In our journey so far we have looked at God’s name – Yahweh; we have looked at some aspects of His character – he is unchangeable, he is three in one, he is a God who gets angry at sin; yet he is a God with immense love for us; we have seen God revealing himself to us in different word pictures – he is like a Father, a shepherd, a rock, an eagle, and so on. Last time we saw that the key to knowing God is getting to know his Son Jesus. Jesus said “I am the way the truth and the life, no-one comes to the Father except by me.” (John 14:6) At the heart of our faith lies Jesus Christ and a relationship with him.

The bible makes it clear that God is there, it also says that it is possible to know this God even though he is invisible and we cannot hear him. In a physical world that surrounds us and which is so tangible, so concrete, many of us struggle with this idea of the God who is there and with whom we can have a relationship. Those of us who are christians know this reality but we find it hard to express it in words. It is more felt than tel’t as someone once said long ago. We are people who are both physical and spiritual – we have little trouble relating to the physical side of our being but we struggle more with the spiritual. But the spiritual is just as real.

What I want to try and do in this sermon is explain how this spiritual side works. Ultimately there is mystery here but the bible does give us some insight as to what actually is happening when we draw into a relationship with God. I suppose the question I want to ask and answer is this one - how do we get to know God and how do we get to know him better? This is one of the most important questions a human being can ask.

How do we get to know God?

So far in this series I have used Jeremiah 9:23 as a starting point- “This is what the Lord says, Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on the earth, for in these I delight says the Lord”.  I have said that there are two things in this verse to note – understanding God and knowing God. I contended that to know God properly we first of all have to understand him. Now of course we can get to know God without understanding him, and perhaps many do and through time they begin to understand him better. Indeed no-one can fully comprehend or understand God for we are fallible, frail creatures and God is God. But it certainly helps us to know God and to worship him properly when we at least try and understand something about him and what his nature is like. It certainly prevents us from wrong worship of him.

So in the first sermons I have sought to build up a picture of the God presented in the Bible. What is he truly like? We have sought to understand him and his character and that is the first part. From here on I want us to focus more on the knowing aspect, and this is more difficult but just as necessary. If we claim to be Christians then as Christians we claim to know God. If so then we should be able to describe what we mean by this.

A key to this relationship with God is what the bible calls the New Covenant. We read of it in Jeremiah 31:31 – “The time is coming declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant”.  Not only is this the only time this phrase is mentioned in Jeremiah but it is the only time it is mentioned in the entire Old Testament. Now you might say well how can it be that important if it is only mentioned once? Well although the phrase is only found once the idea recurs a number of times in the OT. Also as we look into the second part of our bibles something hits us. The New Testament is another way of saying the New Covenant. The word testament comes from the Latin translation of the word covenant – so it is the same word and conveys the same idea. So the entire Christian scripture is called the New Covenant. Also in the New Testament we have the phrase new covenant on the lips of Jesus. As he holds up the cup at the last supper he says “this is the new covenant in my blood” Luke 22:20.  In 2 Corinthians 3:6 Paul says “we are ministers of a new covenant”. In Hebrews 9:15 it says that “Christ is the mediator of a new covenant”.

So Jesus came to bring in something new. The new is better than the old. The old covenant was written on stone (The Mosaic covenant at Mt Sinai), the new is written on hearts. The old covenant tended to emphasise the externals, the new emphasises the internal. The old was mediated by priests and prophets and required an elaborate sacrificial system and God was at more of a distance. The new covenant brought to us by Jesus is closer, more intimate and does not require a middle party to stand between us and God. We can come into the holy of holies and talk to God directly and even call him abba Father. The old covenant sacrifices had to be repeated daily but the sacrifice of Jesus was once for all. The old covenant was of the letter but the new covenant is of the Spirit.

With the coming of the new covenant in Jesus there also comes the opportunity to know God in a better way. Jeremiah looked forward to a time when ordinary people could say “I know God”, not just the priests and the prophets or those who had a special insight or an inside track with God. With Jesus we see a tearing down of the veil that separated the most holy place from the rest of the temple. In Jesus we see the abolishing of the OT priesthood, the sacrificial system, the hundreds of laws that men had added to the ten commandments. The ten commandments still stand, Jesus says not a jot or tittle of the law will be abolished until the world ends, but the spirit of the ten commandments is now written on our hearts and we want to obey them because we love our heavenly Father and Jesus our redeemer. He places the desire in our hearts to obey them. So in Jesus we have a new and better way of knowing God. There is an immediacy and an intimacy here which the OT people did not possess – or most of them anyway.

