I think I know my daughter pretty well. We spend a lot of time together and enjoy each other’s company. When I tell her I understand her, she comes back with, “You don’t know me like that.” I tell her I do know her like that because I’m her mother. It got me thinking about how we really don’t know other people very well and they don’t know us, not deep down. We often judge others based on how well we think we know them, but we don’t allow for growth and change. We put people in boxes with well-defined walls and corners.
We do the same thing to God. Familiarity breeds contempt but it also breeds complacency. Just as we often treat people according to our expectations of how we think they’ll act, we treat God with the diffidence that comes from thinking we know how he’ll answer prayer, how he deals with people and how he thinks. We have a tendency to make him over in our own image, imagining he’s like us. When we do this, we don’t know him like that. We don’t know him at all.
In 1 Corinthians 13:12 Paul says we will one day know him as we are known. This verse says so much in such few words. First, we will someday know him as he knows us. We don’t understand God, and that’s probably a good thing. Could we handle knowing everything about him as we are, in our humble, human frames? As David said in Psalm 139, such things are too wonderful for me. Our minds would go on overload. God is incomprehensible to us for the present.
This verse also says he knows us! He knows us in the secret, inner places no one else sees. He understands what makes us tick and why we tick in our own unique ways. David talked about how well God knew him in Psalm 139 and I’m sure we can personally apply those verses. Does this make you nervous? It shouldn’t – God isn’t like us. We sometimes turn away from people the more we get to know them, but he never does.
Everyone wants to be understood, to be heard and noticed. I guess that’s why so many are blogging. Everyone has something to say, whether anyone listens or not. But blogging makes it easy to present yourself in any way you want and can never take the place of face-to-face communication. A person could have the most viewed blog on the Internet and still be lonely and misunderstood.
Being in relationship with God assures us we will be heard, noticed, understood and known. He is the only one who sees into our very hearts and knows everything we’ve ever thought, and the wonderful thing is he loves us anyway. When the world seems cold and impersonal and I feel lonely and misunderstood, I take comfort knowing at least Someone knows me like that.