2023 BBC Bible Conference - Session Two "The Incomprehensibility of God"

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that on the handout that you receive, there is a list of recommended reading and I'm trying to remember,
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I didn't grab one to see where it is, but there's a list of books and I'll maybe refer to a couple before another session, and I listed those books, they're all accessible, so they're all written for,
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I have not entered into this topic before, but I listed them in what I think is the order of accessibility, so Gerald Bray's Attributes of God, I would say would be the first one if you're like,
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I've never thought about any of these things before, these Attributes of God, start there, and it increases in terms of depth and detail, we're going through Sandlin's Simply God, for example, in our men's group at our church, so those books are there, they're wonderful, if you've read through books like that and you want to get even deeper,
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I'd love to talk to you, we can talk more about other resources, we're really in so many ways this weekend just skipping a stone across the surface, and there's so much more depth and goodness to contemplate in our
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Lord together, if I might, may I lead us in prayer this morning and then we'll jump into our first session, let's pray.
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Father in heaven, we thank you for the privilege to gather this morning to contemplate and worship you in the meditation of our heart and our fellowship and conversation together, we thank you for the many hands that have served, that we might be here in comfort and provision, we ask now that you would help us as you be with the one who teaches and you be with all and you are with all who hear, that our hearts might know what is incomprehensible to us is your eternal love for us in Christ, we thank you for this privilege and opportunity, may we steward it well for the glory of your name and the good of your people as we go forth and zeal to work for your glory, and we pray this in Christ's name,
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Amen. What we want to do this weekend is know
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God, to consciously know him. If you're a Christian, you know God, you know him as your father and the
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Lord Jesus Christ, but maybe not as self -consciously as you ought and therefore not as happy and assured as you might be.
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Though we might introduce some new terms this weekend and some things maybe that you haven't thought of before, really what we're talking about is far more intuitive than you might think and what sometimes
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I like to tell people is, look, a classical Christian orthodoxy is just organized common sense.
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We're just thinking clearly from scripture. Don't let theologians make you feel like this is far beyond you.
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They need to feel that way because it's tough being a theologian in this economy. But once you learn some of the big terms and once you understand what we're saying, you really will see how we've just been thinking
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God's thoughts after him according to scripture. So for example, if I were to ask you, is
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God made up of what is not God, composed by something prior to him, you would intuitively go, well no, no,
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God's not created by something prior to him. Well that's all we mean by divine simplicity as we'll look at, that there's nothing prior to God.
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It's also all over our hymns and one thing, if I do anything this weekend, is help you pay more attention to what maybe you're familiar with in singing, but these truths about God, we're very familiar with Christians in generations past and it's all over our hymnody.
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Take for example, immortal, invisible, God only wise, this line, unresting, unhastening and silent as light, nor wanting nor wasting, thou rulest in might.
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That's God's pure being, that's God's spirituality and invisibility and immutability, just all right there in beautiful prosaic form.
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You maybe didn't know all those labels or the consistent implications of them, but you're singing about pure spirituality and immutability all the time in your hymns.
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And as we consider these attributes, what we have are two reminders, I think, as we move in and we'll spend some time this morning in our first two sessions thinking about Exodus chapter 3, but as we move in thinking about the attributes of God, what do we need?
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The first thing we need is humility. We need humility. You don't need brilliance, you don't need vast intellectual insight, you do need patience.
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Haste and haughtiness do not lead to holy thoughts of God. Arrogance and impatience do not get us to the knowledge of God.
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What Christians have said for centuries is we believe in order to understand. That is, we reason from faith for faith.
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And if our posture is the opposite, if our posture were, God, I will believe in you when
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I understand you and when you make yourself fully comprehensible to me and you submit to the parameters of my mind, that's a fundamentally rebellious posture towards God.
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And it's also misunderstanding his very nature and that we cannot, as we'll look this morning, contain him in our minds, it's impossible.
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And that posture actually locks us into folly, not wisdom. Because God's not an object we can put under a microscope or at the end of a telescope to examine.
