Part II.
You can listen to today’s devotion by clicking on this SoundCloud link.
Here is God’s wisdom—He is determined to know us in His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. God could simply know us as our creator. That would be all that God needs to know about us. Nothing of our true nature, thoughts, words, or deeds is hidden from God our creator. But something would be hidden from Him (anthropomorphically speaking)—our righteousness in Christ. It is an alien righteousness, remember. For God only to know us on the basis of Genesis 1-3 is to ask Him to know us without Christ.
This is an unusual way to speak, but it directs attention to the awesome grace of God. God is determined to know us in Christ. God’s knowing us in Christ imputes to us Christ’s own righteousness, translates us from enemies to friends, receives us as God’s adopted sons and daughters. Now we are co-heirs with Christ of every spiritual blessing under heaven. (Ephesians 1:3)
This is not because we know God, but because He knows us in Christ. It is only through being known by God in Christ that we may hope to come to some accurate knowledge of ourselves. In John 17:25-26, Jesus prays for us:
“Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”
New International Version
Jesus knows the Father; we have access to the Father’s throne of grace through Jesus. In Jesus and His perfect obedience, in Christ and His vicarious atonement, the Father knows us.
Now we know something, now that God knows us in Christ. Now we know whose we are, whose we must be. Now we love Him. Now we serve Him. Now we understand that to stand in grace is to stand perpetually in God’s knowledge of us in Christ. We know, we love, we serve, we stand in grace…not out of our knowledge of God, but through His gracious knowledge of us in Christ.
Text and picture copyright Don Schatz
It is interesting, though, that in the scriptures the verbiage is always that we are to know God and, even in this verse, Jesus makes God known to us. The emphasis is always on us knowing God over and over. I can’t find much about the opposite, though I understand what you are getting at. I’m deeply, intimately familiar with contemplative spirituality having been trained in an intensive program for spiritual direction at a benedictine monastery and having practiced spiritual direction and been in that community for several years. Yet, I have a growing concern for how the community tends to take ideas that are sort of in scripture and make it into something slightly different, slightly more like basic Hindu practices which are a stark contrast to what we see in scripture. Thoughts? Do you have more scriptures that say more about being continually known by God so we can know ourselves?