The God Who Would Be Known

We’ve spent the first three weeks of our series talking about preparing to seek the Lord: we looked at being done with lesser things and turning away from the things that don’t satisfy. We’ve looked at breaking up the fallow ground and removing the things that are keeping us from turning to God. Last week, we talked about the necessity of humbling ourselves before God and repenting of sin. This week, we’re going to pivot away from the preparation and begin to dig into the idea of knowing God, which really, is the byproduct of seeking God. And so, we’re going to focus down particularly on verses 12 and 13, and there’s two things I think we see here. There’s a gracious invitation, and a glorious promise.

1. A Gracious Invitation

The grace of God is beautifully put on display in this invitation to call upon him and pray to him. To really appreciate the grace of God in this passage, we need to back up a bit and get the context of Jeremiah 29. We picked up our reading in verse 10 this morning, but that really doesn’t get you the full picture. If you’re reading out of the ESV this morning, you have a header at the beginning of chapter 29 that says “Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles.” This is correspondence between Jeremiah and those who had been taken into captivity in Babylon, which, if you look in verses 1-3, includes priests, prophets, elders, trade workers, and even the royal court. Things are not going well in Judah right now. And this is where you really see the grace of God in this invitation to call upon him: four times from verses 4 to 14, God says that he sent them into exile. Verse 4… verse 7… twice in verse 14. Whatever you choose to believe about the way that God’s sovereignty works itself out – did he cause it? Did he merely allow it? – it’s a good question to work through, but for our purposes with this passage today, it’s not particularly important. What is important is that however it works, God has used the nation of Babylon to discipline his people. So, this passage that we’re looking at is taking place in exile. But that begs the question: how did we get here? It is because Israel has rejected the responsibility of knowing God.

This is what sets the stage at the beginning of Jeremiah. These are the first words that Jeremiah is called to preach against Israel: “Hear the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob, and all the clans of the house of Israel. Thus says the Lord: “What wrong did your fathers find in me that they went far from me, and went after worthlessness, and became worthless? They did not say, ‘Where is the Lord who brought us up from the land of Egypt, who led us in the wilderness, in a land of deserts and pits, in a land of drought and deep darkness, in a land that none passes through, where no man dwells?’ And I brought you into a plentiful land to enjoy its fruits and its good things. But when you came in, you defiled my land and made my heritage an abomination. The priests did not say, ‘Where is the Lord?’ Those who handle the law did not know me; the shepherds transgressed against me; the prophets prophesied by Baal and went after things that do not profit.” You see, Israel was given the Promised Land as a gift from God for the purpose of being in relationship with him. When God is calling Moses to deliver the people of Israel out of the hand of Pharaoh, this is the first thing that Israel hears from God about their deliverance from Moses in Exodus 6: ‘I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from slavery to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment. I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.” God’s intention for delivering his people from Egypt is to be in relationship with them. But it runs even deeper than this. The very beginning of the relationship between God and humanity is one of intimate fellowship. If you were to look at Genesis 2, you would see God placing the first man in a garden for the purpose of being in communion with him. It is God’s design for humanity to know him and to be known by him. It is fundamental to who we are as created beings.

And I want to take a moment to really nail this idea home: knowing about God is not the same as knowing God. To be certain, you should have them both. And as a matter of fact, if you don’t know about God, it may be evidence of the fact that you don’t know him very well. Now, I’m not saying that you have to have a deep understanding of all these theological concepts to be a real Christian, but what I am saying is this: imagine I was trying to learn about someone from you, and I ask if you know them, and you said, “that person is my best friend.” If you looked at me and said, “I don’t know,” I would have a lot of questions, and I probably would come to the conclusion that we have very different understandings of what it means to be somebody’s best friend. If someone came up to you and said, “I know that you’re a Christian. I want to learn more about the Christian God, can you tell me what he’s like,” what would you say? Would you struggle to come up with things you could tell someone? God is not a concept to be understood, God is a person to be known. If you don’t know much about him, you may not know him at all.

