People search the wide world for the ultimate experience. You can stay at home, because He’s already in the room. No one, no thing, is greater than the Creator, not even close. God is the most interesting, relevant, creative, powerful, loving, intelligent, wise person there is.
The prophet Jeremiah makes an amazing claim:
“Thus says the LORD: ‘Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the LORD.’” (Jeremiah 9:23–24)
Knowing God and his ways is the ultimate experience. The coolest pursuit. The most satisfying goal.
Here are seven reasons why.
1. Knowing God is the ultimate experience because he is good.
I like to be around things that are good. Food is good. Sunshine and warm temperatures are good.
Music is good. Parks and trees and fields and nature paths are good.
I like to be around people that are good. Good people are generous and kind. Good people are honest and authentic. They are encouraging and hopeful.
They stretch me, comfort, heal, and teach me.
The great news is that God is infinitely good, and being around him is the ultimate good. The more you can get of God the more good that comes into your life. And God’s goodness never cloys or becomes harmful in the way that eating too much will hurt you. God is a good you can never get too much of.
2. Knowing God is the ultimate experience because he is perfect.
God has no faults and makes no mistakes. Ever. He is perfect in knowledge, perfect in wisdom.
God never miscalculates or misjudges. He never has to change, grow, or mature. He does not change because he cannot improve.
Whatever God does, we can be assured he has handled the situation exactly as it should be handled.
I am drawn to that because I am not perfect, and that brings endless problems. Because I am so deeply flawed, I want to know the God who is willing to lead me toward perfection.
That is what God has planned for his followers. Jesus said, “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).
The Bible describes the people who have already died and gone into God’s presence in heaven as “the righteous made perfect” (Hebrews 12:23).
God is working to make us “perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (James 1:4).
So I love getting to know him. I want him to correct all my faults, to fix me. I want to be better, and only God can get me there.
3. Knowing God is the ultimate experience because he is a divine person, not an impersonal thing or force.
God is he, not it.
That means we can have a relationship with him. He has mind, will, and emotions. He is alive. God has experiences. He communicates. He plans, desires, intends, enjoys.
We know God in the way we know a person, not the way we know math tables.
Disappointed Dreams
At some point in our lives we all have dreamed about obtaining some thing.
I have enjoyed photography since I was a teenager and over the years have bought three SLR cameras.
I don’t buy on a whim. With big purchases like that I research the product and prices thoroughly and usually pray about the decision for six months to a year before pulling the trigger. (I usually feel guilty about buying something like a camera and wait until I feel permission from God to do it.)
After waiting that long, I’m excited when the box comes in the mail.
With my last camera purchase a few years ago I enjoyed carefully unboxing the camera and patiently learning its features. I marveled at how much the technology had advanced since I bought my previous camera. The quality of the pictures impressed me. I was more than satisfied with the product and the purchase.
But the experience of owning and using the camera did not match my dreams of getting it. Likewise with lens I have purchased for it. Likewise with every thing I have ever owned.
Things can’t bring as much lasting happiness as good people and healthy relationships. The reason bad people and unhealthy relationships are so painful is due to the tremendous power of people and relationships. When they are good, there is nothing better.
And that is why knowing God is so satisfying. God is the perfectly good person. With him we can have the perfect relationship.
God Is Love
God is a relater by nature. He is Trinity, three persons, one God. He has been in a relationship of love for all eternity.
Knowing God is dynamic. Our relationship changes and grows. There is give and take, back and forth.
We enjoy fellowship and togetherness. There is presence and absence. Learning. Knowing and being known, loving and being loved.
Knowing God brings joy as only a relationship, only a person, can. We are social, relational beings by nature, and that is because God made us in his image. God is social.
The pain of loneliness shows we were created for relationship.
Relating to people satisfies a need in our soul we do not fully understand. As we know God better, our need for relationship is met in an ultimate way.
4. Knowing God is the ultimate experience because he is infinitely superior to us in every imaginable way.
I like to experience people who are superior to me. (That’s not hard to find.)
Of course, every person we meet is superior to us in many ways, but we don’t always have occasion to experience it. But when I do, something good comes into my life.
One man in our church is an outstanding cook, with a specialty in making desserts. For many special events he has made gourmet cheesecakes that are the best I have ever tasted. At our last Thanksgiving meal he made a pumpkin cheesecake with homemade whip cream.
