Summary
Two Ways of Knowing
God made us curious. From childhood we gather facts and figures to make sense of the world around us—why bugs crawl, why the sky goes dark, why friendships fracture, why marriages strain, why a mother falls ill. This drive to know is a good gift. But it has a limit. No accumulation of information can carry us across the threshold from the world we can measure to the God who made us, nor can it lift us out of the pit our sin has dug. There is a knowing of the mind, and there is a deeper knowing that only the Holy Spirit can give.
In John 14, Jesus speaks this deeper knowing into troubled hearts. At the Last Supper He has just told the disciples that He is going away and that Peter will deny Him. They are agitated, stirred in angst. His answer is not more data but a Person: "Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me." He promises that in His Father's house are many dwelling places—not a hotel room for the night, but a permanent residence He Himself goes to prepare. Revelation 21 shows the goal: God tabernacling with His people forever.
Then Thomas raises the question every honest mind asks: "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" Thomas wants a map. He is thinking concretely, with the eyes of the head alone. Jesus answers not with directions but with Himself: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" John 14:6. The way is not information to be acquired; the Way is a Person to be trusted.
We constantly slide back into Thomas's mistake. We try to earn the map. If I pray enough times, read the Bible all the way through, pile up enough good works, surely I will know the way. But Romans 3:23 levels every such ladder: "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Read yourself into that verse and the truest knowledge of self emerges—I cannot climb out. And yet Paul does not stop there: we "are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith" Romans 3:24-25. Ephesians 2:8-9 says the same: "By grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God." Even the faith that knows is given.
The Holy Spirit does what study alone cannot. He opens the eyes of our minds to know what is before us, and the eyes of the spirit to know Who is before us—Jesus, true God and true man, who entered our creation, kept the Law perfectly in our place, stretched out His arms on the cross to gather every sin to Himself, and gave us His own righteousness in exchange. This is what we know: Christ, and Christ alone. The Reformation gift is precisely this clarity—grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone, given through the Word "Know" 10-26-25.
This is why Lutherans treasure the concreteness of Baptism and its lifelong affirmation. In the water, God claimed you, washed you, sealed you with His Holy Spirit, and promised that your eyes would be opened to know Jesus. As children we sing, "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so," and it is true knowledge. As we grow, we gather the facts and figures of Scripture and the Confessions—not to leave that childhood knowing behind, but to know Christ more deeply. And at the end, when memory fades and abstractions fall away, the same simple promise remains, fresh and sufficient: Jesus loves me. He has prepared a permanent dwelling. He will come again to bring us to Himself. This we know—because we know Him.
Video citations
- "Know" 10-26-25 — If you would please open your Bibles to the Gospel of John, the 14th chapter. If you're using a Pue edition of the Bible, this can be found on page 95 in the New Testament. We are in the Gospel of…