Introduction

The topic of spiritual formation finds its biblical basis in the knowledge of God. Jesus said, “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. (John 17:3, ESV). Knowing God involves sharing in God’s own life, so that the attitudes and actions we express in this endeavour will always be of a reflection of our estimation of who God is. Throughout scripture the knowledge of God is incomparably glorious (Ex 15:11; Deut 3:24; 1 Sam 2:2; 2 Sam 7:22; Ps 35:10; Isa 40:18, 25; 46:5 etc.). This however is not how most believers in Australia live and the reasons behind this are plain.

500 years ago a famous Protestant Reformer said, “To know Christ is to know his benefits.”  (Philip Melanchthon). This has become the prevailing emphasis in Western Christianity[1]and a sure recipe for spiritual dwarfism. The one and only true measure of God likeness is to be found in the humiliation and exaltation of the Son of God; “he made himself nothing by taking the very natureof a servant, being made in human likeness.⁸ And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death – even death on a cross. ⁹ Therefore God exalted him to the highest place” (Phil 2:8-9). When we are possessed by a revelation of who God has shown himself to be in the death and resurrection of Jesus[2] we are powerfully motivated to know this sort of God, whatever the cost. So in the next chapter of Philippians Paul passionately declares, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ” (Phil 3:8-9). The real test of our desire to know God is our willingness to suffer[3].

The Way of Knowing

God’s plan to bring us his saving knowledge begins in eternity. Peter speaks of “the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you” (1 Peter 1:19-20, ESV[4]). This is “the eternal cross in the heart of God.” that precedes even the creation of humanity. It means that the LORD was fully prepared for what happened in Eden.

Eden is a test of knowledge. The LORD commanded, ““of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”” (Genesis 2:16-17, ESV). ““But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”” (Gen 3:4-5). According to Satan what God “says”, “the wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23), and what God knows, breaking his commandment will lead to a spiritual illumination, are two contradictory things. Once Adam and Eve committed themselves to believing this lie the human race became incapable of believing what God says about himself, he became fundamentally unknowable (Rom 3:11; 1 Cor 2:14; 2 Cor 4:4). The heavens might constantly speak of God’s glory but no one seems to be listening (Ps 19 cf. Rom 1:19-21)[5]. God’s plan that will break through such ignorance will involve the sufferings of Christ, but already in the Old Testament there are profound insights into this way of saving knowledge.

One of the most unforgettable Old Testament stories is the “sacrifice of Isaac”. God commands Abraham to take his “only Son” “whom you love” and sacrifice him on the mountain (Gen 22:2)[6]. Abraham obeys the LORD’s but shortly before he can slaughter Isaac a voice from heaven stops him. The natural response of many parents (and others) to this story is revulsion. “I could never do that; I could never bring myself to kill my child. The loving God I believe in could never ask such a terrible thing.” Responses like these are quite natural, but they highlight a major difference between these people and Abraham in terms of knowing God.

God himself declares from heaven “now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”” (22:12). For the first time in his long relationship with Abraham the LORD experiences i.e. knows that the patriarch’s obedient fear of himself knows no limits. After this incident Abraham and God knew one another at a whole new level. More than this, God sees something of himself in father Abraham, for the real sacrificial Son will perish on the cross. This story is an acted parable of the truth that without fear God can never be deeply known.  “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.” (Prov 9:10).

The immaturity of the Western Church is due to its failure to sacrifice its Isaacs. I remember recently an experienced pastor exclaiming that for the first time in her life she understand that following Jesus could actually lead to a demotion at work! Yet 40 years ago I really wanted to do a PhD in science many years ago, but the LORD said “No” and I had to walk away from opportunities even my pastor thought was right. God and Abraham really knew one another, but there are few Abrahamic fathers in the Church today who know how to impart to their spiritual sons and daughters the fear of the LORD. One of the seemingly stranger titles of God in Genesis is ‘the fear of Isaac”, appearing on the lips of Jacob this is a sign that Isaac’s awesome[7] experience of being offered as a sacrifice passed down the generations (Gen 31:42; 53). Most of us have so few spiritual children because we know so little of the awesome ways of God. If God kills something precious in your life, he can raise it back to life (cf. Heb 11:17-19); but if you hold onto your precious child of promise your knowledge of God will be forever stunted. Everything we have said so far about the knowledge of God finds its fulfilment in Jesus.

Jesus’ Formation By The Father

If you think the sacrifice of Isaac was a strange story, how about this scripture; “For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.  So now Jesus and the ones he makes holy have the same Father.” (Heb2:10-11 cf. 5:8-9). According to this writer perfection is defined in terms of access to God as Father. The suffering which perfects Jesus begins in Gethsemane and climaxes in the cross.

Gethsemane is the only place where Jesus calls God “Abba, Father” (Mark 14:36), this profound intimate knowledge of the Father is a fruit of what Hebrews calls Christ’s “godly fear” (Heb 5:7). Such a fear-filled knowledge will come to completion at the cross. The cry from the cross, ““My God, my God why have you forsaken me?”” (Mark 15:34) is a plea far deeper than any anguish of abandonment that rushed through the soul of Isaac on the mount of sacrifice.  For the first time in Jesus’ life he does not know God as God knows God. God’s Word promises that he will never leave or forsake his faithful servants (Ex 3:12; Josh 1:5)., but Jesus experiences God as totally absent. Satan’s original lie, God says one thing but knows another, seems totally justified. At a much deeper level however the inability of Jesus to know God as Father has a saving purpose.

