Do You Really Want to Know God?

WHAT IF…
DO YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW GOD?
DR. JIM DIXON
DECEMBER 16, 2012
Galatians 4:6

I am not really an author. I’m not a writer of books. I’m just a pastor. Around here, when we think of those who write books, we think of Lee Strobel and Mark Mittelberg, and they’ve written many, many wonderful books. But I do have a new book that will be coming out in a matter of months, and it’s called, What Would Jesus Ask? 10 questions That Can Transform Your Life. What would Jesus ask? The truth is that God has questions that He would ask us. It’s not that God doesn’t know the answers. God is omniscient. He knows everything. But He wants us to go deeper. He wants us to think deeper. There are questions He would have us ponder.

Our Lord Jesus Christ came into the world, and He too posed a lot of questions, questions that He knew the answers to. But he wanted to take us deeper, wanted to make us reflect and think. So, I’d like to begin this morning with a question. And the question is, do you really want to know God?

Do you really want to know God? I mean, maybe you don’t really want to know Him. Maybe you just kinda want stuff from Him. Maybe you want Him to protect you. Maybe you want salvation, eternal life. But do you really want to know Him? Maybe you’re kind of afraid of Him. I think, to some degree, all of us are. Maybe because of that, you don’t really want to know Him.

In the year 1931, Thomas Edison died, and He was 84 years old. Edison had three children through his first marriage, and then three more children through his second marriage. So he had six kids, but Thomas Edison wasn’t really a family man. He spent most of his time in his laboratories. And of course, in those labs, he became perhaps the greatest inventor in the history of the world. His inventions seemed to the people of our nation and people all over the world as though they were supernatural. So when Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, people thought, how can this be? How can you bottle lightning up inside of glass like that? What’s happening? How can that be? When he invented the phonograph, people thought, how can a machine talk? How can a machine make music? How is that possible for a phonograph to do those things? All of his inventions seemed like that. They seemed miraculous and supernatural. So Thomas Edison was called the Wizard of West Orange, New Jersey, which is where his primary labor laboratory was located.

He wasn’t much of a father, so he was often in his lab. When he wasn’t in his lab, he was hanging out with his cronies. And who were the buddies of Thomas Edison? They were Henry Ford, Harry Firestone, and John Burroughs, the naturalist. These guys hung out together. They took camping trips together for long times away from their family. They would go on camping trips and then would smoke cigars.

Of course, in 1920, Thomas Edison had a famous interview with Scientific American Magazine. I have a copy of the current issue of Scientific American in my hand. And Scientific American is a magazine I’ve subscribed to for many years. I love the subject of science. This particular issue, the current issue focus is on intelligence—the difference in gender, male intelligence, female intelligence, the intelligence of children, how you raise a genius. Of course, we all have that problem. How do we raise our geniuses? And it focuses on animal intelligence. It focuses on all of these things.

But in 1920, the same magazine 92 years ago, conducted an interview with Thomas Edison. I bet if you had a copy of that magazine, that’d be worth a whole lot of money. In their interview in 1920 with Thomas Edison, Edison said that he was working hard on a machine that would stun the world. It was a machine he said that would actually communicate with the next world. Thomas Edison believed in the soul. He believed in the realm of the spiritual. He believed in the supernatural. He didn’t really believe in God. He believed in a supernatural realm, a spiritual realm, but without God—at least historians tell us he hoped there was no God. He had a huge fear of God, but he had this longing to talk to his mom, whom he had loved and who was departed.

So he thought, if I could create this machine, and if it had unheard-of, sophisticated technology, they might be able to communicate through vibrations with the world beyond. Obviously, it didn’t happen. But I think all of us can relate a little bit to Thomas Edison. We probably miss our moms and dads if they’re departed, and maybe we’re a little bit afraid of God. Maybe we’re very afraid of God, and maybe because of that we really don’t want to know God. That certainly was true of Adam and Eve in Genesis chapter three. We’re told in Genesis chapter three, in our passage of scripture for today, that because they had sinned and they felt shame, they sought to hide themselves from God. They actually sought to hide themselves from God amongst the trees of the garden. God called to them, “Where are you?” He was trying to get them to ponder the question, “What are we doing? Why are we hiding, hiding from God?”

