When people begin to think about God they may assume that it is possible to begin with our own concepts of  God which we can build up into a fuller knowledge of God. However, when we think about God we only have human ideas about God that we accept as true but are actually false. And we use human words to express these ideas. The “God” that we have in our human minds is an illusion. When Jesus encounters us by the Spirit he reveals the Living God to us.  In doing so, he shows that all our human ideas about God are wrong. 

In Jesus, the living God is both revealed and concealed at one and the same time. He is revealed because when Jesus encounters us he reveals the Living God just as He is – in all His Trinitarian wonder and glory.  He takes our inadequate human ideas and words to make them servants of his own unveiling.   However, we must say God is also concealed because our human ideas and words have not in themselves the slightest capacity to comprehend God. Even the most godly among us cannot grasp all that He is!  Our knowledge of God through Jesus is true but not exhaustive. 

Because God is at one and the same time knowable and unknowable to us we never become his masters.  However, it is also true that in both cases he becomes truly recognisable by us.  We know him, not because of our own thinking and speaking, but simply because he makes himself known to us through Jesus by his Spirit.