KNOWLEDGE ENCOUNTER
OF THE 2nd KIND
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As I confessed in the blog
series “LOSING TO WIN” I was a church leader ignorant of God’s method of
overcoming sin? The Bible never hid that
information from me. On the contrary it repeatedly
announces the method on almost every page, especially in the New Testament. I knew that knowing Jesus was God’s means for
curing the troubled heart but I also knew that when painful emotions and mental
anguish flood the heart they normally churn up unhealthy desires which spilled
out as sinful conduct. Unfortunately I
somehow missed the Bible’s specific instructions on applying God’s Cure. I think I must have tried all the various
methods known and used by the Christian community but found them as effective
as using a net in stopping the flood.
My failure boiled down to an incorrect
assumption that Biblical references to “knowledge” mean mental acuity. Identifying it as such I overestimated the
value of intellectual attained remedies.
Yet it makes perfect sense that if the Bible’s message is addressed to
the spirit of man rather than his brain then knowledge of the method should also
be a spiritual kind. Since we only truly
know Christ spiritually then the knowledge itself must be spiritually as well. Here
is what I found.
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CONFUSION OF KIND
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Our abiding consciousness of the
life of God within us, not thinking about Him but knowing the One Who is alive in
us, is our means of freedom from self-destructive habits. It is a kind of knowledge which is unattainable
by intellectual study or scientific research and yet Biblical. The Bible which directs us to the remedy, remaining
ever conscious of God (to believe in Him) also directs in how it is done. It describes a knowledge encounter of another
kind…spiritual rather than academic. Jesus
seems to be describing just such a method in John 8:31-32 because He ends His
explanation with a promise of freedom. Yet His description of the method is so
utterly confusing that not even professional Bible scholars can untangle it.
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“To
the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, ‘If you hold to my teaching, you are
really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’” John 8:31 + 32
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It appears Jesus requires us
to hold His teaching before we know what that truth will be then it will set us
free. It left me wondering. “How can God
expect me to hold to a teaching I don’t know yet?”
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Checking the commentary in
the margin of my Bible I found no indication of a method being presented here. Other
Bibles like, The New Oxford Annotated Bible, at least describe “the
truth” as something other than a philosophical general knowledge. It calls it, “a saving truth.”
.
The NIV Study Bible, published by Zondervan identifies a goal but no
method either. It does hint at two kinds
of knowledge though. In its comment on
the word “free” it says it is a, “Freedom from sin, not from ignorance.”
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Those brief notations
actually create less confusion than the more expansive commentaries. Some of them propose that “the truth” spoken
of is a universal truth that becomes a personally held, self-evident, truth. Others see it as two different types of
truth, one that is a teaching to be held on to and the second one which is
actually “the truth”. Still others
believe “the truth”, itself, changes from the one that is held at the beginning
into another that is known later. This
is essentially what J. W. Shepard proposes.
He suggests that what is to be known is an evolutionary or “progressive”
developing kind of “the truth”. While I
figured it could be one of those or a combination as Zondervan’s Commentary
on the Whole Bible asserts. It
argues that “if” we can hold on to “the truth” during a trial of our faith we
prove ourselves to be an authentic disciple.
It goes on to tell us that unfortunately we will never know what “the
truth” is until it does in fact “set you free”…or not. Nonetheless we should hold on to whatever it
is.
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Seriously, these explanations
are just too confusing. What’s more they
are worthless nets in the flood. They fail
to be helpful because like me they see only one kind of knowledge, the intellectual
kind. They glance past the one essential
fact in freedom from destructive habits and sin…our spirit aware of God’s Holy
Spirit within. Just “think about it” for
a minute; If God-consciousness is not a mental acknowledgment what is it? Holding to God’s teaching and knowing the
truth are both impossible requirements for mankind without the Holy Spirit of
Truth within. (John 14:17, 15:26, + 16:13) The reason is God’s Spirit alone knows
God. If we are to recognize God it must
be a somewhat spiritual knowledge. Mentally
it can be an intuitive impression accepted by faith but known spiritually. Any real knowledge of God must factor in the Spirit
of Truth alive within. (Roman 8:9) When we allow for the reality of the
indwelling Spirit of God the steps to our freedom from destructive habits become
obvious. To clear away the fog let’s go
back over what Jesus said, step by step, with the spirit’s God-consciousness:
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1)
“If you hold to
my teaching,” – The only way human-beings can exert enough spiritual energy to
hold the teaching of Christ is if the Holy Spirit empowers us.
