Do you KNOW God??? God has revealed Himself through His Son Jesus Christ. We know Him through The Holy Spirit and His Word. Jesus is The Word made flesh. When we have seen Him, we have seen the Father. God did not leave us clueless. He left us with an accurate account of all that we need to know about Him in The Bible. When we are His and obey Him he reveals Himself to us. In our spirit we call out to Him as our Father. We are called the children of God. What an intimate knowing relationship this is. It is the rightful quest of life to get to know The LORD better and better. We can have a relationship with Him and yes He does reveal Himself to us. It seems that you do not KNOW Him or really very much about Him except that you think He is unknowable except perhaps esoterically. The Muslims, also, believe that God is unknowable. One of the greatest things about Christianity is that God chooses to reveal Himself to us and desires to have a close, loving, and intimate relationship with us. He is our Father.
Wonderful post, Bell. You started my day on that high note!
Your Protestant, anthropomorphic understanding of The Father is not at all in accord with what the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church has always taught. It is a construct of the West which has developed since the 16th century. The Church, most especially in the East, has always applied what is called apophatic reasoning to understand The Father which is a method whereby we can try to understand by establishing what God is not.
"When we are His and obey Him he reveals Himself to us."
None of us can experience the essence of The Father or better put, share in it. Some few, through the power of the Holy Spirit, can experience, even share in, the uncreated energies of The Father, can experience a vision of the Uncreated Light. This, however, can happen only if one has died to the self quite nearly completely, so that our entire being becomes focused on God. Because The Word became Flesh and dealt among us, and by dying destroyed the power of death, we can and do experience Christ. By becoming "like Christ", we fulfill our created purpose and thus are adopted sons of God.
But do we "know" God's standards? No; God doesn't even "exist" in any way we understand existence. We see all around us the results of His energies, but not His essence.
"It is the rightful quest of life to get to know The LORD better and better. We can have a relationship with Him and yes He does reveal Himself to us. It seems that you do not KNOW Him or really very much about Him except that you think He is unknowable except perhaps esoterically."
It is not only a rightful quest, it should be the ultimate quest but it isn't a matter of "knowing", it is a matter of experiencing the Uncreated Light. Now perhaps you see this as being overly esoteric. Given the mindset of The West, especially since The Englightenment, I can see how you would feel and believe this way. But in the East, The Church has always declared the ineffability and complete transcendence of The Father. In fact, even the Trinity is a great mystery, at least the inner relationships of the Trinity are, the definitions of the Creed notwithstanding.
It may be that much of the apparent differences in what we believe are in fact nothing more than how we talk about things. But I believe it goes deeper than that. You apparently believe that we can know and understand The Father and thus can freely define Him and His purposes and ways. The Church declares that we can only experience His uncreated energies. I think that's a fundamental difference which goes beyond mere words.