And of course, we live in this kind of a world. There are people all over the world disconnected, separated from God, and some of them willfully hiding from God. This is a world of great suffering and tragedy, of course. The Bible tells us in Genesis that, “In the beginning, God created.” We’re told that God gave this amazing gift. And you might be thinking, well, that gift is life. And yes, life is a great gift, but life would have no meaning without this other gift. That other gift is freedom. God gave the gift of freedom to us, and it’s freedom that makes life worth the living, with all of its risk, with all of its dangers.

So God gave freedom to the angelic hosts. God gave freedom to the human hosts. That freedom has been used and it has been abused. Some people have used their freedom for evil. That’s certainly what has happened, just two days ago, in Connecticut at that elementary school. And God grieves. And God’s promises that all will have to stand and give an account. God will one day judge the world. God will judge all souls, even the souls of those who recently died. Everything is in God’s hands. But God doesn’t cause all these things. But He allows them by granting freedom.

In granting freedom, it was a huge risk, which He foreknew the results of. But He thought it was still worth giving. He’d rather see humans free, abusing their gift, than not free at all, just automatons and robots. So God gave this gift, and the world is just so messed up. I mean, there’s just been too many of these deals, too many of these mass killings, and it doesn’t seem like the world’s getting saner. It just kind of feels like the world’s coming unraveled at times. And yet in Christ we have great promises. And of course, He’s come with this offer of communion with God.

I think back to when our daughter, Heather, was six or seven years old, kind of the age of many of the kids in Connecticut. Our daughter was six or seven years old and we were at home and the phone rang and Heather went and picked up the phone, which she didn’t always do. She answered the phone, and it was Bo Mitchell. And Bo Mitchell was and is one of our good friends. Bo and his wife, Gary, lived right across the street from us. Bo and Gary Mitchell, along with Bob and Allison Belts and Barb and I, kind of served together in starting the church 30 years ago. And Bo has a great sense of humor. Bo loves to tease people. He loves to play practical jokes. When he heard Heather’s voice, he thought he was gonna play a little practical joke. Heather picks up the phone, says, “Hello. Bo Mitchell goes, “Heather,” and she’s just kind of quiet, and he says, “this is God speaking.” And Heather is just stunned. I mean, she throws down the phone, runs through the house, shouting, “God is on the phone! God is on the phone!”

How would you feel? I mean, if God actually did that. What if God called people up? What if He gave you a phone call? Would you want to talk? Are you kind of afraid? Do you want to know Him? Do you want a relationship with Him?

Well, Christ is coming to the world to offer this. And of course, Adam and Eve sought to hide. I know you’ve all heard of Mount Sinai, which sometimes in the Bible’s called Mount Horeb. It was on Mount Sinai, in Exodus chapter three, that Moses went up to the mountain and experienced a theophany, a manifestation physically of the presence of God. In Exodus 19, Moses is up on the mountain again and encounters God again. For 40 days and 40 nights he is on top of Mount Sinai. Because of these things, Mount Sinai began to be called the Holy Mountain. And we know from Talmudic literature that for hundreds of years Jewish people made pilgrimages to Mount Sinai, at least the mountain that they believed was Mount Sinai. For hundreds of years, they made pilgrimages to the Mount called Sinai or Horeb, because it was the Holy Mountain.

But what the Talmudic literature tells us incredibly is that when they’d make their pilgrimage, they’d stop at the base, and they’d never go up, because they thought that on the top of Mount Sinai was the Shekinah, the presence of God. They thought that the presence of God hovered over the top of the mountain, and they didn’t want to go up there if God was up there. So they would pilgrimage to the mountain, stop at the bottom, and never go to the top. They didn’t really want to know God; they didn’t really want to encounter God.

Of course, I think there’s a part of each of us that can kind of understand that. There’s the Holy of Holies in the history of Israel that played a prominent role in the life of Israel. And of course, the Holy of Holies was the innermost part of the tabernacle and the innermost part of the temple. In the Holy of Holies, again, was the Shekinah, the belief that God’s presence hovered in the Holy of Holies over the Mercy Seat of the Ark of the Covenant. The glory of the Lord was in there, but nobody could go in there. They were sealed off and nobody wanted to go in there. God was in there. Only the high priest went in, and he but once a year on Yom Kippur. And they tied a rope around him so that if he died in there, in the presence of God, nobody would have to go in. They could just pull him out with a rope. In all of the history of Israel, that there’s no recorded incident of any of the Jewish people trying to sneak into the Holy of Holies. The presence of God was in there and people wanted to stay out.

