Transcription
There is a distinction sitting at the center of the Christian faith that may be the most consequential distinction a human being can ever reckon with. And yet, it is a distinction that the modern church has almost entirely stopped drawing with the clarity and the urgency that the eternal stakes of it demand. It is the distinction between believing in God and actually knowing God. Between having accurate information about Jesus and having genuine living relationship with Jesus. Between the kind of faith that fills a person's head with correct theology and the kind of faith that transforms a person's life from the inside out and produces the fruit that scripture consistently identifies as the evidence of genuine salvation.
And the reason this distinction matters with such urgency is not academic. It is not a theological fine point that belongs in a seminary classroom and can be safely ignored by ordinary believers going about their ordinary lives. It matters because James 2:19 draws this distinction in the most confronting way possible when it says, "You believe that there is one God, you do well. Even the demons believe and tremble."
Even the demons believe. The demons are not atheists. The demons do not lack theological information about the existence and the nature and the power of God. They have seen him. They have been in his presence. They know with a certainty that no human being on earth can claim that he is real, that he is holy, that he is all powerful, that Jesus is the son of God, that the gospel is true, that judgment is coming and that they will face it. The demons have correct theology about every essential truth of Christianity and that correct theology will not save a single one of them from the eternal consequence of never having genuinely known the God whose existence they cannot deny.
And the question that James 2:19 forces every person who reads it to ask about their own life is whether the faith they are carrying, the faith they have perhaps been carrying for decades inside the church, the faith they would defend if challenged and point to as the foundation of their eternal security, is categorically different from the faith the demons have, or whether it is the same thing with a more comfortable name attached to it.
The reason this question is so difficult for so many people to honestly face is that believing in God and knowing God can look almost identical from the outside for an extraordinarily long time. A person who genuinely believes in God attends church. A person who genuinely knows God attends church. A person who believes in God prays. A person who knows God prays. A person who believes in God reads the Bible, uses Christian language, participates in ministry, identifies as a follower of Jesus and would be genuinely offended if you suggested their faith was not real. The external behaviors that accompany genuine saving knowledge of God and the external behaviors that accompany sincere but ultimately demonic level belief in God are so similar in their outward expression that no human observer can reliably tell them apart.
Which is precisely why John wrote the letter of 1 John, which is the most systematic and the most practical guide to self-examination that the New Testament contains and which was written for exactly this purpose. 1 John 5:13 states the purpose of the entire letter when John says, "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life." So that you may know. Not so that you may hope. Not so that you may reasonably assume based on the fact that you prayed a prayer at some point in the past. So that you may know with genuine certainty. Which means genuine certainty about your eternal standing before God is available and is something John expected his readers to pursue. And it comes not from pointing to a past moment of religious decision but from examining your present life against the specific marks that John lays out throughout that letter as the evidence of genuine saving knowledge of God.
The first and most foundational mark that 1 John gives for genuine knowledge of God is obedience. And the way John frames this is so direct that it is almost impossible to misread even with the most determined theological creativity. 1 John 2:3 and 4 says, "By this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments." "He who says, 'I know him, but does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him.'" A liar. That is not gentle language and it is not language that leaves room for a moderate middle ground where a person can genuinely know God while consistently and deliberately ignoring what God has said. John connects knowing God and keeping his commandments with a directness that mirrors exactly what Jesus said in John 14:15 when he told his disciples, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments." The connection between genuine love for God, genuine knowledge of God and genuine obedience to God is not a connection the Bible treats as optional or as one possible expression of faith among several equally valid alternatives. It is the connection that John identifies as the primary evidence by which a person can know whether their knowledge of God is genuine.
Now, this does not mean that the person who genuinely knows God obeys perfectly. 1 John 1:8 says, "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us." Which means John is fully aware that genuine believers sin and is not describing a standard of absolute sinless perfection as the evidence of genuine salvation. What he is describing is the direction of a life. The genuine and consistent orientation of a person's will toward obedience. The genuine hatred of sin and genuine desire for holiness that characterizes someone whose relationship with God is real rather than merely claimed. The person who genuinely knows God does not make peace with deliberate ongoing sin. They fight it. They grieve it when they fail. They get back up and pursue holiness again. Because the God they know is holy and genuine knowledge of a holy God produces genuine desire for holiness in the person who knows him. The person who merely believes in God can hold correct doctrine about God's holiness while living in complete comfort with patterns of deliberate sin. Because their relationship with the truth is intellectual rather than transformational. The truth lives in their head as information and has never penetrated to the place where their actual daily choices are made.
