When God first Knew Me

I often hear Christians speaking about their initial experiences of God; how he saved them, set them free, changed their lives, etc. But have you ever thought about God's first experience of you? What's God's testimony of His experience of us. Where were you the first time God ever met you?

I called on the Lord Jesus to save me when I was 19 years old, about 2 AM in my dorm room. I remember well the sense of God's reality, so fresh. I was born spiritually that night. My eyes were opened to the depths of my sin and the beauty of God's grace to save me by Christ. Like I did with my newborn children, God held me close. I knew He was there and everything would be just fine from then on. That was definately the first time God was ever so real to me. Was that it? Was that the first time God met me?


Or perhaps it was at my natural birth. I was "made in Japan", or a least that's where I came off the assembly line (my father was in stationed overseas in the military). I'm sure God was always there, even when I wasn't aware. Was that the first time God met me?

I guess we could go back to conception. After all, the Lord does tell us that He "knits us together in our mothers womb" and that His eyes "see our unformed substance." Was that the first time God met me? When I was concieved?

Hold on for a second. The life I received when I called on Jesus to save me and be my Lord. What kind of life was that? That life was Eternal life. It was the very life of the Son given to me as my own life... for eternity.


Eternity. That's a big word. Transcending all time. In and beyond time itself. Before the beginning and after the end of time. That's the nature of God's life. It's eternal, timeless, transcendant. Before angels or "let there be light", the God the Father, the Son and the Spirit possessed a single life, eternal life.

God the Father before creation beheld His Son and determined to display the Son in the creation. He determined to make humanity in the image of God so that we could contain God's life, like a glove is in the image of a hand to contain a hand. We are created to be vessels containing Christ, expressing the very likeness of God in the creation. "Want to see what God our creator is like? Look at humanity, my image bearers" was God's original thought.

That helps me understand something that God tells me in His testimony of His experience of us: Before the foundation of the world, He never conceived of us apart from His image. Question: Who is the image of God? That's right, Jesus Christ. Before God created, He chose us in Christ. We were known God God in Christ as those marked out to possess His Son as our own life, even as the Son posseses the Father as His own life. God first knew me when He foreknew me. His first sight of me was as one who shares the very life of the Son of God. "He who has the Son has the Life. He who does not have the Son does not have the life."


He loved us in His Beloved Son with the very love He has for the Son. The first time God saw us, we were holy, blameless and free from accusation. We were in Christ.

God's never moved away from that way of looking at us. The only way He ever knows us is the us "in Christ". In otherwords, if a person is not in Christ, God doesn't know them in a relational sense. Jesus Christ said at the final judgement He will turn the damned away with the words, "I never knew you. "The apostle tells the Galatian church, "Now that you have come to know God, or have come to be known by Him." God only ever knows believers as He first knew us when He "foreknew" us in Christ, as those who partake of the life of His Son as our life. Praise the Lord!