knowing

John Frame in Doctrine of the Knowledge of God:

We tend to forget how often in Scripture God performs His mighty acts so that men will "know" that He is Lord (cf. Exod. 6:7; 7:5) 17; 8:10, 22; 9:14, 29f.; 10:2; 14:4, 18; 16:12; Isa. 49:23, 26; 60:16; etc.). We tend to forget how often Scripture emphasizes that although in one sense all people know God (cf. Rom. 1:21), in another sense such knowledge is the exclusive privilege of God's redeemed people and indeed the ultimate goal of the believer's life. What could be more "central" than that? But in our modem theologizing-orthodox and liberal, academic and popular-this language does not come readily to our lips. We speak much more easily about being saved, born again, justified, adopted, sanctified, baptized by the Spirit; about entering the kingdom, dying and rising with Christ; and about believing and repenting than we do about knowing the Lord. For Calvin, there was no such reticence. He was quite at home with the scriptural language; he made it truly his own. And in doing so, he unlocked a rich treasury of biblical teaching of which we are largely ignorant today.