The second mark 1 John gives for genuine knowledge of God is love for other believers. And this one is perhaps the most practically revealing of all the marks John provides because it is the one that is most consistently and most honestly exposed in the ordinary friction of daily life in Christian community. 1 John 3:14 says, "We know that we have passed from death to life because we love the brothers." "He who does not love abides in death." The evidence of having passed from spiritual death to spiritual life, the evidence of genuine regeneration by the Holy Spirit, is love for other believers. Not perfect love. Not love that never struggles or never has to be chosen at cost. But genuine active sacrificial love of the kind that 1 John 3:16 and 17 describes as being willing to lay down your life for brothers and to share material resources with a brother in need when you have the capacity to do so. And 1 John 4:20 makes the test of this love as confronting as any verse in the entire letter when it says, "If anyone says, 'I love God and hates his brother,' he is a liar. For he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.'" Cannot. Not will not. Cannot. The love of God and the hatred of a brother cannot coexist as genuine realities in the same heart.
And the reason this is such a revealing test is that loving people is hard in ways that loving God can be made to seem easy. Loving God can be done in the privacy of your own heart. In the emotional warmth of a worship service. In the genuine feeling of devotion that a powerful sermon or a beautiful piece of Christian music can produce. But loving difficult people, loving people who have wronged you, loving people who are different from you in ways that create genuine friction, loving people who are in seasons of failure and mess and genuine human brokenness, that kind of love cannot be produced by theological correctness or emotional religious experience. It can only be produced by the genuine love of God flowing through a person who has genuinely encountered him. Because 1 John 4:19 says, "We love because he first loved us." The love that genuine believers extend to other people is not self-generated. It is the overflow of having genuinely received the love of God in a way that has actually changed the fundamental orientation of the heart. The person who merely believes in God can feel warm feelings toward God in private and maintain genuine contempt or indifference toward difficult people without experiencing any internal contradiction because their relationship with God has never gone deep enough to produce the transformation that makes genuine love for difficult people not just possible but the natural direction of the life.
The third mark 1 John gives for genuine knowledge of God is the presence of the Holy Spirit producing genuine internal witness. And this mark is important to understand because it addresses something that the external marks of obedience and love cannot fully address on their own, which is the genuine internal reality of a living relationship with a personal God. 1 John 3:24 says, "Whoever keeps his commandments abides in God and God in him. And by this we know that he abides in us by the Spirit whom he has given us." The Spirit whom he has given us. The genuine knowledge of God is not a one-directional reality where the human being knows things about God. It is a relational reality where the Spirit of God is genuinely present in the person, genuinely communicating with the person, genuinely producing in the person the internal realities that Romans 8:16 describes when it says, "The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God." That witness is real and it is recognizable, not as an emotionally manipulated feeling that can be manufactured in a charged religious environment, but as the genuine settled internal awareness of God's presence and God's fatherhood that persists not just in the highs of worship experiences, but in the ordinary un-highlighted moments of daily life. The person who genuinely knows God has an internal life with God that exists independently of external religious environments. They pray not just as a religious habit, but as genuine communication with someone they genuinely experience as present. They engage with Scripture not just as a discipline, but as genuine encounter with a voice they genuinely recognize as speaking to them personally. They experience genuine conviction when they sin, not as an abstract awareness of theological wrongness, but as the specific internal discomfort of having grieved someone they are in genuine relationship with. The person who merely believes in God can go through all the external motions of a religious life and have essentially none of this internal reality because the internal reality requires the actual presence of the Spirit of God who only takes up genuine residence in the life that has been genuinely surrendered to him.
What the difference between believing in God and knowing God looks like in the actual texture of a daily life is where this distinction becomes most practically important. Because theology that does not translate into observable difference in the way a person actually lives has not genuinely moved from the level of information to the level of transformation. Jesus addresses this directly in John 10:27 when he says, "My sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me." Three things in one sentence. They hear his voice, meaning there is genuine ongoing communication between Jesus and the person who genuinely belongs to him. He knows them, meaning the relationship is real from his side as well, which is the thing that Matthew 7:23 establishes as the only thing that will matter on judgment day. And they follow him, meaning the direction of their life is genuinely oriented toward where Jesus leads rather than toward where their own preferences and appetites would take them if left unchecked.
