You Can Know God But Never Master Him

0:09 Welcome to the For the Gospel Podcast, where we provide sound doctrine for everyday people. I'm your host, Costi Hinn, and this is the second episode of a new series on the attributes of God. If you're just picking up with me, last episode I kicked off why we should study the attributes of God with this key truth.

0:26 Your view of God becomes your view of everything, all of life's decisions, your marriage outcomes, if you're married, parenting, philosophy, political views, how you fight, how you talk, how you work, all of it. Your character flows from your view of God. Now, today we're gonna talk about this attribute that kind of helps us really frame up the entire conversation about the attributes of God, the incomprehensibility of God.

0:54 That's the attribute. And it is that God is so infinite and we are so finite. And so you're never gonna be able to know God exhaustively, and yet God has revealed himself very personally. We can know him truly. And his incomprehensibleness or his incomprehensibility should not drive us away from him.

1:16 A lot of people get discouraged and they think, well, I can't know him. What's the point? Well, no, no, it should humble you and deepen our trust and move us to worship because you realize that God is so beyond anything I can fathom, and yet he's knowable. And it's kind of nice, if you ask me, because all of a sudden I get to be the human, because I am, and God is God.

1:36 I don't have to try to be the creator, he is. I don't need to try to be something I'm not. I can be me, he is God. And if you can make God into something that you created and you can figure out, I got news for you. That's not God. God is beyond us. He is the creator, we are the creation. I've got my Bible turned to Psalm 145 for this one, and we're gonna be in verses one through seven.

2:00 David's words here are the perfect catalyst for understanding the incomprehensibility of God. And again, incomprehensible doesn't mean unknowable. It's just describing the endless depths of who God is. I want to break this down with three truths, and then I have four simple applications that'll impact the way you live today.

2:18 The first truth I want to unpack here is that God is greater than your mind can comprehend. God is greater than your mind can comprehend. And I'm getting that from these initial few verses of Psalm 145. I will extol you, my God, O King, David says, and I'll bless your name forever and ever. He says, Every day I'll bless you, and I'll praise your name forever and ever.

2:40 And then verse 3, great is the Lord and highly to be praised. And his greatness is unsearchable. Pretty amazing. David says, His greatness is unsearchable. The Hebrew idea there is God's greatness is beyond investigation. You can't search it out. You can search and search and search, and you're never going to reach the bottom of his greatness or the top and heights of his greatness.

3:06 Scripture says the same thing elsewhere as I was studying this and cross-referencing. You'll see Job 11:7, can you discover the depths of God? Can you discover the limits of the Almighty? He declares. Isaiah 40, verse 28 is another passage. There's no searching of his understanding. And then Romans 11, 33, how unsearchable are his judgments and how unfathomable are his ways.

3:30 The key here is the creator-creature distinction. This matters because the biggest mistake that people often make is thinking God is simply a bigger version of us. He is infinite, my friend, not finite. He is the eternal. We are temporal. He's creator. We're creatures. You could spend 10 billion years learning about God and never arrive at the end of him.

3:55 He's not just a little bigger version of you and I. He's completely and wholly other. And that means one of the first responses to knowing God and realizing that he is incomprehensible is humility. We should absolutely expect there to be things about God you can't fully explain. That's the first truth I want you to really grasp here.

4:18 Number two, God has made himself truly knowable. If you look at verses four to seven, I think there's just a great irony here. You know, David starts out by saying God is not searchable. You can't even get to the ends of his greatness, and then proceeds to just talk about God the rest of the Psalm. It's like this beautiful tension because David says God's greatness can't be searched out.

4:46 But hey, let me just tell you what he's like. In verses four to seven, one generation shall praise your works to another. So we're gonna tell the story of his goodness and we'll declare your mighty acts. On the glorious splendor of your majesty and on your wonderful works, I will meditate. So I'm gonna be thinking about you.

5:03 Even though God is unknowable, I'm gonna think about all the amazing things he's done. Men shall speak of your power and your awesome acts, and I'm gonna tell of your greatness. They shall eagerly utter the memory of your abundant goodness. So I'm gonna look back on my life and see all of these wonderful things you've done, and I will shout joyfully of your righteousness.

5:22 Now, the reason that David can talk about a God who is incomprehensible is because incomprehensible doesn't mean unknowable. We can't know God exhaustively, but you can absolutely know God personally and intimately with your life. There are secret things, though, about him that you're just not gonna know.

5:42 Deuteronomy 29, 29, kind of the ultimate passage on this. I spoke about it a great deal when I was preaching on God's will at our church. I wrote about it in my book, Walking in God's Will, because I was trying to help people understand there is God's sovereign and secret will, meaning he's just gonna do what he's gonna do.