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He himself is the source of our knowledge of him. So we come to him with posture of humility. And also as we think about how we speak about God, Charles Hodge, and I have the quote here on your handout, there are two ways that we think about the attributes of God and understanding these helps us think about what we're doing even this weekend.
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Charles Hodge said this, in regard to God himself and to all his attributes, there is a simple scriptural popular mode of conception which answers all the purposes of piety.
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There is however another mode not inconsistent with or contradictory of the former, demanded by the understanding to avoid confusion and inconsistency.
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Now I think this is very important here from our brother Charles, think about what he's saying. The first is that there's two ways to think about God.
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There's a simple mode that answers all the purposes of piety, that is we would say there's a simple biblical mode that we need for praise and prayer and worship of God.
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So for example, God's omnipresence. You can tell your children God is everywhere so they're not scared when the lights go out or so that they remember that they're accountable for their moral conduct even when their parents aren't around because God is everywhere.
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However, there's another mode of thinking that's importantly not inconsistent with this simple scriptural mode and that's what our consistency and clarity demand.
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God made us to demand logic and organization. Try to have a thought that's disconnected from every other thought you've had.
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Have a single piece of knowledge that's isolated from everything else you know. It's impossible. We automatically categorize and organize everything and we associate new things we learn with old things we've known before.
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That's how we grow in learning. Our minds demand consistency and organization.
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So as soon as we say something like God is everywhere, all of a sudden we have more questions, right?
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Well, God's everywhere but is he there the same way with unbelievers as he is with believers?
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Is God in hell the same way he's present in heaven? What does it mean for God to be everywhere?
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How does God who has no space, who's pure spirit, how does he relate to space and physical contours?
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You see there's all kinds of questions that then start proliferating we have to answer. And so that's what we're doing and what
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Christians have done for centuries. We try to think about how do we understand all that scripture says about God and how do we think consistently of it?
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Now as we learn new terms like aseity this morning and simplicity, that doesn't mean that the scriptural popular mode of expression needs to change.
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It doesn't mean that all of a sudden our prayers have to change or somehow we're not praying rightly if we don't pray to the
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God of pure being who has aseity. Of course not. Use the Psalms to teach you how to pray.
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We grow as God has taught us in scripture. But we shouldn't be afraid of this language that's really just helping us be consistent, helping us be coherent with scripture.
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How do we understand God as he's spoken to us? And the thing we must always remember is that we never reduce
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God to our conceptions of him or even the language of which he's spoken in scripture. And that's what we want to think of and start fundamentally this morning.
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And really one of the first things we have to say as we think about how do we understand the
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God who is blessed is that he's infinite and he's incomprehensible. He's fundamentally incomprehensible to us.
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And that's where we want to begin and we want to think about a pivotal text in Exodus chapter 3. So if you have a
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Bible you want to leave it open to Exodus 3 verses 14 to 15 for both of our first sessions this morning.
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This is a pivotal passage that is vital to our understanding of who God is.
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Let me read for us Exodus 3 beginning in verse 13. Moses said to God, if I come to the people of Israel and say to them, the
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God of your fathers has sent me to you, and they ask me, what is his name and what shall
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I say to them? God said to Moses, I am who I am. And he said, say this to the people of Israel.
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I am has sent me to you. God also said to Moses, say this to the people of Israel, the
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Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob has sent me to you.
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This is my name forever. And thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations. This is a weighty passage that takes great priority in how we understand what
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God is. The point here, Moses is at Mount Horeb, another name for Sinai, and before God redeems his people out of slavery in Egypt, he speaks to Moses who is going to lead it about who he is and what he is.
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So what we have reflected here and what is depicted throughout scripture and we grasp intuitively is that being precedes doing.
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We need to understand what something is before we know who someone is.
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This is intuitive to us. The fact that I'm a Californian to you is a basic category that already fills in all sorts of information for you.
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And so everything else you need to know about me personally as Steve begins with the fact that what I am,
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I'm a man and I'm a Californian. And so already you know a lot of things.
