Dave Brisbin 10.26.25
Book of Genesis tells us that God gave Adam permission to name all the animals in the Garden. It’s not a casual detail. For the ancient Hebrews, authority to name something like a child or an animal, was a symbol of dominion over that something. That’s the point. Control. To this day, Jews do not speak the name of God. But the rest of us continue to name everything in sight, including God…and the theology we build around God.

God told Moses from the burning bush that his name was hayah asher hayah. That is, I am that I am. How can we get any closer than that? How do we describe raw, ultimate existence any more clearly? How do we, using finite tools such as language and logic or even the mathematics of physics, describe what is by definition infinite? Our limited language, concepts, and equations melt all over the dashboard long before temperatures and velocities ever reach the neighborhood of infinity.

But we keep trying. Control is an aphrodisiac.

To be fair, the scriptures are always talking about knowing God. Ezekiel uses the phrase over seventy times in his short book. Jesus says that some of us, knocking on the door of kingdom, will be refused because God never knew us. Really? Once again, entering the Hebrew mind helps us square this circle. To know—yada in Hebrew—comes from the root for hand, so to know is not to think, but to handle. Jesus is saying that some of us, for all the religious work we do, have still never been intimate with God. Now God won’t throw us out for that, but God is intimacy personified. If we’re too unripe, immature, traumatized to enter the defenseless vulnerability that intimacy requires, we don’t know God. We can’t know what we’ve never experienced.

God occupies space beyond thought and performance. If we can stop naming God, trying to understand and dominate for just a moment, we enter God’s space and experience what we’ll never understand. Relax... Understanding is overrated. For Jesus, a precognitive child is the embodiment of kingdom. 

Trust beats certainty the way rock beats scissors. 
Once we experience God, there is no name that can hold or express what we know.

Knowing God

Audio podcasts delivered at theeffect church in San Clemente, CA. theeffect is a community of imperfect people working together to find the emotional recovery and spiritual transformation that is theeffect of God’s love by unlearning limiting perceptions, beliefs, and compulsions, and engaging a first century Jesus in a non-religious and transforming way. See more at theeffect.org.

True North with Dave Brisbin is a podcast about the things that can bring you back to center, whether God, spirituality, community or family or all of them. Never esoteric or abstract for its own sake; always practical and full of common sense, we’re interested in exploring the effect of what we believe on our lives and questioning what we believe in light of the deep connection we’re meant to live. Dave Brisbin is an author, speaker, coach, and songwriter. He is the teaching pastor of theeffect, a faith community and recovery ministry in San Clemente, CA and executive director of Encompass Recovery, an addiction treatment center in San Juan Capistrano. For more on finding deeper spiritual expression free from limiting beliefs and behavior, go to davebrisbin.com.

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