What the Bible Says about Your Deepest Longings
There are two things people want more than anything else. Here are the biblical grounds for them.
A close friend and mentor once told me in college, “It doesn’t say anywhere in the Bible that the deepest human longings are to be fully known and fully loved. But no one can finish reading through the Bible and not know that.” That always stuck with me.
I’m currently writing a book that talks about insiders and outsiders. And I’ll be arguing that being an “insider” means being fully known and fully loved in a community. This is our greatest longing as creatures made in the image of the God who fully knows and loves himself in three persons.
But that got me thinking about the biblical roots of these longings—being known and loved. Where do we find them in Scripture, and are they really our deepest longings?
Knowing God and Being Known
Scripture speaks incessantly about knowing God, in both negative and positive senses. Even in Genesis 3, where we don’t see the concept of personal knowledge on the surface, it’s sleeping beneath the text. Adam and Eve were meant to know God and his creation within certain parameters (Gen. 2:16–17). The tree of the knowledge of good and evil assumes not that Adam and Eve didn’t know anything yet, but that they knew God and creation in a different sense than they would if they ate the forbidden fruit. We could even say that Adam and Eve hiding after they’d taken the fruit was done out of a fear of being known, and a fear of knowing God’s judgment.
After Eden, God identifies his opponents by their “not knowing” him. Note how Pharaoh responds to Moses in refusing to let the Israelites go: “Who is the LORD, that I should obey his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the LORD, and moreover, I will not let Israel go” (Exod. 5:2). Later in Israel’s history, the sons of Eli were “were worthless men. They did not know the LORD” (1 Sam. 2:12). Knowing in these senses means “not having a faithful and personal relationship with God.” We need to use language like this because Paul is clear in Romans 1 that all men do know God (Rom. 1:19–21). They know him as creatures in relational rebellion against him. But they don’t know him in faithfulness and love, as grateful recipients of God’s grace.
This theme—the wicked rebelliously not knowing God and the faithful knowing him by grace—continues into the ministry of Christ. Jesus responds to those who meet God’s judgment with the chilling words, “I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness” (Matt. 7:23). Those opposed to God are those who do not know him in covenant faithfulness.
In contrast, the faithful are those who know God with a precious trust and intimacy. Moses, perhaps the biblical figure who was most intimate with God, is described one “whom the LORD knew face to face” (Deut. 34:10). And when the prophets speak about the redemption of the people, this is put in the language of knowing: “I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the LORD” (Hos. 2:20). Jeremiah records the words of God in the same Spirit, “No longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest” (Jer. 31:34).
In the New Testament, we learn that Jesus has come to make the Father known to people. “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matt. 11:27). This knowledge of God culminates in communion, in oneness with God (John 17:11, 21). That binds together knowing and loving.
And of course, in addition to our knowing God, we’re told that God knows us intimately. Perhaps the most famous passage on this is Psalm 139.
O LORD, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O LORD, you know it altogether. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it. (Ps. 139:1–6)
We know God in a limited sense as creatures, but God knows us exhaustively as the unlimited Creator.
In sum, Scripture frequently talks about knowing God as the central focus of human life. It’s there at the beginning of the Bible. And it’s there at the end. As Herman Bavinck put it,
“The Bible begins with the account that God created man after His own image and likeness, in order that he should know God his Creator aright, should love Him with all his heartheart, and should live with Him in eternal blessedness. And the Bible ends with the description of the new Jerusalem, whose inhabitants shall see God face to face and shall have His name upon their foreheads” (Wonderful Works of God, p. 8).
Knowing in order to love. That brings us to the next section.
Loving God and Being Loved
Knowing God and loving him go hand in hand. Early in Scripture, we hear of God expressing love or hesed (loving-kindness) to Joseph (Gen. 39:21). And God leads the Israelites in his steadfast love (Exod. 15:13). In perhaps the most famous passage of the Pentateuch, Moses calls the people to “love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut. 6:5).
Throughout the Old Testament, the people struggle to love God faithfully, constantly choosing lesser loves in the form of idolatry. Early on, Joshua called the people to “be very careful to observe the commandment and the law that Moses the servant of the LORD commanded you, to love the LORD your God” (Josh. 22:5). But the people fumbled this cyclically in the time of the judges and during the rise and fall of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. The prophets constantly call the people to return to God, who will be merciful and forgiving. The resounding call of the psalms is to love God above all else, which leads being preserved and protected: “O you who love the LORD, hate evil! He preserves the lives of his saints; he delivers them from the hand of the wicked” (Ps. 97:10).
By the time we get to the New Testament, Jesus not only repeats the Mosaic call to love God with all that is within us (Matt. 22:37), but declares the love of God pursues his lost people. God loves the world enough to send himself to redeem it (John 3:16). But Jesus turns heads by talking about the intimate love the Father has for him (3:35; 5:20; 10:17), even before the world existed (John 17:24). Jesus calls his followers to love one another as he has loved them (John 15:12, 17), making love the identifying marker of his people (John 13:35). They are both fully loved in the Son and are sent out to fully love one another.
And so we see that knowing God and loving God are intertwined, as is being loved and known. Herman Bavinck notes how beautifully this manifests in Christ’s own life.
Jesus knew God by direct, personal sight and insight; He saw Him everywhere, in nature, in His word, in His service; He loved Him above all else and was obedient to Him in all things, even in the death on the cross. His knowing of the truth was all of a piece with His doing of it. The knowledge and the love came together. (Wonderful Works of God, p. 13).
In Scripture, knowing and loving are joined at the hip. And so Paul can say in 1 Corinthians, “if anyone loves God, he is known by God” (8:3).
The Centrality of Knowing and Loving
Are these the “deepest longings” we have? I’m always a bit uneasy with superlatives (e.g., most, best, worst), but it’s hard to imagine otherwise. Paul talks about the destiny of humanity in these same terms of knowing and loving God.
“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12).
“I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39).
Fully knowing and fully loving, being fully known and fully loved—these things seem to be the purpose and end of the Christian life. They drive the biblical narrative forward, and they drive our own lives forward. These are the deepest things we’re after, and the frames of our hope for life after death.
So, yes I do think these are the deepest longings of the human heart. The real question for us and our broader culture is this: what substitutes or counterfeits are we trying to replace God with in our striving to be known and loved? And once we identify those counterfeits, how are they affecting us and drawing us deeper into confusion and isolation from the only one who can fully know and love us?
Check out One with God to learn more about what it means to be fully known and loved by the Trinity.
