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 I was a lurker before I was a blogger. When we moved to Texas four years ago, I took up reading blogs as a way to pass the time. It started with my friends blogs, expanded to blogs about families with quads, and then included general Christian living, parenting, and simplified living blogs. I was a faithful reader, but a total lurker. I knew a lot of facts about the authors of the blogs I read. I knew generally where they lived, the names of their children, and how they spent their days.

Then I became a blogger, and I began interacting with some of the blog authors I read. Twitter is the great equalizer. I would get brave and reply to one of their tweets, and astonishingly, the replied back. I’ve tweeted several times with a couple of these authors now. We’ve even exchanged a few e-mails and comments on our blogs. We are beginning to build a relationship. I’m coming to know them as a friend rather than just facts about them as a lurker.

Soon, I will get to meet lots of them in person. First at the dotMom conference in Birmingham and later at the Allume Social conference in Harrisburg. No doubt, our relationship will grow even more as we sit and talk face to face (that is if I don’t scare them away with my weirdness!).

Here’s an amazing truth: We can know God just as we know friends. We don’t have to be lurkers. We do not have to settle for knowing only about God. He wants us to know Him in relationship. <—Click to Tweet!

Knowing God

Basic Truths:

First, we cannot know God outside of the fact that He has chosen to reveal Himself to us through creation and Scripture. As history shows, sinful humanity has a tendency to misinterpret God’s testimony through nature. Therefore, Scripture (as God’s inerrant and infallible words) alone is the lens through which we view and understand creation’s testimony about God. (Rom. 1:19; Matt. 11:27; 1 Cor. 1:21; 1 Cor. 2:14; 2 Cro. 4:3-4; John 1:18)

Second, God is incomprehensible in the sense that we can never fully know God. In other words, we will never understand everything about God or even one attribute of God completely or exhaustively. Our inability to know God fully is attributed to His greatness rather than our sinfulness. This indicates that even in eternity, we will continually be learning more and more of the depths and riches of God. (Ps. 145:3; Ps. 147:5; Ps. 139:6, 17; Isa. 55:9)

Third, even though we will never know God fully, we can know God truly. Grudem uses the example that he will never know everything about his son (or even himself) but he still truly knows his son in relationship. Grudem writes, “all that Scripture tells us about God is true” (151).

Finally (and most excitedly!), we can know God personally rather than just knowing about God. He desires a personal relationship with each and every one of us. (Jer. 9:23-24; John 17:3; 1 John 2:13)

Application

Once we understand that we will never know God completely or exhaustively but that we can know Him in personal relationship, we can settle into a lifetime and eternity of continually learning more about God. We will never run out of new reasons to praise Him. We will always have new reasons to thank Him.

What is one new thing God has revealed to you recently about Himself? Share in the comments!

If you are new to t{squared}, I am using Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine to guide this study! The numbers you see in parenthesis refer to page numbers in this text.

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This post is linked with thanks to:

Thought Provoking Thursday
Thoughtful Thursday
Thankful Thursday
Proverbs 31 Thursday
Life in Bloom
Thrive at Home Thursday

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Photo Credit: Cia de Foto

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