You do not know what God is really like

You can know what God is like

Some Christians believe that God can’t be known. Like Job’s friend Elihu, they believe that God’s greatness requires him to be unknowable,¹ not realizing that his ability and desire to make himself known to such lowly creatures as ourselves² ranks chief among what makes him the greatest of all.

God can be known. Coming to know him is a process. The Lord defined eternal life as knowing God,³ not just showing that it is possible to know him, but showing that the very process of coming to know him is eternal life. As you learn more about him and live everything you know, you will increasingly know him and increasingly obtain eternal life.⁴

What does it mean to know God?

Many Christians would be offended by the suggestion that they don’t know God very well, if at all. Their offense is only possible if they use a completely different definition of what it means to “know” God than they do when referring to others. The differences between knowing God and knowing others consists only of how much there is to know—not the process of coming to know it. God is more complex and more intelligent than anyone.⁵ There is so much more to know about God than any human.⁶

Knowing God consists of much more than knowing some things about him. Knowing of God or just knowing about him is not the same as knowing God. You would never say you knew a fellow human if you knew as little about him or her as most Christians actually know about God. To know God requires more than what knowing another person does, not less.

Knowing that God exists isn’t the same as knowing God. You could never say that you know another person simply because you know they exist; why would your criteria for knowing God—who is deeper than any person—consist of anything less? You can know very little about God and still believe in him.

Seeing God is not the same as knowing him. After his resurrection, Jesus appeared to two of his disciples along the road to Emmaus as an unrecognized man, walking and talking about the events of his ministry and the scriptures that pertained to it.⁷ If you can see him and yet not recognize him, you can obviously see him without knowing him. To know God, you must learn more about him. You can learn more about God without seeing him, and you can see him without learning more about him.

To know someone is to know their character: what they do, why they do it, and how they feel in doing so. When you know someone’s character, you can accurately predict how they will think, act, and feel in different situations. Knowing God is a question of knowing how he thinks, feels, and acts.⁸ The more accurately you can anticipate how God would think, feel, or act, and the more situations across which you can accurately do so, the better you know him.

God’s character is the most complicated thing there is

Knowing someone’s character is more difficult the more sophisticated they are. The more sophisticated a person is, the more variations and layers will exist in what they do, why they do it, and how they feel across varying situations. The more sophisticated a person’s character, the more partial your understanding of their character will be, and the more your understanding can increase in breadth and accuracy as you observe and analyze them in different situations over time. The more knowledge they have, the more nuanced their beliefs, the more complex their desires, and the purer their motives, the more there is to learn and the more opportunities there are to make mistakes in predicting their experience in a specific situation.

God’s depth far exceeds the depth of the deepest person.⁹ A superficial understanding of God’s character is insufficient to know his character well enough to even begin to replicate it in any recognizable way. The Psalms contain as much information about the character of God as any other book of scripture, and yet the Psalmist wrote:

5 O Lord, how great are thy works! and thy thoughts are very deep.
6 A brutish man knoweth not; neither doth a fool understand this. (Psalm 92)

Common Christianity criminally oversimplifies God to great detriment. An illustrative example of this is the question, “what would Jesus do?” Some Christians don’t seem to mind that they can’t answer this question for the vast majority of the situations they face in life. Others answer it in nearly every case with something like “be nice,” ignoring how often Jesus was far from nice in the gospel accounts or how much worse those situations would have been if he had been. Few stop to consider that an answer to this question in any degree of accuracy requires far more knowledge of God’s character than they possess. One reason why so few bother to exert any significant effort in knowing Jesus is that they think there isn’t much to know. To presume that knowing the Lord is quick or easy requires contradicting every verse of scripture and every ounce of common sense. And yet, Christians and atheists alike tend to believe exactly that.