Now, it’s true that foreign emperors—basically Antiochus IV, called Epiphanes—desecrated the Holy of Holies in the second century BC. And it’s also true that Titus and his Roman legions desecrated the Holy of Holies in the first century AD. But these were foreigners, and these were in times after the Ark of the Covenant had disappeared and the Gloria had departed. But when the presence of God was believed to be in the Holy of Holies, they didn’t want to go there. They didn’t really want to know God.

So there’s this long history of people who didn’t really want to know God, but kind of wanted to respect God, kind of wanted to venerate God and hope that maybe they would get some perks from God—that they might get some protection from God. They hoped that God might do stuff for them if they respected Him.

And so you see throughout religious history people wanting to show a little respect, a little veneration, towards God in hopes that perks and protection might come, but not really wanting to know God. So God would ask you today, do you really want to know Him? Do you really want to have communion with Him? Do you really want to have an intimate kind of relationship with Him? I think people come to church in the same way. I mean, God is kind of there. I mean, He is everywhere, He is omnipresent. But there’s some sense that God shows up at church, but distant enough that it’s kind of safe. And you can show a little respect for God coming to church. And maybe you can even volunteer a little, and maybe that’ll bring some perks and protection from God, maybe salvation itself. There’s this kind-of-but-not-really wanting to know God. So this kinda leads us to our teaching this morning, which really follows this question. Do you want to know God?

The teaching this morning is this: Christmas is the promise that God wants to be our friend. This is what Christmas shows us. This is what Christmas tells us. God actually wants to be your friend. And we would not know this had not Christ come into the world. Christ tells us that God wants to be our friend. You might not want to know Him, but He wants to know you. He wants to really know you. Of course, in a sense He does know you. He knows your innermost thoughts, but He wants to enter into relationship with you, even into friendship.

I have a ring on my left hand. It’s my wedding ring. It looks like something maybe Frodo or Bilbo might have worn, but this has Hebrew written on it. So that has the Hebrew word, “Abba,” written on it. And on my wedding ring, if you went around the ring, there are three Hebrew words: “Abba, Ben, Ruah.” So it says, “Father, Son, Holy Spirit.” And this Hebrew word (which is actually an Aramaic word), abba, is surrounded by huge controversy. The Hebrew word for father is “ab,” and the Hebrew for “my father” is “abi.” But now you have abba, and what does abba mean?

Well, about the time of Christ, the Hebrew was morphing, and you’d say, “My father,” by saying, not “abi,” but “abba.” So there was a change there. But they also know phonetically that little kids, when they called their fathers, would say, “Abba.” Just like we would say “Dadda” or “Mama,” they would say “Abba.” But little kids would say, “Abba.” So Jesus is the one who gave us this word. Jesus is the one who taught us to call God Father, and He gave us this word “Abba.”

And of course, it was kind of unthinkable in the ancient world, in the Jewish world, for anyone even to call God “ab,” even to even to refer to God as “abi,” “my father,” because that’s just a little bit intimate and maybe it lacks respect. So people call God Jehovah, Jehovah Shammah, Jehovah Sabaoth, and Jehovah Elohim.

But this tender term “Father” was something that was suspect and rarely used. Now Jesus brings us even perhaps a more tender form of this word with Abba. And He teaches us to address, those of us who believe in Jesus as Lord and Savior, to refer to His Father as our Father and to use this word, Abba. It’s an amazing thing. So when Jesus prays in Gethsemane, we know He uses “Abba, ho pater.” It combines the Hebrew with the Greek. Paul does the same thing, actually, in Romans and in Galatians. It became formulaic in the early church, “Abba, ho pater,” which is “God our Father.” So when we say, “Abba, Father, Abba ho pater,” it is the Spirit Himself bearing witness with our spirit that we’re children of God.

