Wanna Know God?

They were convinced they knew Him.  They had studied and memorized what He had said.  They knew well the stories about Him and how He had interacted with mankind in the past.  Then He showed up.  This God they thought they knew showed up and they did not recognize Him at all.  As a matter of fact, they were so clueless as to who He was that they were convinced that this Jesus was a messenger of Satan.

Isn't that tragic?  Imagine spending your entire life in pursuit of knowing Him only to find out that all that time and effort was nothing more than an empty pursuit.  Though these religious leaders knew the Law and all that the ancient prophets had spoken, they did not truly know God.  If we are not careful, we too can spend our lifetime thinking we know Him when in reality we have no clue as to who He is.

We can jump through all the hoops that religion requires of us and when its all said and done we've done nothing but become great hoop jumpers.  Religious demands commonly do little more than offer us a false sense of connecting with God.  It's much like a Facebook approach to knowing God.  Like a Facebook friend, we scroll through His profile, pics, and posts, but in the end we do not truly know Him.  We are not at all acquainted with His heart, His nature, or His passions.  We are left to make judgments about Him that don't correctly represent Him at all.  Often, this leads to a description of God that looks a lot like us because it makes us feel much better about ourselves.  After all who wants to think that the motives of their heart are not at all like His? Does anyone really want to believe that they are acting more like a son of hell than a son of God?

Much like the religious leaders of Jesus' day, when we don't truly know Him, we often make the same mistakes they made.  We blame things on God that He didn't do.  We characterize the acts of God as satanically generated and vice versa.  In doing so, we perpetrate a great deception convincing many that we know God and this is what He's like.  I wonder if God ever wishes that if we aren't gonna take the time to really get to know Him if we would just "hold our peace" (that's King James for shut up) in regards to declaring who He is?

Not only did the religious leaders not know God, they had no desire to really know Him.  When confronted with the truth of who He was, they rejected that truth because He didn't fit in the box they had built for Him. They had this idea of what they wanted God to be like and when He wasn't like that they wanted nothing to do with Him.  They had an image of God that was not at all consistent with who He was.  Scripture tells us that Jesus is the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15).  God wanted, and still wants, mankind to know Him.  He sent Jesus to give us a visual image of who He is. In Christ was and is the fullness of God (Colossians 2:9).  Jesus isn't just like God, He is God.  Truly knowing God is dependent on knowing Jesus.  When our pursuit of God detours around the person of Jesus, just like those 1st century religious leaders, our knowledge of God will be completely skewed.  An accurate assessment of who God is can only be obtained through knowing Jesus.  Nobody comes to the Father except through Jesus (John 14:6).  It is this Jesus who introduces us to God.  Wanna know God?  It starts and ends with knowing Jesus!