The character of God takes serious time and effort to discover. Consider what you would need to know in order to fully know God’s character.¹⁰ You would need to know what he does, why he does it, and how he does it. Because everything he does is for the benefit of the world,¹¹ you would need to know everything necessary to calculate the best possible circumstances across all time, all situations, and all people. There is certainly more to God’s character than can be learned in a lifetime.

To know the Lord is not only difficult—it is the most difficult thing you can do. It is also the most valuable thing you can do. It both requires the highest cost (everything you have) and provides the greatest benefit (everything God has, notably including the greatest joy that anyone can have).

The difficulty of learning more about God is shown by the magnitude of his efforts to reveal himself to us

The Lord is constantly attempting to reveal more of himself to us. He uses broad means, including: attempts to speak to us in our minds and hearts, the testimonies of angels and men who know him better than we do, our surroundings, and our life situations. All of creation is an attempt to convey this revelation. He even came to earth to live a mortal life in order to demonstrate to us how he is.¹² Were it easy to know him, none of these interventions would be required, let alone all of them. In spite of all of these great efforts, there are still only very few who know him very much at all.

God created every able-minded person with the ability to make moral judgments, whether they believe in or have been taught about him or not. Your conscience provides a mechanism for learning more about how God is and how he would act in your place. That mechanism is guilt, which is a signal that you have done less than your best and different than God would have in your place. The way to minimize the guilt that you feel is to always do the very best that you can. As you consistently do your best, you will increase in the strength and accuracy of your assessment of what is best, learning more about how God would live in your place, and gaining greater reasons to live the same way.

Since the fall of Adam, God has sent angels and inspired men to “minister unto the children of men, to make manifest” the character of Christ; that all good things come from and lead to him.¹³ God carefully arranges to send specific people¹⁴ to the earth at specific times to demonstrate aspects of his character to his children throughout time¹⁵ and across geography.¹⁶

The difficulty and complexity of communicating to us the content of God’s character is evidenced by the complexity of creation. This creation is intricately designed to provide uncountable witnesses of who, how, and what God is.¹⁷ God created everything we know of in order to provide a place where we would have the opportunity to learn more about him,¹⁸ implement what we learn into our own lives,¹⁹ and do what we can to help others to do the same.²⁰

The difficulty and value of communicating to us the content of God’s character is attested to by the high price that Jesus paid in order to demonstrate it. Jesus came to earth as a mortal man in order to make the Father known to us.²¹ It is in and through Jesus that we come to know and become like the Father.²² Consider how much Jesus suffered in leaving the glory of the Father’s presence to come here,²³ enduring bitter contradiction against his character for three decades, experiencing stiff persecution against his ministry for another three years, and receiving death at the hands of those he came to save.

Your present understanding of God is incomplete and, at least in some ways, incorrect

The historical examples of those who knew God best suggest that getting to know God’s character is no easy thing. Throughout history, even those who knew God best found themselves surprised in their continued interactions with him. For example, even after spending three years with Jesus nearly every day, his disciples were constantly shocked by what he said and did. Given that those who spent so much time with God still found themselves surprised by him, your operating assumption ought to be that your idea of God is incomplete and, at least in some ways, incorrect.²⁴

Each person’s view of Jesus’ character is determined by their heed of what they believe about him and their diligence in learning more.²⁵ You may have an idea of what God is like, but that doesn’t meant that it is correct or complete. Like everyone else, your knowledge of God is limited in breadth, depth, accuracy, and application. As long as you lack complete knowledge of God, you stand to be surprised frequently and significantly by his thoughts, feelings, and actions, including his directions to you.

Your present perspective of Jesus’ character is not what he is really like. Your ability to perceive and replicate the character of Jesus is akin to a child’s ability to replicate a great master’s painting. Fine details are blurrily summarized, a broad color palette is mapped to a much smaller set, and many aspects are omitted completely. A child cannot reproduce a fine painting, and fallen man cannot instantly come to understand nor replicate the character of Christ.