He is a blessing to me and everyone in the church for who he is, and he is a blessing to us in this particular way of being a superior dessert chef. I enjoy many things about him, including his superior ability in this area.
People with superior knowledge, ability, experience, character, faith and so on bring more to us than we have. They bring what we need or want, but lack.
God is superior to us.
He is infinitely superior.
He is superior in every imaginable way.
As a result, he brings unlimited benefit to us in every imaginable way.
Divine Superiority
Being around God is like being an amateur violinist and spending a year getting personal daily training from the greatest violinist who ever lived.
Only that great violinist is not only better than anyone ever, not only twice as good or thrice as good or ten times better. This great violinist is not just a hundred times more skilled or a thousand or a million times more skilled than any violist ever. He is literally infinitely more skilled.
That means there is no limit to how superior he is to any other violinist.
That is what God’s superiority to us is. No exaggeration. He has unlimited, perfect virtue and ability.
He created us and our ability. We have no ability or virtue on our own. Literally zero.
So for a human to be around God is for someone who has zero to be around someone who has infinite supply.
Divine omnicompetence
Not only is God infinitely good at what he is good at, he is good at everything. Everything. There is nothing God cannot do, and do infinitely well.
He doesn’t do anything less than perfect, infinitely excellent, and wonderfully superior.
God is superior in knowledge and wisdom. Love and kindness. Joy and peace. Power and energy. Creativity and imagination. Goodness and virtue. Authority and glory. Righteousness and purity.
Not only is good superior to us in every way, he has ways to be superior that we don’t. It’s as though we own three musical instruments, and he owns dozens of instruments. He plays instruments we don’t have. And plays them perfectly.
God is the ultimate. As a result, he is the most interesting being in the universe. And will always be so.
We will never exhaust the pleasures of knowing his superiority.
Divine Generosity
I like to experience God because he is generous with what he has. He likes to give. He likes to share his superiority.
Another word that describes God’s superiority is glory. God is glorious and he delights to show and share his glory.
Therefore, knowing God is the ultimate experience, the ultimate obsession.
5. Knowing God is the ultimate experience because he is both like and unlike us.
What attracts men to women and women to men?
Much of the spark of sexual attraction is the difference between the sexes, not only the difference between the male and female bodies, but also the difference in emotions and perspective. Men and women think differently.
But we are also the same. We share human nature. We are persons capable of conversation and creativity. In addition we share in having mind, will, and emotions; dreams and hopes, loves and loathings.
You can love your dog, horse, or cat, but your relationship with humans has the potential to be far richer than what you can have with an animal (notice that I used the word potential).
We tend to make friends with people who have something strongly in common with us.
Like the electricity between men and women, knowing God is full of wonder because he is both like and unlike us.
Similar to God
God created us in his image, so we resemble him.
Like God, we are personal and relational. We are rational. Like him we have a will and make choices. We are alive. We both are moral beings attuned to right and wrong.
Because God created us in his image, we by nature can understand many things about him intuitively as we think about him, and as we read about him in Scripture and ponder his creation.
Because we have much in common with God, we can have a deeply satisfying relationship with him. This relationship has the potential to be far deeper than we can have with any human, animal, or lifeless thing.
Different than God
But God is also very different from us. He is divine, we are human. He is eternal and uncreated. We are short-lived and created. He created us; we did not create him.
So we are two infinitely different orders of being.
God has no limits. We are limited in every way.
God exists on his own, perfectly independent, with no need for anyone or anything but himself. We are completely dependent on him for everything, every heartbeat, every breath, for existence itself.
God is holy. He is other. He is unique.
And this makes him intriguing. This makes us curious.
Boom
Put these similarities and differences together and you have more than a spark, more than electricity—you have lightning and thunder. You have the most exciting, interesting, and mysterious experience available.
Therefore, knowing God is the ultimate obsession.
6. Knowing God is the ultimate experience because he is mysterious.
People like mysteries. Once we understand something fully, we get bored with it.
So people like puzzles, mystery movies and books, mystery religions, mysterious people, conspiracy theories, and scientific explorations of the unknown.
We love what is new. We like going places we have never been.
