“But they understood none of these things. This saying was hidden from them, and they did not grasp what was said.” Luke 18:34
Hitting a spiritual wall
If she could have hit me I’m pretty sure she would have. But since she was a participant in the new member class I was teaching, it would have made for an awkward membership interview later. After working through a long description of the Trinitarian attributes of God, this new Christian had hit the wall. She was frustrated, things just were not making sense—and this was a very intelligent, articulate woman. She had come to the class expecting that the path of explosive spiritual growth she had been experiencing since her recent conversion would continue right along that night—and it was not.
I knew exactly how she felt. I grew up in the church and don’t remember ever not believing in Jesus, but I did not at all grasp the doctrine of justification by faith alone apart from works until a few years out of college. In the span of a few months, God awakened me to many truths I had missed; I was excited and passionate about Scripture in a way I don’t remember growing up, when it just seemed like a list of rules I was failing at.
But then the insights stopped coming. The questions I had became much harder to find answers to and the Bible studies I was participating in, my prayers and private readings just started to seem stale again. And then I largely stopped trying. For several years, God’s word seemed cold and distant when I could not neatly answer the questions on my heart about the nature of God, of election, the cross, and of our relationship with him while we continue to sin as Christians. In my frustration, I wrongly began to question whether we can know much about God at all.
In those moments, we can become confused, tempted to settle for conjecture instead of truth, or start to question even the foundational beliefs we once held so precious when we cannot rationalize it with the questions we cannot answer.
When we are most confused about the abstract, we must start with the most concrete: in the ultimate grace God came into human history, lived among us, took the penalty for our sin and rebellion on himself, died on the cross before being resurrected three days later and appeared again.
There is nothing more tangible about God than this. From this point of grounding everything we know about God in that tangible truth we can begin again to work out from there reminding ourselves of three things.
1. God has gone to amazing lengths to reveal himself to fallen creatures
He has made his invisible attributes including his eternal and divine power plain to us through the creation of the world (Rom. 1:19–20). All our awe and wonder at the heavens, mountains, oceans, and other created things are meant to lead us to and reveal the Creator. God inspired some 774,000 words of Scripture describing in painstaking detail his nature and our relationship to him through Christ. Today, God the Holy Spirit indwells his people (1 Cor. 3:16) revealing his love and perfect will, awakening our hearts to worship him, opening our minds to the truth of Scripture, and bringing us to a fuller and richer knowledge (1 Cor. 2:12–13). From the first breath of mankind God has been gracious to reveal himself to us.
2. There is more to know about God than we will ever be able to grasp in this lifetime
The pursuit of knowledge about our Creator is an act of worship; we honor and glorify God by showing that he is so precious to us, and his ways and his will are so valuable to us that we pursue them as our greatest prize (Matt. 13:44). If we spent every ounce of mental energy God had endowed to us and filled up libraries with insights of our God, it would represent the smallest fraction we can define of his eternal nature.
Pursuing knowledge of God is never-ending, not endless in a sense of futility but in a sense of vastness (Rom. 11:33–36). God is eternal, and we are finite. Simply by definition there is more to know than we can comprehend. It is as if we were trying to catch of glimpse of something extraordinary standing on the opposite side of a fogged pane of glass that is slowly becoming clearer. We struggle to make out the shape, the outlines, sometimes even to catch a glimpse of texture—but no matter how hard we strain the image is simply more complex and glorious than we can comprehend. But God has promised that one day the fog will lift when we will see him face to face (1 Cor. 13:12).
3. We should find our inability to fully grasp the nature of God infinitely comforting
Something greater can never be fully comprehensible to something lesser. The characters of a play cannot fully know the intentions of the playwright. The author sees all dimensions of the story, knows all the interdependencies of the plot lines, and knows the outcome of the story he writes. Every word he writes is toward an end that he sees although the characters cannot.
In our lives, no matter how clearly we try to explain life to our young children, they simply lack the capacities and life experience we have as adults. (Granted, the reverse can be true as well.) They depend on us to guide them through circumstances they cannot understand but we do.
So it is with our heavenly Father. He knows the outcome of why every drop of rain fell where it did, why every struggle we face is building to something powerful, why we even live in the times and places we do (Eph. 1:11). As the Author of life, he brings all these pieces into place for a purpose that is building to an end that he designed. And because he is God, we know that end is for his glory, which is our ultimate joy in him. Like a loving Father, he has told us everything we need to know.
Wouldn’t it be disappointing if understanding God could be reduced to a single moment of clarity? If we could come to a full understanding of God, it would somehow mean we were greater and he is inferior. If that were true, we could not depend on him, for how can something greater depend on something inferior? Yet we know how very little is within our own power. We know how greatly we must depend on something. We have a deep need to believe there is something bigger than ourselves at the very root of our soul, and if we cannot depend on God, whom can we depend on?
Eventually God taught me to stop trying to understand him on my own terms, with my own categories and under my own rational capabilities. As a Christian, the bigger and more intricate God seems to you, the more comforted and safe you should feel.
Matt Rogers is a pastor at the Downtown Bellevue church.