Your understanding of God’s character at any moment is like looking down at a dark city from an airplane at night. Some areas are well lit, some are partially lit, and some are totally dark. You can’t see everything, so you have to make educated guesses about what you can’t see (the totally dark and partially dark places) based on what you can see. Your sincere idea of how and what he is will change with every step you take towards him. Though your perception of Jesus may change significantly with each step, you will see over time that it is becoming more accurate as you close the distance towards him. As you learn more about the Lord, you will marvel at his ability to guide you toward him given the abundance of your limitations and the magnitude of his perfection.²⁶

Knowing the scriptures isn’t the same as knowing God

The scriptures are meant to teach us about the character of Christ, but few study them enough to learn very much about him at all. It’s not difficult to find a professed Christian whose confidence in how they imagine Jesus to be far exceeds their familiarity with the scriptures that describe him. Most Christians nonchalantly claim that they know Jesus, when few are even familiar with the scriptures that describe him. A superficial study of the scriptures may be sufficient to yield a list of God’s attributes—such as love, mercy, and justice—but not enough to surpass the superficial ideas of the meaning of these words, let alone their application to daily life.

It is nothing short of astounding that modern people believe you can know all there is to know about Jesus through vague familiarity with a few verses of scripture. Many of these same people have no problem spending at least four years and ever-increasing sums of money to study at college. No one should think that they know much about the author of all truth and the creator of everything known while their effort to study him dwarfs in comparison to the time required to gain a functional understanding of anything within his creation.

The best way to prove how little the average Christian knows the scriptures is to mark their surprise as you cite stories from the New Testament that illustrate a very different Jesus than they believe in. You may be surprised to hear that Jesus:

• Responded to a sincere Canaanite woman asking for help by calling her a dog on account of her ethnicity.²⁷
• Used the profanity of his time to insult those with whom he disagreed.²⁸
• Insulted religious leaders.²⁹
• [Drank] and ate enough to be credibly criticized as a drunk and glutton.³⁰
• [Denigrated the religious beliefs of a Samaritan woman who] had honored him by calling him a prophet, while proclaiming the superiority of his own.³¹
• [Disputed] his friends’ heartfelt proclamations of loyalty.³²

The fewer the scriptures upon which you base your understanding of God, the more likely you will be surprised by how he actually is. Anyone surprised by scriptural accounts of what God said, did, commanded to be done, or allowed to happen should diminish their confidence in their understanding of his character and wherever they obtained it. If you don’t even know the aspects of the Lord’s character demonstrated in the scriptures, how can you possibly imagine that you know him?

It is one thing to be overconfident in your expectation of how well you know God given a lack of familiarity with scripture, but there are many who manage to avoid learning how he is in spite of spending a great deal of time in the scriptures. Instead of searching the scriptures for improvements they can make to themselves, they make scripture study an end in itself.³³ Rather than searching for differences they can reconcile between them and God, they ignore the differences and memorize the behavioral matches or irrelevant factoids, building up tall barriers of verse-enforced false traditions that make it all the less likely they will receive the truth when confronted with it.³⁴

The scriptures are not meant to be the product—you are. They are an instruction manual for the work, not the work itself. You can’t correctly understand how God is through only studying his word. You must also live it!

Those who study the word of God without living it tend to subconsciously skip over the parts that suggest needed change.³⁵ Christians ought to know, explain, venerate, and emulate Jesus’ behavior on all occasions, not just when it matches their church’s arbitrary standards or their favorite feel-good activity. Instead of ignoring the parts of the scriptures that don’t align with your religion, you ought to ignore the parts of your religion that don’t align with your scriptures.

Even in the rare case that a person knows the scriptures well and applies them honestly, they should not mistake being familiar with that limited account for being familiar with the unlimited being. It is always difficult to convey an accurate model of someone’s character from one person to another in a way that the other person can accurately predict the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the person you are describing across many situations. If true for a normal person, imagine how much more difficult this would be if you were describing the Lord. The apostle John spent three years with the Lord, and yet he lamented how difficult it was to write adequately about him.³⁶ If you were to somehow hear about what transpired during the remainder of the three year ministry of Christ beyond the few weeks covered in the New Testament, or the contents of his thirty years of life prior to that, how confident can you be that you would not be surprised in what you learned?