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If I were to tell you, well, I had a great day off. I spent a great day off with Hodge. Well, it would help you to know whether I was referring to reading the works of the late theologian
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Charles Hodge or spending time with my 90 pounds of zany love, our pure door dog,
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Hodge. Understanding what is important before you ever understand who.
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Are we talking about the works of a dead theologian or my dumb dog? And so here, being precedes doing.
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And so as Moses is exploring the reason for Israel's redemption and what's at the bottom of it, what's behind Moses' question is the assurance that God can be trusted for it.
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What's the first thing he needs to know? What God is. He needs to understand his identity, his conception.
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And that's what God does in verses 14 to 15 of Exodus 3. God answers Moses' questions with three answers.
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I am who I am. I am. And then the God of your fathers
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Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And then he gives a name which is translated in all caps in our
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English Bibles LORD, which we typically would translate today as Yahweh.
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That's a name that's tied to the answers. I am who I am. And I am a
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Yah in Hebrew is I am Yahweh. This is God's essential name. It's a name that is attached to this self -disclosure of God as I am.
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And the fact that God starts with what he is before he gets to who he is, the
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God of your fathers, is incredibly significant. And God gives here his essential name that's vital for understanding.
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And every time Yahweh shows up in our Bibles or for our English Bibles we see LORD in all caps.
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It is like a hyperlink that takes us back here and reminds us of who
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God has revealed himself to be. And what we see here in the midst of this is
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God's inaccessibility and incomprehensibility. Remember God came to Moses, we didn't read it, but the beginning of chapter 3,
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God came to Moses in verse 2, the angel of the Lord in a flame of fire out of the midst of the bush.
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He looked Moses and behold the bush was burning, it was not consumed. And then God called to Moses and told him, do not come near, take off your sandals for the place in which you are standing is holy ground.
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The bush was not being consumed, the fire was not sparked by any created thing or what we would call natural phenomenon.
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The fire is independent of creation. The fire can't be touched, the fire can't be grasped, the fire cannot even be approached.
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And here God is revealing of himself his inaccessibility to man. Remember later it will be fire that signifies
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God's presence for Israel in the wilderness by night and the cloud by day. Both also clouds and fire are manifestations of things that cannot be grasped or held or accessed by men.
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Or even centuries later if we go fast forward to 1 Kings and we think about the prophet Elijah when he's on the mountain before the
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Lord, and this is what happens in 1 Kings 19 verses 11 -12, the Lord passed by and a great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the
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Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.
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And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire the sound of a low whisper.
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So God shows up to his prophet with a wind, an earthquake, a fire, all of which repel and defy human access.
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You don't contain and you don't access clouds, fires, earthquake or wind.
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God is communicating even in his manifestation, you do not access me, you do not contain me, you do not control me.
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And God is not in any of them, he's not in creation. How does God show up to his prophets and his people?
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He speaks, the sound of the word. God as he is in himself cannot be comprehended or accessed by anyone but himself.
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We looked last night at 1 Timothy chapter 6 verse 16 where Paul says he dwells in unapproachable light.
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He told Moses in Exodus 33, no man can see me and live. And that heightens for us the wonder that God assumed humanity and came to us in the
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Lord Jesus Christ. When Jesus was transfigured in brightness on the Mount of Transfiguration before Peter and the other disciples, his clothes were as white as light and they fell on their faces terrified.
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That was a glimpse of his divine glory. But what we have in Jesus, the
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Bible says, is an appearing. That's not insignificant. God shows up that we might know him, that we might understand him in a form accessible to us in the human nature of the
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Lord Jesus. So the Lord could say to Philip in John 14, whoever has seen me has seen the
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Father. Or Paul will say in Colossians 1, he is the image of the invisible
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God. The reflection and communication of God himself.
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God has spoken in many portions, in many ways, and in his last days he has communicated in his son, the word became flesh.
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The inaccessible God has communicated to us. But even there we remember that the fullness of God is incomprehensible to our minds.