This is another reason why knowing God is the ultimate experience. We can never know all there is to know about God.
He is infinite, different than us, and infinitely superior to us. He is inexhaustible and in many ways unpredictable.
Knowing God is like swimming in the deep end of the pool or in the ocean. Everything else we do in this life is like trying to swim in the kids’ wading pool, or in a puddle. We quickly exhaust its ability to delight, challenge, and inspire.
Surfers are waiting for the ultimate wave. Classical music fans are looking for the ultimate sound system and perfect album. Gamers are looking for the ultimate video game.
But in this world the next big thing eventually loses its luster.
God’s Secret Name
There is always the unknown about God. He both reveals and hides himself.
In the Bible God gives dozens of self-revealing names for himself so that we can know him. But the Bible also says of Jesus that “he has a name written that no one knows but himself” (Revelation 19:12). That means there are things about the identity of Jesus that he will never reveal to us.
We can understand many thing about his ways. Psalm 103:7, for example, says, “He made known his ways to Moses.”
But in many other ways his paths are beyond tracing out and unexplainable.
Romans 11:33–34 says, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! ‘For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?’”
Now that is interesting! That is challenging!
Knowing the Unknowable
Knowing God is like climbing a mountain on which you can never reach the peak.
It’s like writing a book you can never finish because the more you write the more you understand, and the more you understand the more you realize you have yet to learn.
Knowing God is like reading a favorite author who you hope keeps writing more books. You enjoy her writing so much you never can get enough.
The more you know God, the more you see there is to him.
It’s like the experience of astronomers over the last several hundred years. The more they peer into the heavens and the better their telescopes become, the more stars and galaxies they find, the bigger the universe keeps getting.
Knowing God is like the experience of scientists exploring subatomic matter. First they found molecules and thought they had discovered the smallest elements in the created world. Then they discovered that molecules were made of atoms. They thought atoms were the smallest building blocks of matter. Then they discovered subatomic particles like quarks and bozons. What’s next?
If that is true of the material world, which ultimately is finite, how much more is it true of the infinite God?
Of God you can never say, “Been there, done that.”
The apostle Paul was getting at this when he prayed that you “may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:18–19).
God is the ultimate obsession. The more you know him, the more interesting he becomes.
7. Knowing God is the ultimate experience because he is beyond control.
Relationships are interesting because people are interesting, and one reason people are interesting is they are not puppets. People are a wonder to explore and a challenge to know because we each have our own mind and will.
And because of that, relationships are dynamic, fluid, ever changing, like Chicago weather. Being a weatherman in Chicago is interesting; in San Diego, boring.
God has his own mind and will, and so he is anything but boring to relate to.
If you want a God you can control, master, limit to formulas, put in a box, and have all figured out, you’ll need to make yourself an idol. People make idols so they have some measure of control. We come to idols because we want some higher power who will do what we want. Idols are manageable deities.
The true God is not manageable.
People have written books about How to Manage Your Boss. That’s an interesting turnaround, and it’s something every employee would like to do. How sweet it would be to control the supervisor who controls you.
But you can’t do that with God. Forget about writing the book How to Manage God. It can’t be done.
Few would dare put that into words, but that is what we all try to do. We want to control our lives, and therefore we need to control God. We know he is superior to us, but we need to manage him if we are to have the life we want. So we set the agenda and schedule for how he works in our lives and see if we can persuade him to go along.
But the true God is way beyond us.
He is “the blessed and only Sovereign” (1 Tim. 6:15). He “works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Eph. 1:11). “Whatever the Lord pleases, he does, in heaven and on earth” (Psalm 135:6).
The world is his kingdom, not mine.
If that were the end of the story, we might not be happy.
God’s open-door policy
But there is more. For God invites us into a relationship where our desires matter immensely to him.
Though he is sovereign, he invites us to present our requests to him. He is a good Father who loves to give his children what they ask if it is in their welfare.
God is sovereign and holy, which is wonderful; he is also loving, fully open to our entreaties, good, kind, generous, gracious, relational, and completely approachable through faith in our perfect mediator Jesus Christ.
Put that all together, and you know he is both almighty and trustworthy.
Knowing him is never boring. Never shallow.
What it is to mountain climbers to scale Mount Everest is just a hint of the majestic experience that awaits us as we walk with God.