5:58 And Moses says the secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us. That's God's revealed will. And God is incomprehensible. You can't fully know his sovereign plan, his sovereign ways, what he's doing. He's doing a million things at once that you and I have no clue are going on.

6:16 And our job isn't to try to pry all of that open, like there's secret knowledge available to us. No, we don't try to pry open what God has concealed. We accept that. Our job is to spend our lives believing and treasuring and obeying and discovering what's available to us and what God has revealed. And ultimately, God has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ.

6:40 And so anytime people are looking for these secret knowledge portals and they're like, oh, well, have you heard this and oh, this? And everyone thinks, you know, I'm gonna find something new that no one ever knew about God. And people use the word revelation a lot, not to describe, you know, this is a revelation of God to us from the Word.

6:58 No, they're like, I've got a new revelation for you. And I, this great mentor in seminary, used to all say, Costi, if it's new, it probably isn't true. You know, the idea that you're gonna come up with something new that no one else in all of human history has discovered unless you're discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls.

7:12 The idea, though, that you're gonna say, you know, I think it means this, nobody else has come to this conclusion is not clever. It's concerning. The bottom line is Christ has been revealed. Everything is available to us in Christ. And the minute you have exhausted the depths of knowing Jesus Christ and all that that entails, go ahead and chase some weird secret knowledge, but you never will.

7:36 You could live a million lifetimes over and never get to the bottom of who Jesus is and all his greatness and grandeur and splendor. The Bible says in John 1 18, no one has seen God and yet he's been revealed in the only begotten. Jesus is the explanation of God. And so you don't need to try to find secret knowledge, you don't need to go crazy places and get involved in crazy experiences to discover God.

8:08 He stoops down to reveal himself. He has done that through Jesus Christ. And so he is incomprehensible, but he is totally knowable. Third, God's incomprehensibility should produce worship, not frustration. Whenever I talk about this stuff with people, there is inevitably a few folks that just kind of get frustrated.

8:28 They feel like God is holding back on them, or it's just, well, well, why was he doing this? And why won't he that? When you look at Psalm 145, look at some of these pairings. Verses one and two, I will extol you, I'm gonna bless you. Every day I'll bless you, I'm gonna praise you. You look at some of these other statements like I will meditate, I'm gonna, I'm gonna praise your works to another, I'm gonna declare your mighty acts, tell of your greatness.

8:54 You have all these statements. You know, I'll bless your name. Every day I'll bless you, I'll meditate, I will tell, I will praise over and over. David encounters a God and knows a God that he cannot comprehend. That is his view of the Lord. And yet his response is not frustration. It's not God, why won't you give me more?

9:15 Come on, where's the good stuff? It's it's worship. I'm just gonna go off about all that I know about you. And this is really important to think about because we have an instinct to want to know God. And that's great. But that sometimes goes too far when we want a God we can completely understand. You know, we want answers and explanations.

9:37 I want to know why. But think about it for a second. If you could completely comprehend God, he wouldn't be God. It wouldn't be much of a God if you if you could understand him and fit him entirely into your little three-pound brain. And that's not an insult to you. My brain is three pounds too. That's not the God of Scripture.

9:56 There should be moments, there are appropriate moments where the only Christian response is just, oh, the depths of the riches of both the wisdom and knowledge of God, like Romans 11. That's it. I'm just blown away by God. And so what do we do with this? How do we navigate his incomprehensibility? Where does the rubber meet the road?

10:15 Let me just give you four practical implications here. Number one, stop demanding that God explain himself to you on every front. I know you want answers. I think that we have a lot of answers. I think that the Christian doesn't often have to say, well, I don't know, to like basic, obvious things. But God's not going to explain everything to you.

10:35 Why did that happen? I don't know. Why hasn't he fixed it yet? You know, God, why'd you allow that? Why this suffering? Why this child? Why this marriage? Why this diagnosis? Why this disappointment? Look, there's nothing wrong with asking God questions. He can handle your emotions. But eventually, faith and knowing God and who he is and studying his attributes is going to help you be able to really say, not play acting, not faking it and trying to sound all Christian ease, but genuinely you'll believe this in your heart.

11:04 I don't understand what God is doing, but I know enough about God to trust him when I don't. That is incomprehensibility applied to your life on a Monday. Number two, stop shrinking God to fit your preferences. When you understand his incomprehensibility, well, you realize that you can't fit him into your little box of preferences.

11:26 We naturally create these manageable versions of God. He is a God who never judges. That's really big. You know, well, I just don't feel like God would be careful. You and your feelings about what you think God might do don't define God. God defines God, and the scriptures do. You know, we want a God who always mansplains, a God who always agrees with us, a God who exists primarily to just make our lives work and do things that we want.

