Who is this God we worship? Why does He love us? And what’s this all about God dying on a cross? All of that is foolishness to the world. It’s crazy-talk that the world may ridicule. “It all sounds foolish to them because only those who have the Spirit can understand what the Spirit means” (1 Corinthians 2:14). But the treasure of the gospel can be understood by those who have the Spirit of God living in them.

No eye has seen, no ear has heard,    
And no mind has imagined
What God has prepared
For those who love Him (Isaiah 64:4).

No eye has seen, no ear has heard … But God has revealed the truth of the gospel to us by His Spirit. These are the deep secrets of God. Jesus told his disciples privately: “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see. For I tell you that many prophets and kings wanted to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it” (Luke 10:23-24). How blessed are our eyes, too, our spiritual eyes, to see and understand the amazing love shown to us by God through the death of His Son! If we have tasted and seen that the Lord is good, we have been blessed far more than we deserve. If we have ever experienced the tears of gratitude for Christ standing in our place for us, we have been graced with an understanding that poor Israelites never had. They were the ones who daily saw the pillar of cloud and fire. They were the ones that walked through the parted Red Sea. They were the ones who heard the actual voice of God thunder the Ten Commandments from the burning Mount Sinai (Exodus 19-20). They saw and heard all of that and many, many more miracles. Yet sadly Moses told them, “the LORD has not given you minds that understand, nor eyes that see, nor ears that hear” (Deuteronomy 29:4).

No mind has imagined … The treasure of heaven that awaits us who believe is unimaginable. But even today, we who are of Christ have been given a foretaste. We have been given the Holy Spirit as God’s guarantee that He will bring us one day into the eternal Promised Land (Ephesians 1:14). And the Spirit lives in us to guide us into all truth, and Jesus said the Holy Spirit will never leave us (John 14:16-18). Paul teaches that the “Spirit searches out everything and shows us even God’s deep secrets (1 Corinthians 2:10). By giving us His Spirit, God has given us the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16).

For those who love Him … If we believe and know this God, this amazing God of love, through the revelation of the Spirit, then we can truly worship God as He desires. Jesus told the Samaritan woman at the well:

You Samaritans know so little about the one you worship, while we Jews know all about Him, for salvation comes through the Jews. But the time is coming and is already here when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The Father is looking for anyone who will worship Him in that way. For God is Spirit, so those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth (John 4:22-24).

I think you can never really love someone until you know them. It is not enough to know a bunch of facts about someone to be able to love them. You can be infatuated with some movie star by watching them from afar and reading about them in magazines. But you can never really love someone that way. Only until you know a person intimately can you truly love them as they really are. God knows us intimately. He knows us much more deeply than we know ourselves. And yet He loves us and proved that love by dying for us to save us.

And if you love someone, you want them to know you. You want them to know everything about you and you want to know everything about them. God wants us to know Him. He loves us and wants us to love Him and know Him in a very intimate way. That is why He gave us His Spirit to show us and let us understand our God of amazing grace. In Christ’s prayer at Gethsemene, He defined eternal life as to know the only true God, and Jesus Christ (John 17:3). Knowing God is actually eternal life! This is the secret wisdom of God. This is the tree of life which God hid from Adam and Eve when after they ate of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. The fruit of the tree of life is knowledge of God. This is why it is so important to study and absorb the Word of God daily, to eat it as spiritual food. I believe this is why Proverbs says, “The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life” (Proverbs 10:11). The righteous have the life of God in the knowing of Him, and so their words are an overflow of that eternal life. They are the true worshippers that the Father is looking for. They know Him and He knows them. We don’t want to be like the Samaritans who worshipped God without knowing Him much at all. Praise God for the Holy Spirit who leads us into Truth and transforms us into true worshippers who worship the Father in spirit and in truth.