From Knowing About to Knowing

There is something you have probably noticed, even if you have not named it yet. You can know a great deal about someone without knowing them. You can study their biography, memorise their patterns, describe their character with accuracy to someone else — and still be a stranger to them in the way that actually matters. Something of the same gap exists in a life with God. Most of us have spent years — perhaps decades — knowing about him. We have studied the text. We have meditated on what we found. We have prayed, honestly and faithfully. And there is real value in all of that. But there is a third thing, distinct from study and meditation, that most of us have never tried. This chapter is about that third thing.

Section 1.1 — Why Faces?

The title of this manual uses an unusual phrase: the faces of YHWH. Not the presence of God — the faces. The distinction is not accidental, and it matters before we go any further.

God is not a single undifferentiated experience. He is multidimensional — a being of extraordinary complexity, fullness, and particularity. The way we encounter a multidimensional being is not by seeking "more" of him in some general sense, as if God were a volume control that could simply be turned up. It is by engaging specific expressions of who he is. Different promises open access to different dimensions of his nature. Engaging the promise of favour-as-shield gives you access to the shielding character of YHWH — specifically that. Engaging the promise of path-of-life gives you access to something else. These are not subtle distinctions. They are real ones.

The Hebrew word for face is panim — and in Hebrew it has no singular form. It is always plural: faces. God's face, in the language of scripture, is already many-faced: a fullness of personhood that looks at you in multiple facets simultaneously. When Genesis 3:8 describes the sound of YHWH walking in the garden in the cool of the day, the picture is of an unhurried, rhythmic melody of face-to-face (panim-to-panim) companionship — the baseline humanity was built for. And the record preserves the invitation to return to that baseline: "My heart says of you, 'Seek his face'" (Psalm 27:8). Not his atmosphere. Not his general presence. His face. Because a face implies something that ambient presence does not — it implies that someone is looking at you. You can be in an atmosphere without being seen. A face sees you.

When Moses spent time before the panim of YHWH on the mountain (Exodus 33:11; 34:29–35), the skin of his face physically shone when he came down. Why? Because the Hebrew word for glory is kabod — which literally means weight, heaviness, substance. When you stand before the face of God, his nature carries weight, and that weight transfers through sustained contact. What happened to Moses temporarily from the outside in, Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 3:18 now happens to us permanently from the inside out: "And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another."

This is why the practice in this manual works the way it does. Each promise you will engage is not a technique for accessing "more God." It is a specific doorway into a specific face of YHWH. The God you encounter through Psalm 5:12 and the God you encounter through Psalm 25:14 are the same God — the way a friend is the same person whether he is protecting you or showing you the way. But the expression of who he is in each case is distinct. The practice honours that distinctiveness. You are not seeking an undifferentiated presence. You are learning to recognise specific faces — and to let their kabod transfer to you.

Exercise 1.1 — The Three-Mode Comparison

Experience the operational difference between study, meditation, and engagement in your own body before the teaching names what you felt.

A note on placement: this exercise appears here rather than at the end of the chapter because you will read the teaching on the three modes more clearly once you have something in your hands. Five minutes now. The teaching follows.

Take Psalm 5:12: "For you bless the righteous, O YHWH; you cover them with favour as with a shield."

1. Read the verse once as you normally would — analytically. What does "favour" mean here? What does the shield imagery imply about protection? Study it briefly, as you would study any verse you wanted to understand.
2. Set that aside. Read the verse again slowly, three times. Let it sit in you without trying to extract anything. Simply let the words turn over. Notice what feeling or image, if any, arises — not by seeking one, but by allowing.
3. Now stand up, with your hands resting open at your sides or in front of you. Speak the verse aloud, in first person, as a present reality directed to God: "YHWH, you are surrounding me with favour as with a shield." Repeat it slowly, two or three times. Allow your body to respond naturally — there is no correct response. Simply notice what is different about speaking it this way compared to the previous two phases.
4. Sit down and write three sentences — one about what each phase was like to notice. Even if the difference was minimal. Even if you felt nothing in phase three. Write what was true.

Do not evaluate the exercise yet. You are gathering information.

Section 1.2 — Three Modes and the Open Hand of Yada

Now that you have something in your hands — even if it is only the observation that the three phases felt different, or that you felt self-conscious in the third one, or that nothing clearly changed — let me name what you were doing.

There are three distinct modes of relating to scripture. Most people who read this are fluent in the first two and have never deliberately practiced the third.

Study is analytical. You approach the text as a source of information and bring the tools of observation, interpretation, and application. You ask: what does this mean? What was the original intent? How does this fit the wider argument? Study extracts meaning from text. It is a real and necessary mode. This manual would not exist without it.

Meditation is repetitive dwelling. You take a truth — already extracted through study or received through reading — and you sit with it, return to it, allow it to become familiar. Not to extract more meaning, but to let the truth become part of how you think. The practice of lectio divina lives here. Meditating on Psalm 5:12 means allowing the image of the shield to settle into you over time, not mining the verse for more data.

