The Jungfrau. Photo taken near a farm outside Grindelwald, Switzerland, in June 1980. We had taken the trip with heavy cloud cover until this picture was taken. It is as if God reached down with His holy light, so that we could actually see the Swiss Alps.

December 2, 2025 / 0 comments

Do We Really Know IT?

They will know that I am the Lord their God, who brought them out of Egypt so that I might dwell among them. I am the Lord their God.

  • Exodus 29:46

Live in temporary shelters for seven days: All native-born Israelites are to live in such shelters so your descendants will know that I had the Israelites live in temporary shelters when I brought them out of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.’”

  • Leviticus 23:42-43

Then they will know that I, the Lord their God, am with them and that they, the Israelites, are my people, declares the Sovereign Lord.

  • Ezekiel 34:30

From that day forward the people of Israel will know that I am the Lord their God.

  • Ezekiel 39:22

“An essential element in Locke’s theory of knowledge is the view that because we are able to observe only an object’s observable characteristics and behavior we have no way of apprehending it independently of those characteristics. In other words, we cannot have any knowledge of what the object is that has those characteristics and behaves in that way, the thing in itself: it is an invisible, metaphysical something – a ‘something I know not what,’ as Locke himself said. He characterized it: as matter, material substance, but was insistent that we could know only its characteristics or properties, we could never know it.”

  • Bryan Magee, The Story of Philosophy

“Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”

  • C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

John Locke (1632-1704) was an English philosopher and physician.  He was considered a founding father of Empiricism, the philosophy based on observable information.  He was not the first Empiricist, but he was the earliest influential one.  He is also considered the father of Liberalism.

The founding fathers of the USA borrowed a great deal from John Locke in writing the Declaration of Independence and other early documents.  Locke said that we have an inalienable right to Life, liberty, and property.  In those days, many people owned slaves.  George Mason, of the Virginia colony, expanded Locke’s three inalienable rights to include “acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”  Locke’s concept was that everyone should have a bit of real estate that was their own – thus property.  Mason expanded upon that to state that having property is not that good if you cannot pursue happiness and absolutely not if your safety is not assured.  Thomas Jefferson then decided that the pursuit of happiness should be the third point of Locke’s three inalienable rights.  It avoided the slave issue for the time being and all the founding fathers could agree.

Note that we do not have the inalienable right of happiness.  Happiness is a fleeting thing.  Happiness often comes from comparison, and comparison can become the root of many evils, mainly covetousness and then all the other commandments follow.

But in his purest empiricist sense, Locke says we cannot understand anything by the observable elements that we can experience by our senses,

Steve Cosgroves said, “Never judge someone by the way he looks or a book by the way it’s covered; for inside those tattered pages, there’s a lot to be discovered.”  From this, we get the English idiom of never judging a book by its cover, but the saying has existed since there were books, in one form or another.

With a book, we can open the book and read it.  With a human body, we can now take x-rays, CT scans, etc., but do we really know that human?

I love the following Mark Twain quote.

“Explaining humor is a lot like dissecting a frog, you learn a lot in the process, but in the end you kill it“.

  • Mark Twain

The point is that to really know something, we just might have to dissect it, and that might kill it.

I am reminded of the chocolate bunnies that you can buy during the Easter season.  Of course, if you gave up chocolate for Lent, this might be a cruel analogy.  But you can admire the bunny.  You can examine the bunny from all angles.  You can take photographs of the bunny.  But unless the box that the bunny came in spoiled the surprise, you will never know whether the bunny is solid or hollow unless you take the first bite.

That was what John Locke meant by this part of his philosophy, but let’s look at God.

Can we see Him, hear Him, touch Him, smell Him, or taste Him?  No, God the Father is a spirit, and He does not have a body as we do.  Some people claim they have heard His voice, and many in the Bible have done so.  But as Jesus said to Thomas, you are blessed for you have seen, but blessed even more are those who believe yet have never seen.

Here is where the foolishness comes in.  The psalmist calls those who do not believe in God to be fools, but Paul reminds us that the secular world thinks believers are fools for they believe in something that is not experiential – thus Empiricist Philosophers would have to deny God’s existence from their philosophy alone.  Yet, some empiricists are Christians.  We experience God in what He does.

The phrase “and know that I am God” appears in some similar form three times in the book of Exodus and five times in the book of Ezekiel.  Change the wording a bit and you might find more.  Those who heard those words in Exodus the first time were there.  They saw God perform the ten plagues.  They saw the waters of the Red Sea part and then come back together to swallow the Egyptian Army.  They saw the pillar of fire.  I have wondered if the pillar of fire had a scent.  When burning one fuel or another, you can get a variety of scents from the flame.  But the point is that the Israelites experienced these miracles and many more.

In Ezekiel, Ezekiel declares one prophecy or another and then God emphasizes the point that they will see these things happen and they will know that He, their Lord, is God.

And as I am believing, I see God every day.  The secular world, who has blinders on and cannot see clearly, will excuse daily miracles as being coincidences.  Unless it is a GMC, God-Made Coincidence, I do not believe that coincidences exist.  God’s will is going to be done.

But you cannot simply state that you believe and then you start seeing God’s work in your life.  You need to read the Bible and understand the nature, the attributes, of God.

So, as the book’s quote says that we can never really know “it,” we can know others better by talking to them and hearing what they have to say.  And we can know God, dimly.  We will know Him fully, when we meet face-to-face.

If you like these Tuesday morning essays about philosophy and other “heavy topics,” but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Tuesday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.

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