At first glance, people who advocate "internal knowing" or "self-knowledge" appear to be very humble, that they want to seek God's guidance, direction or knowledge. However, if one looks a little deeper, one realizes this is actually the most prideful and arrogant thing to do.

Instead of the objective knowledge that God had conveyed to His prophets and messengers (which is recorded in the Bible), self-knowledge or internal knowing is to spit in God's face and claim that they know better. To hide their pride, they will say that their "knowledge" is from God. However, if the knowledge is truly from God, it should be the objective truth. That is, God will have the same knowledge to everyone. It's easy to know that "internal knowing" or "self-knowledge" is false, because it is impossible to get people with such knowledge to agree on any issue.

People with internal knowing or self-knowledge will give you two "explanations" for the discrepancies, they say 1) God's will on each person is different, and 2) our 'self' or our experience is bad, thus in order to get to the truth, we have to peel our knowledge like an onion, until we reach the truth.

Let's tackle these two explanations one at a time. First off, we are not talking about different wills of God on different people, but the absolute truth like what is God like. Some of these "internal knowing" people will tell you that God is all love and not evil. Others will say that God is both good and evil. So when two people with subjective "internal knowing" have opposite views, say on the nature of God, who is correct?

This brings us to the second point. These people will tell you that they have opposite views because they still have not gotten to the absolute truth yet, and they are still "peeling the onion". But this does not tell you who is correct. If a Christian wants to know the truth, he or she will open the Bible and gets the objective truth. With "internal knowing" or "self-knowledge" it's all subjective, and no one knows the truth. I have seen one person with "internal knowing" or "self-knowledge" literally flip-flopped from God is all love and not bad, to God is both good and evil overnight. So, how do you know this is the truth. People with "internal knowing" and "self-knowledge" will never get to the truth even till the day they die.

There is something very interesting about wanting to know what God knows apart from the objective knowledge that God has given us in the Bible. This was exactly the trick used by Satan who tempted Adam and Eve to sin, trying to replace God's objective word (not to eat the forbidden fruit) by our subject knowledge (questioning God's word). Satan said, "you will not surely die (if you eat the forbidden fruit), for God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:4-5).

Satan was created perfect in his own ways (Ezekiel 28:15) , but he wanted to be God himself (Isaiah 14.12-14) and rebelled against God.

Today, Satan is using the same trick to lure us to sin, by telling us that we have the subjective "internal knowing" or "self-knowing" and we don't need to listen to the objective word of God (the Bible). It is very revealing when we notice that the name of the forbidden tree is called the Tree of Knowledge. Sound familiar?

People with internal knowing or self-knowledge reminds us of God's remark at the end of the Book of Judges (Judges 21:25) "in those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes."