Tuesday, September 2, 2008

God thunders marvelously with His voice;
He does great things which we cannot comprehend.
Job 37:5 (NKJV)

One of my favorite pastimes is sitting by a nearby flowing stream while meditating on some portion of Scripture or reflecting on some theological book. The multifaceted sounds of the rushing brook flowing through a forest abundant with life grabs both the imagination and the soul. In this place, all forms of life surround me. Most are unaware of my presence while all fail to comprehend it. In these moments I cannot help but reflect on the incomprehensibility of God. Ulrich Zwingli once noted the remarkable truth that “Of ourselves we know no more about the nature of God than beetles know about the nature of humans.” ¹

God is above all things, standing above time itself. In bringing the message of God to those tending the Bethlehem flocks, the heavenly angels reminded the lowly shepherds that all glory belongs to “God in the highest” (Luke 2:14). With the skill of a psalmist the apostle Paul declares, “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out! For who has known the mind of the Lord?” (Rom 11:33-34a). Even the divine name itself, the holy tetragrammaton ‘Yahweh’ (sometimes rendered Jehovah) hints to the incomprehensibility of God since it simply means “I am who I am”. “There is no name that fully expresses his being, no definition that captures him”.²

Augustine, the Church’s premiere theologian, was equally awed by the infinite magnitude of God which far surpassed the human mind. In his day, as in ours, there was a disturbing tendency to reduce God to human categories. Yet such visions of the divine behold only a benign human creation, a human-phantom writ large, an imposter originating from humanity’s all too finite imagination. Humans, even Christian humans, are sinfully inclined to want to wrap our minds around God. We wish to probe him, understand him, to weigh him in the balance. Augustine warns us against this tendency when he writes, “We are speaking of God. Is it any wonder if you do not comprehend him? For if you comprehend, it is not God you comprehend…To attain some slight knowledge of God is a great blessing; to comprehend him, however, is totally impossible.”³

I believe in a God I do not understand. “’For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways’ says the Lord. ‘For as the heaven is higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts’”(Isaiah 55:8-9). Yet my failure in comprehension is rewarded with the precious gift of apprehension. Many seek to understand God, and so reduce him to less-than-God in order to make this possible. I seek only to delight in the knowledge that he is.

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¹ Ulrich Zwingli, Opera III, 157.
² Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, Vol 2 (Baker, 2004), p 47.
³ Augustine, Lectures on the Gospel of John, tract 38, NPNF (1), VII, 217-21.