From the Greek word for knowledge, epistome, we get the term epistemology, which is one of those very large and intimidating words which just simply means the study or the theory of how we know. It’s the heart of knowing anything. For most of us, we basically just go through life with a rudimentary understanding without without truly knowing the details. Gravity is an easy concept to see. Just trip and you have figured most of it out. But if you look into it deeper, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity has a lot to say about gravity that most of us wouldn’t understand. Being a gravity denier isn’t one of those things that we currently see at the moment. But being a denier pretty everything else does. I would say that this whole idea of how do we know is one of our current major issues in the world. How do we know? Now, for you who grew up in a foot in the analog world and then a foot in the digital world, you understand this differently than those who may only just know the digital one. When you used to have to go and find out something you didn’t know to go to the library to look it up or ask a teacher or somebody who knew more than you, that was a part of how you had to find out how you know.
Now you just ask your phone. But how do you know your phone knows? Where does that information come from? And more than ever, we are bombarded with information and competing belief system that make us ask the question, how do I know I’m right? How do I know if this is true or or not, if that’s true, we live in an ever increasing state of confusion. More information at our fingertips than any time in human history, but a greater uncertainty of what we do with that information or how we evaluate competing truth claims. With Pontius Pilate, we sit on our tribunals asking, what is truth? Even while we have the Lord Jesus, the Lord of truth, standing before us. Because the Lord is a foundation of all knowing, we can have real and true knowledge of the world through the Son, through Jesus. The letter of 1 John is very much concerned with our knowing. He wants his readers to know with a confidence that they have eternal life in Jesus Christ. In this very short letter, the two Greek words or verbs for knowing are used 40 times. John wants us to know something important about our belief in God.
He the letter with saying, That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and have touched with our hands concerning the word of life. The life was made manifest and we have seen it, testified to it, ‘Proclaim to you eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us. That which we have seen and heard, we proclaim also to you. The eyewitness testimony for John is not the case for us, though. It was true of him in his time, but not now. I had a conversation with a non-Christian friend of mine a few years ago, and she made this statement. She said, I don’t really see how an ancient book should tell us how we live our lives today. We understand that. We read in the Bible, shepherds living in tents, Egyptians running around in chariots, a is watering a camel, it’s a sign to a slave that she’s to be the wife of his master’s son. We look at that and that’s hard for us to understand. It’s hard for us to see in our time. We multiply that by many examples.
How do we decide between differing and competing truth claims? Because we’re made in God’s image, we can know how to live in his world. Because of our sinful condition, it’s not always easy. We live in a disconnected and fractured time of knowledge after the fall. We are made to learn, to grow, and to understand, but we were never made to do it alone. Very familiar to us from Proverbs 3, Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. The Psalm tells us, Psalm 14, The fool says in his heart there is no God. Without the Lord, we are left to our own foolishness. We get atheist scientists to wonder if humans are the result of aliens planting us on the Earth some long years ago. We can be left with skepticism, the idea that there’s no real knowledge that’s possible. But skepticism is a fool’s errand. It’s not sustainable. You can’t live there. Chinese philosopher Zwang Zu, around 300 BC, he’s the one credited with this idea. He said, Now, I do not know whether I am a man dreaming I was a butterfly or whether I’m a butterfly I’m a man.
It’s one of those trippy Zen things that sound really profound, but no one really thinks they’re a butterfly trapped in a dream. We just don’t. Much of the time, not always, but much of the time, doubts can come because we want to do things we know we’re not supposed to do. Fairly common for college students who want to sleep with somebody, suddenly start wondering if God exists or the Bible is true. It’s a convenient skepticism that lets us just do what we want. It allows us to criticize but provide no real answers to living life other than how we would like to. 1 John 2, he says, By this we know that we have come to know him if we keep his Commandments. Whoever says, I know him, but does not keep his Commandments as a liar, and the truth is not in him. Whatever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected. You see, knowledge is lived out. We live out what we believe. Obedience is the truth in action. God has created us to know it’s fundamental to being a human in order to live in his world. But of course, the fall has changed all of this.