“Abba ho pater” was formulaic in the early church, and we know that they began almost every prayer like that. When we say “Abba, Father,” it was Jesus who taught us to do this. 135 times in the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—Jesus refers to God as His Father. A lot of times it says, “ho pater.” But we know that what Jesus actually spoke was Aramaic. It was rendered into the Greek as “ho pater,” but He actually said, “abba,” and He’s taught us to do this

But there’s even a word more amazing that Jesus gives us with regard to relationship with Him and with the Father, and that is the word “philos.” This is in incredible. This word is the word for love. There are many Greek words for love—“agape, philos, storge, eros. Philos is a word for love that refers to love of friends. There are many words for friends, but this word philos refers to a close friend. It refers to a dear friend. This is a term of endearment. It a friendship where there’s a lot of love for each other. This is the word Jesus tells us to refer to Him by. Jesus said in John 14, “No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing. But I’ve called you friends.” Philos. So we have this invitation of Jesus to think of our relationship with Him as one of friendship, and through Him, the Father.

So, later in the chapter of John 14, Jesus tells us that, if we love Him, He and the Father will come and make their home inside of us. It’s an amazing promise in John 14. If we love Him, He and the Father will both come and make their home inside of us. And they do that through the promised Holy Spirit. This is intimacy. So you might not want to know God, but He really wants to have a relationship with you. The word Abba and the word philos, these both tell us that.

You can see in the Bible that, in a sense, those who were inspired of the Holy Spirit to write are struggling with what analogy to use for our relationship with God. And the analogy they’ve come up with really is marriage. This is an amazing thing. I want to just take a moment and kind of describe for you the first week of my life with Barb.—Barb and I were married on August 21st, 1971. This was in Temple City, 1971, just outside the church. We were married at Temple City Baptist Church 41 years ago, and we remember the day so well. we wanted to get married in my home church, but it had been destroyed by the LA earthquake earlier that year. We might’ve been married in Barb’s home church, but it was being remodeled. So we were married at Temple City Baptist Church.

It was a very hot day. I mean, it was like a hundred degrees and there was no air conditioning, and it seemed like no ventilations. So I think everybody in there saw people fanning their faces, and we were just so hot standing up there with the lights shining down on us. I know when the minister said, you may kiss your bride, we just tasted salt. That’s kind of the reality of it. So that’s how we started out.

We came out of the church and took all of our pictures. We got into Barb’s car for our honeymoon. We decided to take the honeymoon in Barb’s car. Barb had a little VW bug, and our friends had come and sabotaged it. So there was shaving cream and rice, but not only all over the outside. They’d opened the doors somehow and put shaving cream and rice all over the inside of our car. It was sticky and gooey. We tried to clean it, did the best we could, and just drove off for our wedding night. We went to Santa Barbara, where I had gone to college for four years and a fifth year for a teaching credential. So we went to Santa Barbara, to the Biltmore.

Now, you might think, as I described the honeymoon, that we had a lot of money, but we didn’t. In fact, I borrowed the money for the honeymoon and used our credit card, and we were kind of started right out in debt. Neither one of us had much money. I was a seminary student working part-time at the YMCA. So we’re going up to the Santa Barbara Biltmore. I’d made reservations there. We get there to the Santa Barbara Biltmore and we go to the desk and they give us the room key. And they say they’ll have a bellman or bellhop or somebody like that take us to the room. And so we turn around and it’s a friend of mine who’s now working at that hotel. That was a bummer because it was like, oh no, you know, what are my friends going to do to us tonight?

But in any event, he did take us to the hotel room there in the Biltmore, and the phone rings in the room and somebody says, “Congratulations on your honeymoon.” We say thank you. He said, could we bring you something, maybe some wine or champagne? At this point in our lives, Barbara and I had never ever tasted wine or champagne. I know that sounds, wow, you guys grew up in a bubble. But in any event, we had never tasted wine or champagne. So they said, “Can we bring you something?” And then they started describing various things. They said, “Something dry, something sweet, something red or white,” and I didn’t know what anything meant. So I just kind of said, okay, whatever, and so they sent us something and it turned out that it was champagne and it was cooling in a silver bowl of ice. And so we opened it up, tasted it, and we thought it tasted horrible. We just thought, wow, this doesn’t even taste good. Why do people drink this stuff? So we just kind of put it back in the ice.

The next morning I go to pay for the room. And I knew the room was expensive because I’d made the reservation, but this was the one time splurge. So I go to pay for the room, and it’s three times what I thought it would be, because the champagne cost twice as much as the room. It was Dom Perignon. So I think, man, we can’t leave that in the room. So I went back to the room to get the Dom Perignon to bring back out with us. We put it in the back of the VW and we head out.