God’s history as a test of how well you know his character

If you know someone’s character, you can accurately explain what they did in the past and why. A powerful test to assess the breadth of your knowledge of God’s character is to consider how well you can explain what God did in the scriptures. The first and most obvious question is: how familiar are you with the stories themselves? If you are not familiar with what he did in the past, it is unlikely you have any idea what he will do in the future.

For each story, ask whether you can explain what he said or did. Why didn’t he say or do anything else? Can you explain the differences between occasions when he was proactive, when he waited to respond to someone else, or when he remained silent or aloof ? Can you explain why he healed people when he did and how he did? Can you explain why and when he didn’t heal people? Can you explain why he sometimes received violence, sometimes resisted it, and other times inflicted it? Can you explain why he sometimes endured persecution and sometimes fled from it? Can you explain his behavior in the Old Testament, and seamlessly link it to the consistent character of what he demonstrated in the New? If your model of God’s character can’t explain why destroying whole cities and nations is the epitome of righteousness, your model is significantly limited.

Any of God’s recorded behavior that conflicts with your present understanding of him provides you with opportunities to get to know him better. If you can’t explain why Jesus did things in the past, how can you hope to predict what he will do in the future?

God’s future as a test of how well you know God’s character

If you know someone’s character, you can accurately predict what they will do in the future and why. The easiest way to predict what God will do in the future is by getting to know what he did in the past and applying those examples to similar present and future situations. If you observe what someone does in a particular situation, you can reasonably assume that they will do the same thing under the same circumstances at another time. There is no one for whom this is more true than God.³⁷

What about situations where you have not yet seen what they will do? If you understand someone’s character, you can not only accurately predict how they will act in previously observed situations, but also how they will act in any situation. This is because you not only know what they do, but you also know why they do it. If you know why he does what he does, you can more accurately predict more of what he will do across a broader range of situations.

If you know God’s character, you will be able to precisely predict what he will do and not do in the future. If you can’t perfectly predict the future, you must admit that there is still more for you to know about God.

Someone who knew God’s character could clearly and accurately unfold the cryptic descriptions of the End Times from scripture. After all, it should be easier to fill in the blanks on extensive predictions than it is to generate them from nothing.

If you know God’s character, your ability to predict his actions will not apply uniquely to the End Times, but also to the present time. If you know God’s character, you should be able to accurately predict his will in the small-scale situations of daily life as well as in the big picture over time.

Answers to requests as a test of how well you know God’s character

God’s responses to your request provide a proxy to measure how well you know him. The less often God grants your requests, the more evidence you have of distance between how you believe God is and how he actually is. The more you learn about God and the more you restrict your requests to what best advances his purposes, the more often he will grant your requests.³⁸ The Lord promised that:

...whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, which is right, believing that ye shall receive, behold it shall be given unto you. (3 Nephi 18:20)

The more unanswered questions you have for God, the more evidence you have of distance between how you believe God is and how he actually is.

The Lord’s responses to our questions are subject to what we are willing to receive. The more you know and live God’s character, the more directly and immediately he can answer the questions you ask him. The more you know him, the more building blocks you have from which he can construct the answer to your questions. The less about him you know, the more he will have to lay out to you in order to answer your questions, and the more likely limits in your cognitive abilities, diligence, or trust in him are to form a barrier between you and the answer to your question.

God’s knowledge as a test of how well you know God’s character

Do you know what God knows? God knows all things.³⁹ Do you?⁴⁰ He knows how everything came to be,⁴¹ and how everything comes to an end.⁴² He knows the relationship between all things and how everything affects everything else. He knows the true worth of all things. He knows all possible actions, their long-term cost, and their long-term benefit.

