Three Ways of Knowing God

The scriptures referred to are Genesis 1:1-2:3 and Matthew 28:16-20.

It was Christmas and my mother and my brother thought it would be nice if Santa actually handed out the presents. So they bought a Santa suit and told me to wear it. My niece was just old enough that she might see through the disguise if her father wore it but she might not if I did. As for my son, he was just over a year old. He might be taken in. He was—and he began to scream and cry. I guess it was one thing to talk about old Saint Nick and to read about him and even to see him on TV. But to have him standing in front of you, in the flesh, not as a concept or as a story but as a huge man in red...well, it was terrifying. Nobody ever wore that costume again.

11 men go to Galilee to meet a man they saw die. And when they see him, they are overwhelmed with awe and worship him, even though some entertain doubts. And then he gives them a mission: to go to all the nations in the world and make the people his followers. It's a daunting task. But he promises them they will not be alone. He will be with them every day, every step of the way.

After Pentecost, the success of the apostles' preaching brought them into conflict with the same religious authorities who engineered Jesus' execution. So the reconstituted 12, with Matthias selected to fill Judas Iscariot's place, spread out and took the gospel to the ends of the known world. We read of the early careers of some of them in the book of Acts but the exploits of others we only know through legend. Matthew is said to have evangelized Ethiopia and died a martyr there. Bartholomew went to Armenia and was skinned alive in Azerbaijan. Thomas brought the gospel to India where he was impaled by a spear. Thaddaeus traveled through Syria and ended his life in northern Persia. Simon the Zealot is supposed to have visited northern Africa, Spain and Britain. Philip may have reached southern Russia. Peter died in the imperial city of Rome, as did Paul.

These men were given the task of turning the world upside down and they didn't balk. They undertook this immense mission with enthusiasm. Why? Because they had incredible news to tell the world. And they had 3 reasons to believe it.

There are roughly 3 ways to know something. One is to reason it out. Throughout time, most people have believed in a creator god because it seemed the most reasonable explanation. The world could be the result of an incredibly long series of fortunate accidents, the equivalent of winning the lottery trillions of times. Or it could be the way it is by design. Today many scientists note that the universe in general and our world in particular seems fine-tuned to give rise to life. If the freezing point of water was just a little different, if earth's distance from the sun were slightly less or more, if earth's axis wasn't tilted just right, if we didn't have a moon, life would not be possible, let alone a lifeform like us capable of understanding the cosmos to the degree we do. So it could be just a lucky confluence of innumerable coincidences—or it could be planned. Occam's razor, the principle of logic that says the explanation with the least number of necessary elements is usually the correct one, would seem to come down on the side of a creator. And the consensus of great thinkers throughout the ages is that there was a creator god. The Bible doesn't even argue the idea. It accepts it as its fundamental premise.

The disciples were Jews. They believed in a creator God. Furthermore, they believed the creator had a special relationship with their race, not because he was playing favorites, but because he had a special purpose for them. God intended them to bring a blessing to the world. (Genesis 12:1-3) But they didn't seem to be accomplishing that. They were a tiny nation usually at the mercy of their larger and more powerful neighbors. And they were not always faithful to their covenant with God. Still God was faithful to them. He had liberated them from slavery in Egypt. He kept them from being utterly destroyed or completely absorbed by the empires that dominated the Near East and the Mediterranean. They survived as a people through their shared history and traditions and faith.

That's the second way of knowing something: it's passed on to you by someone you trust. This applies to just about everything we learned in school, as well as what we get from the news and what we read. Scientists learn much of science that way, through learning the history of whatever branch of science they are specializing in. They don't redo every single experiment that led up to today's state of knowledge. They trust their instructors and mentors and textbooks. Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientists in history said, “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Science, like most human endeavors, requires faith or trust in someone else.

For instance, we all know that our country declared independence in 1776. How? Do we have photographs? Video? No. We trust the writings of the people who were there, who witnessed it, and who participated in it. No historian seriously thinks that they made most of it up as mere propaganda or that we became a country in a totally different way.

Similarly a large part of the Hebrew Bible is the collected history of the Jews. Archeology confirms most of the historical sections, like the existence of the Davidic kings, the exile, the return under the Persians, and the worship of Yahweh. In fact, at one point scholars doubted the existence of the Hittites, because they couldn't find archaeological evidence of them. But archeology depends on finding ancient ruins, remains and rubbish. Dig at the wrong spot and you could miss something important by just a few yards. But eventually the evidence was discovered and today you can even study the Hittite language.

