Equip 2024: Our Blessed and Boundless God #2 - He Who is: Divine Incomprehensibility | Steve Meister

Well, why don't we take a look at our next, well, let me make a note, too, at the end of your, I think it was the end of the notes on the last one, has recommended reading. So those are books I recommend, and I have them organized according to, you know, from easy to difficult.

And Kofi got you a wonderful bundle with the books and resources. Those are great. So those are great things. There'll be a lot of stuff this weekend that if it's new to you will probably go, wow, I need to think about that for like a week.

And so that's often the case. These would be great resources to help you do that. And we'll move now as sort of introducing God as blessed and think about God as incomprehensible beyond our knowing or saying.

Knowledge and Love of God

And we want to know God because we love him. And if you are Christian, you know God and you love him by the Spirit's power. But if we want to love him and be happy in him, we need to know him more. And this is basic to really any relationship.

Augustine said, no one can love a thing that is unknown. Or even the Presbyterian leader, J. Gresham Mason, said, human affection is really bristling with dogma. That is, when you think about those you love, what's beneath that are actually, you could call them doctrines.

They're truths you know about people. They're things you know, and that's what brings you to love them. And so it's no less true for God. For us to grow in love and joy in God, we need to know him. So we can get rid of some of the times the caricatures that run around the Christian world that somehow knowledge of God is going to hinder our love and devotion to him.

That's silly. We want to know him so we can love him more and we can have greater joy in him. Augustine again, a happy life is joy in the truth, for this is joy in thee or in you who art the truth, O God my light.

But as for the knowledge of God we know, we need to think about what we're talking about when we talk about God and the different ways we talk about God. And our endeavor too, and we'll think about this this weekend, our endeavor for consistency so we can think about God rightly according to his word.

Two Modes of Thinking About God

And Charles Hodge, in a very helpful comment here on your handout, says there's two ways for us to think about God. And he says 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.

So that's the first way, simple scriptural answers all the purposes of piety. And he says there is, however, another mode not inconsistent with or contradictory to the former, demanded by the understanding to avoid confusion and inconsistency.

So think about what Hodge is saying here. He's saying there's two ways to think about God. There's a simple mode and that answers all the purposes of piety, for our praying and our worship, for leading our families.

You can tell your kids God is everywhere and you don't have to say more than that. God's always there.

He's everywhere.

But the second mode, he says, consistency demands for understanding and for clarity, to have organization in our minds and to think clearly and logically. And this is the method of thinking about God that we'll do this weekend, where we start to get into bigger questions.

So you tell your kids God is everywhere, but then that raises other questions. How is God everywhere? Is God present on earth the same as he's present in heaven, or is it different? Is he present in heaven the same as he's present in judgment in hell, or is that different?

So God is everywhere, but how is God everywhere? And then you start having to give longer answers about how God in the fullness of his presence is exactly everywhere. And the important thing that Hodge says here is noticing this isn't inconsistent or contradictory with one another, but they're necessary for our understanding.

Sometimes when you get into this topic, people say, well, that's so philosophical. Everybody's philosophical. If you care about consistency and not being contradictory, you have a philosophy. And the question is whether or not it's scriptural or it's warranted by what God has said.

And so this is what we're thinking to do as we think about God. And as we think about God, we want to begin in one of the weightiest passages in scripture, and we'll be there this morning, or excuse me, reverse that.

God's Self-Revelation in Exodus 3

We'll be there tonight and tomorrow morning. And that's Exodus 3. And so if you have your Bible, turn to Exodus 3, and we think about this passage here where God reveals his name, and we think about how God is wholly unlike us.

And we think about how then God is far beyond our ability to grasp. So in Exodus 3, we're told in verse 1 that Moses is at Horeb, which is another name for Sinai. And this is before God redeems his people, before he leads them out of slavery.

And he speaks to Moses, who we know is going to lead, humanly, that redemption. And he tells him not just who he is, but God tells him what he is. His whatness, or the fancy word is quiddity for that.

And what we have reflected here is a very key point, that being precedes doing. Knowing what precedes how and why. If I say I love spending my day off with Hodge, am I referring to reading a 19th century theologian, Charles Hodge?

I love spending my day reading Charles Hodge. Or am I referring to my 90-pound Pyrrhodor dog, whose 90 pounds of fur is any love? You need to know what before who has any meaning. Whatness matters. The nature of a thing matters.

