1511 - "Getting to 'Know' God"

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Each weekday, Dr. Crisp will be discussing biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Tune in daily to start your day right and deepen your understanding of how to better walk the way and enjoy the journey. Here's your host, Dr. Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_01 0:20

Welcome to On the Way. This is Tony Crisp and this is Podcast 1511. Over the next couple of days, I want to talk to you about knowledge. I want to talk to you about knowing God, about walking with God, about being intimate with God. You see, God has given us a great privilege. He has drawn us to himself. He has given us the privilege and the honor to know him and to know him personally, not just know about him, but to know him. And one of the greatest joys in my life is when I understood that studying the Word of God, the written Word of God would help me to know the living Word of God. Now I know that the Bible is alive, it's powerful, it's sharper than any priest's fillet knife, and it pierces even to the dividing apart, asunder the joints and marrow, and it is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of our heart. And we are before God naked. He sees us as we are, and when we read the word objectively and we say God speak to my heart, isn't it amazing how God will speak to us? Now He will not give us knowledge of who He is for us to play with, to use and squander. But if you want to know God you can know God personally. You can know not just about Him, and we need to know about Him, we need to know the facts about Him, we need to know the revelation that God has given to us in the Scriptures Old and New Testament. But that knowledge will become dry and stale if we just use it so we can strut around and say how much we know. But you see, the purpose of knowing about God is to know Him personally and to become intimate with Him. So I want to speak to all of us about knowing God. And in order to do that we need to understand the language that God uses to tell us about knowing Him. I'm not going to be long. This is just to get us started. In the Old Testament you have the Hebrew language. Now the Hebrew language was chosen by God because there is no language on earth that is majestic as the Hebrew. It is the language of creation. It's the language of majesty, of wonder. With it you can be conceptual and talk about the grandeur and the transcendency and the great majesty of who God is. There's no language anywhere that does better than that. But Hebrew is not an analytical language. Greek is an analytical language. It gets down to the nitty gritty, to the details, to the shades and nuances of language. That's why God chose Greek, not just to make it the universal language of the days of Jesus and the apostles, where you could go anywhere on earth and you could find people that would speak Greek much like what English is today. It's the international language of business. So it was in the days of Jesus and the apostles with Greek. And Greek is very precise. The concepts of justification, of sanctification, of glorification, of adoption, of redemption, those are the languages of technicality, the language of the courtroom, the language of life. And so I want us to look at just four words having to do with knowledge, and I'll give them to you so you can look them up and find out about them for yourself. See the wonderful day that we're living in. You can learn to have language tools that what it took me six or seven years of language study of Hebrew and Greek, you can find the same answers, it seems, just in a few minutes. And I use some of those tools myself, and one of the things that I'm doing now is helping pastors to learn how to use the Greek tools and the Hebrew tools where they can give to their people what they could not have given to them if they'll just halfway apply themselves. But you know what I found out? A lot of guys don't want to study anymore. They really don't. Study's hard work. Honestly, it's much easier for the most part, for the most part, not all, and not always. But it's much easier to make a hospital visit than to spend an hour studying. It's much easier to go drink coffee with somebody and let them tell you their problems or share with them and have fellowship than it is to do an in-depth word study or wrestle with a theological issue. And so men are failing to do that. And it's much to our hurt and our harm in the body of Christ. But I want to give you a Hebrew word that you can look up. It's Yada. Y A D A is the way it's mostly spelled, but it's the language of the Old Testament, and it's the word to know. It's the word for knowledge. Now it's amazing because the concepts, the Hebrew concepts versus the Greek concepts in philosophy. The Hebrew language looks at a man not so much as a tripartite being as the New Testament does. Paul, for instance, says to the church at Thessaloniki, he said, I pray that your whole body, soul, and spirit be preserved blameless unto the day of Jesus. It gets down to discerning between the soul and the spirit. Now you and I cannot do that, but God's word can. That's why in the book of Hebrews, chapter four, it says the word of God is alive, it's powerful, it is dynamic, it is able to discern the thoughts and intents. And the sword of the Spirit, that great fillet knife that is sharp on both edge, the Holy Spirit, the Word of God, can discern between the soul and the spirit, but you and I cannot. You see, there's just a part that we