The person who genuinely knows God is a person whose life over time is moving in the direction of genuine transformation, not perfectly, not without setbacks and failures and seasons of genuine struggle, but the direction is real and the movement is observable because 2 Corinthians 3:18 says, "We are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another." Transformed. Present tense, ongoing, progressive, real. The person who has been a Christian for 10 or 20 or 30 years and who looks essentially identical in character and in the condition of their heart to the person they were when they first professed faith has not been experiencing genuine ongoing transformation, which means the relationship that produces transformation has not been genuinely functioning in their life.
Genuine knowledge of God changes people. It changes what they love and what they fear and what they want and what they are willing to sacrifice and what they cannot tolerate about their own character and what they find themselves genuinely drawn toward. It changes the inner person in ways that eventually become visible in the outer life because what is genuinely in the heart cannot remain permanently invisible in the behavior. Luke 6:45 says, "The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil. For out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks." What is genuinely in the heart comes out and what genuinely knowing God has put in the heart comes out in ways that make the difference between a person who believes in God and a person who knows God eventually, over the course of a life, unmistakably observable.
The reason millions of people have the first without ever having the second. Why so many people carry genuine sincere belief in God that never becomes genuine saving knowledge of God is something that Jesus himself diagnosed in John 5:44 when he asked the religious leaders of his day, "How can you believe when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?" How can you believe? The capacity for genuine saving faith was being blocked by something specific, which was the addiction to human approval. The love of what other people thought, the need to be respected and validated and seen as spiritually significant by the people around them was occupying the space in their hearts that genuine love for God required.
And the application of that diagnosis to the present is direct and uncomfortable. Because the Christianity that is most available and most accessible in the modern church is a Christianity that can be fully practiced while remaining fundamentally oriented toward human approval rather than divine reality. You can attend church for the community it provides and the social belonging it offers without ever genuinely seeking God. You can participate in ministry for the identity and the significance and the respect it generates among people who matter to you without ever genuinely being sent by God. You can hold correct doctrine because it gives you confidence in debates and discussions and makes you feel spiritually superior to people who are less theologically informed without ever allowing that doctrine to produce the humility and the obedience and the love that genuine knowledge of God always produces. And the result is a faith that is genuine in the sense that it is sincerely held and not consciously performed, but that has never crossed the threshold from intellectual and social religion into the genuine personal encounter with the living God that John describes in 1 John as producing specific and observable and testable fruit in a person's life.
The difference between believing in God and knowing God is ultimately the difference between having a file of accurate information about a person and actually being in genuine relationship with that person. You can know every verifiable fact about someone, their history, their character, their words, their actions, their beliefs and be a complete stranger to them in the relational sense, having never actually sat in their presence, never actually heard their voice directed at you personally, never actually been changed by genuine encounter with who they are. That is what demonic faith is. It is accurate information about God held by beings who are eternally separated from him. And the terrifying reality that James 2:19 forces every reader to confront is that it is possible to sit inside Christianity for an entire lifetime, to hold accurate information about God with genuine sincerity, to feel genuine emotion about that information in the right religious environments, and to arrive at eternity having never crossed the threshold from information into relationship, having never moved from believing about God to genuinely knowing him.
John 17:3 is the verse that settles what eternity actually turns on when Jesus says in his prayer to the Father, "This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent." Not this is eternal life, that they believe correct things about you. That they know you. Genuine, personal, intimate, relational knowledge of the living God. That is eternal life.
And the extraordinary mercy in the fact that you are reading this right now is that the God who can be known, the God who John says in 1 John 4:8 is love, the God who Jesus said in John 6:37 will never cast out anyone who comes to him, is not hiding from you. He is not making himself inaccessible. He is not requiring theological credentials or religious performance or a certain length of church attendance before he will make himself genuinely known to a person who genuinely seeks him. Jeremiah 29:13 is his promise to every person who has read everything here and recognized the gap between what they have and what genuine knowing God actually looks like. When it says, "You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart." With all your heart. Not with a portion of your heart reserved for God while the rest remains oriented toward the approval of people and the comforts of the world.