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So Moses, so God's image, God tells Moses here in Exodus 3, I am who I am.
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I am sent me. Now you likely have a footnote if you're reading out of the ESV like I am and says well we could translate that as I am what
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I am or I will be what I will be. The best rendering is I am who I am and we don't need to spend time in the ambiguities of Hebrew grammar this morning because regardless of how you render this, the point carries.
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God specifies a subject, I am, and then with a pronoun gives the same predicate,
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I am. I am who I am. What's that exactly?
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It's intentionally mysterious. It's intentionally circular. It forces your attention back to the subject,
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I am. God is saying he is, period.
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He's incomprehensible. That's not the same thing as saying God is wholly unknowable or that we cannot apprehend him.
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We can, but we cannot comprehend him. We cannot contain him in our minds.
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William Ames said God as he is in himself cannot be understood by anyone but himself.
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Who fully knows God? Only God. We can't bear the full bright light of God's simple glory.
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It's an unapproachable light. So an old principle in theology is that the finite cannot contain the infinite.
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What has no boundaries cannot be put into a bounded thing, which includes our minds.
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The finite cannot contain the infinite. An old resident of some town here in Massachusetts could say,
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I've lived here my whole life, I know every inch of this town. And why can they say that? Because it has boundaries.
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You could conceivably live your whole life within a town and spend time growing up as a child to an adult and say, hey,
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I know I've traversed every inch of this town. With sufficient boundary and sufficient time, you can comprehend almost anything.
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Even the most big and complex things we understand, like modern jet planes and airplanes, which are certainly complex, at the end of the day they have manuals.
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You could devote your life to understanding all the pieces and parts and technology that go together in making a jumbo jet fly.
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You can comprehend it. But God is. He's fundamentally incomprehensible.
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Not that he's so as complex as multiple airplanes. He has no boundaries.
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He has no parts. He has no extent. There's no limit, no descriptor. There's no definable extent that you could go to and stand back and survey and go, well, that's
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God. Because there's no end to him. He's infinite. He's free of any and all the limitations of the creation he brought into existence by speaking.
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What we typically say here in relation to this is God is pure spirit. He's inaccessible, incomprehensible in his infinitude.
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Remember Jesus said this to the woman at the well in John 4. John 4, verse 24, he said, God is spirit.
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Not a spirit, one among many, but spirit. He's not material or bound in any way to any place or anything.
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It's a fact of what God is, like saying this tree is wood. Spirit is his substance.
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He's infinite, without circumference. Thomas Watson said God is an immaterial substance of pure, unmixed essence, not compounded of body and soul, without all extension of parts.
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So he's incomprehensible to us. We cannot have infinite thoughts of an infinite God. Or as we'll press further, we can't have simple thoughts of a simple
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God or absolute thoughts or eternal thoughts. So God is fundamentally incomprehensible.
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With our limits and God's lack of limits, we have to confess that God is mystery.
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This is our Dutch brother, Herman Bovink. He famously said this, mystery is the lifeblood of dogmatics or theology.
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Remember that line anytime someone says to you, theology is putting God in a box. We say, no, the lifeblood of our understanding of God is mystery.
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And then Bovink goes on to say this, scripture is equally far removed from the idea that believers can grasp the revealed mysteries in a scientific sense.
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In truth, the knowledge that God has revealed of himself in nature and scripture far surpasses human imagination and understanding.
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Now notice what our Dutch brother just said that is so significant. He said, even the revealed mysteries cannot be comprehended in a scientific sense.
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So what we're saying here, when we say God is incomprehensible, we're not just saying what
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Moses said in Deuteronomy 29, 29, that the secret things belong to the Lord, that God hasn't shared everything with us, which is absolutely true.
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We're saying something even more fundamental. What God has said cannot be comprehended by us in a scientific sense.
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We're used to assuming comprehension because we used to send smoke signals and now we can send text messages around the world.