Secular scholars have problems with the part that God plays in the narrative. But the same people who wrote the historically confirmed parts wrote the theological portions. To believe one part while distrusting the other says more about one's philosophical approach to life than about the trustworthiness of the documents themselves.

The disciples knew their Bible. And they knew that God promised to send a Messiah, an anointed prophet, priest and/or king, to free their people. Then they encountered Jesus. They saw his healings and heard his teachings. They ate with him, traveled with him, spent nearly 3 years in his company. They knew he was different. They hoped he was the promised one. However, when he was killed, they thought they were wrong about him. (Luke 24:21) But when he rose from the dead, they had to rethink who Jesus was.

They passed from the second form of knowledge to the third: experiential. They had firsthand knowledge of Jesus. He wasn't merely a prophet; he wasn't merely a man. A person who did what he did, who said what he said—that he and his Father are one, that he is the resurrection and the life—and who then conquered death must be divine.

Those 3 forms of knowledge were their 3 reasons to fulfill the great commission laid upon them by Jesus. They reasoned that the world had a creator. They knew the history of their people and their relationship with God. And they personally knew a man who could only be God. Then came Pentecost. The Holy Spirit was poured out on them and they now experienced God in a new way: internally.

Today is Trinity Sunday. The Trinity is not an easy concept to grasp. Usually when I talk of the Trinity I explain it in terms of the relationships or roles of the persons in the Trinity. But another way of thinking about it is the 3 ways in which we know God.

We know God as creator. We can see his hand in the beauty of nature, in the wonders of the subatomic world, in the stars in the sky, in our brains which have more connections than there are stars in the Milky Way. We affirm this when we say, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.”

We can know God through the writings of those who encountered him, especially the gospels. We can trust the recollections of those who knew Jesus and were willing to die in foreign lands for the privilege of carrying the good news of their incarnate, crucified and risen Lord. This is not a distant God who creates the world and walks away from it but one who enters it to redeem it. Through Jesus we know that God is a God of love, who became one of us, as the creed says, “for us and for our salvation.”

And now we come to the unsettling part. We can know God through the action of the Holy Spirit within us. We can...but do we?

One reason the Spirit is so foggy in most of our minds is that we are uneasy about encountering him. It is all very well to talk about him and read about him but to actually face him, to let him come into our lives...well, it's just too terrifying.

But letting him in is the point. God is not real to us until he is a part of us. Our God is not abstract or remote. He is not up there or out there but right here—within us. We not only know that he exists and what he is like but if we open ourselves to him, we know what it feels like to be living in him and to have him living in and through us.

We feel him as we pray, as we worship, as we encounter the world with integrity and empathy. His are the thoughts that break in on us suddenly and inspire us with awe because we could never have come up with them on our own. His are the words of wisdom that we cannot believe are coming out of our mouths just when they were needed. His are the acts of courage and conviction and compassion that we find ourselves doing despite the fact that they are what we least want to do. We see him in others and we perceive his presence growing stronger in ourselves.

The Holy Spirit is what makes God a Trinity and what connects us to God. He completes the circuit, so to speak. We know live circuits are dangerous. They are also powerful.

You could think of the Spirit as our DSL. A DSL or Digital Subscriber Line gives us high-speed access to the internet. The Spirit is our link to God. Sign on with him and all the riches of his grace are ours to download. To continue, however, we will have to upgrade things at our end. And he will help us do that as well.

There are other analogies for our Triune God. He is our destination, our path and the power to walk it. He is the author, the hero and the story itself. He is the composer, the performer and the music. He is the original idea, the word or perfect expression of it and the power that communicates it to us.

Is your brain starting to overload? No wonder. God is by definition bigger than we can imagine. Any god we can totally comprehend is too small to really be God. And that kind of god is also too small to help us. So we mustn't be surprised if at the heart of God there is a paradox, a threeness that is also one. But we mustn't despair of knowing him either. You know better than anyone how your body functions even though you don't know every organ in it or know what every part of the code of your DNA does. And just because we can't possess exhaustive knowledge of God doesn't mean we can't have true and essential knowledge of him.

But we need to get over our fear of encountering him. We need to look at him and let him reach out to touch us. Only that way will we discover that the scary big guy is really our Father, laden with gifts of love.