Be Still and Know (Part 2)

Psalm 46:10, "Be still and know that I am God." 

I have spent the greater part of my life seeking to "know." It has been and still is what internally motivates me. But as my Eastern Orthodox friends rightly tell me, "Knowing God as a subject is different than knowing him as a person." I believe you have to have both but the first is actually much easier than the last. 

The first time that we come in contact with this "knowledge" issue is in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2:16-17. "And the LORD God commanded the man [Adam], 'You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.'" 

Many of you have heard me teach deeply on this passage before but to remind you of its truth...God did not prohibit Adam [and Eve] from eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because He is a withholding type of God. As good parents we know that certain information or certain exposure to more mature things will actually damage the child. They are not ready for such things. As good parents we are not withholding because we love to torment and selfishly keep things away from our children; we do it because we love them. We want them to grow up whole. 

I recently was reminded of this truth while watching a "Children of the Holocaust" program from a Jewish perspective. Children, little children, whose greatest concern should be "Who do I play with today?" or which picture to post on the frig....little children forced to watch the shooting of their mother, father, and older siblings. Little children who used to have three home-made loving meals now  fighting and stealing from other children - rotten leftovers found in a garbage can or stale bread in the concentration camps. As adults we see how such tragedy, how such knowledge, especially of evil, has changed them, broken them almost beyond repair. 

We see this with brutality but we also see this with explicit sexual exposure, with drugs and alcohol, abject poverty, cyber bullying, and a host of other "knowledge" issues. In my experience, in my opinion, they deaden you to the true knowledge creation was to offer you. Instead of reflecting the Creator and His divine mission of blessing, it was perverted and used for selfish ends. 

We often view the Fall from a sin perspective [and rightly so] but seldom do we see this as as a fall from what we were to potentially have with God. The loss is linked to Paradise but it was so much more. We lost what we could become. We lost what God was planning to give.

God does not desire to withhold things from us that give us pleasure or fill our social needs. However, He knows the best time to release them into our lives. He brings us to a certain level of maturity and then discloses them to us. 

It was this premature knowledge that put a distance between man and God. Adam had the knowledge but he lacked the maturity to handle the information. In becoming "like God" [Gen. 3:22] his own way, he distanced himself from God and the true intent of the knowledge. 

In Genesis 4:1 we have another "know." In the old King James translation it tells us that Adam "knew" Eve.  What does that mean?  It means that when they were both picking weeds out in their garden, Adam would look up and say to one of the animals, "Oh...there's Eve. I'd recognize her anywhere. She was the one who got us kicked out of the Garden." Well...she was the only woman on the planet at that time and they were still together as a couple so naturally he would say this. 

Actually, "to know" in that context was to be sexually intimate. Even though sin had entered into their relationship, they sought to love each other, to hold on to the divine covenant. God did not abandon them as well. He sought the restorative love that Adam and Eve were pursuing. 

I start here because I believe it is at the heart of Psalm 46. I am called to "Be still and know." At this point I don't want to rush ahead and fill in the rest of the text. I want to savor the word for awhile and figure it out before I move on to the end. 

My ability to "be still" is predicated on a certain "knowledge." So I will get my Systematic Theology books out (of which I have quite a few) and I will write out what I "know." This is not a bad exercize but it will leave me deficient and devoid of my quest. I have no doubt that there are atheists and agnostics who "know" the Bible and its underlying themes and principle better than me. They spend their life trying to shred it of all truth and importance. But they will never be successful. They are only arguing one aspect of "know." 

The Apostle Paul wrote one of the most heartfelt sentences that I have found in the Scriptures. One might call it my life verse - although I have surely failed to keep its truth in my own heart. After suffering great physical affliction and imprisonment he still penned these words, "That I may know him [Jesus] and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so somehow to attain to the resurrection of the dead" (Philip. 3:10-11).  

Paul was a brilliant man.  A Ph.D in theology, of the right religious family, studied under the right influential teachers....he knew. But he did not know until he had a personal experience with the risen Lord himself. It was finding out the truth of who this person, Jesus, truly was, matching O.T. examinations with what now stood in front of him. It's one thing to know that God is love; it is another thing to know the God of love. This is what Paul was after. 

What do I know?  I know that in my quest for something deeper:

1.  God is not purposely withholding with evil intent. 
2.  God is waiting or working in me to develop a certain level of maturity. 
3.  God will release whatever I need and what I desire when He is ready and...when He knows that I am ready. 
4.  God desires me to keep studying but for the sake of building others up and leading them to a deeper relationship with His Son. 
5.  I need to remember that eternal life is not based on a written exam but on a friendship with the Almighty God. 

Can you hear the quiet, parental voice?

"Be still.....

"and know..."