Life in the Knowledge of God

And this is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.—John 17:3.

1. The prayer of Christ from which this text is taken is in some respects the most precious relic of the past. We have here the words which Christ addressed to God in the critical hour of His life—the words in which He uttered the deepest feeling and thought of His Spirit, clarified and concentrated by the prospect of death. Even among the prayers of Christ this stands by itself as that in which He gathered up the retrospect of His past and surveyed the future of His Church; in which, as if already dying, He solemnly presented to the Father Himself, His work, and His people. Recognizing the grandeur of the occasion, we may be disposed to agree with Melanchthon, who, when giving his last lecture, shortly before his death, said: “There is no voice which has ever been heard, either in heaven or in earth, more exalted, more holy, more fruitful, more sublime, than this prayer offered up by the Son of God Himself.”1 [Note: Marcus Dods, The Gospel of St. John, 247.]

2. The essence of eternal life is here defined and represented as consisting in the knowledge of the only true God, and of Jesus Christ His messenger, knowledge being taken comprehensively as including faith, love, and worship, and the emphasis lying on the objects of such knowledge. The Christian religion is described in opposition to paganism on the one hand, with its many gods, and to Judaism on the other, which, believing in the one true God, rejected the claims of Jesus to be the Christ. It is further so described as to exclude by anticipation Arian and Socinian views of the Person of Christ. The names of God and of Jesus are put on a level as objects of religious regard, whereby an importance is assigned to the latter incompatible with the dogma that Jesus is a mere man.

3. It may seem strange that, in addressing His Father, Jesus should deem it needful to explain wherein eternal life consists; and some, to get rid of the difficulty, have supposed that the sentence is an explanatory reflection interwoven into the prayer by the Evangelist. Yet the words were perfectly appropriate in the mouth of Jesus Himself. The first clause is a confession by the man Jesus of His own faith in God His Father as the supreme object of knowledge; and the whole sentence is really an argument in support of the prayer, Glorify Thy Son. The force of the declaration lies in what it implies respecting the existing ignorance of men concerning the Father and His Son. It is as if Jesus said: Father, Thou knowest that eternal life consists in knowing Thee and Me. Look around, then, and see how few possess such knowledge. The heathen world knoweth Thee not—it worships idols; the Jewish world is equally ignorant of Thee in spirit and in truth; for while boasting of knowing Thee, it rejects Me. The whole world is overspread with a dark veil of ignorance and superstition. Take Me out of it, therefore, not because I am weary of its sin and darkness, but that I may become to it a sun. Hitherto My efforts to illuminate the darkness have met with small success. Grant Me a position from which I can send forth light over all the earth.

I

Life Eternal

1. What is the meaning of “eternal”? The answer of the ordinary man would be, “Something that lasts for ever.” With him eternity would simply mean endless time; it would mean duration, or permanence, or endless succession, or unalterability; it would mean adding so much time together that you could add no more. And so the sort of metaphors that people have used to express eternity have been the metaphors of the circle or the sand on the seashore. We have all been told that if we tried to count the sand on the seashore we should never reach the idea of eternity. Now, that sort of language is eminently misleading. “Time shall be no more.” That “phantom of succession of time” is wholly inapplicable to the life of God. With God there is no time—no past, no future; all is the everlasting now. It is only in consequence of our present limitations, only in consequence of that great condition of time under which we live, that we are unable to think of God as living out of time, and that we are compelled to think of Him as living only in endless time. The life eternal is the real life; it is the life that is life indeed.

The Greek word bios and the Greek word zoe both mean “life” and are translated by “life”; but they are words of entirely different significance in the Greek. The first word signifies chiefly animal life—the brief space of time, the brief space of life through which we have to pass; bare existence is the word used, for example, in such passages as “What is your life? It is even as a vapour.” But the other word zoe belongs to an entirely different and higher conception. In the New Testament, it is used almost, if not entirely, for the inherent principle of life which is involved in the very being of God Himself, so that the first word means conscious existence; the second word means the sort of life of which God is capable, and we have it in all such passages as “should not perish, but have eternal life.” “I am the resurrection and the life,” saith the Lord. “I am the bread of life.”1 [Note: Archbishop W. Alexander.]

