Swimming in the Deep End: Knowing God

One issue that I have struggled with for some time is God’s knowability. Is he really knowable? How can I be okay in the uncomfortable tension between “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts,”[Isaiah 55:8–9] and Jesus’ prayer that we should find fullness of life in knowing God [see John 17:3]. If God is a truly transcendent being, and therefore cannot possibly fit into human understanding, then why should I even bother to try and ‘figure him out’? That, however, is a bad question to ask.

To try and ‘figure God out’ would imply that he can be ‘solved’ like a math problem or a logical puzzle, and is tantamount to putting God beneath a microscope so that he can be studied within the confines of the sterile (not) laboratory of the human mind. Instead, it is more fruitful to ask ‘how can I honor God in the way that I think about him?” Rather than turning God into an object to be studied and dissected, this question is far more relational. Since God is a relational being, a person to be known rather than a problem to be solved, it is more appropriate to think in terms of honoring or dishonoring God by the way I think about, talk about, and worship him. Still, it’s like being thrown straight into the deep end. An unfathomable God simply cannot domesticated and goaded into the limited corral of the human imagination. He is wild. He is dangerous. And he is good.

Understanding that God is transcendent and therefore not fully knowable should not lead the believer into despair, but to a place of awe and wonder at the vastness of the God whom we worship. It should be even more profound for the believer (and it is for me) that God would deign to actually become like us and communicate to us in a way that we can understand [see John 1:14]. Good theology doesn’t have to mean that the theologian has it all figured out. In fact, I submit that any theologian who claims to have everything about God is either lying or in denial, because they have made God a tame, mundane object of study and shrunk him to the size of the mere human mind. That is not to say that humans are all pea-brained idiots and can never truly know anything outside of themselves. Rather, one must acknowledge that when they are dealing with the all-knowing, all-powerful, eternal, holy, Triune God, they are diving into waters that are well beyond the human capacity to understand. J.I. Packer was correct in saying that good theology leads to doxology, because good theology leads people to think correctly (though not comprehensively) of God, and worship him as a result. God calls us to know him, even if at times that means simply throwing up our hands and saying, as Job did, “I spoke of things I did not understand, things to. wonderful for me to know” [Job 42:3].