And so as Moses here is exploring the reason for God's redemption, the assurance he can have, how God can be trusted, he needs to know first what God is. The nature of who God is. And God explains that in, beginning in verse 13, let's read this significant session of Exodus 3, Moses said to God, if I come to the people of Israel and say to them, the God of your fathers has sent me to you, and they ask me, what is his name?

What shall I say to them? God said to Moses, I am who I am. And he said, say this to the people of Israel. I am has sent me to you. God also said to Moses, say this to the people of Israel, the Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob has sent me to you.

This is my name forever. And thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations. Notice as God answers Moses' question, he gives three answers. I am who I am, I am, and then the Lord or Yahweh, which is a derivative of I am, and then the God of your fathers.

And where God starts is as significant as the meaning of each, because before he explains who he explained what he is. And as I said, we'll think about this more tomorrow morning, but we're going to begin this evening is thinking about the incomprehensibility of God's being that he reveals here.

The Incomprehensibility of God's Being

God says, I am who I am. I am sent me to you. And you may have a footnote that says, or you could translate this, I am what I am, or I will be what I be. I am who I am is probably the best rendering. And we don't really need to bother with the ambiguities of the Hebrew here.

The point is significant. God gives a subject, I am, and then he, with a pronoun, specifies the predicate with the same, I am. It's mysterious. It's circular. As one writer says, it forces your attention back to the subject.

God is he's incomprehensible. He's beyond our comprehension. It's not saying God's unknowable or that we can't apprehend him, but we can't contain him or comprehend him with our minds. So William Ames on your handout says, God, as he is in himself, cannot be understood by any save himself.

The only one who fully knows God is God. An old resident of Medford could say something like, I know every inch of this town, because they've lived there their entire lives. But the reason why is that possible?

Because Medford has boundaries. It has an extent. And if given enough time and attention, you could even get to know it that well, intimately. You could comprehend it. We can comprehend big things with enough time and focus.

Even airplanes somewhere have manuals and explain all the parts and you can eventually grasp it. But God is, he has no boundary. He has no limit. He has no descriptor. There's no definable extent where you can go and stand back and say, well, they're all there is of God.

I can see all of him. That's it. God's free of every limitation of he is immense and he's free of all the limitations of the creation that he brought into existence. And so remember we saw in first Timothy, we can't even approach the bright light of God's.

Glory.

It's unapproachable light. Moses later in chapter 33 asked to see God's glory and God replies, you cannot see my face.

And live.

Because what you see, you can survey and come to comprehend and understand, and you can't see infinity. No one can see God, but himself. Human perception can never take in the infinite, eternal, omnipresent light.

An old principle is that the finite can never contain the infinite and God is infinite. He is beyond our comprehension. We can't have infinite thoughts and so we can't comprehend an infinite God. So how do we ever know God?

Well, that's the third answer that God gives here to Moses. The third name in verse 15, the God of our fathers, your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now we know who they are.

We know their stories in scripture. We know how God had covenanted and condescended to promise and to deliver each of these patriarchs. And God gave a name, Yahweh, by which his people can know and call upon him.

So this incomprehensible God can be known by his works in creation, as he works to redeem and reveal himself, and by his word, as he reveals himself and as he covenants himself. So we can know God insofar as he reveals himself in his works and his word, but we can never fully comprehend who he is.

Or to use the analogy of a tree, we can put our hand on the tree, but we'll never get our arms all the way around it. We'll never comprehend God. John Calvin, on your handout, helps us think about this.

He says, we know the most perfect way of seeking God, and the most suitable order is not for us to attempt with bold curiosity to penetrate to the investigation of his essence, which we ought more to adore than meticulously to search out, but for us to contemplate him in his works, whereby he renders himself near and familiar to us and in some manner communicates himself.

That is, we can never grasp the essence of God, but we comprehend him in his works, how he comes to us, how he communicates to us, and how he's spoken in his word. And that reminds us that communication between us and God can never be assumed and taken for granted as a matter of course.

God's Accommodated Revelation in Scripture

God in mercy has condescended to speak to us, that we could know him, that we could understand who he is, and he's accommodated himself to us. And that is a key point. As we think about God speaking in his word in scripture, we're thinking about what we call accommodated revelation, where God has stooped down to speak to us.

Or what Christians have referred to the Bible for centuries is baby talk. Augustine said scripture suits itself like to babes. It's baby talk. Calvin has a now famous image, and he talks about scripture as a nurse lisping with infants.