Even so is man: No matter how well he may know the law governing his animal personality, and the laws governing matter, these laws do not give him the least indications as to how he is to act with that piece of bread which he has in his hands—whether to give it to his wife, a stranger, his dog, or eat it himself; whether to defend this piece, or give it to him who asks for it. But the life of man consists only in the solution of these and similar questions.2 [Note: Tolstoy, Works, xvi. 281.]

2. There would be little worth or significance in the mere endless prolongation of life, apart from the question of the kind of life that is to be lived for ever. The life that Christ promises us is of an order altogether higher than the life of ordinary experience. It is a life that lifts us up to a new region above the cares and meannesses of this world, that makes us indifferent to most of the ends and ideals for which the mass of men live, and at least independent of the pleasures to which they are so wedded. Eternal life, in fact, is spiritual life. When the spirit, the highest part of our nature, is called forth unto full activity and matured to its full stature, and when it subdues and regulates the whole man, then we have entered on this new plane of existence.

3. This spiritual life may be ours here and now. It is an error to connect the thought of eternal life exclusively with the future. If we are of God’s elect, we are now living this eternal life. At this very moment the eternal life of God is throbbing in our hearts. Every act of prayer and communion with God, every effort after righteousness and truth, every enterprise of love and mercy, is a manifestation of this life. The gift of eternal life is a present possession, not merely a future expectation. We have all been baptized into this life, we have all been made partakers of this life, we are all exhorted to show forth this life.

Too often is eternal life regarded as the reward of a life of active virtue, as the far-off hope which stimulates the fainting heart to “patient continuance in well-doing”; too often is it supposed that only when the battle is over and the victory won shall we pass beneath the dark gateway of death into the bright peace of the heavenly Kingdom. But, on the other hand, the herald of Christ came with the cry, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand,” a cry which Christ Himself confirmed by proclaiming to His hearers, “The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you.” Eternal life, then, is not set before the world as the prize of patient purity, the reward of long-continued well-doing, or the stimulus to incite men to a life of holiness. It is not a glory which only after death will crown the successful endeavours of the faithful; it is the purity, the well-doing, the holiness itself. It is the knowledge of God and Christ, with all the spiritual virtues which attend it—knowledge which, if the rational nature of man be no delusion, may be ours now; virtues which, if the life of Christ have any significance, if His blessed example and exhortations have any meaning for us, may adorn our present earthly life.1 [Note: A. Semple, Scotch Sermons (1880), 333.]

II

Eternal Life as Knowledge of God in Christ

1. It is knowledge.—Knowledge is a word of more than one meaning, and that knowledge of God which is eternal life has very little in common with that knowledge of Him which is called theology. For there is a difference, and that a fundamental difference, between knowing a thing and knowing about it; there is a difference, and that a fundamental difference, between the knowledge which we gain from books and that which comes through feeling.

Those who “know God” most worthily are not the intellectually powerful, but the spiritually sensitive, and very often such are found among the “poor of this world.” To them is given the higher vision. The husband knows his wife, not by keen intellectual estimates of her character, but by the insight of a close and intimate fellowship. In this way the mother knows her child, and adjusts all her relations by the knowledge. The friend could not tell us why he loves his friend, or recount those elements of character which he admires. Heart knows heart, and love knits bonds. And the innermost secret is that we must feel God, and by the feeling gain our knowledge of Him.1 [Note: R. T., Light for Life’s Even-tide, 79.]

The mere knowing of the understanding is never life, but only the instrument or tool of life. That which my understanding, my logical faculty, knows is, so far, outside of me. I may build my life on it. But of it I cannot build my life. I know that twelve times twelve are a hundred and forty-four, that London lies nearly two hundred miles from Liverpool, and that June is likely to bring warm days and December cold. And on each of those bits of knowledge I build up now and again fragments of my life. They are useful to me in my planning and contriving; but they are not life. But I know the remorse that is the fruit of sin, the pleading of the Holy Spirit in my conscience, the look of love in my friend’s eyes, the bliss of the summer sunshine, the chill pain of a great bereavement; and that knowing is itself of the very texture of my life. If you could take this strange abstract thing, my life, and divide it up into its several elements, you would find it all made up of knowings such as these. They are of its essence. For these knowings in me are not information given me by others, not inferences reached by syllogism, not even convictions grasped by closest reasoning, but immediate realizations, instant experiences. And so these are not the furniture of life, but life itself. And if the eternal life consists in knowing certain objects, then the knowing must be of this immediate kind, facts of the soul, realizations woven into the very structure of the self.2 [Note: R. C. Armstrong, Memoir and Sermons, 253.]

