God is Incomprehensible (God is Infinite - Pt 3).
“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 40:28.
Q. What does it mean to say that God is Infinite?
A. To say that God is infinite means that he is limitless, incomprehensible, perfect, unchangeable, and incomparable in all his being, attributes, and works.
Q. What does it mean to say that God is incomprehensible?
A. To say that God is incomprehensible means that there will always be an infinite degree to which he remains unknown to us.
One of my old mentors used to have an expression that he often used, I don’t know if it was original or not, but regardless it always stuck with me: “God is not subject to our scrutiny.” This statement is profoundly true. There is and will always remain to us a certain and infinite incomprehensibility about God. At face value, however, this presents a problem doesn’t it? If God is incomprehensible, how can we know him at all? Why not resign ourselves to failure right here at the start? To say that God is incomprehensible, however, is not to say that he is wholly unknowable – far from it. So what does it mean? And why is it so important to understand this?
In John 14:9 the Lord said to Philip: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” There is no question about it: God has revealed himself to us through his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Clearly then, God is not utterly incomprehensible. There is a degree to which we can know him. In fact, the essence of eternal life, which God gives us in Christ (Jn 3:16) is to know God
(Jn 17:3). Knowing God is actually the greatest and most important thing in our lives (Jer 9:24). And yet, having said that, there is also a sense in which God is incomprehensible. There is a sense in which he remains unknowable.
R.C.Sproul had a gift for expressing theological truth simply, and his comments on the incomprehensibility of God are no exception: “Theologically speaking, to say God is incomprehensible is not to say that God is utterly unknowable. It is to say that none of us can comprehend God exhaustively” (Sproul, Tabletalk, Aug 2014). Sproul expresses the truth here clearly and concisely. What this means is that there will always be a part of God that remains unknown to us, and an infinite part at that.
Consider Genesis 1:1, for example: “In the beginning, God created…” Now stop right there. We are so used to these words, aren’t we? And yet they are so heavy with meaning that they will confound even the greatest human intellect. Who can conceive in fullness what is
said in these words? Who can even begin to scale the eternal infinitude of God? Who can discern his nature? Who can fathom what it means for him to have existed from eternity? You will break your mind trying to get your head around it. So then, God has revealed himself, and yet there is also an infinitude of his being that is and remains utterly and totally beyond us. It is for this reason that Paul, in 1 Timothy 6:16, speaks of God as dwelling in “unapproachable light.”
Solomon also confesses that “the highest heaven” cannot contain God (1 Kgs 8:27), and if the highest heavens cannot contain him, how much less our tiny little minds? Even our knowledge of created things is limited in the extreme, there is so much in the world that we don’t yet understand. When we turn to consider God himself, the degree of our ignorance moves to infinitude. Read even the first few words of the Bible, and your intellect will be defeated: “In the beginning, God created…” Who can fathom God? He existed before the world was created. And while we can say those words, who can possibly comprehend a being who stands outside time itself? What does it even mean to exist outside of time itself? We have no categories for it! We cannot possibly comprehend the idea of such a being – God is incomprehensible, there will always be an infinite part of him that remains unknown to us.
“Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable” (Ps 145:3).
Q. How ought we to benefit from the doctrine of God’s incomprehensibility?
A. The doctrine of God’s incomprehensibility ought to fill us with awe and wonder, humble us at his immensity, inspire us to know him, and restrict us to what he has revealed.
Q. How is it that God’s incomprehensibility should fill us with awe and wonder?
A. By showing us that in his plans, purposes, and person, there is an infinite horizon of excellence for us to see.
“How can a man be in the right before God? If one wished to contend with him, one could not answer once in a thousand times. He is wise in heart and mighty in strength – who has hardened himself against him, and succeeded? He who removes mountains, and they
know it not, when he overturns them in his anger, who shakes the earth out of its place, and its pillars tremble; who commands the sun, and it does not rise; who seals up the stars; who alone stretched out the heavens and trampled the waves of the sea; who the Bear and Orion, the Pleiades and the chambers of the south; who does great things beyond searching out, and marvellous things beyond number. Behold, he passes by me, and I see him not; he moves on, but I do not perceive him” – Job 9:1-11.
As you go about your morning routine each day, if you could begin to comprehend what God is doing right there in that moment, while you’re pouring coffee, your brain might just melt. First, your kitchen was filled with light, which has just arrived after taking 8 minutes and 20 seconds to cover the 150 million kilometres between earth and the sun. Now that’s a long way! But thankfully the sun, a nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma about 109 times bigger than our planet, which is sustained by a constant sequence of nuclear fusions at its core, is up to the task of generating that light and propelling it that distance into your kitchen. God effortlessly spoke that sun into existence on day four, by the way. Now that light is good, but it would be useless if you didn’t have an eye that could use it. If that light didn’t pass through the clear front layer of your eye, which bends the light on the way to passing through your pupil, and if that wasn’t followed by an inner lens working with your cornea to focus the light correctly for your retina, which is a light-sensitive layer of tissue at the back of your eye capable of turning the light into electrical signals which then travel through your optic nerve to be translated by your brain into the images that you see, if that didn’t happen – you wouldn’t be able to see your coffee, your stove top, or your coffee cup. And let’s not even get started on what it took to organise coordination between your brain and your hand so that you would be capable of lifting that coffee cup up to your lips and taking that first sip. And please don’t even mention the word “molecular”, because my brain is starting to hurt now.
But the wonder of what God did to make it possible for you to make and drink that coffee is only just the beginning, we’re only just getting started. Because you remember what happened next don’t you? When your kids came out, and you yelled at them, or your spouse did something that annoyed you and you got angry, in that moment God did something incredible. You see, your sin in that moment required God’s patience. In other words, God was willing, in that moment, to suffer the infinitely heinous crime of your sinful anger by temporarily withholding his righteous judgment and sending you to hell. By the way, his patience was also exercised when you didn’t not think to thank him for the light, the coffee, your kitchen, and everything else from earlier that morning too.
But we’ve got further to go here. You see, not only did God exercise his patience toward you, but he also provided what was needful for the forgiveness of your morning sins as well. God’s patience has limits, and so a more permanent solution to our guilt is necessary, and
to deal with the guilt of this morning’s anger God himself actually became incarnate for your sake. He lived a perfect life, and died on your behalf crucified on the cross, so that you would not be judged for getting angry this morning at 8:10am. And so not only did God in his goodness arrange that delicious beverage for you, and all that was necessary for the enjoyment thereof, but he arranged his own incarnation so that you would not have to suffer the eternal torments of his righteous judgment when you misused that gift this
morning. God perfectly arranged all of these things so that you would be sustained and have the gracious provision that you needed for the 30 minutes between 8:00am and 8:30am this morning.
Now this ought to awe us. Think about what God has done for you in the space of an average 30 minute span in your home life, and think about how little you were even aware of it at the time. In the words of Job: “he passes by me, and I see him not; he moves on, but I do not perceive him.” But even what we’ve considered, awesome as it is, is but a tiny finite glimpse into who God is and what he has done. And what’s more, what we’ve talked about so far still abides in the general realms of comprehensibility (although we are daily unaware of these things in the moment). Beyond what we’re capable of comprehending, God is and has been at work in even more incredible ways, an infinity of ways which are presently beyond us. In every moment, his infinite mind of wisdom and power is working and arranging every possible contingency down to the last molecule.
How is it that God’s incomprehensibility ought to fill us with awe and wonder? By showing us that in his plans, purposes, and personality, there is an infinite horizon of excellence for us to see.