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We're used to mastery, but we can never, even with all our advancement in modern world, escape our finitude, our finiteness, to grasp the limitless infinitude of who
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God is or fully grasp even what he's revealed. Just take eternity.
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God says he's eternal. What is eternity? Yeah, I don't have any idea either.
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You have no idea what eternity is. It's completely beyond our comprehension to fathom timeless existence.
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It's so innate in us and our created being to be locked in a progress and chronology of time and change that we can't even fathom what it means to exist without it.
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So even when we speak of it, we can't even speak of it properly. We say improper things like eternity passed.
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If it's eternity, there's no past. That's assuming time. Or we say the moment of creation.
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There was no moment of creation. There were no moments until there was creation. You see?
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We can't even fully grasp eternity. So even what God's revealed cannot be contained in our minds.
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Gregory of Nazianzus, wonderful church father. Gregory's rapper name is
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G -Naz if you want to know him personally like I do. So this is what G -Naz says here.
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For neither has anyone yet breathed the whole air, nor has any mind entirely comprehended or speech exhaustively contained the being of God.
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That's a wonderful and accurate image. Well, how close could we get to comprehension of the being of God?
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About as close as we can to inhaling all the air in the world. That's what it would take.
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If you could inhale all the oxygen in the world, then you could grasp the being of God. Well, that's impossible.
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Exactly. We cannot breathe the whole air or speak exhaustively. So he goes on to say, but we sketch him by his attributes and so obtain a certain faint and feeble partial idea concerning him.
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That is, even in all we're doing, when we expend our minds to think and to contemplate the beauties and glories of God, we are grasping what
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Gregory says here, a faint and feeble and partial idea. We are sketching. Now this ought to be not a stumbling block, but an assurance for us.
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And that's what Augustine said. Augustine, in somewhat famous sentence, said this in his sermons, we are talking about God.
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Why be surprised if you cannot grasp it? I mean, if you could understand it, it wouldn't be God. That is, if it was something that we could contain in our minds and have full comprehension, then we'd have to admit, well, this can't be an infinite creator because I can fully understand him.
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So it's an assurance to us. And it also communicates to us the beauty and grace and mercy of God's revelation and that he's spoken.
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So in all that we've said here of mystery and incomprehensibility, well, then how do we know God? What did
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God say in verse 15 to Moses? The God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the
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God of Isaac and the God of Jacob has sent me to you. I don't know what
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I am, who I am means, but I do know the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In fact,
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I know the stories, right? We have the words and the promises and the covenants and all that God has done acting in history.
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So we have the God who has condescended and covenanted to deliver and promise and redeem.
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And God has given a name Yahweh by which we can call upon him. And just the chapter earlier before this, we're told that God heard,
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God knew, God remembered his covenant promises with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
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We know God as he's revealed himself to us and he's spoken to us in his word.
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And we can truly apprehend what God has communicated. Where I'm from on the central coast of California, we have massive giant redwoods.
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Some of them have been, we're told on the earth when the Lord Jesus was walking around thousands of years ago.
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You can line up a whole family and still not get a full profile of a giant redwood.
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You will never put your arms around it, but you can put your hand on the bark and you can know something of what is true about that giant redwood tree.
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The same is true of God. God has spoken and we can truly apprehend him and we can have true knowledge of what he's revealed.
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Is that everything? No, you can't breathe in the whole air, but you can know what he said and we can apprehend him as he has come to speak to us.
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And we talked about this in the Q and A last night as he's condescended to speak to us like a nurse to a child.
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Calvin is really helpful on this area. I have a couple of quotes here in a handout from him. He says this, let us willingly leave to God the knowledge of himself for as Hillary, this is
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Hillary of Portier, he's a fifth century father says, he is the one fit witness to himself and is not known except through himself.
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But we shall be leaving it to him if we conceive him to be as he reveals himself to us without inquiring about him elsewhere than from his word.
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That is, Calvin says, don't try to run around speculatively. Listen to what
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God has said. And he goes on and says, we know the most perfect way of seeking God. The most suitable order is not for us to an attempt with bold curiosity to penetrate the investigation of his essence, which we ought more to adore than meticulously search out.