2)
“…you are really
my disciples,” – Only those who have the Holy Spirit in them qualify as
disciples.
3)
“Then you will
know the truth,” – Individuals with the Holy Spirit inside have the possibility
of conscious recognition of the truth, which is God’s Spiritual present within us.
4)
“…and the truth
will set you free.” – It is the recognition of God’s Spirit, inside us that
will set us free.
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The awareness of God within
is not an intellectually generated illusion.
It is spiritual perceived “knowledge” of God within us. It is our spirit conscious of the Divine Spirit within which sets us free from vain
thoughts and harmful emotions. At the
moment of this spiritual recognition we have “everything we need for life and
godliness.” (2Pet. 1:3) Our spirit, intuitively
recognizing our union with God not only (a)frees us to set our desires aside
but (b)gives us His power by which we can yield to His desire…His will. It is not regular mental knowledge activated
in this kind of knowledge of God but a purely spiritual knowing.
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INTELLECTUAL BIAS
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The confusion between
intellectual knowledge and spiritual knowledge is more or less a peculiarity of
Western Christianity. We hear claims of
increased manifestations of spiritual activity among less westernized Christian
communities. I submit that by-in-large the
reason is the Western World tends to approach life, even spiritual life, from a
postmodern mind-set. Therefore we can
easily overlook the spiritual part of human nature. Less-westernized Asian Christians don’t seem
to exhibit as much of this bias.
Watchman Nee, for example, speaking unapologetically of spiritually
derived knowledge said,
.
“The
spirit is that part by which we commune with God and by which alone we are able
to apprehend and worship Him. Because it
(the spirit of man) tells us of our relationship with God, the spirit is called
the element of God-consciousness.”
.
Nonetheless in this country it
is normally assumed that knowledge is exclusively intellectual. However from the earliest Hebrew tradition
“knowing God” was understood to be other than an intellectual capacity. At the end of his trial, Job recognized that
the knowledge he had of God through “hearing” about Him was inferior to
“seeing” Him. “My ears had heard of you”
Job said to God “but now my eyes have seen you.’ (Job 42:5) The sighting he spoke of was not a retinal
image because “No one has ever seen God.”(John 1:18a) The reference to visual perception repeated
throughout scriptures is obviously speaking of our spirit’s recognition,
perception, and/or consciousness of God’s Spirit…knowledge of God. Because the earliest Biblical scribes had the
attitude that God’s nature was so far beyond our intellectual comprehension
they used terms like “knowledge of God” without concern that it would be
mistaken for anything other than spiritually knowledge. (Job 36:24)
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Today, because of our
intellectual bias, we use code phrases to approximate the difference between
intellectual and spiritual consciousness.
We ask or say things like; “Do you know God or do you just know about
God?” or “Have you experienced God in a personal way?” or “Do you hear God’s
voice speaking to your heart?” It is our intellectual bias that makes this type
of clarification necessary. Now-days words
that actually do draw a distinction between spiritual and intellectual
knowledge are awkward and actually less clarifying. “What do you mean?” would be the expected
response to the question “Is your spirit conscious of God?” However the New Testament deliberately does
translate the distinction. It makes the
differentiation between spiritually discerned knowledge and cognitively learned
knowledge by use of specific phrases…“knowledge of God” or “knowing God”. An exception is made when discussing “knowledge”
that contains both kinds, information about God as well as firsthand experience
of God. In those instances, with very
few exceptions, they simply use the word “knowledge”.
..
TRANSLATOR’S DILEMMA
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I also wondered why the Bible
didn’t simply use two different words when speaking of the two different kinds
of knowledge. The spirit’s kind of knowledge
should have been called “consciousness of God” to differentiate it from the
intellectual kind of knowledge of God. I discovered that the earliest
translations actually did use the more precise term, God-consciousness. Two interesting linguistic factors influenced
the use of today’s less precise wording. The first factor is that the earliest
translations were in Latin. The Latin translators
used the Latin word “conscius” for the specially formulated Greek word,
knowledge of God. Quite literally all
references to this kind of knowledge could have been more precisely translated God-consciousness.
