What does the Bible mean when it refers to the knowledge of God?

"The fear of Jehovah is the beginning of knowledge" — not of wisdom, but of knowledge. A weighty sentence. All true knowledge, all moral knowledge begins by putting God in His own place. Nothing is right or true without that. For to leave Him out falsifies the position and relationship of all.

I must know God to be at rest, God must have His place. Now putting God in His true place — that is the fear of God — is the true beginning of all knowledge.

The result is the apprehending the fear of Jehovah, and arriving at the knowledge of God. Here therefore it is not a call to men which we have, but the heart itself seeking for true wisdom as its portion and treasure, and thus the intelligence of relationship with Jehovah and the knowledge of God are obtained. "For Jehovah gives wisdom." It is not merely that I by man's understanding get wiser, but Jehovah gives true wisdom.

The apostle John speaks of life as a subjective state in believers, though inseparable from the knowledge of God fully revealed as the Father in the Son, and indeed characterised by this. The Lord said to His Father, "This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent."

Even so there is no spiritual and eternal life without the knowledge of God; and no knowledge of God without the revelation which reaches us in the word of the Sent One and the faith which receives it. Because of this, we believe, Jesus spoke not only of the believer having eternal life but of his passing out of that spiritual death which is marked by utter ignorance of God into the realm of life which is filled with the light of the knowledge of the Father.

The basis of all truth lies in the knowledge of God. Had that knowledge reached us apart from grace it would have overthrown us; but here was One full of both grace and truth, and dwelling among us.

The expression, full knowledge, which in the Greek is epignosis, is used by the apostle Paul more often in his prison epistles than in his other epistles... The expression, we understand, means full knowledge, true knowledge or clear knowledge, and in these latter epistles would appear to refer to the knowledge that is brought to us in the full revelation of God. In the Old Testament the knowledge of God was fragmentary but, since the coming of the Son of God and the giving of the Holy Spirit, we are living in the times of full knowledge.

The knowledge of the love of God comes out fully in the death of His Son, even as it is written, "In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him." The more our souls feed upon the death of Christ, the greater will our knowledge be of God and His love; but whatever our apprehension, the cross is the measure of divine love.

The Apostles, as they looked upon Christ, saw the perfect revelation of all that God is. They saw the perfect purity of Christ, and they realised that God is light — absolute holiness. They saw the perfect love of Christ, and they realised that God is love. These are the great truths that the Apostle presses in the course of the Epistle — God is light and God is love.

In the Son there was the perfect revelation of the true God; all that God is in His nature of love, and in His grace to men was fully manifested in Jesus; and the Holy Spirit has come, so that true believers have been given "an understanding, that we may know Him that is true" (1 John 5:20). Now we know God in the way He has been revealed in the Son, in the fulness of His love, and we have been brought to share the Son's place before the Father.

In turning to the apostle's prayer, we find he asks first that they may have knowledge of God's will — have that spiritual intelligence and understanding as to God's mind, that they may be able to walk. How can Christians do God's will if they do not know it?

That we might have the full knowledge of God's will, He has given us His word, in which there is presented to us all His thoughts. God does not only wish us to know His will in regard to our individual path, or in regard to our gatherings in the assembly, important as these are: He also desires us to know all His will in regard to Christ, and in relation to Himself. To this end He has told us of "the good pleasure of His will", "the mystery of His will", and "the counsel of His own will" (Eph. 1:5, 9, 11).

This new man is renewed into full knowledge, after the image of Him that created him. His knowledge is very different from that of Adam in innocency, for it is the full knowledge of God in Christ, both as regards the revelation of the Father in the Person of the Son, and all that is to be learned of God in His counsels of love, which centre in Christ glorified at His right hand in heaven.

"Whom ye know not." The religious world as seen in the Jews and their leaders, spite of their profession, their sacrifices and their ceremonies, was ignorant of God. This solemn sentence by the Son of God exposed the true state of man's religion; it lacked what was vital, the knowledge of the true God. Moreover, when the true knowledge of God came in Jesus, they refused Him... The religious world of today, in Christendom, has the same words engraven on it, "Whom ye know not."

But how immeasurably more is God known in His Son! There and then only did He reveal Himself as He is, far beyond His governmental dealings with a fleshly people controlled by His law, which, avowedly, made nothing perfect.