One of the great challenges we all face is this desire that we have, of course, for certainty. If we can’t know for certainty that something is infallibly true, we often think the only other option must be skepticism. But the Bible doesn’t speak to us about infallible certainty of knowledge. It speak to us about confidence of knowledge. That we are confident, as John tells us, in these truths. There’s a lot of anxiety of not being able to know that causes us fear. You ever wonder why people get so angry when you challenge their ideas? It often comes out of fear Because if they’re wrong, then what? We want this guarantee that our ideas are anchored to something that cannot move. We want life to give us a 2 plus 2 equals 4 about everything, an immovable foundation. Throughout scripture, the Lord is referred to as our rock, as our foundation. Deuteronomy 32, speaking of the Lord, the Rock. His work is perfect for all his ways are justice. Jesus, a God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright as he. We instinctively long for this. Why? Because we were made by a God who is just and upright and true.
When the serpent tempted Eve, he suddenly said, did God really say? He expressed skepticism, doubt about knowing if God was really true to his word. And now in our state of sin and misery, this satanic doubt can gnaw in our minds. We want the Lord just to show up and tell us everything about how things are in himself. We want a prophet to come and tell us what’s going to happen. Some infallible person who can tell us to turn this way or that, to think this way or that. A longing for a really definitive, charismatic leader who can claim to speak with such certainty. Thus sayeth the Lord. I think this This is one of the draws that so many have to podcast gurus today. It seems to be especially true, I would say, of young men. Podcasts have become the source of true and certain knowledge for many. Now, there’s some good here, to be sure. It’s like reading a good book or listening to a good speaker. It’s a source of knowledge for us, but it has limitations. There are dangers of a disconnected virtual leader or teacher. Digital connections are severely limited.
None of those people that we listen to actually know us, and we really don’t know them. We just know a curated image of them. One such digital mouthpiece just recently told his followers and said something to the fact that if your pastor did not talk about Charlie Kirk’s death, you need to leave that church. Really? Who in the world are you to tell pastors what they should speak about in their churches? Who gave you this authoritative power? And yet many have entrusted themselves to these virtual authorities. That’s just an example. There are many like that. What’s interesting, though, when you look at the Bible, we see that truth and life are embodied, not detached. In Acts 20, Paul is speaking to the elders of Ephesians on his way to Jerusalem. He says this. He says, You yourselves know how I lived among you the whole time from the first day that I set foot in Asia, serving the Lord with all humility, with tears, and with trials. Then in 1 Thessalonians 1, there Paul says, You know what men we proved to be among you for your sake. You see, the people that Paul was ministering to, they saw him and his companions as they lived among them.
It was embodied. They could see the consistency of what Paul was talking about with his life. You cannot have a virtual wife or husband You cannot have a virtual pastor. It’s really hard to have a virtual friend. Why? Truth and life are embodied. It’s the part of how we know. We know in covenant, we know in relationship. To know God is to be in covenant with him, and that gives us a connected and covenantal knowledge of the world of God. In Proverbs, but in several places, we read, The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction. It is knowing God as being in relationship to him. The whys have always known that to live life as two plus two is four is not possible. Certainty and a clear and inconvertible ideas are not what we live out in life. We have a lot of fuzzy edges. We live in a broken world. Proverbs tells us that we are to learn from the whys. Let the whys hear an increase in learning. What we hear all around us, though, especially in our culture, is that we need to break away from institutions.
We need to free ourselves and think for ourselves. That’s actually the worst mental slavery. We think we’re free, but in reality, we’re slaves to our own limitations, our own culture. You see, whether we like it or not, we are in relationship to our history. We’re connected to our past, the good and the bad. We learn from our failures, we learn from our successes, all of this in relationship to the Lord. As a part of what God has done through redemptive history is that he has revealed himself, he has self-authenticated himself, his truth in community of his people. In the Bible, we see that God reveals himself sometimes to individuals, to be sure, but those individuals are always connected to the rest of God’s people. Moses’s life was authenticated by the people of God who lived with him. They could verify his life in his teaching. If he went off the rails, they knew they were a part of that. In 1 John, he is an eyewitness whose other people could verify because there were other people with him who saw these The same is true the rest of the New Testament. They were not disconnected teachers, but those who lived in real connection in covenant with God’s people.
And we do the same thing. We have to trust what God has done in previous ages because we’re not there. Just like future generations have to trust what we have done here and can see and live and live as we continue to hand down the truth to them, that we are in a direct succession of God revealing his truth to his people, trusting what he has done in other time periods. It’s a part of how we know anything. An important piece then of knowing is the humility to have. Proverbs 11, When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with the humble person is wisdom. Proverbs 3, God gives favor to the humble. You see, true knowledge should make humble. When we seek to know something, it requires us to come in low, not in arrogance, not in pride. It requires a certain amount of risk. You cannot have a knowledge of God without the risk of an involvement in a relationship with God. You can’t keep him at arm’s length and expect to know him. You have to enter into that relationship, that covenantal bond that comes through faith in Christ. And as a part of that, our worship of the Lord helps us make sense of the world around us.
