Knowing Christ (Part 1)

A person who views God as only a curious object to be studied instead of the infinite Father who desires fellowship with each member of the human family, thinks it foolhardy when hearing Christ's disciples speak of knowing Christ, the Father's Son. After all, wasn't Jesus of Nazareth killed and buried two thousand years ago? How can one know a dead man whom they've never met?

Saul of Tarsus must have thought the same thing before his Christ-encounter on the Damascus Road.¹ However, that one personal revelation of the resurrected, living Christ suddenly transformed the mistaken theology of this radical rabbi, thrusting him into a lifelong quest. He had seen Christ with his own eyes; he had heard Christ with his own ears, now he aspires to know this One who knows this chief of sinners so well.² In commenting on Paul's conversion experience and how it propelled him into a quest to know Christ more fully, F. F. Bruce says, "A relationship of mutual knowledge and love was established there and then between the apostle on earth and his exalted Lord, and to explore the fullness of this relationship was from now on Paul's inexhaustible joy. For him, in short, life was Christ—to love Christ, to know Christ, to gain Christ."³

To know Christ in the experiential reality of saving grace and the aspiration to know him intimately and increasingly is a key ingredient in cultivating and expressing a passionate love for him. The Bible assumes Christ can be known personally and increasingly. Every authentic disciple of the Lord Jesus knows this to be true. 

Christ Can Be Known

"I walked in the sunshine with a scholar," reflected noted evangelical theologian J. I. Packer, "who had effectively forfeited his prospects of academic advancement by clashing with church dignitaries over the gospel of grace. 'But it doesn't matter,' he said at length, 'for I've known God and they haven't.' "⁴ Packer said the man's remark caused him to do a great deal of thinking. Such thinking resulted in his writing Knowing God, a book now considered a classic in its field.

No one, including the greatest of the church's saints, has ever been able to fully comprehend God (the finite is incapable of fully comprehending the Infinite). But the Bible affirms that God can be known—not perfectly, not absolutely, but he can be known by those to whom he reveals himself—to those who cultivate a healthy spiritual appetite for him. "Because God is infinite and we are finite or limited," writes systematic theologian Wayne Grudem, "we can never fully understand God." Grudem further explains: "In this sense God is said to be incomprehensible, where the term incomprehensible is used with an older and less common sense, 'unable to be fully understood.' " Grudem then adds: "This sense must be clearly distinguished from the more common meaning, 'unable to be understood.' It is not true to say that God is unable to be understood, but it is true to say that he cannot be understood fully or exhaustively."⁵

So while God cannot be known exhaustively, in the sense of fully understanding him, nonetheless, he can be known—known personally. God has chosen through the centuries to grant a limited knowledge to man by revealing himself in a number of ways—through natural creation, the Law and the prophets, signs and miracles, and the conscience. However, God's ultimate revelation of himself culminated in the Incarnation—"the Word became flesh and dwelt among us."⁶ In the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, God's Son came to more perfectly reveal what God was like: "No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side has made him known."⁷ Thus, to see Christ was to see God—in a limited measure—but the most "limited measure" man had ever experienced until that point in history. As the apostle would later write, "For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell."⁸ And as Jesus himself once explained to an inquiring disciple who asked to see the Father: "Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father."⁹

Jesus was God in the flesh. Yet many people saw Jesus during his earthly ministry but never came to know him as the Christ of God. They only saw a man. One of his apostles would later lament this fact: "He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him."¹⁰ The prophet and forerunner of the Messiah, John the Baptist, exclaimed to his hearers one day, "I baptize with water, but among you stands one you do not know."¹¹ While teaching in the Temple one day, Jesus made reference to his Father. Some unbelieving Jews upon hearing Jesus' comments, asked sarcastically, "Where is your Father?" Jesus replied, "You know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also."¹² Here Jesus plainly says these people neither knew his Father nor him, yet they were actually in Jesus' physical presence and saw Jesus with their own eyes and heard him with their own ears.

Clearly this shows that it was possible to know Jesus as a man but not know him as the Son of God and one's own Savior and Lord. To know the Lord Jesus to be more than a man, to know him to be the Son of God, to know him to be one's personal Lord and Savior—requires the revelation of the Spirit. One's spiritual eyes—inner heart—must receive divine illumination before such knowledge can be made possible. The Lord Jesus and the apostles affirmed such a truth.¹³ One of the classic New Testament examples of the necessity for divine revelation in order to know that Jesus was indeed the Christ of God occurs during Jesus' ministry at Caesarea Philippi. On this occasion Jesus had asked the disciples who the people were saying he was.¹⁴ The disciples answered, "Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets." But Jesus wanted to know who the disciples believed him to be: " 'But who do you say that I am?' Simon Peter replied, 'You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.' " Jesus informed Peter and the rest of the disciples that Peter did not come by such knowledge through human reason but by personal revelation: "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven."

