6 Knowing God Is the Key

for who He is, we will be driven to real repentance as Isaiah was.

Isaiah also gained a realistic worldview. Contrast this with the evolutionary humanistic mindset where we want to delude ourselves into believing that the world is getting better and better. This is what we would like to believe and what Satan wants us to believe.

However, the moment we get a realistic concept of God, we get a realistic worldview. Isaiah said, “I live among a people of unclean lips.” He realized that not only was he fallen and unclean, but that everyone else was as well.

Once Isaiah realized this, he then received forgiveness and cleansing, giving him a new foundation for his thinking, living, and serving. God never reveals our unholiness in comparison to His holiness just to destroy us. Instead, it is to drive us to repentance, so that we can then be clothed in His righteousness and become partakers of His holiness. This is the grace of God, because if we got what we deserved, His holiness would slay us.

God’s holiness should drive us to repentance, just as it did in the case of Isaiah. God sent the seraphim to the altar to take a coal and touch his lips. “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.” Only after the realistic self-analysis had taken place was Isaiah ready to say, “Here am I. Send me!”

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If I were to ask you to name at least five attributes of God, could you do that? Try to list just five attributes or qualities of God’s nature that He has revealed to us. Many of us probably couldn’t do it, so how can we ever hope to give ourselves to a God we do not understand? It’s like two people marrying each other—entering into a covenant relationship—but knowing nothing about each other’s attributes.

Let me make a few suggestions of some books on this topic, because there are so few of them. You can go to Christian bookstores in person or online and find the shelves groaning with experiential books. You’re not going to find very many books on the nature and attributes of God. Does this tell us something about the reason for the impotency of American Christianity?

The first book is Knowing God by J. I. Packer. You’re probably going to need some time to read it, because it’s not a book that you “read”—you study it. But it will really bless you. Another is The Knowledge of the Holy by A. W. Tozer, and a third is The Attributes of God by A. W. Pink.

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I guarantee you that if you read these books, you will climb to new heights in your Christian life because your understanding of God will be significantly and eternally magnified. They are not necessarily easy to read. These are books that are going to make your mind and spirit be challenged, so you’re going to have to read them when you’re totally alert. It will absolutely revolutionize the quality of your thinking and the quality of your living.

According to John Calvin, “It is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself.” Why? Because we have a fantasy knowledge of ourselves. We do not often have the honesty to deal with ourselves realistically. We cannot have a clear knowledge of ourselves until we have first looked upon God’s face, as Isaiah did, and only then can we move from contemplating Him to scrutinizing ourselves. You will never know who you are until you know who God is.

The age-old problem of man is the identity crisis of who am I ? This is the question of adolescence as well as adulthood. Who am I? Well, we will never know who we are unless we know who He is. God is the great I am (Exodus 3:14). He is the eternal one—I am. Therefore, we only know who we are by knowing who He is.

Once again, this drives us back to the principle that we do not understand ourselves by studying ourselves. We understand ourselves by studying God. The ap-

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proach to knowing and understanding yourself is not to study who you are. Rather, it is to study who He is, the great I am of the universe.

Satan’s Lies about God

Remember that Satan’s oldest and most successful attack is on our concept of God. He tries to either confuse or lower your understanding of who God really is. He knows that if he can do this, soon he’ll keep you from being able to really worship or be obedient to God because that false representation of God is too small for you to worship. I’ve oftentimes found this in debates with people who call themselves agnostics, existentialists, atheists, or just rebellious people. What they’ll immediately do is start throwing out questions like, How could a good God send anybody to hell? What about sincere Buddhists? How do you explain the problem of pain?

What they are trying to do is one of Satan’s greatest tactics. He is trying to get them to find God’s feet of clay. But He doesn’t have any! However, Satan knows that if he can get people to spot what he claims is an inconsistency, an act of changeability, or an instance where God has acted ungodly, then that gives us the justification to say, “You do not deserve my allegiance. Therefore, I can go and do what I’d already intended to do anyway, and that’s to do my own thing.”

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Go back to the Garden of Eden. What was Satan’s attack? He came to Eve and asked, “Did God say . . . ?” What’s he doing? He’s trying to lower Eve’s concept of God. If he’s going to get Eve to be disobedient to God, he must make Eve believe that God is an unworthy God who is trying to restrict her. He’s not really the gracious God that He’s made Himself up to be. If we start to question God, soon it will lead to disobedience.

If you understand the oldest temptation to humanity, then you understand Satan’s tactic. He has not had to change it. All he has done is refine it for thousands and thousands of years. And because we’re fallen, we just keep buying the same lie over and over again.

The first thing he will do is point out something that makes God appear unworthy. Pretty soon, he will lead you down the path of disobedience. Listening to the wrong source gave Eve a wrong understanding of God. It then led to a disobedient action.

So, remember there is more than one power in the universe vying for the attention of your mind. The Bible teaches that everything in the universe either comes from God through His Holy Spirit or from Satan through demonic influence. The moment you start listening to the wrong source, you will get the wrong information. The wrong information will lead to the wrong action. This is how Satan sets up every temptation.

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Two More Principles

Let’s pull a principle from this: We cannot give ourselves to a God we do not know. Paul spells this out in Romans 10:14–15: “How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!’” And then in verse 17: “Faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ.”

We cannot give ourselves to a God we do not know. This is why we have the Great Commission in Matthew 28:19 and are called to make disciples of all nations. As a result, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13). They will come to know God.

Correct knowing will lead to right thinking. And right thinking will lead to right living, which leads to right loving. There’s your formula. How do you get your thinking right? Get your knowledge right. What’s the greatest knowledge? You’ve got to have a right knowledge about God. Where does that come from? What God has revealed about Himself in Jesus Christ through the written Word.

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Here’s the other principle: Right thinking must be based upon right knowing, and right knowing must be based upon the truth. Jesus prayed in John 17:17, “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.” What is truth? By His Word the truth is known. So, to what degree will you know correctly? To the degree that you know God’s Word. Correct knowledge, correct thinking, correct living.

You will never get to know God casually. You will never get to know God in a halfhearted way. Daniel 11:32 (nasb) is a telling verse. Speaking of how God’s people will handle adversity, in the second half of the verse it says, “but the people who know their God will display strength and take action.”

Hosea 6:3 (nasb) states this about knowing God: “So let us know, let us press on to know the Lord. His going forth is as certain as the dawn; and He will come to us like the rain, like the spring rain watering the earth.” I hope you’re seeing from these selected verses that you are not going to get to know God casually. You are not going to get to know God by just sitting in the church pew once a week. You’re only going to get to know God if you persevere and have a heart that longs for Him.

In Philippians 3, Paul shares about his strong religious background, culture, education, and other aspects that he used to think were important. But in verse eight, he declares: “I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for

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