I’ve heard some older married couples say they love each more now than when they were married. They say it’s because of the shared history but also because they love with more knowledge of the one that they love and that increases love all the more. Yet when I try to think about this in terms of God and his people – say me for example – I run into trouble.

As Daniel has been reflecting:

Consider the throwaway comment of the Apostle Paul in Galatians 4:9:

But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God…

The description that Paul gives of becoming a Christian has two sides to it – coming to know God, and coming to be known by God. They are the two sides of a personal relationship. The ‘knowing’ here is not an epistemic term, but a relational one. This is therefore a question of revelation – as any personal relationship is. I cannot force you to relate to me, nor can I decide by myself the depth of our relationship: that is decided by the extent to which we reveal ourselves to one another. Similarly here.

But this relationship, for all its genuine two-sidedness, is not symmetrical. The “or rather” is significant. It doesn’t undo the first clause, but it does relativise it. Your coming to know God happens in the context of God’s coming to know you. His action is decisive in a way that yours is not. He reveals himself – opens himself to personal relationship – in your direction, and you respond. Numerous other Biblical passages, in Old and New Testaments, paint the same picture.

What does this mean for the connection between love and knowledge? These are thoughts in process but I think it means:

• The Cross of Christ is the place where we are known, as Christ, the Word become flesh in the incarnation, goes further and identifies with sinners and becomes sin, as, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God”. In uniting us with Christ, we are known by God and come to know him; it is the basis of shared history as our story is eternally linked with his death and resurrection.
• The Cross of Christ is also the definition and demonstration of the God’s unfailingly complete love. Yet, love without knowledge is deficient. What, after all, is being loved?
  
• However, the place where we are most known by God as fallen creatures made in God’s image is the place of the ultimate demonstration of divine love.
• Love and knowledge for the Christian are bound together and seen most clearly together in the Cross of Christ.