Php. 3:10 ... "That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death."
As He looked forward to the Messianic Age, God spoke through His prophet, "They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord,' for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them," (Jer. 31:34). It is the will of God that everyone should come to know Him, for He is their creator, their sustainer, and their only hope for eternal life. Furthermore, throughout the Bible there emerges evidence of God's desire to fellowship with man whom He created in His own image. God has revealed Himself to an extent in the wonders of nature, (Psa. 19:1; Acts 14:17), although this knowledge of Him speaks more of His deeds than His personality. God has also revealed Himself to a far greater extent in the Holy Scriptures, so that we may know His will for us. But most of all, God has shown us His character in the life of Christ, who is "the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature," (Heb. 1:3). As God desires us to know Him through the image of His Son, we should also keenly desire to know Jesus and through Him to come to know God.
To "know Jesus," however, involves far more than factual knowledge. Many avowed enemies of Jesus are very informed on the details of His earthly life, and even on the substance of what He taught. To know Jesus even requires more than the acquaintance with Him that comes from understanding and appreciating His life and its grand mission. Really knowing Jesus involves active participation in His experience; that is, a kind of reenactment of His life in one's own. This begins when one becomes a Christian, since in baptism one unites with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection. We read in Rom. 6:3-5, "All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death. Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection."
After this initial union with Christ, the Christian continues inseparably therein throughout the balance of his life in a fashion that is almost mysterious. At least we are at want for words to try to explain it. The nature of it is outlined by Paul in Gal. 2:20, "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me." This statement applies to every true Christian as much as it did to Paul. In one's conversion he shares in Christ's crucifixion, undergoing a very real type of death. But in dying he is reborn to a new life, one in which the life principle is Christ who dwells within him. Life in the flesh goes on, not as before when the person chose his own course, but rather as faith in Christ directs him. This living relationship with Jesus involves "knowing Him" in the truest sense.
As one attempts to reenact Jesus' life in his own experience, he will devote himself to adopting Jesus' model of thinking and conduct as the normal standard by which he himself is governed. Without regret or complaint he will endure whatever hardships that follow in the shadow cast by Jesus' own agony. In the end he will die in the faith and for the faith in imitation of the Lord, looking up out of the "valley of the shadow of death" with unwavering hope. For the Christian is persuaded that sharing his life with Jesus will lead to the ultimate experience of Jesus' sharing with him His resurrection when He returns at the end of the age to summon His disciples from their graves.
