What Do You Know About God?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

God, people, and things.  That is the proper order of importance.  If you look at those three, I think that our ability to exhaustively know each one decreases from God to people to things.

Our knowledge of an infinite God is very small compared to all that can be known of Him.  We can spend hundreds of lifetimes and just scratch the surface.   If you understand who God is, then you get this.

Our knowledge of people is more exhaustive than our knowledge of God.  In one lifetime, we can learn quite a bit about people, taking us toward a comprehensive understanding, but never quite getting there.  We mostly learn about other people by reflecting on the person we know best, ourselves.  We make the reasonable assumption that if we think and act a certain way, it’s probable that other people think and act in similar ways.

Our knowledge of things can be quite extensive.  We can learn exhaustively about tables, bicycles, the rules of hockey, blog software, and computers.  We have comprehensive knowledge in many areas of science because we are able to study things in great detail through repeated observation and experimentation.  Our knowledge of things is never totally complete, but it can get close, and in a relatively short period of time (depending on the thing you’re studying).

Many of us avoid studying God and people because our knowledge of God and people is far from complete.  The more we study, the more questions come to mind.  We can never get closure and finally say, “We know all there is to know.”  I think this intimidates many people.

We enjoy studying things because we can gain almost complete understanding of many things.  How long does it take to study a table before we understand virtually all there is to know about it?

My challenge to you is to spend more time learning about God and people, and less on things.  Just because you’ll never finish the curriculum doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start the class.  The incomplete knowledge you gain about God and people is vastly more important than all of your other  knowledge.

The sooner you figure this out, the sooner your life will take on meaning and importance that it never had while you majored in things.