1.21 blog

We’ve been looking at God’s conversation with Ahaz in Isaiah 7.10-16, and learning about how we can rightly know God. That word “rightly” is the key word, because biblically speaking, everyone knows God (Romans 1.18-23). The problem is that their “personal relationship with Jesus” is the relationship of enemy. In our last post we saw that God offers Ahaz help in knowing him. He offers him a sign. The bottom line for us to learn from this (and basically all the posts in this series will be saying this in different ways) is take what God offers.

God wants us to know him. Fine and good. But that begs the question:  which god? What’s he like? How can we learn about him?

And here’s where a lot of us get off track, because we’re looking for God all over the place, and missing out on what he is offering us. God reveals himself to us in his Word (Hebrews 1.1-3; 2 Timothy 3.16). So if you want to know God, you need regular exposure to the Word. If you’re not in the Word, you don’t want to know God. Period.

Knowing God is more than knowing the Bible. But it’s not less.

And here’s why we need the Bible. While it’s true that you can learn about God from nature, Scripture teaches us that  the knowledge we get from nature is very limited (we can learn that there is a God and that he’s powerful, that’s all). It also teaches that the revelation of God in nature is universally misinterpreted and misunderstood (See Romans 1.18-20). So even if you do find God in the flowers, you will always misunderstand that experience and be led away from him without Scripture. John Calvin reminds us that our hearts are factories of idols. Left to ourselves, we’ll never find God. Any gods we find that way will more closely resemble ourselves than the True God.