This note is interpretation, not translation. It is about one Greek word in one verse, Philippians 3:10, “to know him”, and it follows that word through Paul’s letter, the Hebrew scriptures behind it, the Gospels and letters that use it of Jesus, and this book, where the same verb is used four times. Two chapters before it, in the same letter, Paul writes that every knee will bow and every tongue will confess, and the note follows that too, because Isaiah’s own text puts the two together. Jon asked for both; the readings here are the texts’ own, and the one thing that is his is the recommendation at the end.
The word. “To know him” is tou gnōnai auton: the aorist infinitive of ginōskō, with the article in front of it, which in Paul’s Greek states the purpose of everything that came before. Greek has two common verbs for knowing. Oida is knowing a fact, or being aware; ginōskō is coming to know, by acquaintance or by experience, and it is the verb the Greek translators reached for when the Hebrew has yada, the word of “Adam knew Eve his wife” (Genesis 4:1). The two verbs overlap in the New Testament and the difference is a tendency rather than a rule; but Paul chose ginōskō here, and the aorist makes it a thing entered into, “to come to know him”, rather than a fact held. The infinitive has three objects in one breath: him, the power of his resurrection, and the sharing of his sufferings, “being shaped to his death”. So the knowing Paul means has the cross and the empty tomb inside it. The form gnōnai is in twelve verses of the New Testament; with the article tou before it, only here.
The sentence it ends. Paul has just listed what he had: circumcised on the eighth day, of Israel, of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee as to law, blameless as to the righteousness that is in law (3:5–6). Then: “But whatever things were gain to me, these I have counted loss because of the Anointed. More than that, I count everything to be loss because of the surpassing worth of the knowledge of the Anointed Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have suffered the loss of everything, and I count it refuse, so that I may gain the Anointed and be found in him, not having my own righteousness, the one from law, but the one through trust in the Anointed, the righteousness from God on trust: to know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the sharing of his sufferings, being shaped to his death, if somehow I may arrive at the resurrection from the dead” (3:7–11). The knowledge in 3:8 is the noun gnōsis, the same family; the word for refuse, skybala, is what is thrown to the dogs. The righteousness from law and the righteousness from God are set against each other, and “to know him” is where the second one goes.
Pursued, then pursuing. One verb runs through the chapter under the surface. At 3:6 Paul’s zeal was shown in “persecuting the assembly”, diōkōn tēn ekklēsian; at 3:12 and 3:14 he says “I press on”, diōkō, toward the goal. It is the same word: to pursue, to chase, to hunt down. It is the word Jesus used on the road: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? … I am Jesus, whom you persecute” (Acts 9:4–5). The man who hunted Him now hunts after knowing Him, and the letter uses one verb for both without comment. And he says the hunt is the answer to a capture: “I press on, if I may also lay hold of that for which I was laid hold of by the Anointed Jesus” (3:12). The Greek translation of Hosea had already put the two words together: “let us know, let us pursue to know the LORD” (Hosea 6:3), where the Hebrew is nirdefah lada’at et YHWH and the Greek reads diōxomen tou gnōnai ton Kyrion, the verb of Philippians 3:12 beside the infinitive of 3:10, with the article. Paul does not quote Hosea here, and this note does not say he does; it says the phrase was there in the scriptures he read, and that the rest of that verse is the early and latter rain the Harvester reading follows.
Knowing God in the Hebrew scriptures. The word is yada, and it is personal from its first use. Moses, with the people under judgment, asks for it as the one thing: “you have said, I have known you by name … now, if I have found favour in your eyes, let me know your ways, that I may know you” (Exodus 33:12–13). Jeremiah makes it the one thing worth boasting in: “let not the wise boast in his wisdom, nor the strong in his strength, nor the rich in his riches; but let the one who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD who does mercy, justice and righteousness in the earth, for in these I delight” (Jeremiah 9:23–24; the Hebrew numbers them 9:22–23), which is the line Paul cuts down to “let the one who boasts boast in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:31). Hosea says it is what God wants in place of sacrifice, “mercy, and not sacrifice; the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (6:6), that its lack is what destroys a people, “my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (4:6), and that it is the end of the betrothal: “I will betroth you to me in faithfulness, and you will know the LORD” (2:20; 2:22 in the Hebrew). Jeremiah’s new covenant ends in it, with forgiveness as its ground: “they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, for I will forgive their guilt” (31:34). Isaiah and Habakkuk give it as the end of the story, “the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:9; Habakkuk 2:14), and Isaiah 53 gives it as how the Servant justifies: “by his knowledge my righteous servant will make the many righteous, and he will bear their guilt” (53:11). The psalm says what knowing does: “those who know your name trust in you” (Psalm 9:10; 9:11 in the Hebrew). And Daniel: “the people who know their God will be strong and act” (11:32).