But the other side of the knowledge coin is that knowing about him is not equivalent to knowing him. You can’t know him well without knowing about him, but you can certainly know about him without knowing him. A lot of people in my generation are, in every manner of the word, obsessed with Taylor Swift. If you wanted to know a lot about Taylor, there are some people I could point you to that could tell you all you would want to know and more about her. But none of these people know her. They may feel like they do, but they don’t. That’s called being parasocial. It’s this type of relationship that we sometimes feel with celebrities, whether it’s a musician, actor, whoever it may be, where we get attached to them and we feel like we know them because we know a lot about them. We watch interviews with them, we follow their social media, we consume the products that they put out, but they are unaware of our existence. It is completely possible, and perhaps easy, to be a parasocial Christian. We read our Bible, we even read a Christian book or two, maybe we even went to a Christian college and took some Bible classes as gen-ed classes. God has created us for the purpose of knowing him. I’m sure the exiles knew a lot about God. But their actions demonstrated that they did not know God, because the fruit of not knowing God is always evident. You’ll either be living in ways that go against the heart of God, or you’ll be living for someone other than God.

This is really worth a whole sermon series, but Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7 hammers on this point over and over again, that it’s not about doing things because it’s the good and moral thing to do, but doing things because you know God. “You have heard that it was said, you shall not murder, but I say to you, to even be angry with your brother is to be subject to judgment.” “When you give, when you pray, when you fast, don’t do it so that you may be seen by others.” Why, what’s the point? He’s taking you a step further. He’s saying, if you truly know the heart of God, you’ll do these things with no concern for the reward of men, but out of an expression of your relationship with him. If you truly know the heart of God, you can’t bear the thought of harboring resentment towards your brother. This is why the Sermon on the Mount culminates in this harrowing passage that many of us are probably familiar with in verses 22 and 23: (paraphrase). Jesus says, these may have seemed like acts of worship, but you did them for your glory. This is the backdrop of the indictments that Jesus gives the Pharisees in Matthew 23. Listen to Matthew 23:23: ““Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.” Was it wrong for them to tithe these things? Of course not. But they neglected justice and mercy and faithfulness, which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they did not know God. And this is the indictment that comes against Israel through all of the prophets. This is what leads to them being sent into exile. They have not carried out their responsibility of knowing God.

And yet, as we come back to Jeremiah 29, we see the invitation to seek God. This is the beautiful, radical grace of God. The very reason that God has exiled Judah, he is giving them another chance. And it’s not as though this is the first time Israel has botched it. Like I said, if you start at Isaiah and read all the way through the remainder of the Old Testament, you will see over and over the prophets scolding Israel for their neglect of the things of God and urging them to turn back to him. This is not a second chance for God’s people. This isn’t a third chance. God had shown immense patience with his people to have not removed them from the land centuries before the exile. And yet, even after the exile, he is still giving them another chance to repent of sin and turn to him again. This is great news for us. This is great news for me, this is great news for you. Because what this tells us is that it is never too late to seek God.

Listen to these words from Psalm 103:8–9: “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever.” This passage says two things about God’s anger. It doesn’t say that he doesn’t have it. To be sure, God has a righteous anger toward sin. God has wrath. God is just. But what does David say in this psalm about the anger of God? First, he is slow to anger. We have to be careful to not project our own qualities onto God. Some of us, if we get cut off in traffic on the way to lunch after service, might not only get angry quickly but also be angry for the rest of the day. God is patient with you. The other thing that David says is that even when God is angered, he does not keep his anger forever. The words of this psalm come to life here in Jeremiah 29. And just as the people of God are encouraged to repent and seek God yet again, God extends the same gracious invitation to you and me today. Even when we sin, even when that sin brings God’s discipline into our lives or brings circumstances into our lives that are a result of our behavior, it is never too late to turn from your sin and seek God. We need to hear that every day. If you are in this room and you don’t know God and you feel him nudging you to repent and turn to him, know that your past won’t keep you from him. If you’re here and you do know God, know that whatever sins you’ve committed in the past day, week, month, are not the nail in your coffin. It’s time to repent of those sins and turn to him anew again. Because we also see the grace of God in the second component of this passage…