can see and a part we cannot see, but you can't say, Oh, that was a soulish act. That came from the soul and not the spirit. You and I, that's way, way above our pay grade. Now you might think you're smart, but you're not when it comes to that. That's God's business. Leave it in his hands. You can observe the fruit, but you can't tell where it comes from. And we don't even know our own heart and our own motivations. We certainly cannot know the motivations and the why of someone else. Let's leave that to God and get out of that business. We'll be a whole lot better off in the body of Christ in the church of Jesus. And so I want you to journey with me this week about the word Yadai, because it is a word that's used in the totality of a relationship. It's used the knowledge of God, the knowledge of each other. It's the word that's used for intimacy. You know that, the Bible says in the fourth chapter of Genesis, and Adam knew his wife, Yada. He knew her, that's intimacy. He knew her sexually. And so there's that kind of knowledge. It's a broad concept, but a wonderful concept. It's a word that speaks of knowing as in a covenant relationship. It's deep. But yet it can be used also of knowing as an acquaintance. And the New Testament there's the word Oida, O I D A Oida, and it is the word that's used, for instance, to describe intuitive knowledge. All of us are born with the intuitive knowledge, with the intuition to know that there is a God, to know K N O W Oida. We know it intuitively. It's internal, it's part of us. There's some things you just know. That's oida. And then there's the word gonosko. That is personal and personal experience, knowing someone and getting to know someone. That's gonosco. It's experiential. It's observation. We experience something, we know something. And then there's an intensive of that. It's epigonosco. Epi is a preposition which is an intensifier for all practical purposes. Now the word epi from a prepositional standpoint means upon. Sometimes it's above. An episcopas, episcopas. Scopas is the word for the sights on a deer rifle. That's scopas. And looking at small things, it is a microscopas, a micros. It's a small looking at little things, a microscope. And then there is a telescop. Tele is the word for end, a far out look. And so a telescope looks at things that are way out. They are beyond. They're out there. A telescope. The word epi and scopas is episcopas, episcopagan. That means seers, scopas, epi over overseers. You give oversight to something. That's one of the words for the role of a pastor, the office of a pastor. Now think about it. Paul said if any man desire the office of an overseer, episcopas, episcopas. And so epi put together with Ganosco means intensive oversight, mature oversight, precise oversight, full realization, to know someone intimately. Episcopas. Yes. That's oversight. General oversight. When that's put together with Gonosco, it means general knowledge, oversight, intensive. It's used in a variety of ways, and we're going to look at those. But the goal of these next few podcasts is to help us to know God on the way, to walk with Him, to experience Him. You see, we know there is a God, but we want to know that God. Do you know God? Do you know Him intimately? You see, the Bible says to those who truly believe, to those who have committed their life to Him, Jesus is precious. I believe it's the bottom line for really knowing God and the and the marker and the gauge as to whether you really know God or not, or to where whether you're saved to put it more bluntly. I want to ask you one question. Only you can really answer it. Nobody can answer this for you. You might think you can answer it for your kids or your wife or your husband. You cannot. Only you and God know this. Is Jesus precious to you? To those who believe, Peter said Jesus is precious. To those who believe he's precious. You say, well, what does precious mean? Well what do you think it means? It means it is very close to you. It's very desired by you. It's valuable to you. You would do anything for something or someone that's precious to you. Is your wife precious to you? Is your husband precious to you? What about that little baby girl or that baby boy? What about that son or that daughter, that grandchild? You say they're just precious. What does that mean? You'd do anything for them. You'd climb any mountain, swim any river, you would pay any price if it meant that they could be happy and content and that you could bring joy to their life. Well, the same thing's true about Jesus. Is he precious to you? You see, Jesus doesn't want to be a part of your life. He wants to be your life. He wants to be the most precious. He will play second to none. He wants to be your Lord, your Savior. He wants to be most precious to you. Is Jesus precious to you? Do you know him intimately? He knows you. I pray that you know him. And that over the next couple of days, we can look at some of these passages so that we'll have a greater desire to know him. And once we know him, we will make him known to others. For on the way, this is Tony Chris.

SPEAKER_00 13:50

Thanks for listening to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Tune in every weekday for information on biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Fridays are for your questions. Email your questions to questions at TonyCrisp.org, then just listen for your question to be answered on Friday's podcast. That's questions at TonyC R I S P dot org. Thanks for listening and have a blessed day on the way.