When Muhammad Ali was the reigning world heavy-weight champion boxer and at the height of his fame, he was on an airplane that was preparing to take off. The flight attendant came by and reminded him to fasten his seat belt. Ali said, “Superman don’t need a seat belt.” To which the quick-thinking flight attendant replied, “Superman don’t need an airplane, either.” Ali buckled his seat belt. Ali, you may remember, was famous for obnoxiously boasting, perhaps to intimidate his opponents, “I am the Greatest, I am the Greatest” (Charles Swindoll, Shedding Light on our Dark Side. Insight for Living, 1993, 85).
Well, God is the Greatest! God doesn’t need a plane nor seat belts. He is the Almighty Creator and Sustainer of the universe. His created natural laws that keep airplanes in the sky. We fail to see the greatness of God when we, like Muhammad Ali, are blinded by the pride of our own misconstrued greatness. Don’t we secretly sometimes chant to ourselves, “I am the Greatest”?
God is so great and so highly exalted above His creation that God’s Word teaches that He is incomprehensible. Yet, God is so loving that He has condescended to reveal some indispensable truths about Himself to us so that we could be saved and serve Him.
1. The Word of God teaches that God is incomprehensible, that is, we cannot know God exhaustively
After presenting the most comprehensive teaching on the doctrine of salvation in all of God’s Word in Romans 1-10, Paul erupts in praise to God for His wisdom in devising such a great salvation in Romans 11:33-35. Paul praises God because of our inability to plumb the depths of God’s wisdom in creating the multifaceted plan of salvation about which Paul just wrote. The Bible uses words like unsearchable, infinite, and beyond measure to describe our inscrutable God.
2. The Word of God also teaches that God is knowable, and not just that we can know some truths about Him but that we MUST know Him
Jesus prayed this truth in John 17:3, “This is life eternal, that they might know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” You are not going to heaven unless you know for certain some Bible truths.
3. The Word of God teaches both the incomprehensibility and the knowability of God
We cannot know everything about God but we can know enough about God to be saved and to grow and serve Him. Let’s look at each of these amazing truths and adore God for them.
I. We Cannot Know God Completely
Spurgeon spoke of the incomprehensibility of God: As well might a gnat seek to drink in the ocean, as a finite creature to comprehend the Eternal God. A God whom we could understand would be no God. If we could grasp Him, He could not be infinite. If we could understand Him, He could not be divine (C.H. Spurgeon, A Christmas Question, Sermon #291, December 25, 1859.)
A. What can we Not know completely about God?
1. We cannot know His greatness completely
David praised God’s greatness in Psalm 145:3 and added that God’s greatness is unsearchable. In Psalm 104, David wrote that God’s greatness was seen in the creation of the universe in six days. Apparently, David read the prose account of creation in Genesis 1 and 2, and then from a heart overflowing with awe poetically praised God for each day of creation. Nehemiah after hearing about how “great” was the problem he faced in rebuilding the walls around the city of Jerusalem prayed to his “great and awesome God.” Our great God is greater than any problem we face. What is your heartache today? What kept you awake last night? God is greater!
2. We cannot know His understanding completely
In Psalm 147:4, David praised God for knowing the number of the stars. Obliviously the stars are innumerable. Yet, God not only knows the number of the innumerable stars but He has given each a name. After that thought, David said God’s understanding is unsearchable.
Who can comprehend that the Lord hears in one moment of time the prayers of ten million Christians around the world, and sympathizes with each one personally and individually like a caring Father (as Hebrews 4:15 says He will), even though among those ten million prayers some are broken-hearted and some are bursting with joy? How can God weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice in God? (John Piper. Are There Two Wills in God? January 1, 1995. www.DesiringGod.org.).
Are you hurting today? You don’t have to take a number or get into a long line to talk to God because He can only take one at a time. He can give you and ten million other hurting believers one-on-one time and attention.
B. Why can we never know everything there is to know about God?
1. Because He is God and we are not
Paul in Colossians 1:10 says we are to be continually “increasing in the knowledge of God.” Because God is incomprehensible, we never learn all there is about God in this life or in the next. I had a brilliant professor in seminary, Steward Custer. He said every preacher should try to master one book of the Bible in his life. The book for him was the book of Acts. As a result, he wrote one of the best commentaries on the book of Acts. He, however, did not master it. We can continually increase in the knowledge of God because He is incomprehensible.
