Page 3 of 3

Can we have "direct" knowledge of God?

Which brings up an interesting theological question. Since God has no body, how can we perceive him? How can we communicate with him? Could it be that we possess the capacity for "direct" knowledge of God, meaning without reliance on the body and its senses? If so, our knowledge of God would operate at a different level than our knowledge of other persons. We would not need for God to appear before us in material form. And God, a spirit, could use a kind of direct intuition in communicating with us. Different rules would apply to communication with God, for God doesn't "need" our bodies to access our minds. As Tennyson wrote in a poem, "Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet."

Every animal on earth has a set of correspondences with the environment around it, and some of those correspondences far exceed ours. Humans can perceive only 30 percent of the range of the sun's light and 1/70th of the spectrum of electromagnetic energy. Many animals exceed our abilities. Bats detect insects by sonar; pigeons navigate by magnetic fields; bloodhounds perceive a world of smell unavailable to us. Perhaps the spiritual or "unseen" world requires an inbuilt set of correspondences activated only through some sort of spiritual quickening. "No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above," said Jesus. "The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned," said Paul. Both expressions point to a different level of correspondence available only to a person spiritually alive.

"Now this is eternal life," said Jesus: "that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent." The highest correspondence, reserved only for the creature made in God's image, even organic death is powerless to arrest. No material event, not even death, Paul insists in Romans 8, can separate us from God's love; God keeps alive that which he loves.

As the key to access the unseen world, the Bible presents faith, which Hebrews defines as "being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." Jesus clearly hinted that after his death, something new would happen, a new way of knowing: not the normal process of an isolated brain forming pictures of reality, but an internal and direct path of knowledge. "When the Counselor comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father, he will testify about me," Jesus said. "But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth …. He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you."

According to the Bible, the greatest distinction between human beings is not based on race, intelligence, income, or talent. It is a distinction based on correspondence with the unseen world. The "children of light" have that correspondence; the "children of darkness" do not. One day our correspondence with that world will be complete, not partial. As John said, "Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is."

Philip Yancey is the author of many books, including Reaching for the Invisible God (Zondervan), from which this article is adapted.

Adapted from "Seeing the Invisible God" by Philip Yancey, Books & Culture. Click here to read the original article in its entirety and for reprint information.

Copyright © 2011 by Christianity Today/ChristianBibleStudies.com. Click here for reprint information.