Comrades, I said, who to the West

Have through a thousand dangers pressed,

Let not the little space

Remaining to our race

Run out before our senses find

Experience of the world behind

The courses of the Sun,

Where people there are none.

Consider what hath been your lot:

Not for brute life were ye begot:

But that ye might pursue

Virtue and knowledge too.1 [Note: Dante, Inferno, xxvi. (trans. by Shadwell).]

2. It is knowledge of God.—The one thing needful for men, the great cry of our nature, in which all other cries are swallowed up, is for knowledge—the knowledge of God. To know the true God has been the deep desire of living souls through all time. Wearied by the changes of a fleeting world, finding no repose in the best that the finite can give, men of earnest minds long to know the Eternal that they may rest in Him. An old mystic has said: “God is an unutterable sigh of the human soul.” With greater truth we may reverse the saying, and affirm that the human soul is a never-ending sigh after God. In its deepest recesses there lives or slumbers inextinguishable longing after Him, and the more we consider the nature of that longing, the more we discover that what it aims at is not a mere intellectual apprehension of God, but a personal relationship to Him. It is essentially of a practical nature. It is an impulse to draw nigh to God, to place ourselves in personal fellowship with Him from the conviction that He hath made these hearts of ours for Himself, and they are altogether restless till they find their rest in Him. And thus the cry of the earnest has always been that of the disciple: “Shew us the Father and it sufficeth us.” The dream that has haunted the earnest of the world has ever been this—to live the blessed life man must know the true God, and Christ proclaims that dream to be a fact.

What does knowing God mean? It does not mean knowing Him by name, knowing about Him, knowing Him as a stranger and foreigner, whose speech and ways we have not been accustomed to; it means knowing Him in the sense in which we know a father, or mother, or friend, whom we love and value above every one else; whose ways and thoughts we are thoroughly acquainted with; and who, we feel, knows us thoroughly, feels with us, cares for us, and longs for our being happy.1 [Note: R. W. Church, Village Sermons, 143.]

3. It is knowledge of God in Christ.—The great want of humanity is the knowledge of God. This want is met by Jesus Christ whom God has sent. Christ has power over all that He might give eternal life. It is He that gives eternal life: it is He that gives the knowledge of the only true God which is eternal life. There is nothing that tends to life in the knowledge you have apart from Him. For the knowledge of the true God and for eternal life we are utterly and entirely dependent on Jesus Christ. Christ came to give us this knowledge, and how did He give it? Not simply by telling us certain truths or teaching certain doctrines about God, but by living among us, as God-man in the flesh breathing our cerulean air, and speaking our human speech, loving us with a human heart, and healing and helping us with human hands, and then telling us that he who had seen Him had seen the Father. This is eternal life, that we should see the glory of God—the love of God—in the face of Jesus Christ.

The latest taken away of those who made the happiness of my Oxford life was Robert Gandell, who ended his days at Wells, of which cathedral he was Canon:—but who was chiefly known at Oxford (where he had passed all his time), first, as Michel Fellow of Queen’s; then, as Tutor of Magdalen Hall and Fellow of Hertford College; but especially as Hebrew Lecturer, and Professor of Syriac and Arabic. I have never known a man who with severe recondite learning combined in a more exquisite degree that peculiar Theological instinct without which an English Hebraist is no better than,—in fact is scarcely as good as,—a learned Jew.2 [Note: J. W. Burgon, Lives of Twelve Good Men, i. p. xxii.]

“Jesus Christ whom thou didst send.” He is the key to the difficulty which we all must feel more or less when we speak of knowing God. For us men in this human life the knowledge of the Father is the knowledge of the Son, the knowledge of God is the knowledge of Jesus Christ. We have before us in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ the satisfaction of this need of a divinity which is, if not nearer, at least more apparent, to our human life, and more possible for mortal men to approach. We have before us in the Gospels the picture of God clothed with humanity—treading the streets of an earthly city, living that very life of struggle which seems at first sight to be at the very opposite pole of existence from God. Again and again, through the prison bars of that humanity, there flashed forth the light of the divinity that was in Him; but His life was a human life—a life like yours and mine; a life which felt pain and disappointment and temptation, and a life consequently which, though at far distance, it is possible for us to know and to imitate.1 [Note: E. Hatch, Memoirs, 187.]