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But for us to contemplate him in his works, whereby he renders himself near and familiar to us, and in some manner communicates himself.
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Well, if we can't fully comprehend God, how do we apprehend him? Here, what
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Calvin and Christians and what scripture says is by his word, and by his works.
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He's the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He has spoken, and he has acted. And he's written down his acts.
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That's how we know him. As God has manifested himself in creation, as he's worked in redemptive history, as he's spoken to explain his works, we can have true knowledge of God.
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We can apprehend what he has revealed. We cannot comprehend his infinite essence. And as Calvin says, when you get to that point of incomprehension, you are fit to worship there.
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But we can know what he said. By his works and his word, God has spoken. And we have the privilege of receiving his communication.
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And that privilege can never be taken for granted or never assumed. God has accommodated himself to speak to us and reveal himself to us.
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And we must always remember that even what God has spoken here in scripture, which you can drown in the infinite depths as it were, even of God's revelation in scripture, and still there's more.
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And this is an accommodation. This, what theologians have said throughout history,
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God's word is baby talk. Augustine said scripture suits itself to babes.
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Calvin in a now famous image we referred to last night, he said this, it is true that he is incomprehensible.
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He fills the earth also, but knowing that our minds are heavy and grovel on the earth, he raises us above the worlds that he may shake off our sluggishness and inactivity.
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For who is so devoid of intellect as not to understand that God in so speaking, note this, lisps with us as nurses are wont to do with little children.
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Such modes of expression do not much express what kind of being God is as accommodate the knowledge of him to our feebleness.
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That is, God is not fully revealing his being, he's accommodating himself to our weakness.
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In doing so, he must of course stoop far below his proper height. We look at scripture and we think, how could
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I ever master this? And we can't. We rely on people who have gone before us and people who have spent time and we build on it.
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And what Calvin is saying, we must remember even this, God's word, this is God stooping very, very low and speaking to us like a nurse coos with the baby and talks.
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When my eldest daughter, she's now eleven, Miriam, when she was a toddler,
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I would pick her up and I would say, Daddy loves you so much. And she only picked up the last end of that, much.
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And so then she would toddle over to me and she would come get on my lap or give me a hug and she would just say, much, much,
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Daddy, much, much. And that was her way as a toddler of saying,
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I love you. In fact, I still say it to her before we left. I hugged her and said, much, much, sweet pea.
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That's how we say, I love you. Now, that was our love you. Was I lying to my daughter when
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I was hugging her and saying, much, much? No, that's how her little mind grasped and held on to I love you.
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We were having a true communication, even though it wasn't proper. And was there far more when
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I was saying much, much to my little girl, was there far more behind the way
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I was communicating my love for her than she could grasp? At that point of her development, she could not grasp the extent of my paternal protection and love, desire to provide, and all that goes into being a father of a daughter, right?
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She couldn't get that. But I wasn't lying to her when I was saying that. I was accommodating to what she could grasp.
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And we were having genuine communication that was fit for her development as a toddler.
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And what Calvin and others are saying is that's how we need to understand the Bible. God has accommodated himself to our finite, feeble minds, that we might grasp something of his grandeur and greatness, and he stooped low to communicate to us.
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That doesn't mean he's lying to us. It doesn't mean it's false. It doesn't mean it's wrong. Certainly not. It just means it's creaturely.
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It's not infinite, because we cannot have infinite thoughts of infinity. So God accommodates. And what it reminds us is that we never reduce
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God to his revelation. Because if you do that, and this will become important in two sessions, if we reduce
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God to his revelation, his revelation was accommodated to creatures, that means you make God a creature, and you pull him into creation.
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We must always remember his radical otherness. Now how we've thought about doing this in the church and throughout history is we refer to our knowledge of God and God's speech to us as analogical.
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And this is really important to grasp, that God speaks to us analogically, and we know him analogically.
