# Come, Let Us Know God (Part Two) The question of God's nature has always been central to human inquiry, yet it remains one of the most elusive and contested territories of thought. To speak of knowing God is to enter a paradox: the infinite cannot be contained within finite understanding, and yet the human spirit perpetually reaches toward this transcendence. This second part of our exploration ventures deeper into the philosophical complexities that surround our conception of the divine. What does it mean to "know" God? This question bifurcates immediately into two paths. The first is the path of reason—the attempt to understand God through logic, through the careful construction of arguments that might lead us closer to comprehending the divine nature. The second is the path of experience—the claim that God is not merely an object of intellectual inquiry but a presence to be encountered, felt, and lived. The rationalist tradition, stretching from the medieval theologians through the Enlightenment philosophers, has insisted that God's existence and attributes can be demonstrated through reason alone. They have offered us the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, the argument from design—each a careful edifice of logic meant to prove that God must exist. Yet these arguments, for all their intellectual rigor, have been contested in each generation. They prove nothing to those who do not wish to be convinced, and they offer little comfort to the soul that seeks not merely intellectual assent but transformation. The mystics, by contrast, have always maintained that God dwells beyond the reach of reason—in the silence beyond language, in the stillness beyond thought. For them, knowledge of God is not achieved through the labor of the intellect but through the purification of the heart, through devotion, through love. They speak of union with the divine, of a dissolution of the separate self into the infinite being of God. Their language is the language of paradox and symbol, for how else can one speak of that which transcends all categories of speech? Between these two traditions—the rational and the mystical—lies the vast territory of lived religion, the ordinary experience of believers who navigate both the demands of reason and the pull of faith. They seek to honor both the God of philosophy and the God of the heart, though these two are not always one and the same. The question of divine attributes further complicates our inquiry. Is God omnipotent? If so, how can evil exist in a world created by an all-powerful and benevolent being? Is God omniscient? If so, do human beings possess genuine free will, or are we merely players in a cosmic drama already written? These questions have troubled theologians for centuries, and they remain unresolved—not because thinkers have been inadequate to the task, but because they touch upon genuine paradoxes in the nature of reality itself. Some have sought to reconcile these tensions by limiting God's power or knowledge. Others have maintained the full classical attributes of God while reinterpreting the nature of evil and freedom. Still others have abandoned the quest for logical consistency and embraced mystery as the ultimate truth—that God is not bound by the rules of human reason, and that to demand consistency from the infinite is to remain trapped within the finite. The nature of God's relation to creation presents yet another layer of difficulty. Is God transcendent—utterly separate from and beyond the created world? Or is God immanent—present within creation, sustaining it at every moment? Most religious traditions have sought to hold both truths in tension: God is both beyond the world and intimately woven into its fabric. But this both/and approach, while existentially satisfying, raises new philosophical questions. How can the infinite be present within the finite? How can the unchanging God act within time? How can the all-encompassing being relate to that which is not itself? Here we encounter one of the deepest insights of mystical theology: that God transcends the categories of both transcendence and immanence, both being and non-being, both unity and multiplicity. To truly know God, we must first unknow—must divest ourselves of all concepts, all images, all categories derived from our experience of the finite world. We must arrive at a knowing that is simultaneously a not-knowing, a darkness that is brighter than light, a silence that speaks more eloquently than all words. Yet even this apophatic approach—this way of negation—risks becoming another form of knowledge, another concept to be clung to. The truly wise perhaps recognize that the ultimate "knowledge" of God is not knowledge at all in any conventional sense, but rather a surrender, a trust, a opening of oneself to a reality that transforms even as it remains forever beyond comprehension. In the end, we return to where we began, but transformed by the journey. To know God—or to seek such knowledge—is to embark upon an endless quest that defines the human spirit itself. We are creatures capable of asking ultimate questions, of yearning for the infinite, of experiencing moments of transcendence that suggest we are made for something beyond ourselves. Whether these intimations point to a reality beyond our minds, or whether they reveal the deepest capacities of consciousness itself, remains perhaps the ultimate question. Yet the asking itself—the sincere and humble asking—may be the truest form of knowing we can achieve.

I have spent considerable time discussing whether God exists. Now I shall attempt to explain that God knows all things. To say that God knows all things means this: God possesses knowledge.

To understand that God possesses knowledge, we need not venture far. Each morning, when the sun rises at the meeting place of sky and earth, breaking through the dawn mist and scattering its bright rays in all directions; each evening, when we see darkness cover the sky with planets and stars; on the night of the full moon, when we watch the moon rise in the east at dusk and set in the west at dawn—in all these moments, we gain such vivid knowledge of God's omniscience. At the very least, we come to understand this: the God who is equally present in all places and at all times, under whose command all the workings of nature proceed in perfect order, surely cannot be an ignorant fool devoid of knowledge. God is all-knowing.

The primary mark of knowledge is revealed in the work of one who knows—a work that will unfold within the bounds of order. Imagine entering a house and finding that all the servants and attendants are performing their tasks with perfect precision, placing every object in its proper place. At once you would understand: the master whose commands these servants obey so faithfully and well must surely be a man of wisdom; he could never be a fool or a madman. But suppose instead you found torn books scattered here and there, broken things lying about, food dust-covered in the wrong vessels instead of clean dishes, then you would surely think: what kind of master is this! Either the master is an absolute fool, or he has lost his mind. Whenever we observe order in any work, we naturally conclude that such work must have a director or a knowledgeable master. For this reason, order is called the primary mark of knowledge.

