Follow Me — Not Study Me

This is the fourth and final entry in a four-part series, Ways to Know God. You can read the series from the beginning here.

“Follow me.” And he rose and followed him. — Matthew 9:9

There is a man you can describe in some detail: his biography, his work, the books he has written. You can speak about him with confidence. And you have never once been in the same room with him. This distinction, knowing about someone and knowing someone, is obvious enough in ordinary life. But when it comes to God, we collapse it constantly. We fill our heads with theology and doctrine and Scripture memory, and we call it knowing God. And then we wonder why the ache has not closed.

The Hebrew word the Old Testament uses for know is yada (יָדַע). It is one of the most intimate verbs in the language. When Genesis says that Adam knew his wife Eve (Gen. 4:1), it uses yada. When Psalm 139 says “you have searched me and known me” (Ps. 139:1), the word is yada. When Jeremiah records God saying “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jer. 1:5), the word is yada.

This is not the knowing of a database. It is the knowing of presence, of time spent together, of being fully seen and not turning away. It is the kind of knowing that can only accumulate, that requires history, proximity, the slow revelation of one life to another.

When Jesus defines eternal life in John 17:3, He does not say: this is eternal life, that they believe correct things about you. He says: that they know you. The Greek word is ginōskōsin (γινώσκωσιν), the New Testament equivalent of yada. Relational knowing. Experiential knowing. The knowing that comes not from study alone but from encounter.

Which raises an uncomfortable question for anyone who has been studying for a long time.

Doctrine matters. Scripture matters. Theology done well is not the enemy of yada — it is one of the roads toward it. The point is not that thinking about God is wrong. The point is that thinking about God is not the same as knowing God, any more than reading every book about the ocean is the same as swimming in it.

The Pharisees knew the Scriptures better than almost anyone alive. They had memorized entire books. They could trace the genealogies, cite the prophecies, argue the fine points of Mosaic law with precision. And Jesus looked at them and said: “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5:39-40).

The Scriptures were pointing somewhere. They were refusing to follow the pointer. They had mastered the map and missed the territory entirely.

Søren Kierkegaard saw the same trap from a different angle. He described a stage of existence he called the religious, not the stage of knowing more about God, but the stage of actually standing before Him in personal relationship. The danger, he observed, is that a person can remain in the ethical stage indefinitely: doing the right things, believing the right things, living a respectable religious life — and never make the final move into genuine encounter. The Pharisees were not immoral men. They were deeply ethical ones. That was precisely the problem.

It is easier to see in a different context. Think of someone who has studied marriage for decades: read every book, taught the courses, counseled hundreds of couples. And gone home to a spouse they have stopped truly listening to. The knowledge was real. The presence was missing. It is possible to become an expert in something and a stranger to it at the same time. This is what religious life looks like when it stops at the ethical stage and never makes it to the personal one.

We can know the creeds and miss the Person. We can have correct theology and cold hearts. We can teach about the love of God and never quite let it land on us personally.

Nathanael was sitting under a fig tree when Philip found him. Reading, perhaps. Thinking. A serious man, one who knew his Scriptures and took God earnestly. His first response to the news about Jesus was not wonder.