Know About Him or Know Him?

What if the distance we feel from God has nothing to do with how much we know?

June 12, 2026

From Bible Portal

“Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” — 1 John 4:8

Most of us have learned to separate knowing from loving.

Knowing belongs to the mind. Loving belongs to the heart. We know facts. We love people. And somewhere along the way, we began approaching God the same way, studying Him, learning about Him, accumulating theology, and assuming that the accumulation itself was bringing us closer.

The Pharisees made this mistake more thoroughly than anyone. They had memorized the Scriptures. They could debate every nuance of the law. And yet Jesus looked at them and said: you search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and yet you refuse to come to me. All that knowledge. All that distance.

Knowledge matters. But there is a kind of knowing that leaves everything unchanged. Scripture is calling us toward something far more costly than that.

Yada

The Hebrew word for “know” is yada (יָדַע). It appears throughout the Old Testament, and it does not mean what our English word suggests.

Yada is not the knowledge of information. It is the knowledge of presence. Of intimacy. Of being so close to another that their reality becomes woven into your own. It is used to describe covenant relationships, the bond between husband and wife, the kind of knowing that can only happen when two people choose to be fully present to each other and fully seen.

When John writes “whoever does not love does not know God,” he is not issuing a moral warning about being nicer. He is describing a spiritual reality: genuine knowledge of God and love for God cannot be separated. They are not two different journeys. They are the same journey, approached from different directions. To truly know God is to be transformed by what we find. And what we find, at the center of everything, is love.

Fully Known Before We Begin

Paul writes something that deserves to stop us entirely:

“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12

That last phrase. Even as I have been fully known.

Before we ever began pursuing God, He already knew us. Not as a distant observer. Not as a record keeper maintaining our file. He knew us in the yada sense: personally, completely, with nothing hidden and nothing held at arm’s length. He knew the fears beneath our confidence. The wounds beneath our defenses. The motives beneath our best intentions.

He knew all of it. Not part of it. Not the presentable parts. All of it. Fully. And He loved us anyway.

This is one of the great wonders of the gospel. God’s knowledge of us does not lead Him away from us. It draws Him toward us. The God who knows us most completely is the God who loves us most perfectly. Before we sought Him, He was already seeking us. Before we learned His name, He knew ours. Before we loved Him, He loved us first.

The Knowledge That Changes Us

There is a kind of knowledge of God that costs us nothing. We hold our theology at a comfortable distance. We affirm it on Sunday and set it aside on Monday. We know about Him the way we know about a historical figure whose biography we have read but whose presence we have never actually felt.

Yada is different. It requires us to open the rooms we have kept locked. To stop managing our relationship with God from behind glass and let Him into the actual territory of our lives: the places we are not sure we want anyone to see, the parts of ourselves we have never fully acknowledged even to ourselves.

As we draw nearer, we discover something that surprises us every time: we are not moving toward a stranger. We are moving toward the One who has known us completely, all along, and has been waiting for us to close the distance.

Before We Move On

Many of us have spent years learning about God while still feeling strangely distant from Him. John tells us why. The distance is not caused by a lack of information. It is caused by a lack of intimacy. God has not invited us into a classroom. He has invited us into fellowship with Himself.

He has revealed Himself fully in Jesus. He has loved us before we loved Him. He knows us completely and calls us to know Him more deeply, not by studying harder, but by drawing closer, trusting more, and letting what we find there change us.

We were not created to know about God. We were created to know Him.