Our Response

By now, hopefully, the case is clear: God is incomprehensible to us, yet because of his greatness, his humility, and his perfect love, we can still have an accurate knowledge of him.

How do you respond to the reality that God is incomprehensibly great? How do you handle mystery? One likely response is confusion. We say, "OK, I don't get it," "This doesn't make sense."

I think this is frustrating for all of us. It is disappointing. It makes us feel our inadequacy and our limitations. But if you insist on saying, "God must make sense to me!" then the problem is, you haven't understood what that sentence means. Why must GOD make sense to you? Given the differences in who we are, how could he be comprehensible?

We need this doctrine. It challenges our pride.

To take it a step further, some people don't just feel the occasional frustration that God is incomprehensible. In a sense, they give up. They see God as incomprehensible - and that's ALL they start to see about God.

As the theologian Fred Sanders says: "But the problem with overusing this negative mode of thinking is that when you have subtracted everything you can imagine from the internal life of God, you are left with nothing in your mind to think about, and it becomes impossible to conceive of that blankness as being more lively and interesting than what you have subtracted."

If you go this route, it is pride in another way. Ok, God is incomprehensible? All my thoughts about God are useless. Forget about it, there's nothing to think about there. But that's not humility - that's despair.

What would be a better way to respond?

If we are humble, we will see God's incomprehensibility from a different light.

These truths will become a source of awe and wonder!

Instead of a smug sense that we know it all, we will be amazed that there is ALWAYS more to know about God. We will long for an eternity to know more about this infinite, holy, perfect God. God's incomprehensibility can lead to worship, wonder, and awe, but only if our hearts are humbled by the reality that, by the very nature of our study, God is incomprehensible to us.

I think about when my kids wrestle with me. They both work with all of their might to pin me to the ground. There are two outcomes: either I pin them or I let them pin me.

But either way, they don't have a full understanding of my strength. Their lack of understanding is because there is a difference in the degree of our strength. And one day very soon, it will be the other way around: they'll be stronger than me.

But our lack of understanding of God is because there is a different kind of strength. And that difference is permanent. Still, our God is so good to us. If, like Jacob, we have a fierce pursuit of God, he will come to us and wrestle with us. And the outcome will be that we end up closer to God, but walking with a limp. It is better to be limping and blessed by God than to walk in our strength.

As we read in Psalm 145, "I will extol you, my God and King, and bless your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless you and praise your name forever and ever. Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable."