incomprehensible
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Last week in Bible study we covered this rather-difficult-to-put-in-a-nutshell truth: God is incomprehensible.
Several times while I was reading the material, I caught myself thinking, Duh. Of course God is incomprehensible. This is obvious. Why do I need to read about it?
Oh, the irony of thinking Duh in response to the words “God is incomprehensible.” That reaction is exactly why I needed to read about it.
If you know me or are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I have made it my life’s work not only to know God as He has revealed Himself in His Word, but also to make His Word accessible to others so they can know Him, too. But God is incomprehensible—and that makes this whole errand seem, at face value, rather foolish. I can know God in a measure sufficient to walk in relationship with Him and to whet my appetite to know Him more, but I will never know Him entirely, even with an eternity ahead of me to try (let alone in this life).
The more I meditated on God’s incomprehensibility over the last week or so, the more I noticed two internal reactions surfacing: first, frustration; then, humility.
Frustration that I have read the Bible front to back many times over, and still barely skimmed the top off its riches of wisdom. That I’ve studied under scholars, both formally and informally, and can’t even hold all of that information in my mind at once—when there is infinitely more out there to learn. That I—a person who finds great security in facts and knowledge, turning every anxiety into a deep-dive of research and logic to soothe my fears—will never know God fully. Not in this life and not in the next. Never.
I know Him enough to know that this isn’t a frightening truth. But it is a frustrating one. I can imagine myself sometime in eternity future, still trying to plumb the depths of His character, and the deeper I go the deeper He gets. I suppose it will be something like trying to travel to the edge of an ever-expanding universe.
But after the hot swell of frustration came that gentle friend, Humility.
The incomprehensibility of God has humbled me to the point of wondering how I have ever made any but the most basic and absolute claims about who God is and what He is like. How we could ever try to color Him inside any lines—denominational, political, cultural—or stuff Him inside any box? I keep thinking of the entire book of Job, in which Job and four secular philosophers wax eloquent on how God would definitely do this and never do that, and God’s response is, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”
What if my denomination isn’t the one doing it “right”—it’s just doing it right in one small way, while the others do it right in other ways, together forming a kaleidoscope of glimpses of God’s glory? What if my political values aren’t “right”—they are just one valid way of looking at many complicated issues, and there is more than one way to love my neighbor with my vote? What if my cultural blinders keep me from seeing and accepting and celebrating how differently God might be working in people and places who are very much unlike me?
If I have learned anything by meditating on God’s incomprehensible nature, it’s that I know far less than I think I do about God. I don’t know which church He’d go to, which style of worship He’d choose, which candidate He would vote for, or whether He really still calls people to obedience through dreams and visions. What I do know is that He is good, and that He is King, and that all of us are probably wrong about a humbling portion of the rest of our most-cherished beliefs.