The covenant that ends in knowing: Jeremiah 31 and Hebrews 8. Jon asked for Hebrews 8 and Jeremiah, and they are one text. Hebrews 8:8–12 quotes Jeremiah 31:31–34 in the Greek, the longest quotation of the Hebrew scriptures anywhere in the New Testament, and 10:16–17 quotes its last lines a second time. Jeremiah says: “Look, days are coming, says the LORD, when I will cut a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah” (31:31) … “this is the covenant I will cut with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them and write it on their heart, and I will be their God and they will be my people. And they will no longer teach, each his neighbour and each his brother, saying, Know the LORD; for they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD, for I will forgive their guilt and remember their sin no more” (31:33–34; the Greek translation numbers the chapter 38). Four things stand in that order: the law inside, “I will be their God and they will be my people”, the knowing, and the forgiveness that is its ground. The middle line is the covenant formula, and it is older than Jeremiah. Its first use is at the exodus, and there too it ends in knowing: “I will take you to me as a people and I will be to you a God, and you will know that I am the LORD your God who brings you out from under the burdens of Egypt” (Exodus 6:7); then “I will walk among you and be your God, and you will be my people” (Leviticus 26:12). Jeremiah has it four times besides the new covenant (24:7; 30:22; 31:1; 32:38), and one of them puts the knowing and the formula in one line: “I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the LORD, and they will be my people and I will be their God, for they will return to me with their whole heart” (24:7). Ezekiel sets it beside the new heart (36:26–28) and beside the tent: “my dwelling will be over them, and I will be their God and they will be my people” (37:27); Hosea turns “not my people” into “you are my people” and the answer “my God” (2:23; 2:25 in the Hebrew); Zechariah has it of a people brought back to live in Jerusalem (8:8). Paul stitches Leviticus and Ezekiel together as God’s word to the assembly: “I will dwell in them and walk among them, and I will be their God and they will be my people” (2 Corinthians 6:16). What Jeremiah adds to the formula is the knowing, and Hebrews keeps his point exactly: “they will not teach, each one his fellow citizen and each one his brother, saying, Know the Lord; for all will know me, from the least to the greatest of them” (8:11). In the Greek of that verse the command uses the verb of Philippians 3:10, gnōthi, and the promise uses the other verb for knowing, eidēsousin; the Hebrew has one verb, yada, for both. The point does not hang on the verbs. It is that under this covenant the knowing is not handed from teacher to pupil but given by God to each, “from the least to the greatest”, which is what Jesus says in Isaiah’s words, “it is written in the prophets, And they will all be taught by God; everyone who has heard from the Father and learned comes to me” (John 6:45; Isaiah 54:13, “all your children taught by the LORD”), and what John’s letter reports as done, “you have no need that anyone teach you” (1 John 2:27; the section below on the Spirit sets out how). Hebrews then draws out the ground Jeremiah gave. Because the covenant is “I will remember their sins no more”, “where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer an offering for sin” (10:17–18), since “by one offering he has perfected for ever those who are being made holy” (10:14); and “in saying New, he has made the first old; and what is growing old and ageing is near to vanishing” (8:13). This book ends where Jeremiah’s covenant ends. The formula is said from the throne, “Look, God’s tent is with people, and he will live with them. They will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them” (21:3), and the tent is Ezekiel 37:27’s dwelling; in the text followed here the people is plural, laoi, where Jeremiah and Ezekiel have one people, so the formula is said over the nations of 21:24. It is said again to each person, “I will be his God and he will be my son” (21:7, marked as 2 Samuel 7:14, whose words it is), the covenant formula with the son in it. And the knowing of 31:34 is what the last chapter shows: “they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads” (22:4). How close this is: Hebrews quotes Jeremiah word for word; Revelation does not quote Jeremiah 31 anywhere. What it has is the formula, whose words are shared by a dozen verses from Exodus to Zechariah, and 21:3 stands nearest to Ezekiel 37:27 because of the tent. That Jeremiah’s “they will all know me” is fulfilled at 22:4 is this note’s reading of the two placed side by side, and the texts do not say it.
