And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. (John 17:3)
Introduction
What does it mean to know God? This is one of the threads that Jesus weaves throughout His High Priestly Prayer. This prayer is a well threaded fabric glittering with diamonds, and we find one such diamond here in verse 3. What does it mean to know God? This is the perennial question man is always seeking to answer in every age. There has been no end to the speculating and philosophizing of man on this subject. But it is not a question which man can philosophize his way to. It is a question in which the answer can only be had by divine revelation. God must reveal it and Himself to us, and He has. From the very lips of our Savior offering up prayer to the Father we have answers to such questions. What does it mean to know God, and who are the people who know God? I will seek to answer such questions from this prayer today. These are important questions to answer because Jesus tells us that this is eternal life – knowing God. Every man ought to have a particular interest in obtaining eternal life. Yet far too many men are not so concerned with their souls or with knowing God in Jesus Christ. This is the hardening of sin and the blinding of Satan. Let us not be so unconcerned this day.
In verse 2 it is Jesus who gives eternal life, and in verse 3 Jesus tells us what eternal life is – it is knowing the only true God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. The meaning and implications of this are profound.
A Believing People
In first setting out to understand what it means to know God and who they are that know Him, we observe that this knowledge is something that is given from God and received by man. It is not something obtained by man apart from the gift of God. Verse 7, “Now they know that everything that you have given me is from you.” Verse 8, For I have given them the words that you gave me and they have received them and have come to know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me.” And verse 26, “I have made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known.” One cannot know God unless he humble himself to receive all from God like a child with nothing to offer and no abilities to obtain a thing except by receiving a gift. This knowledge of God is had only by receiving God’s Word through Jesus Christ, the ultimate gift sent from the Father. The unbeliever does not like this for he does not love or desire Jesus Christ. And this is precisely man’s problem of knowing God. He does not like God’s terms or God’s revelation.
This begins to make sense as we notice how closely connected “knowing” is with believing. We see this particularly in verse 8, “For I have given them the words that you gave me and they have received them and have come to know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me.” That this knowing is obtained only by being given and received in Jesus Christ and that is so closely tied with belief in Jesus as sent from the Father begins to show us that this knowledge of which Jesus speaks is not a mere intellectual knowledge. It is not just that we know about God or that we know the facts about Jesus Christ, it is that we know Him. Those who know God, whether it is the disciples, or those who would believe on account of their testimony, have the common element of belief. There are not any who have ever lived or will live who know God in the way that Jesus speaks here who do not also believe in Him. All study of theology and time spent in philosophizing about God that is not done in belief of Jesus Christ is done in vain. It was Augustine that said something to the effect of, “I believe that I may understand.”
A Thinking People
While this knowing of God is more than merely intellectual knowledge, it is also not less. Christians are to be thinking people. Christians are a people who know the truth, who use reason and logic, and love God with all their minds. This intellectual rigor cannot even begin unless one first humble himself to receive Christ from God as a little child. It is the prideful intellect of man that is truly darkened in seeking to find out God apart from belief in Jesus Christ. In Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. We must call men to belief in Jesus Christ before anything else. This has major implications for apologetics, science, education, and much more. But this mere intellectual knowledge is not here what Jesus speaks of.
A Spiritual People
This knowledge is also not knowledge coming from the light of nature, for it is not a knowledge that every man has, for it is a knowledge that is eternal life, which not every man has. It is not a knowledge from the light of nature, but rather it is the special working of the Holy Spirit to illuminate and enliven the hearts and minds of the elect. And when the Holy Spirit does this work, it is not a data transfer into the intellect. It is life from the dead. It is an experiential knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ. This knowing is a relational knowing. It is a knowing in terms of a covenantal relationship with God in Christ. It is a knowing in terms of possessing Christ, and He, you. We know and understand a basic sliver of this in terms of human relationships. You may know all about some famous person that you have never met. But also, you don’t know them at all. Your spouse on the other hand, you know him or her in a very different way, in an experiential way. There is a union there. There is a nearness there.
