Knowing God

“The God of the Bible is, from start to finish, the God who makes himself known.Though not fully comprehensible by his creatures, God has given us the ability to know him truly and savingly.” (Kevin DeYoung)

The Apostle Paul on how we know God:

10 Now God has revealed these things to us by the Spirit, since the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. 11 For who knows a person’s thoughts except his spirit within him? In the same way, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12 Now we have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who comes from God, so that we may understand what has been freely given to us by God. 13 We also speak these things, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual things to spiritual people. 14 But the person without the Spirit does not receive what comes from God’s Spirit, because it is foolishness to him; he is not able to understand it since it is evaluated spiritually. 15 The spiritual person, however, can evaluate everything, and yet he himself cannot be evaluated by anyone. 16 For

who has known the Lord’s mind,
that he may instruct him?

But we have the mind of Christ.

From Daily Doctrine, on knowing God:

…the Bible teaches that the only proper way to know God is by way of objective revelation. Rationalism and mysticism may seem like opposite errors, but at the heart of both mistakes is an attempt to place the locus of authority in the human person instead of outside of ourselves (extra nos). This is also the problem with liberalism. As one of the movement's leading scholars puts it, liberal theology "is the idea that Christian theology can be genuinely Christian without being based upon external authority. Since the eighteenth century, liberal Christian thinkers have argued that religion should be modern and progressive and that the meaning of Christianity should be interpreted from the standpoint of modern knowledge and experience. By contrast, historic Christianity has maintained that only God can adequately reveal God (1 Cor. 2:10-16).

Modern knowledge, and personal experience must be tested by God's revelation (and not the other way around). We must apprehend God's revelation by reason, and we need the illumination of the Spirit to lead us into truth, but reason is not independent of revelation, and the Spirit's illumination is not independent of the Scriptures. We don't want to be subject to our experiences at the expense of the intellect, and we don't want to follow the intellect at the expense of faith.