While Paul writes to the Galatian churches that the revelation of the gospel was given to him in a unique way—"For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man's gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ"¹⁵—he also prays for the Ephesian Christians "that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him."¹⁶ He then proceeds to elaborate on the specific knowledge he has in mind. In other words, one cannot know Christ without the Holy Spirit's revealing Christ to him by the Spirit of God. Paul new this so well. He told the Corinthians, "even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him in this way no longer."¹⁷ There was a time prior to his Damascus Road revelation that the apostle thought of Jesus in mere human terms—"according to the flesh"; all that changed for Paul after not only seeing Christ personally, but being illuminated inwardly. He alludes to this in his letter to the Galatians: "But when God, who had set me apart even from my mother's womb and called me through His grace, was pleased to reveal His Son in me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles."¹⁸ 

Knowing Christ Personally

How is Christ to be known? One way which Christ can be known personally is as one's Savior and Lord. Such knowledge is communicated by grace and appropriated by faith to those who hunger and thirst for a right relationship with God.¹⁹ God, of course, has taken the initiative in making such knowledge available through the atoning death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ and by sending his Holy Spirit into the world to convict sinners of sin, righteousness, and coming judgment.²⁰ This personal knowledge is not acquired by merely an intellectual assent to prescribed biblical texts or to creedal formulations of cardinal theological statements. The apostle Paul knew this too well before his conversion to Christ and would later write in his Roman letter, "if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved."²¹

The history of evangelical conversions to Christ records the testimonies of countless individuals who were well-versed in the Bible, knew many of the creeds verbatim, but who, nonetheless, did not know Jesus Christ personally as Savior and Lord until they were able—by the Holy Spirit—to appropriate such knowledge of Christ by the grace of faith. Methodism's founder, John Wesley, is one famous evangelical example of a person who knew a great deal about Christ, but for many years did not  know Christ experientially.

John Wesley (1703-1791) was born into the home of devout British Anglicans, Samuel and Susanna Wesley. His father served as a minister in the Church of England for many years and his mother gained a reputation for being a very godly woman. The ten Wesley children surviving infancy were raised in a Christian atmosphere where the Scriptures were daily read and prayers were often offered. Because of the parents influence on their children's religious training, and Susana Wesley's in particular, biographer Skevington Wood says of that Epworth, England manse, the "Epworth rectory has been rightly epitomized as the cradle of Methodism."²² Susana Wesley's instructions were so thorough in preparing John for his first Holy Communion, that the father served his son the sacrament at the age of eight.²³

Wesley later became a student at Christ Church College, Oxford, at the age of seventeen. In due course, he graduated with Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees. He was ordained as a deacon in the Church of England at the age of twenty-two, and three years later he was admitted as a priest. He was elected as a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1726. It was during this time that what became known as the "Holy Club" was born. Called such by its antagonists, this small accountability group was formed by its members to encourage one another spiritually and to serve the poor. George Whitefield later became a member of this group.

Eventually believing that he should serve God and his church as a missionary in the state of Georgia, Wesley and his brother Charles sailed to the American colony in the fall of 1735. His brief ministry of approximately two years in this foreign land was a failure according to his own testimony. In his February, 1738, journal entry, Wesley laments his failures:

"It is now two years and almost four months since I left my native country, in order to teach the Georgian Indian the nature of Christianity: But what have I learned myself in the meantime? Why, (what I least of all suspected,) that I who went to America to convert others, was never myself converted to God [later editing his Journal, he noted: 'I am not sure of this']. 'I am not mad,' though I thus speak; but 'I speak the words of truth and soberness'; if haply some of those who still dream may awake, and see, that as I am, so are they."²⁴

It was not until May of the same year that John Wesley came to a personal knowledge and assurance that Christ was his Lord and Savior. God used some devout Moravians and Luther's Commentary on Romans to lead Wesley to an evangelical faith in Christ.

What about you, my friend? Are you trusting in your religious traditions, good works, or in keeping the rules of your particular church? Or are you trusting only in Christ and walking in daily fellowship with him? 

- Soli Deo Gloria -

Unless otherwise noted, the Bible version used in this article is the English Standard Version. 

1. See Acts 9:1-19.
2. See Philippians 3:1-11.
3. F. F. Bruce, Philippians, p. 114.
4. James I. Packer, Knowing God, p. 20.
5. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, p. 149.
6. John 1:14.
7. John 1:18.
8. Colossians 1:19. See also Colossians 2:9.
9. John 14:9.
10. John 1:10—11.
11. John 1:26.
12. John 8:19.
13. Scholars often make a distinction between "revelation" and "illumination," because of a desire not to confuse the uniquely inspired  revelation of the written Word of God.
14. See Matthew 16:13-17 for this complete text.
15. Galatians 1:11-12. Emphasis added.
16. Ephesians 1:17. Emphasis added.
17. 2 Corinthians 5:16, NASB.
18. Galatians 1:15-16, NASB. Emphasis added. The NASB translators render εν εμοι literally, as it should be, "in me," not "to me" as other versions, such as the ESV. The NIV also renders this as "in me."
19. See Ephesians 2:4-10; Matthew 5:6.
20. See, for example, Romans 3:21-26; John 16:8.
21. Romans 10:9-10.
22. A. Skevington Wood, The Burning Heart, p. 31.
23. Wood, 33.
24. John Wesley, The Works of John Wesley, 3rd ed., Vol. I, reprint of 1872 edition, p. 75