2. Because of sin
There is a debate among theologians that the reason God is incomprehensible is because we cannot know God’s essence only His energies or works. In the past Eastern theologians like Basil argued: “The energies are various and the essence simple, but we say that we know our God from His energies, but do not undertake to approach near to His essence. His energies come down to us, but His essence remains beyond our reach” (Basil of Caesarea, Epistle 234, in NPNFE, 8:274). This is the position of Michael Horton: “We know God by his works, not in his hidden essence” (The Christian Faith, 52).
Wayne Grudem sees no difference: “Others have said that we cannot know God as he is in himself, but we can only know him as he relates to (and there is an implication that these two are somehow different). But Scripture does not speak that way. Several passages speak of our knowing God himself. We read God’s Word in Jeremiah ‘Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, let not the mighty man glory in his wisdom, let not the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches; but let him who glories glory in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth; for in these things I delight, says the LORD.’ Here God says that the source of joy and sense of importance ought to come not from our own abilities or possessions, but from the fact that we know him” (Systematic Theology, 152).
Western theologians like Augustine and Aquinas said the reason God is incomprehensible is because of our sin. Satan tempted Adam and Eve with God-like incomprehensible knowledge in Genesis 3:5: “For God does know that in the day you eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” That sin backfired. The result was not incomprehensible knowledge but the opposite, a totally depraved mind with limitations on knowing right and wrong.
The Fall affected our thinking as Paul teaches in Ephesians 4:17, 18. Theologians call this the noetic effect of the Fall. That is why God must condescend so we can know Him. This is the difference between what Luther called the theology of the cross and the theology of glory. Those who hold to the theology of glory think they can figure God out on their own. The theology of the cross is the truth that God came down in His Son and revealed Himself to us in our sinfulness so we can know Him.
Sinners are blinded to the saving gospel by the Fall and the god of this age (2 Corinthians4:3-6) and consequently “the natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God for they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). Only the light of the glorious gospel can penetrate that darkness and draw the sinner to God.
3. Because of our need to worship such a great God.
The wife of martyred missionary, Jim Elliot, wrote, “If God were small enough to be understood He would not be big enough to be worshipped” (Elisabeth Elliot, Secure in the Everlasting Arms, Revell, 2002, 91).
Puritan Richard Baxter wrote similarly: “The sea is not the sea, if you can hold it in a spoon” (Elliot Ritzema and Elizabeth Vince, eds., 300 Quotations for Preachers from the Puritans, Pastorum Series. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2013).
Think about three incomprehensible acts of God and worship Him
1) At the crossing of the Red Sea, God’s incomprehensible power was experienced (Ex. 14:31-15ff)
God miraculously rescued 2 million Jews out of Egypt by supernaturally parting the Rea Sea. Millions of Jews walked across on dry ground between two giant aquarium-like walls of water. God’s power is still incomprehensible and available to help rescue you from your dilemma.
2) At the cross, God’s incomprehensible love was displayed when God punished His Son for all sins of all sinners of all time (Rev 5:9).
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” If you have been rejected by friends or family, you have not been rejected by God. If you feel no one loves you, God genuinely loves you.
3) At the Second Coming, God’s incomprehensive wrath will be poured out (Rev 19:1-6).
On June 6th, 1944, the Allied Forces turned back Hilter’s forces. Hilter had marched across and conquered Europe. D-Day was the turning point of the WWII. Almost 5000 soldiers died that one day.
In the future, Satan will conquer Europe again through the Antichrist. Antichrist will lead a revised European Confederation of ten nations to Jerusalem to war against God. Christ will return in glory leading his army and with one fell swoop will destroy these enemies of God. See Revelation 19 for the details. You do not have to experience this incomprehensible wrath because not only is God incomprehensible but He is knowable.
II. We Can And Must Know Some Things About God
According to Isaiah 55:8-9, God’s thoughts are above our thoughts as the heavens above the earth. How so? What does that mean? Is there an unbridgeable gap between us and God?
It was this aspect of the incomprehensibility of God that divided theological friends and a denomination in the 1940s. The incomprehensibility of God was one of the more significant doctrinal debates of the 20th century.
In the 1940s, two very well known theologians debated this issue. When J. Gresham Machen left Princeton Theological Seminary, he founded two Christian organizations: Westminster Theological Seminary and Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In 1940, these two sister ministries became enemies.