Knowing God is to speak of union with Christ. It is to know Him personally without some mediary other than Christ Himself. It is nearness to God, not in terms of us reaching our way up to heaven, but in the fact that Christ has been sent from God to accomplish our redemption, and He has sent His Spirit, who indwells us. The Spirit of God Himself resides within the believer. This is knowing God. It is union with Christ which imparts to us all of Christ’s benefits of being right with God. God sees us and knows us as He does His own dear Son as Jesus prays in verse 26, “I made known to them your name, I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” Knowing God is to know the love of God, is to have experiential knowledge of the love God being shed abroad in our hearts by the Spirit of God. It is to taste and see, or know, that the Lord is good. It is to have experienced the happiness of having one’s sins forgiven by God in Christ. Knowing God is to hear Christ praying in John 17, and to hear Him praying for you.
This is eternal life: knowing God and union with Christ. Eternal life is to be united with Christ forever. Union with Christ is not something that ends because Christ is alive forevermore. This leads us to note the eternal aspect of knowing God.
An Eternal People
Knowing God in Christ is eternal life. This is a knowing that never ends. This knowing of God is one that is eternal, yet it is also a present reality for the believer. It is a present reality and a feature of all eternity. This shows us that there is a definitive sense in which it can be objectively said that the believer knows God and has eternal life. This is the sense of union with Christ. There is another knowledge of God which is progressively increased beginning now, through all eternity.
Colossians 3:9-10, “Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.” This knowledge, though imperfect, is progressive. Christians both have a true knowledge of God and will continue increasing in that knowledge beginning now and into all eternity.
How great and sufficient is God that through all eternity not one person will ever come to know all there is to know of God so as to become bored of Him. This God is without changing. We are creatures who are constantly changing yet God who is eternal has always known all there is to know of us. God does not learn or progress in knowledge for He knows all things. We are but creatures who could never come to know all there is to know of the infinite.
A People of Truth
John 17:3 speaks not only of the eternal nature of knowing God, but also that this knowledge is a knowledge of the only true God. Knowledge and truth are so closely connected that in what sense can we really say that knowledge of falsehood is any knowledge at all? There is one true God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and He can be known because He has made Himself known through the Son.
John 17:3 is in some sense an imprecatory prayer against Gnosticism and skepticism. Christianity is a religion of knowing the truth. We can know the truth. We must reject Gnosticism and skepticism.
A Covenant People
So those who know God are a believing people, a thinking people, a spiritual people, an eternal people, a people of the truth, and finally, they are a covenant people. Jesus has made known the only true God, so that true knowledge of God may be had and may spread. This is Jesus instituting the New Covenant.
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. 33 For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” (Jeremiah 31:31-34)
What great promises we have that in the New Covenant all shall know the Lord, not like they did in the Old Covenant. This new covenant is greater than the old. It spreads itself farther. Habakkuk 2:14 says, “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.”
In verse 26 Jesus says, “I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known…” Now where have we heard this before? This is Psalm 22:22.
Psalm 22:22 says, “I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you…”
Knowledge of God in Christ is a result of the cross, and an answer to Christ’s prayer. The disciples likely did not catch on to this reference to Psalm 22 in the moment, for it was not until after the resurrection that they began to see and connect all the dots. Nevertheless, as Jesus prayed this, it should’ve drawn their minds to realize, now is the time for the Messiah of Psalm 22 and His work, this is Jesus Christ! It is Christ’s mission to make known His name to the world. He began by manifesting it to His disciples, and through their testimony, all those who would believe, all of God’s covenantal people.
As we continue in this long line of spreading the knowledge of God in the face of Christ through the preaching of the gospel, we will be faced with many challenges and many difficulties. To those challenges I want to speak for a moment. As the disciples were being prayed for here, they had no idea what challenges and difficulties were ahead of them.
Application to those who know God
We are facing a time in which secular materialism is failing. One of the fallouts we are beginning to see is a rise in new age occultism and such practices. We see it now with many celebrities talking about using certain drugs to enter into supernatural spiritual experiences. These are demonic experiences. We are going to have to know how to combat it. It begins with having union with Christ. We have union with Christ in which we know God, we know the truth, and we know ourselves. They do not have this nor the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and thus are subject to being led astray when seeking out other spiritual beings and experiences than God through Christ by His Spirit. But we have the gospel and the power of the Holy Spirit which can free them and grant them eternal life to know God and have union with Christ.