Most will readily admit that their knowledge is far less than God’s knowledge, but few realize that this means that they also do not know his character. God’s knowledge is a fundamental part of his character. How can you know what God would do, why he would do it, or how he would feel in doing so if you don’t know what he knows? If there remains anything that he knows that you do not yet know, then even if you know him somewhat, you do not know him fully. To fully know how he is, you would also have to fully know what he knows.

God’s wisdom as a test of how well you know God’s character

God’s wisdom is inseparable from his character. What God understands informs how he is, and how he is informs what he understands. Can you understand what he understands?⁴³ Can you reason as well as he does?⁴⁴ To the extent that you can’t think like God would in your place,⁴⁵ you will be unable to predict what he would do in your place or how he would feel in your situation. To the extent that your ability to reason falls short of God’s, you will see different options for thought, feeling, and action than he does, and you will see them differently than he does.

God’s power as a test of how well you know God’s character

God’s power co-exists with his character; it only exists in those who share his character, and to the extent they do. Can you do what God does? If you find yourself unable to do what you sincerely believe the Lord would in your place, you are either incorrect in what he would do, or too different from him in character to accomplish it. Either way, you should assume that your understanding of what is good is equally different from God’s as your power is from his.

Your level of obedience to God as a test of how well you know his character

As the Lord prepared for his death, he told his disciples that they were not yet ready to join him where he was going.⁴⁶ They had not yet dedicated themselves fully to following his example. He said: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” (John 14:6) They all claimed they would remain faithful to him even unto death.⁴⁷ And yet, all of them abandoned Jesus in his time of greatest trial.

Like the disciples at the time of his death, it is likely that you still haven’t decided to follow him above all else, even if you think you have. Until you have faced and passed the test of the sacrifice of all things, up to and including your life, how can you be confident that you know his character?

Interactions with God as a test of how well you know God’s character

Your association with God is determined by how much you know about him and whether you fully live all you know about him. A complete understanding of God’s character is not required to abide with him, but complete reconciliation to his character as far as you know it is. You become innocent before God, prepared⁴⁸ and worthy to dwell in his presence through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ as soon as you begin and continue to live according to everything you know about him. This is what salvation is.⁴⁹

If you always live in a way that pleases him,⁵⁰ he will always accompany you. The Lord said: “...If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” (John 14:23) Has the Lord “made his abode” with you? If not, can you confidently say that you’ve kept his words? Do you even know his words?

God will not abide with those who willfully rebel against him.⁵¹ The spirit of God actuates a person’s ability to perceive and evaluate the net benefit of available options. To approach the presence of God requires you to adopt reason as your guidance system,⁵² always thinking about and doing what leads to the greatest long-term outcomes rather than what feels good in the moment. While God welcomes into his presence those who always do their best,⁵³ those who are dishonest remove themselves from him.⁵⁴

The love of God as a test of how well you know his character

The love of God is the central quality of his character.⁵⁵ But what does it mean to love others as God loves you? As with other aspects of his character, people are too quick to reduce God’s love to their present understanding of what it might mean. God’s love is not just difficult to attain—it is difficult to perceive and learn.

How can you know that your understanding of love differs from God’s?

• Do you keep all of God’s commandments all of the time?⁵⁶
• Do you follow God’s example completely, all of the time, as far as you understand him to be?⁵⁷
• Do you find it difficult or onerous to keep God’s commandments?⁵⁸
• Do you treat the needs of other people as equally important to your own?⁵⁹
• Would you die for a family member,⁶⁰ friend,⁶¹ stranger,⁶² or enemy?⁶³
• How do you respond to correction? Those who invite you to improve are inviting you to draw nearer to God,⁶⁴ and your response to them indicates the love you have for God.⁶⁵

Those who know God love one another as God loves them.⁶⁶ If you fall short in any of the above-mentioned qualities, you should consider it as evidence that there is more about God’s character that you need to learn and live in order to obtain eternal life.⁶⁷