Chapter One — The Knowing

Drawn from When Did You Last Check the Foundation of Your House, Out of the Depths, Knowing God Starts with Knowing He Is Love, The Companion, Theosis in the Age of Disclosure, Vol II: Knowing the King, Words of the King, Questions of the King, The Upper Room, The Vine Is the Path

"Now this is eternal life – that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you sent."

— John 17:3 (NET)

Start here, because everything else in these volumes answers to this verse. Jesus does not define eternal life as a place, a duration, a reward, or a set of correct beliefs. He defines it as a knowing, and he puts the knowing in the present tense: it is what eternal life is, and it can be had today. The corpus returns to this verse more often than to any other. It closes the Words of the King volumes. It is the measure in the Foundation book. It stands behind the volume on the Psalms, the volume on love, the volume on the Spirit, and the volume on the age of disclosure. Whatever else you take from the writings, take this: the Father and the Son are to be known, personally, now, as a person is known.

The corpus draws a hard line between that knowing and its substitutes. Volume Two of the handbook series puts the problem this way: "A soldier can know the orders perfectly and not know the Commander at all." The same volume says what that does to a church: "The crisis of the contemporary church is not primarily a crisis of disobedience, though disobedience is everywhere. It is a crisis of intimacy." People can keep the commands, defend the doctrines, and fill the calendar, and still be strangers to the One the commands and doctrines are about. The volume's answer is not to loosen the commands. It is to say what the commands are for. "Eternal life is not what you receive at the end of faithfulness. It is what faithfulness is made of. The knowing is not the reward. The knowing is the life."

That sentence is worth reading twice. A great deal of ordinary Christian teaching treats the knowing as the payout and the obedience as the labor. The corpus reverses it. The knowing is the substance of the life, and the obedience is what the knowing looks like when it has legs. A disciple who is working toward knowing God someday has already misread the verse.

The volumes that catalog what Jesus said are built to put you in front of Him and not in front of a system about Him. The Words of the King lays out His speech in its registers: the I AM sayings, the commands, the oaths sealed with Amen, the Beatitudes, the prayers. Of the I AM sayings it says, "Each ego eimi declaration is a double revelation — who He is, and what that resolves in you." Of His habit of swearing by Himself: "Jesus cited Himself." The point of cataloging is not to master a list. It is to hear one voice in its many tones and to know the voice.

The Questions of the King makes the same move from another side. It sorts what Jesus asked into seven kinds and says what is different about a question: "Commands tell you what to do. Declarations announce who He is. Teachings explain the Kingdom. Questions do something different — they locate you." A question is a way of finding a person where he actually stands. And the volume attaches a condition to every one of them: "You cannot answer these questions from a position of sufficiency. Every one of them requires some form of empty hands." Hold that line. The next chapter is about it.

The shortest statement of the whole matter is the Upper Room essay's first sentence about creation: "God wanted a family." Not a workforce, not an audience, not a set of well-behaved subjects. A family, with the Father at the head and the Son at the table. The essay's last word is addressed to you: "Come home."

What does the knowing look like in practice? The corpus says it is relational in the plain sense. It has a beginning that God initiates, it is particular and not generic, it grows through obedience, it is tested by suffering, and it is never finished. It shows up in ordinary hours, not only on Sunday. One of the volumes on love insists that none of this can be had from a book, and it says so on its first page: "This book cannot teach you to love." Another says that "a book cannot teach you to know God." That is not false modesty. It is a claim about how the knowing works, and the rest of this book keeps coming back to it. A volume can point. Only the Father can be known, and He is known by being met.

So here is the first test, and it governs every instrument that follows. When you read anything, hear anything, or run anything, ask whether it produces the knowing of John 17:3 or something that occupies the same space and answers to the same name. The Foundation book states the measure in nearly those words, and it is the only measure the corpus finally cares about.