With the falling of secular materialism, the humanists will be exposed as demonic, for that is what secular humanism is. The goal of these secular humanist elites is to have eternal life apart from Christ. I will not venture here into all the things they attempt to accomplish this, but suffice it to say that on the surface we can see how many of these people do everything they possibly can to preserve and extend their lives, regardless of the ethics of a thing, and they all fail. Seeking life apart from Christ is death.
No other system of unbelief has a doctrine of union with Christ forever. This is how we fight the humanist vision of life apart from Christ – with our doctrine of union with Christ, of total conformity to Christ, and because of this union, also with our doctrine of dying as gain. Humanists do not want to know the only true God, they want to become as gods.
For a long time, and even now, many have been and are far too unconcerned with their souls and life after death. But as Darwinian materialism falls and new age occultism rises, many people will once again be concerned with matters of eternal life for they will not be Darwinian materialists. They will believe in the supernatural and life beyond this one. But they will seek in places that it cannot be found. No nirvana, no drug induced supernatural experiences, or any other such practice will give eternal life. It is union with Christ, or God’s wrath. They can have eternal life not through supernatural out of body experiences, but through faith in the objective historical work of Jesus Christ on their behalf. Eternal life does not come from within or from leaving your body, but through someone outside of ourselves granting it to us, and indwelling us by His Spirit. It is through union with Jesus Christ. The two options are self-conscious eternal wrath, or self-conscious eternal joy in the only God, the true God. So we will face a growing number of those I have described, and we are also neck deep in a culture of death. The culture of death will not go away with the false beliefs I have described, but rather will go from being denied as a culture of death, to open acceptance.
Those outside of the knowledge of God in Christ are subject to a culture of death. This is the culture that surrounds us today: child-sacrifice, immorality, homosexuality – which is directly connected to a suppression of the knowledge of God in Romans 1. Modern medicine in the hands of self-conscious secular humanists leads more to death than life. Many more examples of this could be given.
We combat these forms of unbelief and death with belief in the true God, the only God, and Jesus Christ whom He sent. The Church combats this unbelief with biblical marriage which includes receiving children from God. The Church saves children who are being led to the slaughter, or without father or mother. We conform our lives in obedience to God’s moral standards, obedience to Christ in all areas of life. We combat in prayer, with prayers of all kinds – thankfulness, supplication, and imprecation. We combat with the singing of Psalms, which is singing God’s truth into us. Singing the Psalms helps us believe and reinforces God’s ethics of life over and against the ethics of death and unbelief.
The culture of death is a culture of falsehood, lies, and ignorance, for it is true knowledge of the true and only God in Jesus Christ that is eternal life.
The culture of death is a culture of destruction. It seeks only to steal, kill, and destroy. But Christ came that we may have life, and that abundantly. And that we may know it. Christians must be builders, seeking to give life and spread the knowledge of the glory of God. The culture of death is short-sited because destruction without replacing it with life is not a plan of long term success. We must be future oriented. There is sin and ungodliness that we must destroy, but not without positive conformity to Christ to replace these strongholds. Christianity does not simply offer escape from demonic strongholds, but it positively offers union with Christ and all His benefits.
The culture of death is a culture of pessimism because it does not work for the future but only destroys. We must reject pessimism because pessimism is unbelief. Pessimism has a greater belief in death than in resurrection. Pessimism devalues the power of the gospel and the power of the Holy Spirit. It trusts more in unbelievers, a few of which may seek to employ the power of Satan than it does in believers who are filled with the Holy Spirit. As secular materialism crumbles, my hope and prayer is that many who are attracted to new age spirituality would be confronted with the gospel to see the futility of what they seek and so find their all in Christ, being brought to true spiritual life by knowledge of God in union with Christ.