It’s embodied. We sing, we pray, we eat, we listen, we confess. The Holy spirit illuminates the truth of his word to us. How arrogant it is for us to stand in judgment of the Lord, waiting for him to convince us whether or not we’re justified in believing in him. All knowledge of every kind requires trust and faith. For the Christian, it’s not a blind trust, it’s not a blind faith. You see, it’s not as if we find ourselves alone on this little spinning planet, trying desperately to figure out all the clues to work it out. We’re not called to be archeologists, combing ancient ruins, searching for clues of meaning. No, because the God who has created us reveals himself to us. He has come to us. All of this is revealed word culminates in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. The gospel of John 1, In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. It goes on, The word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as the Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. We’ve just celebrated that for Christmas, the coming of God in the flesh.
Then we move to the end of Jesus’s life. As he’s preparing for his death, he’s speaking to his disciples in John 14, and he says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. And then he goes on. He goes, If you had known me, you would certainly know my Father also. From now on, you do know him, and you have seen him in me. Those are bold claims that Jesus makes. And he’s asking us to take our fears and our uncertainties about knowing him, about what is in front of us, and to follow him. Take your doubts, your skepticisms, and simply follow Jesus. He is known in the walking, in the doing, in the confessing, in the worship. Our struggles with doubts and uncertainties are a part of living in a fallen world. Our ability to know is clearly broken, but it is not destroyed. The Lord did not leave us alone. He came to us. He conquered sin and death. And ultimately, I will not know that by sight until he returns or I die. But I can trust his good promises because I know he is a good God.
And at times, things are going to happen in our lives where we’re going to question that. That’s true of all of us. We will follow him through dark shadows and valleys of tears and trials just as much as we will in the bright and happy places. Human pride breaks my ability to know. In following Jesus, I am called to a life of humility, of going low. I can admit, I don’t know or I’m not sure. I can listen to competing voices without fear of getting lost, even if not entirely don’t know about a particular event or a thing. Because to know Christ is to love Christ. It’s to be known by him and to be loved by him. And we do so, why? Because he first loved us. That our security and confidence of knowing anything is grounded and founded on the foundation of Jesus Christ, the truth revealed to us. And that knowing is a call to follow. It’s never abstract. You can’t have this creative ideas about God that are distinct from your life. You have to engage them. If they’re true, you live it. That’s the embodiment that we all struggle with because we sin, we fall short.
It’s in those moments we question and we doubt. We’re called to repent of our sin, to walk in obedience to what is true. As we walk with God, as we are known by him and make him known, that is such a tremendous gift to the world. You think about how awash everyone is with competing voices, competing ideas, and this person is this, and I don’t know which way to turn. Everything gets turned upside down because some crazy person on a podcast said these crazy ideas, and I’m not really sure because they’re really certain about it. You don’t have to live there. Step back into the world of your people in community. Hear the voices of people people next to you. Live with them. Interact with them. Yes, there’s input and ideas and wonderful things we can draw from, but you have to live here. You have to talk with people that you engage with, and you bring the living Christ to them because he dwells in you by his spirit. There is such a freedom that we have in knowing these truths. It liberates us. The world has put itself in slavery, to following after the wrong things, to denying the fundamental claims of who God is.
And he comes to us in the fullness of truth, in the person and work of his son, revealed to us that we would know we have eternal life in him. The confidence that belongs to the follower of Jesus Jesus. It’s such a tremendous gift that he has given to his people in the midst of so much uncertainty and so much confusion. I don’t have to have all the answers. I just have to be following the one who is the answer. Pray with me. Father Almighty, we do thank you and praise you that you have not left yourself without a witness. And Father, that you have come into our mental darkness and confusion with the very light of your truth of Jesus. And we ask, Lord God, that you would liberate us, that you would free us from our sin in the bondage of our darkness. Father, that we would know the joy that you have set before us in him. And Lord, I would ask again, are there any here who do not know you? Lord, open their eyes to see the glory and the Majesty of Jesus. Father, that they would know the truth in him and he would set them free.
And this we pray and in his mighty name. Amen.
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.