To Know and Be Known

For now we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, as I am fully known. Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. - 1 Corinthians 13:12-13 HCSB

There used to be a television program called "Cheers" that was centered around a group of friends who met every day in a pub. The theme song voiced a yearning that all of us have. It said this was a place where "everybody knows your name."

People have an innate longing to be known. Not only do we want to be known, we want to be loved after we are known! Our truest friends know our quirks, our compulsions, our vices...but love us anyway.

One of the more interesting verses of the Bible says, "Then God said, 'Let US make people in OUR image, to be like OURSELVES..."[1] Here see the very first intimations of the concept we now call the Trinity. God is a community of three. Christians do not worship three gods. We worship one God in three Persons. Try to imagine what it that must be like. How well They must know each Other. Think of the unity!

Jesus prayed that we would be united as He was united with the Father and the Holy Spirit.[2] He wants us to be one as He is one with the Father.[3] His goal is that the unsaved world would know that the Father loves us the same as He loves the Son, Jesus Christ![4]

The Church is described as being a single body with many parts.[5] Some of us are eyes, some of us are ears, some of us are hands and feet; all necessary to the proper functioning of the body of Christ. Again we see community - diversity in unity. We are to know and love and depend on each other because without that community we are worse than impotent - we are dead!

The Pharisees once asked to whom a woman who had had multiple marriages would be married in heaven. "Whose husband would she be in heaven?" they demanded.[6]

Jesus, with His usual tact, replied that they lacked a fundamental understanding of the Scriptures and the power of God. They had failed to understand that marriage customs would be meaningless in heaven.[7]

We will know each other then as God knows us now. God is omnipresent, which He is present everywhere simultaneously. God is omniscient which means He knows everything it is possible to know. Someday we will know each other as well as omniscient God knows us now. Our intimacy, our fellowship, our communal love will be so great that institutions like marriage will become obsolete. Intimacy will be universal. We will know as we are now known.

[1] Genesis 1:26
[2] John 17:11
[3] John 17:21
[4] John 17:23
[5] Romans 12:4-5
[6] Matthew 22:24-28
[7] Matthew 22:29-30