Engagement is something different from both. The move in engagement is not analytical and not simply receptive — it is declaratory, bodily, and present-tense. You are not asking what the verse means. You are not letting the verse become familiar. You are stepping through the verse into the reality it describes, right now.

Beneath this distinction lies one of the most important words in the Hebrew Bible: yada — "to know." When Jesus prays in John 17:3, "And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God," he is not talking about accumulating theological data. In its ancient Hebrew pictographic root, yada is connected to yad — an open hand — paired with the eye of perception. It describes open-handed, unguarded, intimate knowing (the same word used in Genesis 4:1 when Adam "knew" Eve).

Compare that open-handed yada with what happened at the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in Genesis 3. At that tree, humanity reached out with a closed, grasping hand — trying to seize knowledge and mastery on their own terms so they could be in control without needing face-to-face vulnerability with God. Ever since Eden, our religious flesh loves closed-hand knowing: we want to master the text, dissect the doctrine, and stay safely in control. Engagement requires the opposite posture: unclenching the fist of analytical control and opening your hands to receive a Person.

Think of the wardrobe in C.S. Lewis's Narnia. You could spend years appreciating the craftsmanship of the wood. You could study the history of the cabinet — where it came from, who built it, what kind of wood was used. You could open and close the door repeatedly and describe, with real precision, the quality of the darkness inside. Or you could step through. Engagement is stepping through. The verse is not the destination — it is the door.

Notice that these three modes are not in competition. A rich life with God will include all three. Study gives you the material; meditation allows the material to become part of you; engagement steps you into the reality the material has been pointing at. This manual adds the third mode, not to displace the first two, but because for most of us the third has been entirely absent. You have been studying the door and meditating on the door. This practice asks you to step through it.

Section 1.3 — The Promise as Doorway and the Finger of God

There is a theological claim underneath the whole practice that I want to name directly, because it changes how you approach a verse.

A promise from YHWH is not primarily a guarantee about your future. It is an act of giving. When God says "I will surround you with favour as with a shield," he is not making a contractual commitment to produce a future outcome if certain conditions are met. He is extending something of his own nature toward you — his shield-character, the dimension of who he is that covers and protects. The promise is an impartation: it carries what it describes.

Impartation — God giving himself through the language of a promise, not merely describing what he might do. When YHWH speaks a promise into covenant relationship with you, the promise carries his nature. Engaging it is not claiming a future outcome; it is making contact with a present reality.

This is not metaphor. Eden is the clearest image of what I mean. The trees in the garden were not symbols — they were carriers of the reality their name described. The tree of life did not point to life; it carried life. To eat from it was to receive life-energy, not merely nutrition or information about what life is. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil did not point to knowledge; eating from it imparted knowledge. The trees were energetic realities — what I mean by energetic is that they carried the actual substance of what they named. They were not representations; they were transmissions.

Scripture works the same way. And Paul explains the mechanism in 2 Corinthians 3:3:

"And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts."

At Mount Sinai, Exodus 31:18 tells us that the tablets of the covenant were "written with the finger of God." So long as those words remained on external stone tablets, they could only command from the outside. In the New Covenant, that same Finger of God — the Holy Spirit — writes the living substance of the promise directly onto the fleshy tablet of your heart. When you engage a promise — declare it aloud, stand in it bodily, open your hands to it — you are presenting the tablet of your heart to the Finger of God so that his nature is inscribed directly into your inner architecture.

This is why engagement is different from positive thinking. Positive thinking asks you to believe something that may or may not be true in order to produce a desired outcome. Engagement asks you to attend to what is already true — that the character of YHWH is present toward you now, carrying everything that his promises describe — and to allow that reality to make contact with you. You are not manufacturing something. You are attending to what is already there.

It also means that the engagement mode is personal, not mechanical. You are not working a technique on a text. You are stepping into a relationship that God initiated when he gave you the promise in the first place. The promise already belongs to you. The practice is learning to receive what you have already been given.

Section 1.4 — What You're About to Begin

Let me tell you honestly what the next six weeks might look like.

In the coming chapters, you will spend fifteen minutes a day engaging a specific promise. You will move through five core promise-clusters over six weeks: Favour as a Shield (Week 1), the Path of Life (Week 2), YHWH Shalom and the Mountain of Rest (Week 3), the Council of the Lord (Week 4), the Instructing Eye of Abba in Covenant Union (Week 5), and Hayah Olam — Living from the Promise with Open Gates (Week 6). The structure is deliberate and the progression is real — each promise opens a different face, and the faces together give you a wider map of who YHWH is than you had before. But I want to say something about what building means here, because what you are building is more important than what you feel in any given session.

I spent nine months seeking God for something deeper. Real encounter. Something that was not just me talking in a room. I was consistent — not perfectly, but genuinely consistent. And for nine months, nothing remarkable happened. There was no breakthrough I could point to. There were no experiences that clearly exceeded what I might have produced on my own. Then, in a prayer meeting, something shifted. I began to see Jesus. Not dramatically — not in a way I could describe easily or that would satisfy someone looking for a clear account of what happened. But persistently. Over the weeks that followed, I began to see him in the faces of people around me. The encounter that arrived after nine months of apparently empty seeking has not left me since.