11:53 But again, God defines God. Our responsibility is not to make him understandable or palatable or acceptable. We just receive him as he's revealed himself. So stop trying to shrink them into your preferences. Number three, become comfortable saying, I don't know. I'll be honest with you, as a pastor and just as a man, it's it's hard to say, you know, I don't know.

12:19 You got to grow into that, I'll call it a discipline. But once you realize, you know, you don't know everything, there's this masculine humility in that. It's not intellectual laziness at all. You're you're not being a theological coward, like you know the answer and you're like, I don't know. You know, I remember Joel Osteen one time on one of those famous news interviews, and he's, you know, getting asked about basics like heaven and hell, who goes and who doesn't.

12:43 He's like, you know, I don't know. And he's it's that's theological cowardice. You do know, we do know, Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, the life. John 14, 6, nobody comes to the Father but through me. So we absolutely know who goes to heaven, who goes to hell, and how you get there. But knowing where scripture stops and stopping there too, knowing where these secret things belong to the Lord and being able to say, look, I don't know.

13:08 I don't know why God allowed sin to enter the world. I don't know why that couple had a miscarriage and this couple didn't. I don't know why this beloved sister is struggling with infertility, or this brother desires a family and medically things aren't happening. Whatever that looks like for people, but this family just the guy sneezes on his wife and they keep having babies.

13:33 You know, I don't know why God opened the door for that person to have the job you wanted and you didn't get it. I don't know why she chose to marry him and not you, or I don't know why your father or mother died young and somebody else's lived to be 98 years old. I don't know. And it's okay to say, I don't know.

13:51 We don't always have to come up with some theological treatise. Some questions have biblical answers, many do, but others don't. And a mature person knows the difference. The incomprehensibility of God allows you to say that. So listen, tell your kids, tell your friends, tell somebody who thinks, you know, you Christians have all the answers.

14:11 You always say you know everything. Look, I don't. There are aspects of my God that I'll never fully understand. He's incomprehensible, and yet I know this, I can have a relationship with him, and I can be saved, and I can have a lot of answers, and that I can rest in. Finally, number four, never stop pursuing the God you can never exhaust.

14:32 I do understand that people get discouraged by God's incomprehensibility, then they become theologically lazy and go, well, you can't discover God. You know, I don't know, I don't know, and it's how to know about everything. And so they they slow down on the pursuit of God and they settle for less in sort of a shallow relationship because you're like, oh, who can even know?

14:48 I don't even know, man. No, no, no. Listen, his incomprehensibility should not discourage your pursuit of him. Instead, I believe it ought to motivate us because what a joy to think it'll never get boring getting to know more of him because you're never done. And maybe that's where you need an adjustment, and so do I.

15:09 We're used to projects. I do this and I'm done. I record a podcast and eventually the recording stops. I work out and the workout ends. I go on a road trip and I reach my destination. I go to church and eventually the pastor finishes the sermon and the day is done. I go to work, there's clock in, clock out, all these things.

15:30 Listen, yeah, there's a lot of start and end points, but when it comes to knowing God and studying God and loving God, you are never, you're not punching in, punching out. There's there's there's no end to it. It's forever. You're never gonna graduate from knowing him, you're never gonna exhaust his wisdom.

15:46 You're never gonna reach a point where like, I am now an expert on this entire book and on God. I've reached the bottom of his goodness. Next, never. It's never gonna happen. You're never gonna comprehend the fullness of his holiness, and you're never gonna finish exploring all of his glory and so love it, enjoy it, plumb the depths of what you think, and then go even further into who God really is.

16:11 Get into the depths of his attributes, and you'll find you've barely scratched the surface. And when you really grasp the incomprehensibility of God, isn't it obvious that the goal is not to figure God out like you're conquering a new skill? The goal is to spend the rest of your life enjoying getting to know the God that you will never ever exhaust and fully know.

16:40 It makes you long for heaven. I know it does that for me. I long for glory and to see him and to be with him and to experience the scope of his incomprehensibility. And I hope that encourages you today to get to know more of God and then to be humbled by the fact that you can't even get to the depths of it and all that he is.

17:04 You could live a million lifetimes over, and there's still more of him to enjoy. Next week, we'll jump into another powerful attribute of God, but that's a great place to stop today. Thanks for listening, thanks for watching, thanks for your support here at For the Gospel. We're so grateful for all of our partners and the reach that the Lord has allowed us to have.

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18:01 I'll be back next Monday with another episode. Keep on living for the gospel.