So we’re heading north. We put the cork into the champagne. About an hour and a half in, the cork just blows off the top of the backseat and spew champagne everywhere. And you know, our second night was to be at the Madonna Inn, which is a famous hotel. If you know anything about Southern California, you probably heard the Madonna Inn is supposed to be a famous, beautiful place with waterfalls and stuff. We’d never been there before, but I’d made reservations. And we show up and go to the front desk. We start looking through the literature. This is really embarrassing. We start looking through the literature, and in all the pictures of the room, we don’t see any TV sets.

Barbara and I look at each other like, well, they don’t have TV sets here. I’m not saying we’re shallow, but we left. So we left the Madonna Inn and we went to Pismo Beach, and we found a nice hotel on the water at Pismo Beach and spent the second night there. And then we went on up to Yosemite Valley, which is one of our favorite places on God’s earth. And we’ve gone back there many times. But Yosemite Valley is just a beautiful national park. So we went there and we stayed at the Ahwahnee Hotel. The Ahwahnee Hotel still is there today, and you can go and stay there if you’re willing to wait two years for a room. But it’s an amazing hotel and it’s very old world, and has this huge dining hall with candelabras and high wood beam ceilings and incredible romantic dinners.

It was a pretty cool place. So there at Yosemite we had a great few days with the Merced River and Mirror Lake and El Capitan and Half Dome. It’s just a beautiful, beautiful valley. There’s Bridalveil Falls, Yosemite Falls, Upper and Lower Vernal Falls, Nevada Falls. This is an amazing, amazing place. So we had an amazing week there. We actually spent all of our money there and even money we didn’t have. Then we stayed two extra days—because we were borrowing anyway, so we just borrowed some more and we stayed two extra days.

So then we drive home from Yosemite and we come back to my apartment, which actually was a apartment house that belonged to my dad. He was letting me stay there. And Barb and I had… you know I mean, this was our wedding night. This was our coming back from a honeymoon. This is our first night there. Barb had her own apartment. So we come to that place, we pull Barb’s VW up, and I notice smoke coming out of the back. So I don’t know what’s going on, but the smoke’s just starting to bellow out of the back. So I open up the back of the VW, and the engine’s so hot I can’t even get my hands near it. And I say, Barb, when’s the last time you changed your oil? And Barb said, “Oil?” And so that was kind of like… her dad had taken care of her car, but not in about six months. So the engine burned up. That was the first week of our life together.

Our life has been such an amazing adventure, and such an amazing blessing from God and such a miracle. And Barb is my best friend, but also the most wonderful person I’ve ever met in my life. Marriage can be like that. I mean, it really can when God blesses and you have His grace and you have His mercy and there’s forgiveness. Marriage can be like that. Think about this: think about the fact that, in the Bible, God chooses marriage to be the example of the relationship He wants with us. I mean, the word Abba is amazing. The word philos amazing. But what’s more amazing than that the relationship that God wants to have with us He describes as marriage. That’s amazing.

So the church is called the bride of Christ, and Jesus is going to come for His bride. And the church is called the bride of the Lamb. We’re told that when Christ comes for us, He’ll take us to heaven and our eternal life with Him will begin. In Revelation 19 it says that with the marriage supper of the lamb we’re married to Him. We are His bride, and our time in heaven will begin with the great festive marriage supper of the lamb like a wedding feast. This is the imagery in the Bible. So you might not want to know God, but He really wants to know you and wants to have this great relationship with you. So the gospel’s an invitation to come into friendship with Him, to be able to call Him Abba and to come into loving friendship with Him with that term of endearment. Then really the gospel’s an invitation to marry Him. What an amazing concept that God could view us in this way.

So as you come to the table and you partake of the bread in the cup, remember that God loves us so much. If Christ had not come into the world, we would not know how much. If Christ had not come into the world, we’d have no idea that the God of the universe, the omnipotent almighty, omnipresent, all-knowing God, wants to have this kind of a love relationship with us and that He’d want us to call Him daddy, He would want us to be His dear friend, and He would want to marry us for eternity. This is the imagery of the Bible, and that’s what the gospel invites us to. So we come to this table and we say thank You. Thank You for dying for us. Thank You for being our savior. Thank You for being our Lord. Thank You for being our friend. Thank You for marrying us. So let’s look to the Lord with a word of prayer.