The less precise, Knowledge of God and other forms of knowing God were
introduced in 1611 with the publication of the King James Version of the Bible which
set the trends for English Bible translations thereafter. The reason the
English translators did not use “spirit-consciousness” or “God-consciousness” was
the fact that the Latin word “conscius” was not absorbed into the English
language until the 1630s. Quite simply
the word did not exist in English. The English
translators were forced to use the closest word in use at the time, which was
the word “knowledge.”
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The second factor is that
even when the original Greek text actually uses two different words to mark a
distinction between spiritual knowledge (God-consciousness) and carnal
knowledge the English does not. The
Greek specifically added the prefix “epi” to the word “knowledge” to identify the
specific kind of knowledge, “epiginosis”,
which designates a specific spiritual God-consciousness, a spiritually aware
kind of knowledge.* The English
translators had no choice but to settle on the present phrase, “knowledge of
God”, to represent this spirit kind of knowledge.
*The
synonym glossary The Discovery Bible by Moody Press under Comments and
Summaries states: “…(epignosis, ‘true
knowledge’) adequately; to come to a ‘fuller,
clearer, and more thorough knowledge’”. Dictionary of New Testament Greek
Synonyms by Zondervan’s comment on epignosis
states that it is; “an adequate or valid knowledge; an intensified form of ginosko.” Ginosko,
the verb form, “to know”, as defined by The Handbook to the Grammar of the
Greek New Testament published by Religious Tract Society, London is, “the knowing
comes from ‘an active relation
between the one who knows and the person…known.’”
.
The apostle Peter using his rough “Galilean fisherman”
Greek used the “epi” very consistently. Apparently
Peter, as a pastor, was more determined to highlight the difference than the
others. Yet of the 18 times the phrase appears in the New Testament 15 of those
specify this unique knowledge of God. Our
intellectual bias has further contributed to our present-day failure to
distinguish between spiritually discerned recognition and mentally acquired
information. The result is we can read
the nuanced wording and miss the point like I did for so many years.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
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The reason this distinction matters
so significant is that our key to overcoming self-destructive behavior is hidden
in that difference. To demonstrate the clarifying
value of the more precise designations I have insert them into the text of 2
Peter 1:2, 3, 5, & 8 written to the recipients of God’s Holy Spirit. These selected
verses not only use both terms but like John 8:31-32 describe God’s method of freedom:
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“Grace
and peace be yours in abundance through GOD-CONSCIOUSNESS (the knowledge of
God) and Jesus our Lord. His divine
power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our GOD-CONSCIOUSNESS
(knowledge of him) who called us by his own glory and goodness. 2 Peter
1:2-3
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“For
this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness, (and)
INTELLECTUAL KNOWLEDGE (knowledge).” 2 Peter
1:5
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“For
if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from
being ineffective and unproductive in your GOD-CONSCIOUSNESS (knowledge of our
Lord Jesus Christ).” 2Peter1:8(Capitals added)
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The most amazing thing about
what God is funneled through our God given capacity for God-consciousness is
the capacity to know Him…spirit united to Spirit. Furthermore that knowledge allows us to
escape our evil desires and live the life of victory over sin that Peter outlines
below;
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“Through these he has given
us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may PARTICIPATE
IN THE DIVINE NATURE and ESCAPE THE CORRUPTION in the world caused by evil
desires.” 2 Peter 1:4
The diagram illustrates
the intended effect God-consciousness produces in us. It shows our spirit aware of God’s union opening
us to His life, free from not only the guilt of sin but from sin’s power as
well. Furthermore our spirit’s
recognition of the indwelling Holy Spirit (God-consciousness) is the opening
that allows us to participate in the Divine nature and escape the corruption of
our desires.
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Being aware of God’s presence
within is too important for living a Christian life free from sin to that to
lose it in translation, intellectual bias, or some unresolved confusion about God’s
method is tragic. Please don’t let
God-consciousness become only a matter of intellectual knowledge…especially as
time itself is winding down. Of all
times, this is the time to continually ask God to give us God-conscious. His blessing is yours ask for it.
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I may reinforce this
presentation in a future blog, if God wills, using accounts of my personal life. However, if not, I have already presented the
general principles in the LOSING TO WIN series. Of course I naturally think the
whole series is valuable but perhaps THE INTERNAL SEARCH posted 4/24/2015 will
be most instructive. As always, I would
be honored to respond to your feedback.
