It has pleased God that divine verities should not enter the heart through the understanding, but the understanding through the heart.
-- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
My wife MariAnne's nephew Matthew and his wife, Cami were recently blessed with the arrival of their new son, Blaise Elliot. They chose the name Blaise in honour of the seventeenth century French scholar and theologian, Blaise Pascal.
I can't remember what year it was - for it was almost twenty years ago, I believe - that I read the quote by Pascal that is at the top of this article. When I read it, my heart resounded with a soul-gripping amen. Pascal's conviction was that the real issue in knowing the true God and knowing God's truth was not merely a matter of human reasoning and intellectual discovery. It was a matter of the heart. The evidence for God and the truth of God is all around us. Romans 1:18-20 teaches that no one has any excuse for rejecting God and failing to seek Him because the truth of God is not only around us but within us: "because that which is known about God is evident with them; for God made it evident to them." There is no lack of evidence or information about God for God is a self-disclosing and truth communicating relational being. The real sphere of struggle in knowing God is not in the mind but in the heart. God will not be known as a religious fact. He is not merely another great "Star" to be detailed and described on Wikipedia. Our God is the God who is determined to be known in relationship. As in the book of Genesis, when we are told that Adam "knew" Eve, knowing describes the most intimate of relationships. Likewise, we are to know God intimately as our Father, our King, our Lord, our Saviour, our Creator, our Friend. God will have our hearts and without our hearts we cannot know Him. Tragically, it is because of our hearts that we choose not to know Him. We do not seek God (see Psalm 14) and that is not because He is not available or attainable. We do not seek God because we choose lesser loves. Our hearts are directed to created things rather than their Creator. And our God stubbornly refuses to be known except for the purpose of being loved. That is why the gospel is first about changing hearts so then, subsequently, the mind is changed. Just read Ephesians 4:18. There Paul teaches that the problem with our understanding is our hardness of heart. It is not that our hardness of heart is caused by faulty understanding.
Praise God that through the power of the gospel He changes hearts so that we might not know Him as a fact, but rather love Him as a Father. I will add a few more quotes from Blaise Pascal below that you may find helpful.
"The Christian’s God does not consist merely of a God who is the author of mathematical truths—but the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. The God of the Christians is a God of love and consolation: he is a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom he possesses: he is a God who makes them inwardly aware of their wretchedness and his infinite mercy: who united himself with them in the depths of their soul: who fills it with humility, joy, confidence and love: who makes them incapable of having any other end but him."
"Man is full of wants: he loves only those who can satisfy them all."
"The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason."
(the last quotes taken from http://www.rzim.org/resources/jttran.php?seqid=44)