2. A Glorious Promise

I’m going to read this passage again. Listen to the promise of God: you will find him. There’s this amazing nearness with God. Even in the midst of judgment, if you turn and seek him, you will find him. When God’s people find themselves caught up in sin, it is us who turn away from God, but he doesn’t move. In fact, if anything, God in a sense draws closer to his children when they turn to sin. Consider this from the book of Proverbs: “My son, do not despise the Lord’s discipline or be weary of his reproof, for the Lord reproves him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights.” We talked about this last Sunday, that God’s discipline comes into the life of a Christian not as a means of spiteful vengeance, but as a way to prod you to repent of sin and return to seeking God, in the same way that a loving parent would ground their child for a week, not because they hate their kid, but because they love their kid and want them to see the error of their ways so that they can grow. The same is true of God. He is waiting for you to turn back to him.

Let’s notice a few things about the promise of finding God. First, there’s a process. Notice that in verse 13, there’s a qualifying statement: “You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.” And we have to be careful when we see the word “heart” in the Bible, because our understanding of the metaphorical heart is not the same as the Hebrew understanding. This may be review for some of you, but in Hebrew, the heart is not the seat of the emotions like how we would understand it, but it is the seat of the will. In the Bible, and the OT especially, your heart is where your decision-making comes from. When you have the Shema in Deuteronomy 6, “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,” it’s not talking about a love that is full of emotion or puppy love – although, we should love God with our emotions as well – but it’s talking about a love that is expressed through choosing to live for God. So, when God says you will find me when you seek me with all your heart, he’s not as much saying “you’ve got to really want it” as much as he’s saying “you’ve got to really choose it.” Now of course, if you don’t want it, you won’t choose it, but you have to choose it even when you don’t want it. Let’s be honest, it’s not always fun to seek God. To truly seek God means to reject other things. Choosing something necessarily requires the non-choosing of something else. Choosing to seek God means that you have to fight against sin. That’s hard. Choosing to seek God might mean to leave relationships that are not helpful to your faith walk. That’s hard. There are likely going to be days where you would rather choose to seek yourself. To seek your own kingdom and righteousness. This is the beauty of the promise of James 4:8: “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” That as we choose to seek God, we experience more of him. That’s what we mean when we talk about knowing God – an experiential knowledge. We experience the love that he has for us, we experience the joy of living for him, and it becomes easier to seek him more. I said this when I preached on Psalm 16 a few weeks ago, but you can’t willpower your way over sinful desires. You have to conquer the want with a bigger want. As you seek God, you experience the fulfillment of knowing him, and it becomes a greater desire, a fuller joy. I don’t know if you ever get to a point in life where it’s easy to choose to seek God with all your heart all the time – I’d venture to say you don’t – but as you make a practice of drawing near to him, he draws near to you, and it becomes easier. Easy? Not always. But easier.

So there’s a process of seeking God, and there’s also a blessing that comes when you seek God. Take a look at verse 14. Now, like we saw last week with 2 Chronicles 7, these are promises that are specific to the people of Judah in Babylonian exile. The specific promises are not made to us, lest we think that we should apply the promise of God restoring our fortunes in some sort of prosperity gospel type of way. We should instead see the principles about the character of God toward repentant sinners. When we turn from our sin and seek God, he will restore you. There is no forfeiture of what you once had. Think about the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15. When the son returns home, what does the father say? Does he look at his son and say, “that was really stupid. Like, really stupid. You’d better not ever do that again.” Does he say, “you’re still my son, but there’s some real damage done here. I’m not sure I’m ready to let it go just yet. You’re going to have to put in the work to restore this relationship.” That’s maybe the son’s idea of what’s going to happen. That’s maybe our idea of what happens when we seek God out of a place of repentance. But what actually happens? “The father said to his servants, ‘Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet. And bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate.” He is immediately restored to full sonship. When you come to God in repentance and faith, bringing what nothing you have, God does not just forgive you but elevates you to the status of a beloved child, giving you the choicest robes, rings, and meat. He restores you to the point of frustrating those who have followed the rules longer and better than you have.