The second mark of knowledge is its manifestation. Whatever knowledge one possesses will be expressed in proportion to that knowledge. Look at a dog and you will grasp this truth. A dog's affection and understanding are the very expression of its knowledge. Whatever knowledge creatures possess, they necessarily seek to express—and do express—in countless ways. So too with us: whatever knowledge we possess, we desire to express it, we are able to express it, and we do express it constantly. The moment someone realizes that steam has the power to move things, he at once manifests this knowledge, and as a result, we now have steam-driven carriages and steam-powered ships and many other wonders. Again, when someone grasps that lightning can be brought down from the sky, he immediately shares this discovery, and from such knowledge we have learned to install iron rods on our houses to protect ourselves from lightning strikes.

Look, I have learned only very little about God, yet I find myself burning to share even that much with you—or rather, I cannot help but share it. Knowledge has the mark of wanting to be expressed; it is for this reason that we find ourselves surrounded today by a thousand varieties of knowledge: all manner of scientific discourse, religious teaching, talk of plants and creatures. Each person comes to know one thing or another, comes to understand it, and straightaway they lay it bare. In this way you have access to countless subjects of learning, shelves full of books to read. Yet not everyone's knowledge is true, nor does everyone possess the gift of expression. So one must proceed with great discernment.

Now let us examine these two marks and see whether God possesses knowledge. I have already said that He who is the master of the earth, the sun, the moon—He is God. And I have also told you that the earth, the sun, the moon, and all such things perform their work in perfect order, exactly as they should. If you think about it, you will be astonished: they move with such beautiful regularity that there is no possibility of disorder. You know that astronomers can tell us that on such a day, at such a time, a solar eclipse or lunar eclipse will occur. This calculation must match down to the very second. If the calculation does not match down to the second, then we know that the astronomer has made an error somewhere.

How can astronomers perform such precise calculations? They must surely know that the sun and moon, the planets and stars, move according to a fixed law. They have discovered this law, and they also know that this law cannot possibly break or deviate. Because they know this, they can make such precise calculations. Through the principles of this law they have discovered, they can determine exactly where the sun will be at a given moment, where the earth will be, where the moon will be; and when these bodies are in such conjunction, then at exactly that moment an eclipse will occur.

Now, not everyone can tell you how many miles light travels in one second. But learned men have tested and found that in one second, a ray of light travels nearly two hundred thousand miles. The reason such men of knowledge can enumerate these various matters is this: they surely know that all the work of the world proceeds according to a law. If the work of the world proceeded in disorder, they could never predict that an eclipse would occur at a certain time, or that every ray of light travels such a distance in every moment.

By the law through which billions upon billions of suns and moons, planets and stars circle; by the law through which countless heavenly bodies maintain their conjunction with us; by the law through which our own single earth is planted with innumerable trees and plants standing as the means of sustaining our very lives; by the law through which vast forests have, over countless ages yet to come, transformed into stone coal mines to provide for the sustenance of future generations—can you or I be the master of all these laws? He who is the master of all these laws, He alone is our God, He alone is our all-knowing Supreme Lord.

He has laid down countless laws, and the wise seers have called him the knower of all knowledge. Yet we boast of our wisdom whenever we discover, bit by bit, some fragment of these laws. If the creator of those very laws—of which we gain fame by discovering mere fragments—were not himself wise, then who could be called wise? Because he is wise, his knowledge manifests itself in his works. His knowledge towers above ours—vast beyond measure, beyond our grasp. We cannot hold even a fraction of his knowledge in our minds. For this reason, just as the seers have called him 'Truth,' they have also called him 'Knowledge'—the embodiment of knowledge itself. When he is knowledge incarnate, that he manifests himself eternally is nothing but the expression of God's own nature. It needs no saying.

I have said before: knowledge has one defining mark—it shines forth. The seers called it 'self-luminous.' If the mark of every fragment of knowledge is that it manifests itself, then surely the repository of all knowledge must reveal itself in all things and thus shine forth of its own accord—spontaneously and inevitably. You will see this easily enough.

We can know God. God is knowledge itself—the repository of all knowledge—while we are repositories of small, fragmented knowing. And here lies the wonder: that we can know this infinite knowledge through our finite understanding. Why is this possible? Because knowledge, wherever it exists, follows God's law—it is of one nature everywhere. Strike a dog and it cries out in its own pitch of anguish. Strike our body and we cry out in pain with our own voice. For this reason we understand the dog's distress, and the dog understands ours.

If some beast chases you and you run in fear, the beast will at once understand it and chase you all the more. The tricks that circus animals are taught—they are nothing but fragments of their trainer's knowledge being poured into the animals' minds. These creatures grasp, with the small intelligence they possess, only what the trainer has given them. And the trainer, in turn, understands that the animals have grasped his intent. Here, the trainer's knowledge and the animals' knowledge become one in nature. Because all knowledge is of one nature, humans have now begun trying to decipher the language of apes, the language of ants, and so forth.

Because knowledge is of one nature in all conditions, through the thread of knowledge we can become one in nature with God himself. When we discover and come to know God through each fragment of knowledge we acquire, through that very knowledge we become of one nature with him and so come to know him. Every moment, as we gain knowledge of something, in that very moment we are joined to God through the thread of that knowledge and come to know him. Though God knows us at all times and in all states, yet with each moment of our knowing, we attune ourselves proportionally to him.

The more we come to know what is good, the more we dwell upon it in thought, the more we shall find God in our hearts, and soon we shall come to know Him in our minds—our will shall become one with His. This is why the ancient sages have counseled us from that distant past: never believe that you stand alone. God walks beside us always, and He knows us all. Never harbor a wicked thought, never entertain designs for another's harm. Know with certainty that God's knowledge perceives the secrets of your mind at every moment. You cannot escape His gaze, so do not even attempt it. He is Truth and Knowledge itself.