Gordon Clark was being ordained in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1943. When Cornelius Van Til who taught at Westminster Seminary heard about his ordination, he wrote a letter of complaint saying that the denomination should not ordain Clark because of his view of the incomprehensibility of God. Van Til said God’s thoughts are above our thoughts both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Quantitatively, God knows everything and we don’t. God has always known everything intuitively and we know what we know because we read and research. God knows quantitatively more than we do. But Van Til also argued that God knows qualitatively more than we do. Van Til said that because God is incomprehensible what God knows is on another level than what we know because He is the Creator and we are the created. Truth is on another level with God with Van Til. Van Til argued that the truth God revealed in his Word is not the identical truth (univocal truth) but similar truth (analogical truth). Van Til wrote, “We dare not maintain that God’s knowledge and our knowledge coincide at any single point” (Minutes of the Twelfth General Assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1945, 14).
If this is true then truth has two meanings, one for God and one for man. This smacks of post-modernism. Van Til also wrote that God’s revealed truth in His Word “is on the one hand, fully true and, on the other hand, at no point identical with the content of the divine mind” (Van Til’s introduction to The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, by B. B. Warfield. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1948, 33). Michael Horton sided with Van Til (The Christian Faith, 56-57).
The late Robert Reymond saw huge problems with Van Til’s view of truth having two different meanings: “How Van Til can regard this ‘never corresponds’ knowledge as ‘true’ knowledge is, to say the least, a serious problem” (A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith, 99). If truth has two meanings then no Scripture has a single interpretation and the doctrine of authorial intent (the original author’s single meaning of the ancient text) is no longer true and the consistent end of this logic is that the sky is the limit in hermeneutics.
Gordon Clark agreed that God knows quantitatively more than we do but the truth that God has revealed to us in His Word is the same truth God knows. This is so because in order to be saved the sinner must be on the same page of God’s Word as God is.
Carl F. H. Henry saw another serious consequence of Van Til’s view: “All man needs in order to know God as he truly is, is God’s intelligible disclosure and rational concepts and that qualify man---on this basis of the imago Dei---to comprehend the content of God’s logically ordered revelation. Unless mankind has epistemological means adequate for factual truth about God as he truly is, the inevitable outcome of the quest of religious knowledge is skepticism” (God, Revelation, and Authority, 4:119).
Robert Reymond presented two practical benefits of Clark’s view:
1. Christians should be overwhelmed by the magnitude of this simple truth that they take so much for granted---that the eternal God has deigned to share with us some of the truths that are on his mind. He condescends to elevate us poor undeserving sinners by actually sharing with us a portion of what he knows.
2. Accordingly, since the Scriptures require that saving faith be grounded in true knowledge (see Romans 10:13-14), the church must vigorously oppose any linguistic or revelational theory, however well-intended, that would take from men and women the only ground to their knowledge of God and, accordingly, their only hope of salvation” (102).
About God’s knowledge in Isaiah 55:8-9, Van Til wrote that these verses depict “the gulf which separates the divine knowledge from human knowledge” (Minutes, 12). In other words, Isaiah’s words defend Van Til’s view of analogical knowledge, i.e., the content of God’s knowledge on any text is not the same (univocal) as man’s. God has His interpretation, which Van Til calls pre-interpretation, and man has another interpretation or what Van Til calls re-interpretation (Introduction to Systematic Theology, 168). Hence, two interpretations for each text.
Reymond shows that these verses “actually holds out the real possibility that people may know God’s thoughts and urges them to turn away from their own thoughts and to learn God’s thoughts from him. In 55:7 God calls upon the wicked man to forsake his way and thoughts. Where is he to turn? To the Lord, of course (55:6-7). Why should he forsake his way and thoughts? “Because,” says the Lord, “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways” (55:8). The entire context, far from affirming that God’s ways and thoughts are beyond the capacity of humans to know, on the contrary, expressly calls upon the wicked man to turn away from his ways and thoughts and to seek God’s ways and thoughts. In doing so, the wicked man gains ways and thoughts which, just as the heavens transcend the earth, transcend his own. Far from teaching that an unbridgeable gulf exists between God’s thoughts and our thoughts, these verses actually call upon the wicked man, in repentance and humility, to seek and to think God’s thoughts after him” (101).
Spurgeon spoke of the incomprehensibility of God: As well might a gnat seek to drink in the ocean, as a finite creature to comprehend the Eternal God. A God whom we could understand would be no God. If we could grasp Him, He could not be infinite. If we could understand Him, He could not be divine (C.H. Spurgeon, A Christmas Question, Sermon #291, December 25, 1859.)