4. What is it to know Christ? Is it to trust Him? Not simply that, if we trust only in something He did long ago. Is it to love Him? Not simply that, if we love Him only as He stands far back in the past, for the redemption He achieved then. What is it to know Him? It is to have Him pressing Himself, with all the power that ever was in Him still in Him, upon our hearts to-day. It is to be conscious that He is for ever taking my life afresh and impressing Himself upon it afresh. It is to hear Him calling to me, not down the centuries from long ago, but from here—close at my side, with a voice that is newly lifted to-day, an invitation that is newly given to-day. It is not to be inspired by what He was, but to feel His power now coming straight from the living heart of Him to me. It is to experience, not the reflex influence of what He did far back in the history of mankind, but the direct influence of what He does. It is to discern, amid the figures which crowd the canvas of our life, that One Figure moving ceaselessly to and fro. The Real Presence, if you like. To know Christ in this sense—that every moment He comes with a new ministry to snatch me out of my littleness into His greatness—that is eternal life. To know Christ in this sense—that He gives the secret of life newly to me ever and ever again—that is eternal life. To know Christ in this sense—that He repeats to-day every blessing He bestowed in other days, changing the form of it to meet the changing need, answering to every hour’s requirement with grace newly-born out of His great and loving heart—to know Him so is to take life from Him now, is eternal life.2 [Note: H. W. Clark, Meanings and Methods of the Spiritual Life, 21.]

Knowing Christ makes us live as God lives, so far as that can be for us. Knowing Christ makes us live as God lives—that is the miracle—sets us into worlds where limitations and sorrows and dyings cease to have any meaning. Know Christ, and the wearinesses and weaknesses by which an unceasing cry is wrung out from the world cannot touch your true life to harm it any more than they can touch God’s; for Christ gives you eternal life. Know Christ, and you cannot die any more than God can die; for Christ gives you eternal life. There is nothing partial about the blessing Christ bestows. Eternal life is a thing others dare not speak of; but He gives that because He Himself possesses it, and, in giving that, gives all. One may look on this trial of humanity and another may look on that; one voice may speak a word to make this struggle lighter, and another may possess some secret to strengthen the soul in that conflict—Christ, when we know Him, does not patch and mend life so, but just lifts us away out of all these things into the eternal worlds, so that trial and struggle and conflict are to us no more than they are to Himself, to God. One has the secret that will make life worthier, he thinks; and another speaks the word to make life happier, he thinks: Christ bids us just know Him, and all is done.1 [Note: H. W. Clark, Meanings and Methods of the Spiritual Life, 24.]

(1) Knowledge of Christ implies obedience.—“To know Jesus”—what does it mean? Here is a guiding word from the Apostle John: “He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar.” Then how many of us know Him? “He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not.…” Then knowledge implies obedience. There can be no knowledge of Christ without obedience. Without obedience we may have a few ideas about Him, but we do not know Him. If we are destitute of obedience, then that which we assume to be knowledge is no knowledge at all, and we must give it another name. Obedience is essential. What is obedience? Confining our inquiry strictly to the human plane, what is essentially implied in obedience? When one man obeys another it is implied that he subjects his will to the will of the other, and works in harmony with its demands. The oarsmen in our university boats have to subject their wills to the will of the strokesman, whose stroke determines and controls the rest. The oarsmen have but one will. That is obedience, a will attuned to the will of another, and without that attuning of the will no knowledge of Christ can ever be gained.

And once when he was walking with Francis and came to a cross-way where one could go to Florence, to Siena or to Arezzo, and Brother Masseo asked, “Father, which way shall we take?” Francis answered him, “The way God wishes.” But Brother Masseo asked further, “How shall we know God’s will?” And Francis answered: “That I will now show you. In the name of holy obedience I order you to start turning round and round in the road here, as the children do, and not to stop until I tell you to.” Then Brother Masseo began to whirl round and round as children do, and he became so giddy that he often fell down; but as Francis said nothing to him, he got up again and continued. At last as he was turning round with great vigour, Francis said, “Stop and do not move!” And he stood still, and Francis asked him, “How is your face turned?” Brother Masseo answered, “Towards Siena!” Then said Francis, “It is God’s will that we shall go to Siena to-day.”1 [Note: J. Jörgensen, St. Francis of Assisi, 110.]

