In the New Covenant access to God is open so that those making it are no longer cut off in order that they might come to know God. Eternal life is to know God. God gets to know people by their obedient submission to the requirements that He puts them to. Anybody who is iniquitous is not going to be known by God. Those who are workers of lawlessness do not obey Him and do not share the same standards so they could not possibly come to know Him because they would never experience life in the same way that He did. The New Covenant invites one to taste Him by experiencing life in communion with Him through sharing life in study in prayer in meditation and obedience all aimed toward knowing Him and intensifying the community with Him.

Knowing God is deeply tied to keeping His commandments, for true intimacy with Him comes through obedience. Jesus Christ warns that many who claim to know God will hear Him say, "I never knew you," because they practice lawlessness and unrighteousness. To know God means to experience Him intimately, as reflected in the imagery of a husband and wife, a bridegroom and His bride, showing a cherished and personal relationship. Without obedience, there can be no true love for God, as love is demonstrated through keeping His commandments. God Himself reveals His nature as lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness, delighting in these traits and calling us to embody them. Those who strive to walk as He walked, practicing righteousness and showing lovingkindness, can be assured that they know God and that He knows them. This intimate relationship is sustained by persistent effort to live by His standards, never compromising with His laws, and growing in His holy, righteous character.

Keeping God's commandments is intrinsically tied to knowing Him, as it reflects a heart aligned with His will. To truly know God, one must possess the right attitude, desiring to believe and obey Him, and the proper motivation, seeking to bring glory to Him. Selfish attitudes and ulterior motives blind a person to the truth, hindering any accurate understanding of it. One must earnestly want to know, believe, and practice the truth. As Jesus taught, the way to discern the truth of His message is through practicing it, for in doing so, over time, its truth becomes evident as it transforms lives and strengthens relationships with God and others. If the Jewish authorities had truly kept the law given through Moses, they would have understood it and not sought to kill Him, but their refusal to practice it revealed their lack of true knowledge of God. The Feast of Tabernacles serves as a time of learning, where the best way to grasp truth is to apply it immediately with a desire to do His will and glorify Him, embedding it into one's mind and character.

Keeping God's commandments is inseparably tied to actually knowing Him, as I John 2:3-5 establishes: claiming to know God while not keeping His commandments makes one a liar, regardless of how much knowledge about Him has been accumulated. There is a crucial difference between knowing about someone through accumulated information and truly knowing them through lived experience. This principle exposes a broader cultural failure—professing faith in God while disobeying His commandments in virtually every area of life, substituting faith in knowledge itself for genuine moral conformity to God's order. Paul's statement in Philippians 3:10, "that I may personally know Him," reveals the process by which this knowledge is obtained. Paul first had to abandon confidence in his own righteousness in order to receive God's righteousness, which grants access to God and begins a relationship. But knowledge of God itself comes through experiencing daily problems, hardships, and services by the same power that raised Christ from the dead—the Holy Spirit working in one's life. This knowing is the necessary step before resurrection, since knowing Christ is eternal life. Paul's goal included entering "the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death"—a representative death, not merely substitutionary. Christ's death is our death: Christians are identified with His crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. This death has two aspects. The first is the legal, representative death—already accomplished through repentance, acceptance of Christ's blood, and baptism—by which sin's penalty is satisfied and one is raised to walk in newness of life. This is the beginning, not the goal itself, of coming to know God. The second aspect of death is a continuing personal obligation: because God has forgiven and declared us righteous, we owe a response—to "put to death the deeds of the body" (Romans 8:13) and to "mortify" earthly members (Colossians 3:5). This is not something God does for us, since doing so would eliminate free moral agency and prevent the building of character or the writing of God's law in the heart. It requires vigorous, painful, personal determination—refusing to feed sin's cravings so that sin, deprived of nourishment, withers and dies. Colossians 3:10 directly connects this ongoing mortification with being renewed "in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him," confirming that putting sin to death is how one comes to know Christ. This process inevitably involves suffering, since living righteously provokes the world's hostility, just as Christ's righteousness provoked persecution. Suffering is not sought for its own sake but embraced as a divine necessity that produces faith and Christlike character. Christ Himself was made complete through suffering, becoming fully identified with those He saves and able to aid those who are tempted. Believers follow this same pattern—the archegos principle—entering into Christ's sufferings by resisting sin daily, thereby being conformed to His death and, through that conformity, truly coming to know Him.