Look also at verse 12. When you seek God, he promises that he will hear you when you call and pray to him. When we find God, we aren’t finding an impersonal force that sustains the universe. We aren’t “finding God” in a sense of learning what he wants from us in a way that causes us to get our act together morally. When we find God, we are getting a relationship with our creator. We are doing exactly what he says: we are finding him. The blessing of seeking God is God! You are finding a relationship with a person who loves you more than any human ever could, who is all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing, and one of the most wonderful benefits of that relationship is that we know that our cries are always heard. What a great comfort it is to know that every prayer is heard. Even the prayers that weren’t answered in the way that you may have wanted were heard. There’s this wonderful image that shows up in a lot of the psalms as a plea to God, but in Psalm 10 it appears as a promise. Psalm 10:17 says this: “O Lord, you hear the desire of the afflicted; you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear.” This is language that conjures an image of God leaning down in the way that you would lean down to a small child who wants to whisper something to you. To say that God hears you when you call doesn’t quite do it justice. He doesn’t just hear, he actively and attentively listens. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Seeking God doesn’t mean trying your best to be a moral person, it doesn’t mean doing all the religious things, it means drawing near to him. And we allow these things to then flow out of our nearness to him, as a way of pleasing him as a kid would try and please their father, but not as ends in themselves. The end is to know God. To glorify him and enjoy him. And the primary way that we draw near to him is through prayer. We experience nearness to God by coming before him in prayer, because it does two things when we pray. It expresses our weakness. What are elements of prayer? Well, there’s confession. God, I sinned. I need your grace and your mercy. There’s supplication. God, this situation is out of my control and I need you to provide. You’re coming before God and telling him that you are dependent on him. You’re relying on him. Even the person who only sees God as a divine vending machine and only ever prays to ask for things expresses their need for God when they come to prayer in this way, even if they don’t realize it. But then the other thing that it does is it brings you to meditate on who he is. What is the first part of the Lord’s Prayer? “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” Before anything else in the Lord’s Prayer – confession, supplication, even submission to his will – is a statement of adoration. How often do you meditate on the character of God? How often do you sit and think on his holiness, his grace, his love, his goodness, when you come to prayer? This will change your prayer life. When prayer becomes more than a means to get things from God, and instead becomes a means to just look at him, that will change you. I encourage you to try it. Our prayer prompts for this week are going to be built to that end – pick up one of them from the back of the sanctuary and try praying like that this week.

So, there’s a gracious invitation and a glorious promise to those who seek God, and what I want us to really see is the beautiful reciprocity of this relationship. As we are called to seek God, we are seeking a God who seeks us. As we are called to know God, God makes himself known. And God doesn’t merely make himself known through the writings of the Bible, he made himself known by coming to earth in the person of Jesus Christ. The very famous prologue to the gospel of John says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… and the Word became flesh.” Has anyone ever been confused by this passage? We can certainly intuit that the Word is Jesus, but what does that mean? The short answer is that in the same way that your speech is an expression of who you are, Jesus is the expression of the character of God. It’s one thing for God to tell you what he is like, to declare from heaven and from the pages of Scripture that he is all these things, but it is another thing to show you. In the life of Jesus, God is showing us what he is like. This is why Hebrews 1:3 says, “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.” If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus. And the most shocking thing of all that this teaches us about God is that he is willing to suffer loss for the sake of his people, because at the end of his earthly ministry, Jesus goes to the cross, betrayed and abandoned by those closest to him, that you might know God. That you might taste and see his love and mercy. I’ve heard the complaint levied against Christianity before, “why doesn’t God just forgive all sin? Why the cross?” If there was no cross, would you really get it? You wouldn’t see how great the debt was, and you wouldn’t see just how much God loves you. And he not only gives his Son for you, but he gives his Spirit to you so that you might get to experience his nearness for all of your life. And that Spirit is the seal of our adoption as a child of God. Romans 8:15 says that we have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry “Abba! Father!” If you are in Christ, you have been adopted as his child. God sought you that you might be part of his family, so that you could know him. He gave his Son to accomplish it, and he gave his Spirit so that you would be certain of it.

So, the worship team and the deacons are going to come forward and we’re going to prepare to take the Lord’s Supper together as a celebration of our acceptance into the family of God. As we look to the cross, we remember the cost that our sin demanded, and we remember that God was willing to pay it. This is the God that you find when you seek after him. Turn from your sin, seek him with your whole heart, and experience the joy of knowing him.