Have you ever lay on the grass outside and starred up into the clear sky? Have you looked at all the stars…maybe you saw a shooting star or two. I have. Everything in that moment seems to melt away. I would begin to ask myself questions like: How far away are those stars? How old are they? I bet Jesus looked at the same stars like I am doing right now. Is God is bigger than I ever thought of Him to be? It is in those very moments that I begin to recognize that I am not the center of the universe like I am so apt to thinking. The same can be said about standing on the very top of a mountain or staring into the crevasse of the Grand Canyon. These are humbling experiences. In that very moment we realize that we, after all, are very small indeed.
We have grown up in the United States to think “If I study hard enough, or work hard enough, nothing is impossible.” And “If I choose to make a single subject my life’s study, I can know all there is to know about any given subject” In many situations, this is very true. Unfortunately, I think we can sometimes group God into this same category. To think, “Our pastors have figured it out because they seem to know everything about God” or “If I wanted to, I could get all kinds of Biblical degrees and become an expert on knowing God.” This is so very far from the truth.
Where Paul did say to us in Romans 1 “what may be known of God is plain to us” he did not say that all of God is made plain to us. There are 2 very important truths to understand when we consider what it means to know God.
1) God is infinite
2) We are finite or limited
God is said to be Incomprehensible. Not that we don’t have the ability to know God, but that we are unable to understand God fully or completely.
Psalm 145:3 says “Great is the Lord, and most worthy of praise; His greatness no one can fathom.”
Psalm 147:5 “Great is our Lord and abundant in power; His understanding is beyond measure.”
I believe that even David, a man after God’s own heart could have been starring into the night sky when he authored Psalm 139:6 “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it” and then later in verse 17 he continues: “How precious are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them they would outnumber the grains of sand.”
If we would begin to ponder God, really press into Him, we would all be forced to draw the same conclusion; that there is no way we can understand God completely or fully. But even more than that I think we can draw even another conclusion from these very same passages: We can never understand any one single attribute of God either. His understanding, His greatness, His knowledge are all too vast to comprehend. We may be able to know something about God’s love, His power, or His purposes, but to know these things fully would mean that we would have minds on equal standing with God himself.
For those of us that find our satisfaction from intellectual pride, this might seem limiting or even a little hopeless of ever achieving that mark of completion or accomplishment. We won’t ever be able to check the knowledge of God off our list of study, but there is one very amazing thing about this very relationship between God and man.
There will never be a moment in time that we know “too much” about God. We will never grow tired in delighting in the expanse of His attributes. Whenever we get “bowled over” in amazement of God’s love, for example, we can rest assured that our revelation is only the tip of the iceberg in comparison of God’s overwhelming love. And this can be applied to every one of God’s attributes.
This means that for all eternity we will never be able to stop increasing our knowledge of Him and delighting in His character.
The apostle Paul in Colossians 1:9 asks God to “…fill us with the knowledge of His will, through all spiritual wisdom and understanding…growing in the knowledge of God.”
So, can God be known? Yes. Can we ever know God completely? No. Is this great news for us? Absolutely.
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