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.
It was a theological objection.
“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46).
It is a reasonable question. Nazareth was not in the prophecies. The Messiah was supposed to come from Bethlehem. Nathanael knew this. He had done his homework. And his homework was, in this moment, the very thing standing between him and the One he had been waiting for.
Philip did not argue with him. He did not produce a counter-syllabus or a list of supporting texts. He said two words: “Come and see” (John 1:46).
Not let me explain. Not here is the evidence. Come. See. The knowing was in the going, not in the arguing.
Nathanael went. And the moment Jesus saw him coming, He said: “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit” (John 1:47). Jesus already knew him: yada, the knowing of presence, of being fully seen. Nathanael had not yet said a word. And he was already known.
That is the movement. Not from ignorance to information. From distance to presence. From studying the map to standing in the territory. And it began not with a better argument but with the willingness to go and see.
This is what yada looks like in motion. You do not come to know someone by studying their file. You come to know them by spending time in the same direction, by going through things together, by being present to each other over the long haul of ordinary days. Three years of walking together: meals, travel, storms on the water, the weight of Gethsemane. And it was in the walking that the disciples came to know Him. Not just know about Him, but know the quality of His attention, the way He looked at people no one else was looking at, what it meant when He was silent.
The same offer stands. Come and see. To begin walking and let the knowing accumulate the way it always accumulates: through time, through presence, through the willingness to keep going even when the way is not clear.
I have found that my own yada has grown most in the places I did not expect: in a season of waiting that went on longer than I could understand, in moments of prayer that felt like nothing until they suddenly felt like something. Knowing about God had filled my head. Walking with Him reached my heart.
We have traveled through four entries now. The restlessness of the soul. The testimony of creation. The God who walked through the door in the person of Jesus Christ. And now this: the invitation not merely to acknowledge all of that, but to enter into it.
“God is love” (1 John 4:8). Not God is loving, as if love were one of His qualities among others. God is love. And the God revealed in Jesus Christ is this God, the One who absorbed every humiliation in order to stay near us, the One who met the woman at the well in the noon heat, the one hour she thought she was alone.
This is who the ache has been pointing toward. Not a force or a principle or a cosmic explanation. A Person, with a character, who can be known, who in fact wants to be known, with a longing that mirrors our own.
Yada is the destination. And it begins not with arrival but with the first step of following.
There is a difference between knowing God’s resume and knowing God. Between correct beliefs and actual encounter. Between a faith that lives in the head and one that has made it all the way down into the bones.
Nathanael had the objections. Philip had two words: come and see. And everything changed not in the argument but in the going.
The question is not whether He is there. The question is whether we are willing to go and see.
Stay here for a moment. You were not made to know about Him from a distance. You were made for yada, the kind of knowing that only comes from walking together. Stay with that.
i. There is a difference between knowing God’s resume and knowing God. Where in your life has your faith stayed mostly in your head — accurate, perhaps, but not yet personal?
ii. Nathanael had a theological objection that was keeping him from coming. Philip didn’t argue. He said come and see. What objection, doubt, or unanswered question have you been studying instead of simply showing up?
Lord, I know more about You than I know You.
I know the doctrines. I can trace the arguments. I have read the texts and studied the words. And yet there are mornings when all of it sits in my head like furniture in a room I do not actually live in: arranged correctly, dusted occasionally, but not inhabited.
Forgive me for treating knowledge of You as an end rather than a road.
The Pharisees had the Scriptures. They had the promises, the genealogies, the prophecies — and You stood in front of them and said they had missed the point entirely. I do not want to be the person who got everything right and still missed You.
Yada is what I want. Not the knowing of a database but the knowing of presence, the kind that accumulates slowly, through years of walking in the same direction, through the ordinary hours when no one is watching, through the questions that do not resolve quickly and the silences that ask me to stay anyway.
I confess that I have been more comfortable with information than with intimacy. More at ease studying You than being near You. More practiced at talking about the table than sitting at it.
You are not a subject to be mastered. You are a Person to be known. And You have been walking beside me longer than I have been paying attention.
So I turn.
Not dramatically. Not with a grand resolution. Just this: a quiet decision to go and see. To stop analyzing from a distance and simply show up. In the right direction. Toward You.
In the name of Jesus, who never once said study me.
Amen.
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