Application to Lost Sinners
One of the major manifestations of these systems that we face today is the complete and utter identity confusion that so many have. This is the fruit of rejecting the knowledge of God in Christ. You believe lies and begin to not know anything at all, even the most basic biological realities. This is also in part due to many pastors for years now refusing to address man’s problem as being a problem of sin and rebellion against God. They have substituted gentle, loving, truthful, and bold confrontation of sin with psychological soothings and ramblings, and now nobody knows anything for sure. Wolves in sheep’s clothing have opted away from God centered preaching and practice and have oriented their ministries around men and their fleshly desires, and it has lead to a culture of utter confusion and ignorance. This is because we cannot begin to know ourselves apart from God.
I want you to hear what Calvin says on this. This is lengthy but beneficial from his institutes, I want you all to hear this, Calvin says, “[M]an never attains to a true self-knowledge until he has previously contemplated the face of God, and come down after such contemplation to look into himself. For (such is our innate pride) we always seem to ourselves just, and upright, and wise, and holy, until we are convinced, by clear evidence, of our injustice, vileness, folly, and impurity. Convinced, however, we are not, if we look to ourselves only, and not to the Lord also —He being the only standard by the application of which this conviction can be produced. [S]ince we are all naturally prone to hypocrisy, any empty semblance of righteousness is quite enough to satisfy us instead of righteousness itself. And since nothing appears within us or around us that is not tainted with very great impurity, so long as we keep our mind within the confines of human pollution, anything which is in some small degree less defiled delights us as if it were most pure… So long as we do not look beyond the earth, we are quite pleased with our own righteousness, wisdom, and virtue; we address ourselves in the most flattering terms, and seem only less than demigods. But should we . . . begin to raise our thoughts to God, and reflect what kind of Being he is . . . what formerly delighted us by its false show of righteousness will become polluted with the greatest iniquity; what strangely imposed upon us under the name of wisdom will disgust by its extreme folly; and what presented the appearance of virtuous energy will be condemned as the most miserable impotence. So far are those qualities in us, which seem most perfect, from corresponding to the divine purity. Hence that dread and amazement with which as Scripture uniformly relates, holy men were struck and overwhelmed whenever they beheld the presence of God. When we see those who previously stood firm and secure so quaking with terror, that the fear of death takes hold of them . . . [we see that] men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance, until they have contrasted themselves with the majesty of God. Frequent examples of this consternation occur both in the Book of Judges and the Prophetical Writings; so much so, that it was a common expression among the people of God, “We shall die, for we have seen the Lord.” Hence the Book of Job, also, in humbling men under a conviction of their folly, feebleness, and pollution, always derives its chief argument from descriptions of the Divine wisdom, virtue, and purity. Nor without cause: for we see Abraham the readier to acknowledge himself but dust and ashes the nearer he approaches to behold the glory of the Lord, and Elijah unable to wait with unveiled face for His approach; so dreadful is the sight… [T]he knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves are bound together by a mutual tie, [but we must] treat of the former in the first place, and then descend to the latter.”
Our problem is that we want to know ourselves and define our own identities without and apart from God, Christ, and true knowledge. We want to be able to define ourselves by our own standards, instead of by Scripture which would reveal that we are a sinner, and that we need to change, stop practicing sin, and conform our lives to Christ. And as we are seeing when we attempt to define ourselves and know ourselves apart from God, it leads to the utter confusion, deception, and insanity that we see today. It includes everything from smaller cases of purposelessness in life that leaves people lost and depressed, to entrapping deception of gender confusion and so called “sexual identity.”
What I am saying today will be criminal thought crime and hate speech in a few years, unless there is repentance and a change of course. Even now, if we communicate these truths to such a person today we will be culturally laughed and snarled out of the room if not worse. But Church, we cannot back away from this truth, because there is no other truth by which such sinners who are deeply hurting and lost may be given life and restoration. Eternal life and confidence is only had in coming out of your sin in repentance to Jesus Christ, and receiving what He gives.
We cannot capitulate to the demands that we accommodate sinners in their rebellion against God, for that leads to death. We are those who know the only true God and Jesus Christ and have eternal life because God has revealed Himself to us in Jesus Christ and has granted us eternal life, as a gift that can only be received by humbling ourselves in repentance as a child. It is the only way anyone can have it. This knowledge of God Jesus is making known, and will continue to make known as the knowledge of the glory of God covers the earth as the waters cover the sea, to the glory of the only true and triune God, amen.
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