Ineffable: too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words.
Lately, I have been obsessed with a fresh revelation that God is beyond my human comprehension. I know a little of Him. I see glimpses and shadows, but the entirety of God is utterly beyond me. This revelation has not, in any way, had the effect of dampening my zeal to seek the Living God. No, quite the opposite. It has filled my heart with such a largeness of God; such a beyond-ness, that I hope to spend an eternity in endless discovery of His heavenly riches! I am filled with excitement akin to going on vacation to some new place where every day I wonder what new vistas of Eternity lie around the corner!
God is more breath-taking every day! He is more awe-inspiring the more you know Him!
So, when I hear preachers talk like they have God pinned down, my spidy-senses start to tingle. Phrases like, ‘God is the same yesterday, today and forever’ and ‘God doesn’t change’ or ‘God doesn’t do anything that is not in the bible’ make me very wary depending on the context in which they are used.
The bible chronicles a supremely multi-faceted God. If you picked out one particular era, you would be hard pressed to predict that that God was the same God of another era. In fact, I often say that unless you have read the entire bible, you probably have a very very limited understanding of God’s character. To think that we know all there is to know about God is just a tad arrogant. The same kind of arrogance that caused the religious leaders to dismiss Jesus Christ. This unassuming carpenter could not be the God of the bible (up to that time only the Old Testament). I mean, he didn’t speak like thunder and no angels blew trumpets when he entered the synagogue. Worse yet, he ate with sinners and drank wine!!
I do not know where the notion came that God limited Himself to our puny understanding of a few written texts, but I rather suspect that it did not come from God. That’s why the bible never gets boring (if you are reading it with God); because the Holy Spirit continues to pour out fresh revelations of the unsearchable depths of God as we seek Him in scripture. The fact is that our human language just does not have the bandwidth to describe God! The most we can get to is ‘God is like’. He is something like majestic, something like strong, something like merciful, something like a father, something like a king…. words all fall short. They fall short in English, Greek and Hebrew. They best they can do is act as a conduit for the Holy Spirit to pour understanding straight into our spirit.
Blake Healy says that God is so multi-faceted that His nature can only begin to be expressed through the thousands of years of history of billions of diverse human lives. That is a blow-mind thought! The unfolding of history is really a progressive revelation of who God is! How else could an eternal God be expressed in time? That’s why no one person could be the Body of Christ; His nature could only be represented by the myriad variety of millions of unique disciples!
God will always be part mystery on this side of heaven. It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out (Proverbs 25:2). Never let your study of scripture lead you to a puffed-up overconfidence in your knowledge of God. Instead, let it lead you to humble awe of the unknowable God, a healthy scepticism of what you think you already know, a child-like willingness to see God in things you do not yet understand and an insatiable appetite for more of God!
Copyright 2018, Matik Nicholls. All rights reserved.