It is always frustrating when people keep going back to old covenant ways when the new covenant way is better. Religious people who are not born of the Spirit have a natural tendency towards OT religion and all the stuff that comes between them and God. Thus people who veer towards OT Christianity prefer ritual, a minister to mediate between them and God, a tendency towards legalism and inventing rules and regulations to please God. This is all gone in Christ. In Christ we have an immediacy, a coming into God’s presence, a real relationship where God relates to us directly by His Spirit and not through a third party. Now third parties are ok and rituals are ok up to a point and there is a place for them, but too often we can go back to the old ways and to the shadows when the real thing, the substance, is there before us and God wants us to speak to him not someone else to speak to him for us. We can erect barriers between us and God that he wants to abolish.

Part of the thrill of the new covenant is its immediacy, but of course some people do not like that, it scares them and they say like the people of old “Do not have God speak to us or we will die.”  (Ex.20:19).  But the NT Christian deals with God in a more intimate way. Hebrews 12:8f.  18You have not come to a mountain that can be touched and that is burning with fire; to darkness, gloom and storm; 19to a trumpet blast or to such a voice speaking words that those who heard it begged that no further word be spoken to them, 20because they could not bear what was commanded: "If even an animal touches the mountain, it must be stoned."[c] 21The sight was so terrifying that Moses said, "I am trembling with fear."[d]

22But you have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, 23to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, 24to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel

Of course there is a balance here for the writer of Hebrews also reminds us that we still worship God with reverence and awe for he is God and we are not.

The new covenant is key to knowing God. As we come to Jesus and give our lives to him he places this desire in our hearts to commune with God, to obey his commandments from the heart, not just because the letter of the law says so. We learn to worship him and witness for him. The words of 1 Peter 1:9 become a reality to us – “Though you have not seen him, you love him, and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.”

The new covenant way of Jesus brings us on a royal route straight to the throne room of heaven. This is an awesome privilege and we need to remind ourselves of what a privilege it is. It was achieved at great cost and because we did not pay with our blood we can undervalue it and be blasé about it. This is not good.

New Covenant mediated by the Spirit

Another key aspect of knowing God is the role of the Holy Spirit. In 2 Corinthians ch.3 Paul contrasts the Mosaic covenant with the new covenant of the Spirit. The glory of Moses was a fading glory, it was external but the ministry of the Spirit is more glorious. It is also more freeing. Where the old law could be restricting the law of the Spirit is freeing. “”Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom. And we who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever increasing glory.”  The Lord frees us not to disobey him more but to love and obey him more and to be transformed more and more into his likeness.

The Spirit of Jesus in us is key to our knowing God better. In Romans 8 Paul says “the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace” (v.6). If the Spirit of God is in us then we are no longer controlled by the sinful nature. We are led by the Spirit and thus are sons of God (v.14) and it is through this Spirit of sonship that we can cry Abba Father and know God personally. The Spirit dwells in us and bears witness to our spirit that we are God’s children.

This is where the fel’t part of our faith is, this inner witness that assures us that we are God’s and that we know him. It is a work of the Spirit which is hard to explain but we know He is there. He bring us alive to the things of God and we want to read his word, and we want to pray, and we want to serve him. This work of the Spirit is backed up by the means of grace that we use to support that faith – bible reading, prayer, coming to church, the spiritual disciplines. These things put our roots deeper into God and nourish our spirituality so that it becomes as real to us as the physical things that surround us.

JI Packer summarises it this way – “Knowing God is a matter of personal dealing and of personal involvement in mind, will and feeling. The believer becomes emotionally involved in the ups and downs of God’s cause. Equally a person feels guilt and shame when he fails his Lord”.

Responding to God’s Grace This is all a response to the grace of God. God loves us and calls us to himself. In our knowing of God we are hit by an even deeper realisation that God knows us and has our names on the palm of his hands. We are helped to delight in God by knowing that he delights in us. This delight in us, this appreciation of his love that we discover in Christ draws us to himself. God’s love, as it were, softens us up and as we experience the true love of God it awakens our spirits and awakens us from self absorption to a delight and a focus on God and on what he wants. We come fully alive, emotionally, physically, spiritually. This is what we were made for – to respond to God. Irenaeus said the glory of God is a human being fully alive. God loves us so that we might better know him and glorify him. This is our ultimate purpose. This is why we are here. So many of us live lives at a lower level than what we were made for, we do not reach our full potential - we were made to know God. And we come to know him through this new covenant way of Jesus.

Our knowing ought to grow as we grow as Christians. We will never know God fully this side of heaven. Something of Jeremiah’s prophecy is still to be fulfilled. It is partially fulfilled now in Christ. But ultimate fulfilment still awaits when, in the words of Habakkuk 2:14 “the earth will be filed with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” As we enter a new year what better thing to resolve than to enter more fully into this covenant way, to receive Jesus and His Spirit more and more into our lives and to boast this year with Jeremiah -  “let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on the earth, for in these I delight says the Lord”.

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