What Jesus and His followers say of it. Jesus defines the life of the age by it: “this is the life of the age, that they know you, the only true God, and the one you sent, Jesus the Anointed” (John 17:3). He puts it inside the picture of the shepherd: “I know my own and my own know me, as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep” (John 10:14–15). He says it is given, not found: “no one knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone know the Father except the Son and the one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matthew 11:27). He says it of Philip at the table, “so long a time I have been with you, and you have not known me, Philip? The one who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9), and of the world in His prayer, “the world has not known you, but I have known you, and these have known that you sent me” (17:25). And the darkest sentence in the Gospels is the same verb with a negative: “I never knew you; go away from me” (Matthew 7:23). Paul turns the verb round twice: “now that you have come to know God, or rather have been known by God” (Galatians 4:9), and “if anyone loves God, this one is known by him” (1 Corinthians 8:3, after 8:2, “if anyone thinks he has come to know something, he does not yet know as he ought to know”). He says it is now partial and will be whole: “now I know in part; then I will know fully, as I have been fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). The one other place he uses the infinitive of Philippians 3:10 is a prayer: “to know the love of the Anointed that surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:19), where “surpasses” is the same root as “the surpassing worth” of Philippians 3:8. He puts the knowledge in a face, “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of the Anointed” (2 Corinthians 4:6), and says all its treasures are hidden in Him (Colossians 2:3). John makes it testable: “in this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments; the one who says, I have come to know him, and does not keep his commandments, is a liar” (1 John 2:3–4), and “everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God; the one who does not love has not known God, because God is love” (4:7–8). Paul does use the other verb, oida, of the same thing once, at the end: “I know whom I have trusted” (2 Timothy 1:12). The two verbs are not kept in separate rooms.
Shaped to his death. “Being shaped to his death” at 3:10 is symmorphizomenos, and the word family is in only three verses of the New Testament, all Paul’s, and all about the same thing: “those he knew beforehand he also marked out beforehand to be shaped to the image of his Son” (Romans 8:29, where “knew beforehand” is proginōskō, the verb of 3:10 with “before” on the front); Philippians 3:10; and 3:21, where the shaping is finished, “he will change the body of our humiliation to be shaped to the body of his glory”. Knowing Him, in this letter, is the road between the two.
How it happens: He goes, and the Spirit comes. Jon asked where the knowing comes from, and Jesus answers it the night before He died, in the same breath as He says He is leaving. “I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away. For if I do not go away, the Paraclete will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7). The word for “to your advantage”, sympherei, John uses three times, and the other two are Caiaphas: “it is to your advantage that one man die for the people” (11:50; 18:14). The death that was expedient to the high priest and the going that is expedient to the disciples are told with one word. The one He sends is “another Paraclete” (14:16), and the word is in five verses of the New Testament, all John’s: four of the Spirit (14:16, 14:26, 15:26, 16:7) and one of Jesus, “we have a Paraclete with the Father, Jesus the Anointed, the righteous” (1 John 2:1). So He is the first, and the Spirit is the other one, sent so that His going is not a loss. What the Spirit does is set out in four sayings, and each one is about knowing Him. He will be in them: “the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see him or know him; you know him, because he stays with you and will be in you” (14:17, where “know” is the verb of Philippians 3:10, twice, the world’s not knowing against theirs). He will teach: “the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, that one will teach you all things and remind you of all that I said to you” (14:26). He will testify of Him: “he will testify about me” (15:26). And He will hand over what is His: “he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak from himself, but whatever he hears he will speak … That one will glorify me, because he will take of what is mine and declare it to you. Everything the Father has is mine; that is why I said that he takes of what is mine and declares it to you” (16:13–15). The promise that sits between those sayings is the knowing itself: “I will not leave you orphans; I am coming to you … in that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (14:18, 20). John says when the day was: the Spirit was “not yet, because Jesus was not yet glorified” (7:39), and the risen Jesus “breathed on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit” (20:22). John’s letter says it happened: “you have an anointing from the Holy One, and you all know … the anointing you received from him stays in you, and you have no need that anyone teach you; but as his anointing teaches you about all things, and is true and is not a lie, and as it taught you, stay in him” (1 John 2:20, 27), which is 14:26 reported as done. Paul says the same from the other side: “no one has known the things of God except the Spirit of God; and we did not receive the spirit of the world but the Spirit that is from God, so that we might know what has been freely given to us by God” (1 Corinthians 2:11–12); the Spirit of the Son is sent into the heart crying “Abba, Father” and witnesses with our spirit that we are children (Galatians 4:6; Romans 8:15–16); he asks that God give “a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him” (Ephesians 1:17); and the shaping of Philippians 3:10 and 3:21 is said in Corinthians to happen this way, “we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image, from glory to glory, as from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18). In this book the Spirit is still doing what 14:26 and 15:26 say: John is “in the Spirit” when he sees (1:10, 4:2, 17:3, 21:10), every one of the seven letters ends “listen to what the Spirit is saying to the assemblies” (2:7 and six more), “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (19:10), and the last word of invitation is the Spirit’s with the bride’s (22:17). So the texts give the how in one line: He went, the Spirit was sent in His name, and the Spirit teaches, reminds, testifies of Him, glorifies Him and hands over what is His; and the knowing of 14:20 is what that produces. That it is better this way is not the note’s judgment; it is His word, sympherei.
