The lodge had a lounge where FOP members could eat and drink along with their guests. It was a newly built, modern restaurant complete with a police motorcycle hanging from the ceiling. During our time there, the off-duty cops were coming in and out of the building. This man would stop and talk to them about police work, with me lingering at his side.
The whole experience was delightfully surreal. It gave me a peek at what it might be like for me to grow out a magnificent Tom Selleck mustache and be one of the boys in blue.
However, there was no way that I was entering that lodge to eat lunch if I had just showed up by myself. I came as this man’s guest. He had to present his card to the hostess before we could enter. The FOP lounge is not just another commercial restaurant. It is a space specifically built for members of the FOP and their guests. My PCA clergy card would not pass muster for entry. It was this man’s presence and his presence alone that granted me access to that space.
It can be quite the treat to be able to go someplace where you otherwise wouldn’t be able to step foot because you are with someone who has special access to that space. There are lots of memorably enchanting places you can experience in this world if only you know the right person who can gain you special entry.
We may easily forget that the reality of Christian prayer is based on this principle.
Mature Christians are intimately acquainted with the concrete ways in which the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ form the basis of our life of salvation in Him. Unfortunately, it is too often the case that even mature Christians do not give much thought to how Christ’s ascension does the same.
Prayer is one of those things we know we are supposed to do as Christians, but perhaps it may not be something we stop and think about. We don’t consider what exactly it is we are doing and why we can even do it.
But one of the most important things for us to understand about what it means for us to pray as Christians is this: of all the special places in creation to which we might have access because of our connection to someone, the most precious is the access we have to the heavenly throne room of God because of our connection to Jesus.
Christian prayer is an action through which we have special entry to God’s heavenly presence because Jesus always stands there at the right hand of God and we can come through Him as His special guests. Christian prayer is about using our connection with Jesus to gain access to a space we would otherwise be unable to access on our own.
One of the places in Scripture we most clearly find this connection between Christian prayer and the ascension of Jesus is the book of Acts. Some scholars have argued that a better title for the book than “the Acts of the Apostles” would be “the Acts of the Risen Lord Jesus.” He is the agent acting throughout the narrative of the book to accomplish for His people on earth things that He alone can effect from His exalted position in heaven.
The gospel of Luke ends with a brief account of Jesus’ ascending to heaven. Yet, when Luke begins his second volume, he opens by rewinding to give us another account of Jesus’ ascension to heaven. And that is surely not just because Luke wants to be repetitive. It is because Luke wants us to read everything that happens in the book of Acts in light of Jesus’ ascension to heaven. We cannot really understand the events of Acts without understanding how they are connected to the exaltation of Christ at the right hand of the Father.
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God is concerned not only with heart motive—although that is certainly central—nor is he simply concerned that people worship him alone—although that is, of course, true. He is also concerned that his people worship him in the right way, which includes not worshiping in ways that he has forbidden or inventing new ways to worship that he has not commanded.

In the Old Testament Law, God gave his people very specific instructions about how they were to relate to the people around them, including in their culture and worship practices.
Deuteronomy 12:2–8 reveals important principles in this regard. God commanded that the people destroy the places where pagans worshiped, including their altars, their pillars, their images, and even the names of the places. This is clearly more than simply insisting that they worship Yahweh rather than false gods; this is stark evidence that God rejects worship that imitates pagan worship in any way. Everything in pagan culture embodies religious commitments, and those elements that are imbibed with pagan religious meaning must be rejected for use in worship. One might ask why they had to destroy, for example, the altars and pillars; wouldn’t these be useful even for the worship of the true God? Yet God commanded that they be destroyed. He summarized his desires with the words, “You shall not worship the LORD your God in that way.” Instead, they were to listen to his instructions and find a place of his choosing for their worship.
Yet the people disobeyed these principles even as they waited at the foot of the mountain for Moses to return from receiving the law tablets. The golden calf incident is a terrible failure for this newly formed worship community, but unfortunately one that foreshadows many other failures in the days and years ahead. Fearing that Moses would never come back, the people demanded a physical representation of deity, just like the pagan nations had. Aaron complied, forming a golden calf, similar to the practice of both Egypt and Canaan, and the people celebrated with an orgiastic festival so noisy that it sounded to Joshua’s ears from a distance like “a noise of war in the camp.”
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We receive the eternal reality of the Son through created means: God is knowable. If nothing else, by revelation we know God is incomprehensible(!), but by grace and pure condescension we know much more. For God has spoken to us in Christ, who is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature. (Heb. 1:2,3)

Regarding the creator-creature distinction, there is no disagreement among Christians as to whether God knows a greater number of propositions relative to man, or whether God understands how all bits of knowledge exhaustively relate to each other in a mode or manner not available to created beings. Indeed, there is a quantitative difference between God’s knowledge and man’s. God simply knows more stuff. But as just alluded to, the mode or manner of how God knows is radically different than how man knows. We may say that God’s knowledge is original and intuitive whereas man’s knowledge is derivative and receptive. No Christian demurs.
Where things get a bit trickier is over the content of what God and man know. Does the proposition God is Spirit have the identical meaning for both God and man? If not, then how can man know God given that for true knowledge to obtain man’s thoughts must intersect the mind of God? Must man know univocally in order to know God?
Revelation, an accommodation:
The object of our knowledge is God’s revelation of himself, which is a replication (or divine interpretation) of the original, intended to accommodate finite creatures. In other words, God reveals himself to created beings through created things – for instance language, laws of inference and categories of thought. Yet the propositions of revelation pertaining to God that are processed through the human mind are not themselves God. They are suitable accommodations to our finitude. Although God knows himself originally and intuitively, he lisps his revelation of himself to us in a manner fitting to our creaturely capacities.
With respect to mode or manner, God cannot have us know him in the same way in which he knows himself. We’d have to share in the divine essence to know God that way. Accordingly, our descriptions of God will be proportional to what God desires us to know through the revelatory mode in which he has allowed us to know him. But again, must man know univocally to know God? If not, then how can man truly know God even partially?
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