Getting Job-ed
“For I desire faithful love and not sacrifice,
the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” -Hosea 6:6 (CSB)
The Bible teaches us that the most important thing we can do in our lives is to love God. Jesus says in Matt. 22:37-38 CSB, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, will all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important command.”
I’d wager that most of us have probably told someone in our life that we love them with all of our heart and probably have a grasp on what that means and feels like. However, what does it mean to love with all of our minds? We do this naturally in relationships when we ask each other what our dreams are, who we were growing up, what our favorite color is, etc. Although these are surface-level questions and we do not really know the other person until we spend more time with them, this is what we do when we are trying to figure out if we indeed love this other person. I’m sure every single person who is in a successful marriage will tell you that this desire to know their spouse better never stops. Each minuscule drop of knowledge feels like a treasure.
Thus, it begs the question why do we not have this same desire for our relationship with God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit? God has given us an entire book on who He is, what He has done, what He desires, and what He will do. Why can it be such a struggle for us to read and study the Bible? I think it is a very important question we must ask ourselves. There can be a lot of reasons why we do not desire to know God better. It’s important to know that each reason we have begins from a place of our fallen condition (Romans 3:11-12).
As for myself, I was very afraid to read God’s word because I was afraid I’d read something that I didn’t like or would convince me that Christianity was an elaborate hoax. I was certain that if I read the Old Testament that I would come away as a non-believer (how wrong I was). To be honest, I do not know how I ever thought I was a follower of Christ but held this belief at the same time. Eventually, God changed the disposition of my heart and forced me to confront my fear. He would not allow me to hold a pseudo-belief in Jesus that was leading me to eternal hell. I’m so thankful that God intervened and saved me from myself.
Now I am not saying that reading the Old Testament or the entire Bible is what saves us from hell. I am not saying knowledge of Jesus alone saves us either (Matthew 7:21-23) as Satan himself knows who Jesus is and he will forever be under God’s wrath (Revelation 20:10). Only faith (which is given to us by the Father) in Jesus, loving that He is God, that He died for our sins, and that He rose from the dead saves us (Ephesians 2:1-10). However, it is still true that in order to love God, we must know Him. And once we love who God is, that love should create an insatiable desire to know Him more deeply. R.C. Sproul summed this up nicely in one of his sermons on loving God with all of our minds, “If I want to love God more, I have to know Him more deeply. And the more I search the Scriptures, and the more I focus my mind’s attention on who God is and what He does, the more I understand just a tiny little bit more about Him and the more my souls break out in flame.”
-Nash Ballinger
Bibliography
R.C. Sproul, “R.C. Sproul: Love the Lord your God with All Your Mind,” accessed March 1, 2022,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYdeFVoXq-k