He says, Who is so devoid of intellect as to not understand that God, in so speaking, that is in his word, lisps with us as nurses are wont to do with little children? Such modes of expression do not so much express what kind of being God is as accommodate the knowledge of him to our feebleness.

In doing so, he must, of course, stoop far below his proper height. So in scripture, which is beyond our ability to grasp in a lifetime, we devote a lifetime studying it, is God stooping down and cooing like a nurse holding an infant.

When my daughter, she's now almost 13, when she was a toddler, I would pick her up and I would say, Daddy loves you so much, but she only caught the last bit of that phrase. And so then she started responding by saying much, much daddy.

And so I love you between my daughter and I still to this day is much, much. That was how she heard it. Now I wasn't lying to my daughter. I'm still not when I hug her and I say much, much. I was accommodating her three-year-old mind.

I love you. And then she would return that. But there was far more to my paternal love for my daughter than that she could grasp in much, much. My protection and all my provision for her as her father.

But she couldn't grasp that or two or three. She could grasp much, much. And so I was accommodating her toddler mind by communicating with her in that way. And so God in scripture is accommodating his infinite mind to our finite ones by communicating himself to us in his word.

We can't grasp, as we've said, infinite thoughts of the infinite God. So God has to stoop down and accommodate himself to us. And that's what he's done in the Bible. It's baby talk. It's God cooing to us.

And it's important that we never reduce the radical, incomprehensible otherness of God to how he's accommodated himself to speak to man in scripture. And that brings us to what came up in our conversation in our break is how scripture speaks analogically of God.

Analogical Language About God

Now this is really important. So hang in here with this. If you get this, you'll get a lot else. When we think of scripture, we think of it as an analogical communication. What do we mean by that? We mean that the same words when they're used of us and of God are similar but not the same.

I'll give examples here. We mean there's similarity and proportion of the same idea and word between us and God but not identity, not exactness. So it helps to think about this, to think about what we're denying.

So we're denying that when we talk of God or scripture speaks of God, univocal language, so univocal, one voice, uni-voice, the same thing. So if I say I had to put a gallon of gas in the car to go buy a gallon of ice cream, the word gallon is being used univocally.

It's a unit of measure. Gallon of gas, gallon of ice cream, it's the same thing. It means the same. So that's identical. Equivocal, two voices, means entirely different. So if I say park your car at the north end of the park, the word park in that sentence is being used equivocally.

It's the same word, but it means two totally different things. One's a green field you can play in, and one is a stopping motion of your car. Or if you're from the UK, you could say even crazy things like you put your football boot in the boot, which actually means your soccer cleat's in the trunk.

But that's another thing. But that's an equivocal language, two voices. So when we talk about the words we use of God in Scripture, it's not univocal, which is identical, gallon, gallon. It's not equivocal, which is entirely different, which means that they would not be referring to the same thing at all.

It's analogical, which means it's similar but not the same. Now, all of that is sort of just putting language and concepts around what we probably all take for granted and know intuitively. So when we speak of God the Father or God the Son, we know that we're not speaking of fatherhood the way we understand it as humans in creation, the way we experience it.

I was not always a father. You will know that I was not born a father. I was changed into a father after marrying my wife and we had children. But we know that none of that's true of God. God didn't get married and He didn't become a father by the natural course of procreation.

But neither do we mean it equivocally. So we wouldn't say there's no correspondence between the fatherhood of creation and the fatherhood of God. Otherwise, it would be meaningless. So we think of the relation of origin.

So God the Father has eternally begotten the Son. That is a non-physical, non-sequential, non-temporal act. The Father communicates the divine essence to the Son. Or we can think of knowledge. I use this illustration when we were talking.

We know and God knows. But we only know by learning. We learn discursively. We learn one thing after another in a sequence. And we know because things exist. God knows, but things exist because God knows.

Because He decreed from before time all things that are, so He knows all things. And God, think of this, God has never learned a thing.

Ever.

God knows everything in one simple, eternal act. But God knows and we know. So it's analogical, it's similar, but it's not identical. But neither is it entirely different. Or we can think of, and I'll look at this at Redeemer on Sunday, love.

God loves and I love. But God loves eternally so that He bestows good upon His beloved. Whereas you and I, we respond with love. Love has to be drawn out of us by the loveliness of our object. It's analogous, but it's not identical.

Now this is how God has spoken to us like babies. Accommodating Himself to us. He's not misleading us, He's not speaking falsely. He's speaking to us like creatures. To raise our thoughts because we can't fully grasp the infinitude of the essence of God, the incomprehensibility of God.

