keanu Reeves. Keanu Reeves is famous for being a normal person, right? Rides the subway, supposedly makes himself available to people. So you could say, "I know Keanu Reeves because I've watched a lot of his movies and I've heard him talk. I can even do an impression of him." Or you might say, "I know Keanu Reeves because I met him on the subway one day, and we had a conversation." Those are all ways we use the word "know" linguistically, but knowing a person is much harder than knowing an object or an animal or an idea because a person has the ability to hide things about themselves. They have the ability to not disclose, to pretend they're one way when they're really another way. So it takes a long time to know a person.

The Challenge of Knowing God

What about the God of the universe? It is, again, exponentially more difficult to know the God of the universe—an omnipotent, infinite, eternal, omnipresent, omniscient being. Theologians say that God is on some level always going to be incomprehensible to us. Nobody can write a book and say, "That's all there is to know about God." God is an eternal being. There's a sense in which we can't fully know God. There's a sense in which all of what Christian theology says eternity is for is because it's going to take that long for us to really know God in all the ways—in all of who he is, in the depths of who he is. And that's a mystery and that's a wonder. And that's a delight.

But God has also chosen to reveal himself to us. There has been a purposeful disclosure of God in human history—in the person, in a book, in the fellowship of other Christians, in so many ways. God has chosen to disclose himself to us.

But news flash, I'm not going to tell you anything very exciting or new about that this morning. How does God reveal himself? In the pages of a very complicated book, as I said two weeks ago. In the person of Jesus Christ who appeared in history as a historical figure. In the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit inside of believers. In other words, all areas which I can feel some of you rolling your eyes right now. Like, "Tell me something I didn't know, pastor. That's not very helpful."

So let me flip the tables on you. How would you prefer God had done this? Imagine this with me for a second this morning. What would you prefer God had done? If you were an invisible spirit—omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent—that was you, how would you choose to reveal yourself to your creation? I would hazard that you would want both people to have some kind of objective reality and some kind of subjective experience. You would want some kind of solid person who's a representative of God, who is God himself, who you could study in the history books who lived a public life.

If God were to come in human form, they would have to be born on a particular date, in a particular nation. They would speak, grow up speaking a particular language. And they would have to die because that's what humans do. In other words, they can't just keep reappearing every generation throughout history. That means we don't have one God. We have a whole slew of them.

But if we want proof that there's a god as a historical person, that's what you would probably do if you were a deity. And then, I would think you would want not only that objective reality of that god appearing, I think you would want some eyewitness statements about that god. You would want maybe some firsthand reports and not all reconciled and neat and made to look nice but just presented in history. You would want testimony of people who had known him or known people who had known him as close in time as possible in history and you'd want to be able to study those things. If you were this god. I think also that if you were this deity, you would want people throughout history to have some kind of subjective experience of you, some kind of experience of your comfort or your speaking or your encouragement or your leading. Some kind of inward manifestation. Some personal subjective presence in the lives of people.

In other words, you get no way. I'm laying the sarcasm on thick this morning, get it? While we may have problems with how God has chosen to reveal himself, I dare you to find a better way. Yes, we would love it if we all had Jesus in every generation. But the fact that he had to come as a historical person means that there are going to be generations before who didn't know him face to face and generations after who don't know him face to face. That's just how it's gotta be if we expect god of the universe to come in human history as a person. That's how that works. And if you want subjective experience, I gotta say the holy spirit's a pretty good one. I like him. His ability to speak into the lives of Christians, His ability to convict of sin, to tell what's true, convict of righteousness. Not hocus pocus, not the force. But the personal presence of the divine in the life of believer.

You know, none of what I'm saying proves anything. Right? I'm not airtight. I know that this is entirely unsatisfactory to some of you. But look, this is a god who has created a way for us to know him and he continues to make a way for us to know him. And it's not served up the way you may have liked it, but I dare you to find something better.

A God Who Wants Relationship

Listen to what Jesus prays:

This is eternal life that they may know you. The only true god, the one you have sent, Jesus Christ. — John 17:3

God wants a relationship. The Lord Almighty says:

I desire the knowledge of god more than burnt offerings. — Hosea 6:6

Desire people to know me. God is keen on self disclosure. He's keen on people knowing him.

I recognize that in preaching this message, this is probably a very uncomfortable sermon. You may be sitting here this morning as a person who's lifelong church person. And I may be making you nervous because you may be like, I don't know that I know god. Good. That's a good thing. That's a great place to start. Do you want to? The God of the universe says, He's relational. We can know Him. He wants us to know Him.

An Invitation to Know God

So here's my invitation and conclusion for you this morning. Are you willing to open yourself up? Are you willing to hear from God? Open up your attitude. Open up your heart. Open up your schedule. You know, we can't fit knowing god in between appointments or in a rush somewhere. God won't be neatly scheduled like that. You're going to have to make room for God. Make room for stillness or silence.

Open up this book. In particular, I would highlight opening up the book of Psalms. The Psalms are the heart language knowing god book. If you read five Psalms every day—and there's one that's really long, you can make it its own day—you'll read through the entire Psalms every month. And you could read through all of them therefore twelve times a year. And there's something about knowing that language and knowing the heart language and even parroting out loud, reading out loud, some of the heart language, some of the Psalms that speak of what it is to know god and to say after that you're done: I want that. I encourage you to try this.

Open up your own personal history. One of the things that's hardest for us when knowing god is when there's a lot of scar tissue or the gutters are really clogged. And there are parts of your story that involve trauma, really bad experiences, abuse at the hands of other people, painful memories that make it really hard to feel like, I can know that God because He's dangerous. Can you open those up?

Open up your Sundays. Not just worship, not just show up here but open up the rest day of Sabbath. God has offered it to you. Day of rest. Day to be alone.

To tell you the truth, if you could get this into your head, you don't have to do it today. There's nothing that you absolutely have to do today. It can wait. But opening up time for a walk with the Lord is creation, opening up some space. I know some of you, you're like, I have hobbies at home. There's no way I can get silence. I know. But during nap time, can you try? Can you try to make some space? "Lord, I want to know you. Open up yourself."

What can I promise you something? This whole thing that we're doing here, it's not just looking down a well and seeing a reflection at the bottom that looks kind of like us. There's somebody there. This isn't just a figment of our collective imaginations. This isn't a piece of leftover hardware from some kind of evolutionary mud. This is real. There is a God who wants to know and be known, and He's offering Himself up to you. Consider this an invitation.

Would you pray with me?

Lord, we thank you for your word. Thank you that it tells us about what you're really like. And Lord, I pray for all of us here this morning that you would answer the prayers of those who want to know you, that you would show yourself. Lord, I pray that this would become more real if we've been going through the motions. I pray that we'd be really honest and that you would answer that. Pray for those who have deep pain where a mention of this even in a sermon is difficult. Pray, Father, for them this morning that you would encourage them or that you are not the god who hurts or condemns. And Lord, we offer up these prayers to you in Jesus' name. Amen.