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What do we mean? We mean that God reveals himself to us in words that have a similarity or proportion in terms of how they refer to us and to God, but each proper to their nature.
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So we have the same word or idea that has attributed in proportion to the nature of each party, us and God.
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It's analogical. So the same word attributes one thing to God in a way proper to his infinite being, but also to us in a way proper to our finite creaturely being.
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So we say it's analogical. That is to say, if you want to put it in a nutshell, there's similarity but there's not sameness.
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There's similarity but not sameness. We saw that last night in scripture in 1st
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Timothy. Notice we remember we talked about immortality and that God in chapter 1 of 1st
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Timothy verse 17, Paul says God is immortal, and then chapter 6 verse 16 he says he alone has immortality.
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We can say I'm immortal. I'm immortal in soul. But am
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I as immortal as God? No, God alone has immortality. My immortal soul is conferred upon me.
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It is contingent and dependent on the power of God. It was created. There was a time where it was not.
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God is the one who confers life in immortality. He alone has it. He's the source of it.
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So even though we can use the same word immortal, Steve is immortal, God is immortal, we understand that analogically.
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There's similarity but there's not sameness. What about knows, knowledge?
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I know, God knows. But I only know by learning.
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I only have knowledge we say discursively. That is, there's a process where I have to learn things,
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I have to grow, I have to add bits of info and experience to other. God knows.
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But do you realize that God has never learned a thing? God has never learned anything.
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In fact, I know things because things exist. Things exist because God knows those things.
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The only reason that we're all here is because God had knowledge before there was ever anything but him.
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So yes, we could say I have knowledge and God has knowledge, but we are not using the word knowledge in the same way, are we?
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There's similarity but there's not sameness. In fact, we have to even say there's an infinite distance between the fact that I have knowledge and God has knowledge.
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So that's what we mean when we say analogy. We see it all over scripture.
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We call God, wonderfully, our father. God is a father and I am a father.
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But there are a host of ways where our fatherhood is radically different.
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God has never procreated. There's nothing physical involved with his fatherhood. He has never become a father.
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He has always been father to the Son and with the Son, spirating the spirits.
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God is a father and I am a father. Yet, there is a radical difference in what we mean between those things.
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And yet, think of how God has accommodated himself and even, it gets more wonderful to think,
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God created us to experience and understand fatherhood in the various ways that we do, that we might have the means to comprehend him and who he is.
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Fatherhood exists in human experience that we might understand the ultimate paternity, the eternal one, in God himself.
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So God has accommodated himself to us and so we call him father because it evokes in us the response he wants us to have in terms of love and protection and provision.
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He's speaking to us analogically. He's communicating himself to us in ways that are similar but not same to us.
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Now this concept, if you'll grasp it, is basic to what we understand scripture is.
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Herman Bovink, who we just referred to, he said scripture is anthropomorphic through and through. What he means is that scripture is
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God accommodating himself to men and taking on the form of men that we could grasp and understand something who he is.
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Now again, this isn't any more misleading than I was misleading my daughter when I was saying much, much to her. It's accommodating mercy for God to speak to us in this way and it'll have major ramifications for us if we grasp this as we think, especially in a couple of sessions about God's immutability and his impassibility.
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The important thing again is that we just do not reduce God and who he is to how he's revealed himself to us because he's accommodated himself to us in scripture.
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For now, what we're saying is that God is immeasurably beyond all that we could think or comprehend and that's why we have endless joy in God, as we looked at last night.
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As we think about God's incomprehensibility, it assures us that we're truly talking about God.
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This is an assurance again for us. We're talking about the true God who is infinite and beyond our grasp.
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One of the commonalities of every false god and every false religion is that it's intuitive and comprehensible.
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You can understand an idol. You can grasp a false god, which is an indicator that you're talking about a false god.
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We can have real knowledge but not comprehension. And we should be familiar with this.
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That's even true for our observations of creation. What is gravity? What is light? What is time?
