Incomprehensibly Great

We've said God is far beyond our understanding. He is incomprehensible. Why?

First, because He is the Creator and we are His creatures. He is immutable, while we are constantly changing. God is simple, one, and united, whereas we are complex, divided, and confused. He is impassable, yet we are passible. God is infinite, but we are finite. He is holy, holy, holy, and we are sinful, wicked, and suppress the truth.

Any of these reasons is enough for us to humble ourselves and say, How can I know God? What hope is there?

These considerations should destroy any sense of pride or superiority or arrogance about how well we know God. And to the degree we do understand God, we see that his greatness is beyond our understanding.

So do we just give up? What does it mean to know a God who is incomprehensible?

But first, everything we have said about why God is incomprehensible is… amazingly, the same reason we CAN know God. Because God is so great, so awesome, so perfect - obviously, he can communicate with his creation! God isn't limited like we are!

It would be absurd to say, a God this great, just can't tell us the truth about himself! There's nothing to know about him! That's the opposite of what we've just said.

In 2 Timothy, Paul teaches us, "All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching…"

God has spoken! He has given us an authoritative basis to know him and his will. Of course, God can tell us who he is.

The point is more limited: because of our differences, God cannot tell us ALL of who he is. We can expect to have accurate but not exhaustive knowledge of God. The objective basis for testing our knowledge of God is asking how closely our understanding of God aligns with what God has disclosed about himself.

This is one reason why Christians care so much about the Bible. The Bible is the record of God's self-disclosure to us. It is therefore the standard by which we evaluate what people say about God.

Because God is incomprehensible, the starting point is not our reason, but God's revelation.

We use our minds to understand God's word. I hope you sense that we are attempting to love God with our minds in this course! But our reason is operating in response to God's revelation.

Second, the doctrine of God's incomprehensibility leads us to marvel that God is too great for us to understand. But God's incomprehensibility also leads us to marvel at God's humility in revealing himself to us.

God is greater than we can imagine. God is also humbler than we can grasp. As we ponder the mystery of God's incomprehensibility, this brings new wonder to the reality of the Incarnation.

Think of John 1:1, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

And now the wonder of verse 14 - "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth."

God has humbled himself so that we might know him and see his glory.