And if we're going to take our thoughts one more step, we remember that God who speaks this way, He created all things knowing that He would reveal Himself to us in this way. So in other words, God didn't pick Father as a personal property of the first person of the Godhead because He knew, well, humans understand fatherhood, so I'll pick that.

No, which fatherhood came first, God or us?

Well, God.

So the reason fatherhood exists in creation is because that's who God is, and God intended to reveal Himself to His creatures. And the same is true with everything. God is the archetype. And so as we think about the speech of Scripture and the speech of God as analogical, this is basic to understanding, just the infinite height from which God has stooped to reveal Himself to us, and how we understand exactly what we're receiving Scripture.

It's basic for us to understand what Scripture is. So Herman Bovink, our Dutch brother, says this, Scripture is accommodated language. It's anthropomorphic, that is human-like, through and through. God Himself is described in human terms via human faculties, body parts, emotions, sensations, and actions.

And that'll be very significant when we think about how the blessed God describes Himself as angry later in Scripture. It's an anthropopathism, we'll say, but just hold that for later. Now again, God's not misleading us.

This isn't more any misleading than I was trying to mislead my daughter by using much-much as a synonym for love. It's God stooping to accommodate Himself and speak to us. And this'll have major ramifications as we think about how we understand God as immutable and impassable.

And what we're really saying now is that God is beyond all that we could think or comprehend. And that there's way more to God than even what He's revealed in His Word. And that we could never fathom the infinite depths of the Divine Being.

Implications of Divine Incomprehensibility

And that's why there's joy in God. And there's implications as we think about divine incomprehensibility. Let's think through those together and to be encouraged. The first is assurance. It assures us.

It assures us that we're actually talking about God. So when we think about divine incomprehensibility, it's a point of assurance that we actually have the right subject.

God.

It's not a stumbling block. It's an assurance. Because if you fully understood something, you can be sure of one thing. That's not God. Augustine said it. We are talking about God. So why be surprised if you cannot grasp it?

I mean, if you could understand it, it wouldn't be God. We know it's truly God because we can't grasp Him. And one of the commonalities of all the false gods in the history of humanity is they're all understandable.

They're all comprehensible. We can have real true knowledge of God, but never comprehension and complete knowledge. And if partial knowledge is not real knowledge, sometimes folks will object, well then, we don't know anything.

Because what do we know entirely? When you think about even the elements of creation, what is gravity?

We don't know.

Light, how is light a particle in a wave?

We don't know.

And yet, these basic elements of the created realm we still operate on the basis of all throughout existence. And so, the fact that we can't fully grasp God should be a point of assurance and reminder that we're talking about the true God.

And it ought to provoke in us a right humility as we understand who we're approaching and who has spoken to us in His Word and we would prize His revelation to us. And that's secondly, the second implication.

As we think about the incomprehensible God, it causes us to prize our Lord and His Word. It's true, we can't know a person unless they speak to us. And that's what Paul effectively says of God in 1 Corinthians 2, verses 11 to 12.

Who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person which is in him? 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 things freely given us by God.

God has freely given us who He is to understand in Scripture. And the reason there's creation rather than not is because God has spoken that we would understand Him and He's acted. And God has spoken in many portions in His ways and has spoken in His Son and He's given us His Word that we would know Him.

And so, it ought not to again be taken for granted by us that God has so spoken to us that we can know Him and He's revealed Himself to us. It's a remarkable act of mercy. Calvin 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 in seeking the knowledge of God.

And there is another evil, a false opinion which proceeds from pride that to know God is a common thing. Were a hundred lives given us, this one thing would be sufficient to engage our intention. The knowledge of God is our prized joy and the reason for our existence.

And so we can be so grateful for God communicating Himself to us. And thirdly, this reminds us that what we're engaged in always as we think about God is mystery. Is mystery. You've probably heard the expression don't put God in a box.

And sometimes that's said by Christians out of fear that theology is going to box God up. But really what we're doing, even as we think through the difference between analogical and univocal or equivocal and as we're thinking about divine incomprehensibility, is we're actually not putting God in a box.

We're actually reminding ourselves over and over again of the box that we are in. That we can't leave. That we're creatures. And we will never get to the height of infinity in God. And so remember, mystery is pervaded through all our understanding and knowledge of God.