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We can't even define the most basic elements of created realm. And so how could we ever think we could fathom the infinite realities of who
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God is and it should provoke humility in us and who we are as creatures. It also should cause us again to prize our
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Savior and the scripture. We can't know even a person until they speak to us.
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And this was Paul's logic in 1 Corinthians 2, verses 11 and 12. He says this, for who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person which is in him?
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So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world but the spirit who is from God that we might understand the things freely given us by God.
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God has freely spoken to us of himself. He's told us who he is that we might understand.
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There is a creation rather than not because God has spoken and acted. And as we saw last night from our brother
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Richard Sibbes, God's delights to communicate and spread his goodness. He's communicated by creation and he's communicated by revelation and speaking to us.
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And he's spoken to us in these last days in his Son. We are Christians because God who said let light shine out of darkness,
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Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4, has shown in our hearts that we might have the light of the knowledge of his glory in the face of Jesus Christ.
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It's a wonder beyond our comprehension and it should not be taken for granted that God has spoken.
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It's his mercy to us. Calvin again says, we see with what ardor everyone pursues his own fancies while hardly one in a hundred deigns to spend half an hour in the day seeking the knowledge of God.
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And there is another evil a false opinion which proceeds from pride that to know God is a common thing.
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And Calvin says this, were a hundred lives given to us, this one thing would be sufficient to engage our attention.
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If you could live for 10 ,000 years, this one thing, knowing
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God, would be sufficient to keep your attention. He's incomprehensible. He's infinite.
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And so we rejoice in God as the bottomless fountain of joy. It is
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God's incomprehensibility that it fires and inspires our worship. There's an old
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Farside cartoon. Everybody remembers Farside. I hope the reference isn't too old. There's an old
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Farside cartoon with a guy sitting on a cloud with a halo. And it just says, I wish I'd brought a magazine. Like heaven's going to be just this dreary waiting room.
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A lot of Christians have bought this caricature of eternal glory. And really it often fuels our indifference to worship and our apathy towards even corporate and personal worship or seeking the means of grace in the church.
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But worship is fundamentally adoring and wondering our incomprehensible
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God. Think of Psalm 145, verses 1 to 3. We read this, great is the
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Lord and highly to be praised and his greatness is unsearchable.
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Older translations say unfathomable, from the fathoms dropped off the side of a ship to measure the bottoms of the depth.
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When you drop the line to measure the depth of God, the line doesn't stop. He's unfathomable, unsearchable.
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Paul in Romans 11, verse 34, who has known the mind of the Lord? Oh, the depths of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God, how unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out.
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Heaven will not be boring because God has no boundaries and there's no end to him.
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Or as one theologian has said, there is no last thing to learn about God.
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You will never reach a final thing to learn about God. Well, now we're a million years into eternity, no one will say, well, and that's it, now we understand
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God. That will never happen. And the reason that eternity and the joys of heaven will be eternal joys is because God has no boundaries.
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It will be the unfolding wonder of unbounded glory unfolding for eternity. This is what
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Paul says in Ephesians 2, verse 7, he says, in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.
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How are the riches of God's grace to us in Christ? Immeasurable, without end, infinite, incomprehensible.
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You cannot comprehend or measure the riches of God's grace. Heaven will not be boring because God has no boundaries.
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He's boundless and glorious. And so we say with the psalmist, we will bless your name forever because your greatness is unsearchable.
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There's no end to you. There's no extent to you. We exalt God now and forever because you never get to the end of God.
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It's a wonder for us and a great encouragement. And our God is incomprehensible.
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Amen. Let me close our time of prayer. Father, we thank you for all that you've spoken to us, that we might grasp even in our meditations this weekend, the fringes and the hem of your being.
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We pray you would help us to stand in awe and wonder of your glories, the immeasurable, unsearchable depths of your goodness.
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We pray that this joy would give us hope even in darkness and that would garrison our souls against the discouragements of this cursed creation, that we would await for you to be all in all in the victory of your son.
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And we rejoice in your glories forever. Help us to meditate happily upon these great thoughts of you as you communicate yourself to us.