I tell you that story not to set nine months as the standard — for others, the encounter arrives much earlier. But to say this: what you feel in any single session, including the first one, is not the measure of what is happening. The first session may produce nothing. The third may feel mechanical. Week two may feel more alive than week one, then week three may settle into quiet stillness. None of this is evidence that the practice is not working. None of this is evidence that you are doing it wrong.

There are three things I want to address before you begin, because they will likely come up.

The first is category confusion. If you have been trained to read scripture analytically — and most of us have been — the engagement mode will feel strange, perhaps even theologically suspect. Declaring that you are surrounded by favour when you have just had a difficult morning does not feel like honest engagement with reality. I will address this directly in the next chapter. For now: strange is not wrong. Unfamiliar is not dangerous.

The second is the feelings-allergic instinct. If your theological background has warned you away from experience-based spirituality — if you have been taught that feelings are unreliable and the point is faith, not sensation — the engagement mode may trigger that reflex. I am not asking you to seek feelings or manufacture experiences. I am asking you to attend to a reality that is already there. What you feel in response is secondary. What you are doing in engagement is primary, and it is not primarily about feeling.

The third is the prior failed experiment. If you have tried something like this before and it did not produce what you expected — or if you have prayed for deeper encounter for years and nothing changed — I understand why you might approach this with scepticism. I sat in that scepticism for nine months. I am not asking you to manufacture hope you do not have. I am asking you to give the practice a fair run — every day, for six weeks — and to hold lightly the question of what "working" means until you have a week's worth of sessions to look back at whole.

This is an invitation, not a formula. You will have your own encounter. It will not look like mine, or like anyone else's in these pages. What YHWH gives you through these promises will be shaped by who you are and what you need. Your part is simply to show up, open the door, and practice stepping through.

Exercises

Exercise 1.1 appears above, between Sections 1.1 and 1.2. It is placed there deliberately: the reader needs a brief felt experience before the teaching on three modes names what they were doing.

Exercise 1.2 — Dwelling in One Verse with Open Hands (Yada)

Shift from study to engagement using scripture you already know, so that the transition happens in familiar territory.

1. Choose a verse you know well — one you have memorised, prayed, or returned to over the years.
2. Speak it aloud once as you normally would.
3. Now unclench your hands and let your palms rest open. Speak the verse again — but this time as a direct, present-tense declaration to YHWH: not "the Lord is my shepherd" but "YHWH, you are my shepherd." Speak it as if it is true for you right now, because it is.
4. Stay with that declaration for three to four minutes. Repeat the verse slowly. Allow movement if it comes. Breathe. Let the Finger of God write the reality of the verse onto your heart.
5. Afterward, write one word that describes the difference between the two ways of speaking the same verse. Not an explanation — one word.

You are not being asked to manufacture an experience here. You are being asked to notice whether the mode of speaking changes what becomes accessible.

Reflection Questions

The following questions are for your own reflection after completing this chapter. You do not need to answer all of them — read through and notice which ones snag you.

1. Before you read this chapter, how would you have described your primary mode of relating to scripture? How does the distinction between closed-hand grasping and open-hand yada illuminate your habit with the Bible?
2. Paul spent nine months seeking with no apparent result before the encounter that has stayed with him. Does that testimony make you more willing to begin, or less? What does your reaction tell you about where you are?
3. The claim that promises carry God's nature (kabod) and are written on the heart by the Finger of God (2 Corinthians 3:3) rather than merely describing future outcomes is a large claim. What could the practice show you that no argument could?
4. Where have you assumed that seeking more of God is a single, undifferentiated thing? Which face of YHWH do you most want to know across these six weeks?

Chapter Summary

What this chapter has been doing is creating a distinction where most of us had only a continuum.

Study and meditation are real. They are not failures. But they are not the whole of what is possible in a life that carries the promises of YHWH. There is a third mode — engagement — in which we release our closed-hand analytical grip, open our hands in yada, and step through the promise as a doorway into the personal face (panim) and weighty substance (kabod) of the One who gave it. The faces of YHWH are not poetic decoration. Different promises open different dimensions of who God is. The practice in this manual is the practice of learning to engage those specific expressions — the shielding God, the life-giving God, the peace-giving God on the mountain, the counselling God, the instructing Father — not as doctrinal categories but as present realities inscribed on your heart by the Finger of God.

What you are about to begin is real, and it builds. The sessions that feel flat may be doing more than the sessions that feel alive. Consistency matters more than intensity. And the encounter that waits on the other side of this practice — however it arrives, whenever it arrives, in whatever form — will not be a reproduction of anyone else's story. It will be yours.

Chapter 2 will give you the structure for the first session. Before you go there, take a moment with the reflection questions above. Let the invitation in this chapter sit for a little while before you begin moving.

🎧 Audio Field Note — Rinteln Live

The Finger of God Writing on the Fleshy Heart (2:15)
Canonical audio excerpt accompanying Chapter 1: moving beyond cognitive Bible study to living inscription on the heart.