In this book. Revelation uses ginōskō in four verses and oida in twelve. The twelve are mostly His: “I know your works” opens five of the seven letters (2:2, 2:19, 3:1, 3:8, 3:15), “I know your pressure” and “I know where you live” the other two (2:9, 2:13), and twice a name is known by one alone, the new name on the white stone “which nobody knows except the one who receives it” (2:17) and the rider’s name “that nobody knows except himself” (19:12). The four with the other verb are all in the letters: “every assembly will know that I am the one who searches minds and hearts” (2:23), the ones who “have not known the deep things of the accuser, as they say” (2:24), “you will not know at what hour I come” (3:3), and the promise to Philadelphia, “they will come and bow down at your feet, and know that I have loved you” (3:9), which is Isaiah 43:4 quoted. So the book has Him knowing His people by name and by works, and the knowing of Him by them is the thing promised at the very end, in other words: “they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads” (22:4). That is where Paul’s “then face to face; then I will know fully” (1 Corinthians 13:12) lands, and the two are set side by side here as a likeness of sense, not a quotation.
Every knee, every tongue — Jon asked where it leads. It leads back into the same letter. Two chapters before “to know him”, Paul writes: “therefore God also raised him to the highest place and gave him as a gift the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in the sky and on the earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus the Anointed is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9–11). The knee and the tongue are Isaiah’s, from an oath God swears by Himself, and Isaiah’s passage runs like this: “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God and there is no other. By myself I have sworn; righteousness has gone out from my mouth, a word that will not turn back: that to me every knee will bow, every tongue will swear. Only in the LORD, it will be said of me, are righteousness and strength … In the LORD all the seed of Israel will be justified, and will boast” (Isaiah 45:22–25). So in Isaiah the bowing of every knee stands between “be saved” and “in the LORD … righteousness”, and that is the pair Philippians 3:9 is made of: “not having my own righteousness, the one from law, but … the righteousness from God”. Paul quotes the same oath in Romans of God, “as I live, says the Lord, to me every knee will bow and every tongue will confess to God” (14:11), and in Philippians of Jesus, with the Greek translation’s verb for confess kept, exomologeō, and the title the oath was sworn in, “the LORD”, given to Him: “Jesus the Anointed is Lord”. It is the same title Paul uses when he says what the knowing is worth, “the knowledge of the Anointed Jesus my Lord” (3:8). One man says “my Lord” in chapter 3; every tongue says “Lord” in chapter 2. The confession is also how Paul says a person is saved now, “if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and trust in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9), and he says no one can say it except in the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:3). And it runs the other way as well: Jesus says He will confess the name of the one who comes through “in front of my Father and in front of his messengers” (Revelation 3:5; Matthew 10:32, the same verb). This book has the three tiers of Philippians 2:10 at the throne, “every created thing in the sky and on the earth and under the earth and on the sea” giving blessing to the one on the throne and to the Lamb (5:13; 5:3 has the same three), and Isaiah’s oath itself at the song by the sea, “all the nations will come and bow in front of you” (15:4, marked there, and taken up in the Harvester reading). The words for “under the earth” differ between Paul and this book, katachthoniōn, found only at Philippians 2:10, against hypokatō tēs gēs, so that is a shared shape and not shared wording. Where it leads, then, is this: the knowing of 3:10 is one person’s and now, and the confessing of 2:11 is everyone’s and then; the first is entered by trust, the second will be said by every tongue; and the text that gives the second is the text that gives righteousness “in the LORD” to the one who turns and is saved.
Where this stops. That Hosea 6:3 in Greek has the two words of Philippians 3:10 and 3:12 together is wording shared with the Greek translation, not a quotation by Paul, and the note says so. That 22:4 answers 1 Corinthians 13:12 is a likeness of sense. That Isaiah 45:23 is said of the LORD and Philippians 2:11 of Jesus is stated as the text has it; what that means for who Jesus is, the note leaves to the reader, as this site does elsewhere. Nothing here is Jon’s reading except the recommendation below.
A song, Jon’s recommendation. Alongside this note Jon recommends the song “My Jesus” by Anne Wilson. It is easy to find online.