God Incomprehensible

Today's Scripture

Isaiah 55:8-9 — "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."

Romans 11:33 — "Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!"

Psalm 145:3 — "Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable."

The Big Idea

"Incomprehensible" is an old church word, and it does not mean God makes no sense. It means no created mind can take all of him in. We can know God truly — because he has told us about himself — without ever knowing him completely. Think of the ocean: you can really swim in it, and never touch the bottom.

Reflection

Higher than the heavens

Yesterday we said the goal of life is to know God. Today comes the humbling part: the God we are getting to know is bigger than our heads.

Isaiah 55:8-9 measures the gap. God's thoughts are higher than our thoughts "as the heavens are higher than the earth." That is not the gap between a professor and a student, where the student might catch up. It is the gap between sky and ground. God does not just know more than we do. He thinks on a level we cannot reach by trying harder.

The Bible says this everywhere. Psalm 145:3 — "his greatness is unsearchable." Job 11:7 — "Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty?" The expected answer is no. And Job, after listing God's power over storms and seas and stars, ends with one of the most breathtaking sentences in Scripture: Job 26:14 — "Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways, and how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand?"

The outskirts. The whisper. Everything we can see of God — galaxies included — is the edge of the edge of who he is.

David felt the same vertigo just thinking about how thoroughly God knew him: Psalm 139:6 — "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it." Notice his tone. Not frustration — wonder. He sounds like someone standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, not someone failing a math test.

This should not depress us. Anselm, a monk who thought as hard about God as anyone in history, learned to put trust before comprehension:

"For I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand." — Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion

You do not wait until you have figured God out to trust him. You trust him, and understanding starts to grow — the way you come to understand a friend by living alongside them, not by finishing a report on them first.

The danger of a pocket-sized God

Here is the practical problem: our minds hate mystery. We want a God we can summarize. So we shrink him — not usually on purpose, but the way a photo shrinks a mountain — until he fits in a mental pocket.

Think of how a three-line online bio "captures" a person. Name, job, one joke. Now imagine someone claiming they know your mother because they read her bio. Every summary of a person leaves out almost everything — and God is infinitely more than a person like us.

That is why the second commandment bans making images of God. Packer's chapter on idolatry explains the logic:

"The heart of the objection to pictures and images is that they inevitably conceal most, if not all, of the truth about the personal nature and character of the divine Being whom they represent." — J.I. Packer, Knowing God

A statue of God can show strength, maybe. It cannot show holiness, mercy, patience, or the love that goes to a cross. Every image leaves out almost everything. Packer's verdict is blunt:

"Images dishonor God, for they obscure his glory." — J.I. Packer, Knowing God

And Packer presses the point further than statues. The most dangerous images are the ones in our heads — God as a vague grandfather, God as a strict referee, God as a cosmic vending machine. Augustine warned centuries ago that anything our minds can fully wrap around is, for that very reason, not God. If you can fit it in your pocket, you have made a souvenir, not met the Lord.

Test yourself with this: is your picture of God ever allowed to surprise you, correct you, or say no to you? A god who always agrees with you, always shares your politics, and never bursts your categories is probably a reflection in a mirror, not the unsearchable God of Romans 11:33. Real persons resist our summaries of them. So does the living God — gloriously.

The God who stoops to be known

So if God is past finding out, are we stuck guessing? No — and this is the hinge of the whole doctrine. Deuteronomy 29:29 — "The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever." There are secret things; God keeps some rooms locked. Why he allowed a particular tragedy. Exactly how his sovereignty and our choices fit together. The timing of things we have prayed about for years. But there are revealed things — and notice the verse's strong word: they belong to us, like a deed to a house. God has spoken. What he says about himself is true, even though it is not exhaustive.

This is the difference between a puzzle and a mystery. A puzzle is solved and then boring. A mystery — in the Bible's sense — is something too rich to use up. God is not a puzzle missing pieces. He is a Person whose depths keep opening.

John Calvin had a wonderful picture for how God speaks to creatures as small as us:

"As nurses commonly do with infants, God is wont in a measure to 'lisp' in speaking to us." — John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

Baby talk. When a mother leans over a crib, she does not lecture in adult vocabulary; she stoops to the child's level — and what she communicates is still true. All of Scripture is God stooping. He talks about his "arm" and his "face," tells stories, gives names, makes promises — accommodating infinite truth to finite minds without ever lying to us.

That means the right response to God's bigness is not a shrug. Isaiah 40:28 — "Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable." Isaiah does not say, "His understanding is unsearchable, so stop thinking about him." He says have you not known? — take hold of what has been revealed, because an unsearchable God who has spoken is the best news tired people ever got.

Unsearchable — and made known

Now the gospel turn. The incomprehensible God did not stay behind the veil. John 1:18 — "No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known." The God no mind can climb up to climbed down to us. The baby in the manger is the One whose ways are higher than the heavens. Packer never got over this:

"The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the Incarnation." — J.I. Packer, Knowing God

The Incarnation — God becoming a human being in Jesus — does not shrink God down to pocket size. It is God, at full size, stooping all the way: the unsearchable One with searchable hands and feet, the everlasting Creator getting tired at a well, the thunder choosing to whisper so we could bear to hear it. If you want to know what the God beyond your comprehension is actually like, you no longer have to guess. Watch Jesus welcome children, touch lepers, and weep at a funeral. That is the character at the bottom of the universe.

So we live between two truths. We really know God — truly, savingly, today. And we do not yet know him fully. 1 Corinthians 13:12 — "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known." Notice the last phrase: fully known. The knowing we ache for is already how God holds us. That is why Packer can say:

"There is no peace like the peace of those whose minds are possessed with full assurance that they have known God, and God has known them, and that this relationship guarantees God's favor to them in life, through death and on forever." — J.I. Packer, Knowing God

Look at how Paul models this. He spends three agonizing chapters of Romans on a question that kept him up at night — why so many of his own people had rejected their Messiah. He reasons hard, quotes Scripture after Scripture, follows the argument as far as it will go. And then, where the road runs out, he does not file a complaint. He sings: "Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!... For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen" (Romans 11:33, 36). The unanswered questions become fuel for adoration.

When your thinking about God runs out of road, then, that is not a dead end. It is the trailhead of worship. A God small enough to be fully understood would be too small to be worth it.

Going Deeper

Try Packer's own study habit today. He wrote:

"We must turn each truth that we learn about God into matter for meditation before God, leading to prayer and praise to God." — J.I. Packer, Knowing God

Take one truth from today — "his greatness is unsearchable" — and walk it through those three steps. Meditate: hold the sentence in your mind for one quiet minute. Pray: tell God one place in your life that feels too big, and remember it is small to him. Praise: thank him that you will never reach the bottom of him, which means you will never run out of God.