(2) Knowledge of Christ means love.—“He that loveth not knoweth not God.” Then how many of us know Him? No love: no knowledge! May we not slightly alter the former word of the Apostle, and read it thus—“He that saith, I know Him, and loveth not, is a liar.” It would be just as reasonable for a man without eyes to claim that he sees the stars as for a man without love to claim that he knows the Lord. Without love we cannot know Christ. What is love? It is indefinable, as indefinable as fragrance or light. Our descriptive words are at the best only vague and remote. Though we cannot define a sentiment, we can sometimes suggest it by its effects, and this will suffice for our immediate purpose. Love is “good will toward men.” Observe, good will toward men, not merely good wish; willing good, not only wishing it! To wish a thing and to will it, may be two quite different things. Wishing may be only a sweet and transient sentiment; willing implies effort, active and persistent work. Wishing dreams; willing creates. Love is good will, the willing of good toward all men, the effort to think the best of all men, and to help them on to the best. That is love.

The path of the intellect is not the path that brings the soul into that Sacred Presence which it seeks. He is reached by another means altogether. What is it? Let the soul take to itself the “wings of love,” and the distance between it and Him will be covered in a moment. The mountain will become a plain, and He who seemed to be afar off will be found to be nigh at hand. Or, to use the figure which Browning employs, love is the single “leap” that gains Him, which leap the mere intellectual faculty is powerless to take.1 [Note: J. Flew, Studies in Browning, 145.]

(3) Knowledge of Christ is likeness.—Knowledge necessitates likeness. Have we not abundant proof of its truth? Two unlikes cannot know each other. Two men who are morally unlike each other may live together, and neither can possibly know the contents of the other’s life. How would you describe pain to a man who has never experienced it? He cannot know it. He cannot even imagine it. Pain is known only by the pain-ridden. Knowledge implies likeness. The principle has a wide application. To know we must be. To know music, we must be musical. To know art, we must be artistic. To know Christ, we must be Christlike. “This is life, … to know Jesus.” To know Jesus is to share His life! His life is eternal. Life eternal is just Christ-life. This is life eternal, to have life like Christ, to know Him in spirit and in truth.

All grows, says Doubt, all falls, decays and dies;

There is no second life for flower or tree:

O suffering soul, be humble and be wise,

Nor dream new worlds have any need of thee!

And yet, cries Hope, the world is deep and wide;

And the full circle of our life expands,

Broadening and brightening, on an endless tide

That ebbs and flows between these mystic lands.

Not endless life, but endless love I crave,

The gladness and the calm of holier springs,

The hope that makes men resolute and brave,

The joyful life in the great life of things.

The soul that loves and works will need no praise;

But, fed with sunlight and with morning breath,

Will make our common days eternal days,

And fearless greet the mild and gracious death.2 [Note: W. M. W. Call.]

Life in the Knowledge of God

Literature

Allen (T.), Children of the Resurrection, 72.

Armstrong (R. A.), Memoir and Sermons, 248.

Barry (A.), Sermons preached at Westminster Abbey, 3, 71.

Church (R. W.), Village Sermons, i. 140.

Clark (H. W.), Meanings and Methods of the Spiritual Life, 14.

Crump (W. W.), A Buried Sphinx, 1.

Eyton (R.), The Apostles’ Creed, 195.

How (W. W.), The Knowledge of God, 3.

Jowett (J. H.), Thirsting for the Springs, 114.

Kingsley (C.), Sermons for the Times, 14.

Lambert (B.), Memoir, Sermons, and Lectures, 129.

Lonsdale (J.), Sermons, 162.

Lyttelton (A. T.), College and University Sermons, 1.

McLeod (M. J.), The Unsearchable Riches, 93.

Pearce (J.), The Alabaster Box, 70.

Sandford (C. W.), Counsel to English Churchmen Abroad, 194.

Sinclair (W. M.), Christ and our Times, 91.

Swann (N. E. E.), New Lights on the Old Faith, 159.

Walpole (G. H. S.), Vital Religion, 1.

Christian World Pulpit, xxxiii. 21 (Brooks); xxxviii. 291 (Leitch); lxviii. 259 (Horne); lxxiii. 153 (Horne); lxxx. 81 (Alexander).

Churchman’s Pulpit: Easter Day and Season, xi. 314.

Scotch Sermons (1880), 324 (Semple), 365 (Stevenson).

Treasury (New York), xiv. 759 (Scudder).