3 Ways to Respond to God’s Incomprehensibility

Let me suggest three ways in which we need to respond practically to the self-revelation of the gloriously incomprehensible God.

1. Humble Acceptance

First, we need to humbly accept what we do not know. We all find it annoying when we do not know something. It starts in childhood. You only have to see another child whisper in the ear of a friend in the schoolyard to know the rising indignation that comes when you feel out of the loop. There is a sense of urgency to know and a sense of injustice that you have been excluded. We all feel as though we should be fully informed. When it comes to knowing and understanding God, it can drive us to distraction if we feel that we have a question that is unanswered or, worse still, unanswerable.

For people who are exploring the Christian faith, this can be a real obstacle. They may have a question about God and feel there are limitations to the answers they are getting. Or, as believers, we encounter a situation where two truths about God do not seem to sit well together and we cannot reconcile them perfectly. These things can trouble us. The danger will always be that we end up in a position of frustration or doubt and that we give up in despair. But I would like to suggest that this dynamic is actually just what we should expect. We should expect to hit some dead-end roads when we consider the deep things of God.

Knowing the Lord is at the core of who we are and what we do as God’s people.

We need to learn to accept the fact that we are the creatures and not the Creator, that we do not have a right answer to every question, and that there is a necessary place for faith—for trusting the God whom we do not fully understand. Ultimately, if we could find every answer to our questions about God, and understand every answer we received, then the God we worshiped would be a small god, unworthy of our praise and adoration.

2. We Must Respond

If we need to humbly accept what we do not know, then we also need to be responsive to what we do know. When we come to see that there are questions about God for which we do not have an answer, it is easy for us to become fixated on those gaps in our knowledge and understanding, but the truth is that God has told us more in His Word than we will ever fully grasp. “What more can he say, than to you he hath said?” More than one lifetime of truth is contained within the Bible, and I think all of us who spend time digging into the Word only find that, the further we go, the more we have to learn. Therefore, we need to be careful not to fixate on what is unknown—in other words, what God has chosen not to reveal—and rather give ourselves to responding to what He has said.

The Bible is not here to satisfy all my curiosity about God. It does not exist to answer any and every question I may have. It is here, however, to tell me that I am a sinner and that God sent His Son to rescue me. It tells me that I must respond to Him in repentance and faith. It tells me that God requires my obedience. The constant danger for us is that we will set aside the safety card, if you like, because it does not scratch the itch of our curiosity. We will close our minds and our hearts to God’s revelation of Himself in the Scriptures because we have questions that are not yet answered. In doing that, we will fail to hear the message of salvation that God’s Word brings; we will fail to heed the call to repent and believe; we will fail to respond to the requirement to obey.

The Bible does not resolve every question for us. We do not know God as He knows Himself and we do not have insight into every aspect of His being. But while God may not have given us insight or capacity to know Him exhaustively, He has invited us to know Him truly. He has come to us in the person of His Son to reveal Himself to us, and He has placed His call on our lives.

When Jesus appeared on the scene in Galilee, His call to the people was simple, “Repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15). Turn from your sin and believe that I have come to save you from the consequences and destruction of sin. Those who first responded in repentance and faith did not examine the origin of God or the mechanics of Christ’s incarnation, or the validity of Jesus’ claims against those of other religions, or sit down and debate with Him the origin of evil. All those discussions are valid, and the Christian faith is intellectually coherent and bears close examination. Yet sometimes the debate and the questioning actually become the excuse not to respond.

Perhaps you are a believer, but you sense that you are allowing yourself to drift away from the Lord. You are allowing your heart to grow cool toward Him, and what you are saying to yourself or others is that you have encountered some major intellectual barrier. There is some aspect of God’s Word that you do not understand or cannot logically reconcile. If you are being honest with yourself, that questioning is now becoming an excuse for disobedience, for drifting and wandering. Maybe, if you are being really honest with yourself, the problem is that you just do not like what God has quite clearly said. If that is the case, let me urge you to be careful. We may have honest and sincere questions, and it is right and legitimate to bring those to God’s Word and work through them as best as we can, but we need to take care never to allow our questioning to become a cover for disobedience and an excuse to sidestep the Word of God.

3. Ready for More

We must humbly accept what we do not know, we must be responsive to what we do know, and finally, we must be hungry to know more. In the Psalms David wrote, “How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I would count them, they are more than the sand” (Ps. 139:17–18). For David, the knowledge that the thoughts of God are vast in sum—outnumbering the grains of sand by the sea—makes those thoughts more precious and more wonderful to him. When it comes to knowing God, there is always more to know and, in fact, the more we know of him, the more we realize how little we know and the more we hunger to grow in our knowledge.

Of course, something of this is natural when it comes to any relationship. As we get to know someone—in friendship, in family, in marriage—however long we have known a person, we always have more to discover. Those who are married know this especially well: you never reach a point in marriage (even after thirty or forty years!) when you stop learning more about the other person. That is part of the joy and wonder of it. God has revealed more of Himself to us in His Word than we will ever comprehend in this lifetime. There is always more of Him to know and to experience. If we are believers, we long to know Him better.

I was recently reading through Jeremiah and I came across this wonderful exhortation:

Thus says the Lord: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me.” (Jer. 9:23–24)

Knowing the Lord is at the core of who we are and what we do as God’s people. It is the essence of life. Remember that Jesus says, “And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3). Eternal life is knowing God. He is the incomprehensible one. There are depths to Him that we will never plumb, there are heights that we will never reach, but there is an eternity’s worth of growing in knowledge of Him.

I wonder if you and I are hungry to know Him more. I wonder if that is what we boast in—knowing the Lord as He has made Himself known. I wonder if this majestic and glorious God is our delight and if thinking of Him consumes our mental energy, fills our heart, and drives us to His Word.

Where we reach the limits of our understanding, we need to learn to move from inquiry and contemplation to praise and adoration. The Puritan Thomas Watson wrote this:

We can no more search out [God’s] infinite perfections, than a man upon the top of the highest mountain can reach the firmament, or take a star in his hand. Oh, have God-admiring thoughts! Adore where you cannot fathom. . . . In heaven we shall see God clearly, but not fully, for he is infinite; he will communicate himself to us, according to the bigness of our vessel, but not the immenseness of his nature. Adore then where you cannot fathom.[1]

Our great God is incomprehensible. If we belong to Him, our heart’s desire is to know Him better through His Word, but where we reach the end of knowledge and understanding—what good advice that is—let us learn to adore Him all the more.

[1] Thomas Watson, A Body of Divinity (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1983), 54.