Boast that you Know Him

"Thus says the Lord: "Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord" Jeremiah 9:23-24

Why bother with the doctrine of God?

This post is part of a planned series in which we will touch on a few themes from 'the Doctrine of God’ which is the theological discipline exploring what we know about God himself. It answers questions like: Who is God? What is he like? What does he do?

This topic can become very technical very quickly. And whenever we come across something like that, we tend to ask one question: Why should I bother?

The answer, put very briefly, is this. We should bother because the doctrine of God is all about knowing God and being Christians who don’t know God is something close to absurdity. For knowing God is the beginning, middle, and end of the Bible story.

Beginning, middle, and end of it all

I’m sure many of us are familiar with the main movements of the Bible’s story, so I won’t belabour it too much now. However, let me point out just how pervasive knowing God is within it. 

Right from the start, in the first garden-temple, Adam and Eve had one blessing above all other blessings: God was with them. In fact, this was the fountainhead of every other blessing they had. Every good thing flows from the presence of God, and it’s at his right hand that pleasures are found (Ps. 16:11)

We don’t have to read far post-fall either for ‘knowing God’ to become the central covenant promise in the renewal of all things. Here is what God says to Abraham:

"I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you” (Gen. 17:7)

This refrain is repeated again and again throughout the scriptures. "I will be your God, and you will be my people”. It would take a long list to exhaust the references. And as is perfectly natural, we find exactly the same promise at the great finale of the story:

"Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God." (Rev. 21:3)

When we pay even mild attention we find that this blessing, God with his people to know them, is right at the heart of the good life of God’s people. It’s so important that knowing the true God (and no false God) is the first principle of the law of God’s people:

"I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me." (Ex. 20:2-3)

And whenever God’s people have gathered in worship, the blessing of knowing God and belonging to him has resounded in their songs. Songs which were first composed for the temple, where God was because he knew them:

"Know that the Lord, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture." (Ps. 100:3)

Come that we may know him

And so, it shouldn’t be a great surprise that the promised messiah would be ‘Immanuel, God with us’. God himself, making himself known. And in describing the messiah’s coming the apostle John wastes no time in picking up exactly this theme:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known." (John 1:1,18)

The surprise when he came was not that God would make himself known to his people, that was expected all along. The surprise was that his own had taken the path of the fool and (despite all their pretended piety) had ignored their own psalms:

"In the pride of his face the wicked does not seek him; all his thoughts are, "there is no God."" (Ps. 10:4)

"No one is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God."" (Rom. 3:9b-11, paraphrasing Ps.14)

Paying no regard to God has always been a key characteristic of the wicked person, and blindness towards God the prison that sin puts us in. And yet, despite their evil, Jesus came to save his people from sin and to give them eternal life. How does he describe eternal life:

"And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent."

The heart of eternal life, the fountainhead of every blessing, the centre of every good thing is knowing God. This has always been, and always will be the great covenant blessing given to God’s people.

And that brings us to the passage at the very start of this post:

"Thus says the Lord: "Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord" Jeremiah 9:23-24

God’s people in every age are to boast about something. Not riches, not might, not wisdom (as good as these blessings might be). The boast of the people of God is that they know and understand the Lord.

What is our boast?

Now, let me immediately grant that the knowledge of God described in the passages above does not overlap exactly with an academic study of the doctrine of God. That pursuit leads to various temptations, as it has throughout the church's history. Not least amongst these is the temptation to reduce knowing God to knowing some abstract facts about God. If we fail to see that knowing God is more than an intellectual pursuit we have failed.

But I don’t have to go far out on a limb to say that for us, the temptation is the opposite. We often think that knowing God suffers from pursuing knowledge of him. We  modern evangelical protestants are marked far more by intellectual laziness than cold rationalism. And to quote C.S Lewis:

"God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than he is of any other slacker"

The boast of our churches should be that we know and understand the true and living God.

Is this our boast? Or have we traded this weighty glory for something lesser?

Let’s put the question in a slightly different way:

If our part of the evangelical church was to be known for one thing, if we were to put our hope in one thing to bring in the nations, if we were to pursue one thing to renew and build-up our Christian life and witness, what would we honestly have to say it was?

• Friendliness, inoffensiveness, inclusiveness?

• ‘Contemporary’ and ‘contextualised’ church services?

• Great zeal for humanitarian causes?

• Looking righteous and respectable to the world?

This is far from an exhaustive list, because in many places God himself has become a light thing for us, far from our great boast and joy. We are often Ichabod churches. Churches without the weight of the glory of knowing God. 

But the only good boast of God’s people has always been that we know him, that he is with us. Our only boast has been that through the blood of Christ we draw near to him each week. We hear him tell us in his word what he is like, what he loves, what he hates. We come together around his table and eat with him. And then, that we go out into the world as servants of him, refusing to take the names of false gods on our lips.

Knowing God ought to be our only true boast.

And that is why we bother studying the doctrine of God. Not so that we can fall into the rationalist traps that some of our forefathers have fallen into and certainly not to turn our churches into the dusty tombs of dry christian husks.

But to make this our boast: that we know the only true God, that we worship him rightly, and that we know Jesus Christ who he has sent.

Because this is eternal life.