Today I want to talk about faith, joy, and knowledge, and I want to put them together if possible. So Pastor John, as I'm sure you've heard, Augustine, of course, famously said, "Faith seeks understanding." And 700 years later, Anselm said, "I believe in order that I might understand." That's profound.

In a sense, faith is the doorway into more knowing. And then 800 years later, after that, Karl Barth came along and seems to push this one step further, essentially saying, "I believe in order to understand, and I seek to understand in order to rejoice." So for him, there's a progression, and joy is the possession of those with a knowledgeable substance to their faith.

But I want to hear from you. How would you connect this train of belief, and reason, and affection? Well, I have to admit, Tony, that I have always been a little uncomfortable with the sentence, "I believe in order that I might understand." I admit that I have not read the extended contexts in Anselm or Augustine to know precisely how they understood those phrases, and I probably should keep my mouth shut in any critical sense of them.

But the reason for my hesitation, just given the phrase itself, is that believing and knowing have so many different meanings and connotations, even in the Bible. Sometimes believing is described as preceding knowing, and sometimes, in fact, more often, I think, knowing is described as preceding believing. A couple of examples.

"Teach me good judgment and knowledge, for I believe in your commandments." So here, believing is the foundation of his prayer for knowledge. Or John 10:38, Jesus says, "If I do these works, even though you do not believe me, believe the works that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I'm in the Father." So Jesus says there's a kind of believing that can lead into a kind of knowing.

So clearly those guys are onto something, right? However, more often, I think, at least in my surveys, we read things like this from John 16:30, "Now we know that you know all things, Jesus. This is why we believe that you came from God." Or Psalm 9, verse 10, "Those who know your name put their trust in you." Or Proverbs 22, 19, "That your trust may be in the Lord, I have made them known to you this day, namely the sayings of the wise." So knowing is a means to trusting, a means to believing.

So we know from Scripture that it works both ways, depending on what you mean by believing and knowing. Knowing is the foundation for believing, in some sense, and believing takes you deeper into knowing, in some sense. If somebody were to ask me or say to me, "Believe in order that you might know," I would probably respond by saying, "What truth do you want me to believe that I might know the truth?" So you can see the problem immediately.

It would be a very, I think, a very serious mistake to encourage people to believe in a Jesus they knew nothing about. Believing without content, without some knowing of information and truth, is empty mysticism. And the biggest problem with this kind of mysticism is that an unknown Christ cannot be trusted and cannot be glorified.

You can only glorify intentionally something you know to be glorious. This is why preaching the gospel precedes faith, and grasping it, knowing the meaning of what is preached, precedes faith. How are they to believe in whom they have never heard? So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the Word of Christ.

And I would add, and I think Paul assumes it, faith comes from hearing and understanding what you hear so that it's not gibberish. You know, it doesn't do any good to preach in Chinese, to an English speaker, about the gospel because he can't construe it. He can't know it in some sense.

But it is also true that genuine faith opens the heart and mind to deeper and higher and wider knowing. True saving faith is humble and teachable and in harmony with God and less vulnerable to Satan's deceptions. And so for all those reasons, and probably more that Augustine and Enzel saw that I don't, for all those reasons, faith is much more able to see things and know things about God than the proud, independent, deceived heart can know.

So faith leads to understanding, and it wouldn't be wrong at all to say, "I have faith so that I may understand in that sense." However, now what you really were getting at was the joy piece. I haven't even touched it yet. When you stir joy into this mix, the Bible shows—it gets really complicated and yet glorious, I think—the Bible shows that joy is the outcome of both believing and knowing.

Galatians 5:22, "Joy is the fruit of the Holy Spirit." We know that the Holy Spirit is given through faith. Galatians 3:5, "So joy is a fruit of faith as the Holy Spirit works through faith." And Romans 5:3, Paul says, "We rejoice in our sufferings knowing that suffering produces endurance." You have to know something for this joy to kick in in the midst of suffering.

And 1 Peter 1:6 says, "In this you rejoice, though now for a little while you endure various trials." And the "this" refers back to—I count about ten things in verses 3 through 5—of glorious things. We're born again, we have a living hope, Jesus is raised from the dead, we have an inheritance that's incorruptible, we're being kept by God.

And he says, "In this you rejoice," meaning you know this. I've just told you this, and you've read this, so now you know it and you trust in it and you rejoice in it. Now, Karl Barth is right, then, that we pursue knowing and we pursue believing, not as ends in themselves, but in order that we might go higher and deeper in our joy.

Now, I would only add two things to that. This is why I said it may get a little complicated. One is that the reason God designed it that way is that God is not glorified when all that we know about him bores us. In other words, God does not design the world just so that we might know things about him truly, because if you know something truly and it bores you, God is not glorified in your knowing.

And God didn't create the world to present himself as boring. He created the world to present himself as glorious, and therefore we must move beyond knowing, believing, to joy. Otherwise, God doesn't look beautiful, doesn't look valuable. And the last thing I would say, and this is probably the most controversial, we might need a whole session on it, but I'll throw it out there because I don't think I can leave it unsaid since everything else seems to pass over it.

Delight, satisfaction in the glory of God as revealed in Christ, the gospel, is not simply at the end of the process of knowing and believing. It's also at the beginning of it. I think treasuring Christ, that is, valuing him, preferring him above all others, which includes delight in him, is an essential ingredient in the very nature of saving faith at the front end of salvation.

So, in order even to make a start in the Christian life, God must open the eyes of the heart to see and know and believe that the glory of God in Christ is more precious and more sweet than anything. That's how we get started. We discover a treasure hidden in a field and sell everything to have it, which means in order to be saved, God awakens in us not only a knowing and not only a believing, but also a valuing and a delighting in the glory of God.

So, conclusion, last sentence, the new creation in Christ, you and me, the new creation in Christ is born, brought into being through the creation of joy and goes on for eternity from joy to joy. Yeah, there's a lot to chew on there, Pastor John. Thank you for looking at these historic theological formulas.

If you have a formula of your own, a line from a creed or from a hymn, and you wonder what Pastor John thinks of it, send it to us. We'd love to hear from you on that topic. Send it to us from our online home at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn. I'm your host, Tony Reinke, and we will see you on Wednesday.