The cross is not a vacuum; Jesus is actually overwhelmed with knowledge on the cross, the knowledge of our sin.  “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin” (2 Cor 5:21). To know sin is to experience guilt and condemnation (Job 13:23; Ps 51:3). It means that you are not remembered in God’s book of life (Ex 32:30-34).  The cost of God being able to forget our sins so that we might know him (Jer 31:33-34) is that Jesus must feel unknown by God, unacknowledged, fatherless, alone; cf. “I never knew you” (Matt 7:23). In carrying the divine remembrance of all sins for all time, Jesus becomes is a totally forgotten person. This is how in bearing our sin Jesus makes it possible for us to know his Father[8].

If the crucifixion reveals what God knows about our sin, the resurrection is a revelation of what the Father knows about Jesus. That his perfect fear of judgement has formed him into the perfected Son. Christ “was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:4, ESV cf. Acts 13:33). Jesus endured the cross for the sake of “bringing many sons to glory” and is now “seated at the right hand of God” (Heb 2:10; 12:2). Christ is filled with an overwhelming sense of the goodness and wisdom of the Father in condemning our sin in his own mortal experience (Rom 8:3). The Bible promises us that we can share “the mind of Christ” (1 Cor 2:16), and for Jesus God’s judgement is joy because judgement destroys sin. Today the Lord rejoices in the truth that only the crushing pain and suffering of judgement[9] could turn his own heart at the deepest possible level to seek the uninterruptible knowledge of God as Father which only death and resurrection could bring. This is the sort of incorruptible knowledge to which we are called and it come solely through sharing in the life of Christ.

Knowing God in Christ

As Jesus was foreknown as the sacrificial Lamb, “we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. 29 For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.” (Rom 8:28- 29 cf. Jer 1:5; Gal 1:15). When in eternity God chose us in Christ (Eph 1:4), he chose to form us in the likeness of Jesus in exactly the same way that Jesus himself became the perfected Son of God – through death and resurrection[10]. The abysmal spiritual poverty that dominates most of the church scene comes from ignorance of this as the highest of the ways of God. Someone I meet and pray with regularly was telling me about all the losses in ministry, money, relationship etc. he experienced last year. He called it a “Year of Dying”, to which I replied, “It was a year of dying”. This is neither dramatic nor gruesome; it is an exposition of the way of the Father with his true born children[11]. Most Christians become stuck in their journey of knowing God because they misunderstand the nature of their sonship.

Paul brings a number of our key themes together when he states, “And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God. Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods. But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God…” (Gal 4:6-9).

The spiritual atmosphere of this deep divine knowing of sonship is not some fleeting feeling but the awesome mood of the sacrifice of beloved son Isaac and the annihilating judgement experienced by the only Son in Gethsemane and the cross. Those who know such things rejoice that judgement begins at the household of God (1 Pet 4:17) because this is the medium through which God destroys our unbelief in the fullness of his forgiveness i.e. our failure to believe the gospel[12]. Peter makes it plain that confusion over forgiveness is the key sticking point in spiritual growth. After listing various godly virtues he remarks, “For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins.” (2 Pet 1:8- 9). In my experience with people confusion about forgiveness flows from confusion about judgement/discipline.

New Christians generally go through a honeymoon period of passionate love for Christ but after a while they tend to become like the rest of us. The struggles of life diminish our zeal for the Lord and the mature works he desires rarely emerge (Rev 2:4; 3:2). For some reason we think our trials mean that God is not near when he is actually calling us to come nearer. Christian maturity means that everything is shaped by death and resurrection. This is very clear in Paul, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ….that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, (Phil 3:8-10, ESV). “Knowing Christ” involved “the loss of all things” (Phil 3:8-9) so that the resurrection joy of sonship might be ours[13]. You certainly know that you are known by God when you feel the knife of sacrifice killing a vision a vocation a dream or a promise in your life and you yield yourself to his great purpose of conforming you to the likeness of his beloved Son.

Conclusion

God knows you and me perfectly[14] and this knowledge of how he knows us is not attained through the countless laws, principles, patterns, books, seminars and speakers that dominate the modern Western church industry of seeking spiritual formation.  Such intimate knowing is found only in “gaining Christ and being found in him” (Phil 3:8-9). Those whom are found in Jesus know that the Father knows them; this is eternal life (cf. John 17:3). The crucified and risen Lord is not an object of past history, he is working the power of his sufferings and resurrection (Phil 3:10) into your life every day to conform you to his image and likeness (Eph 2:10; Col 3:10). The key to discernment how he is doing this will almost always be in an area of pain, a pain which at first appearances will seem just like another one of the struggles of life, but at a deeper level can be registered as sharing in the sufferings of Christ. When this pain is recognised as under the hand of God, as a sharing in the sacrifice of Isaac and pre-eminently the death of the cross, and submitted to, then assuredly God will be known as he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. And in Christ God knows us as he knows himself.

“Then those who feared the Lord spoke with one another. The Lord paid attention and heard them, and a book of remembrance was written before him of those who feared the Lord and esteemed his name. “They shall be mine, says the Lord of hosts, in the day when I make up my treasured possession, and I will spare them as a man spares his son who serves him.”” (Malachi 3:16-17, ESV)