God Incomprehensible

Today's Reading

Read 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."

Then read Romans 11:33-36: "Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! 'For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?'... For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen."

Reflection

Before we can know God truly, Packer insists, we must reckon with a humbling reality: we cannot know God exhaustively. He is incomprehensible — not in the sense that we can know nothing about Him, but in the sense that we can never know everything about Him. The difference matters enormously.

God has revealed Himself genuinely. Through creation, through Scripture, through prophets and apostles, and supremely through Jesus Christ, God has made Himself known. We can know Him truly. But we cannot know Him fully. There will always be more of God than our finite minds can hold.

Packer frames this with characteristic precision: "A God whom we could understand exhaustively, and whose revelation of Himself confronted us with no mysteries whatsoever, would be a God in man's image, and therefore an imaginary God, not the God of the Bible at all." A God small enough for us to completely comprehend would not be God. He would be a projection of our own intellect — an idol of the mind.

Isaiah 55 makes this point with vivid imagery. The gap between God's thoughts and ours is not like the gap between a professor and a student. It is like the gap between the heavens and the earth — qualitative, not merely quantitative. God does not think slightly better thoughts than we do. He inhabits a different order of reality entirely.

Paul's response in Romans 11 is not frustration but worship. Having spent eleven chapters wrestling with God's purposes in salvation history — including the agonizing question of Israel's unbelief — Paul does not end with a tidy conclusion. He ends with a doxology: "Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!" The mysteries he cannot resolve drive him not to despair but to adoration.

Going Deeper

The incomprehensibility of God is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be embraced. It means that knowing God is an infinite journey — there will always be more to discover, more to wonder at, more to worship. It means we should hold our theological formulations with humility, knowing they are true but never exhaustive. And it means that prayer is not primarily about informing God of things He does not know, but about entering into a relationship with One whose depths we will be exploring for eternity.

Today, let God's incomprehensibility produce not anxiety but awe. The God you are getting to know is bigger than you imagined — and that is the best news there is.