And we're seeking to ward off idolatry. We're seeking to ward off false thoughts of God. And to keep God outside of our box. And keep confessing that He's an incomprehensible mystery. Even in what He reveals, He's an incomprehensible mystery.

Hermann Bavink puts it this way, and he says in what's become a very well-known statement, mystery is the lifeblood of dogmatics or the doctrine and study of God, theology. And he goes on, he says, Scripture is equally far removed from the idea that believers can grasp the revealed mysteries in a scientific sense.

In truth, the knowledge that God has revealed of Himself in nature and Scripture far surpasses human imagination and understanding. Now, notice here what Bavink is saying. He's saying that it's not just, he's not just talking about the secret things we can never get to because we can't comprehend God.

He says revealed mysteries, that was what God has said in His Word, we will never understand in a scientific sense. We won't understand in an exact and complete sense. Let's take even, we were talking about this at the break also, let's take eternity.

God says He's eternal. What is that? Jesse, you're the same as me. You have no idea what eternity is.

Neither do I.

I can't form a single conception of timeless existence. It's beyond my grasp. And so even when we talk about it, I have to use contradictory, improper statements. I have to say eternity passed. Eternity has no past.

There's no succession. Or the moment of creation. There was no moment of creation. There were no moments until after creation. We use this language all the time, that's improper because we can't fathom eternity.

Life without time. I have no idea what that's like because I'm subject to change as a creature. And so even the things that God reveals to us, we can distinguish them and we can identify them and we can explain what it is, but can I fathom the depth of it?

Can I understand the fullness of the mystery? Not a chance. I'll never understand it, as Bobbing says, in a scientific sense or in a full sense. And so to paraphrase Augustine, we describe God, not that it may be said, but so that it may be not unsaid.

That is, we'll never fully exhaust all that who God is, but we have to say something and we have to speak in what Scripture has said. But in the end, as we think and talk about God, we're always talking about indescribable mystery, always.

And there will always be a ceiling to our thoughts where we, as Calvin says, adore the being of God and we worship him and we rejoice in who he is. And that's the last implication that brings us back around to blessedness.

The Joy of God's Incomprehensibility

The implication of incomprehensibility is joy, is joy. We rejoice in the bottomless joy of God. It's God's incomprehensibility that inspires our worship. I don't know how you remember the old Far Side comic strip.

There was an old Far Side cartoon with a man supposedly being depicted with a halo in heaven sitting on a cloud and then the caption was, I wish I'd brought a magazine. You know, this caricature that heaven's going to be boring.

You're just sitting on a cloud all day. And sadly, a lot of Christians have bought a caricature of eternal glory as something boring, something less than even this world. And it's even bled in sometimes into indifference in the church and worship and are seeking the means of grace.

We always remember what drives our worship and our devotion is the unfathomable, ineffable God we worship. Think of Romans, excuse me, Psalm 145, Psalm 145. Great is the Lord and highly to be praised.

And his greatness is unsearchable. There's no end to the greatness of God. You'll never search it out. You'll never get to the bottom. Or what about Romans 1134? Who has known the mind of the Lord? Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God.

How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out. Heaven won't be boring because there's no end to God. He's boundless. God can't get boring because God has no boundaries. You will never have a final thing that you learn about God because God never ends.

He's infinite. And he's full of immeasurable riches. So we say in Scripture, we will bless your name forever. Your greatness is unsearchable. There's no ending to God. And so we exalt God now and we do so with anticipation in perfected glory because God never ends.

He's without boundary. He's without extent. He's without limit. We will never be done learning about God, enjoying God and glorifying God. We exalt God now and we know heaven will never be boring because we'll never get to the end of God.

He is boundless. And so his blessedness and joy has no bottom either. And we'll think about, we'll start tomorrow on why this is the case as we think about God's aseity and his simplicity. But hopefully this is just enough to wet our appetites to think through the ineffable and incomprehensible being of God.

And this is something to inspire our worship and encourage us. And with that said, let me lead us in prayer. Father, we thank you for your kindness and love to us. We thank you for encouraging us by your word.

We praise you for revealing yourself to us and accommodating yourself like a nurse lisps to infants. You have spoken to us in a word that we cannot get to the bottom of, that elephants can swim in the depths of your word.

And yet you here are cooing to us,.

Your children.

We pray that we would treasure and prize your word to us and your speech that we might love and adore you and spend our days meditating upon your goodness until you reveal your glories and your son's return or you bring us home to you forever.

We pray this our father in Jesus name.

Amen.