“Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.” These words from the end of the book of Job have been something of a banner over my ministry as a teacher of the Bible. Behind every revealed truth about God and his ways there is an eternal mystery. We use language to say things about God and yet language is limited by a logic that God himself transcends. Our words are descriptively inadequate when it comes to things of God and yet they enable us to respond and point to something essentially ineffable. God speaks to us in our language but this doesn’t mean he can therefore be defined in words. With words we celebrate, worship, implore, direct etc. But words can never impart understanding. To know God is something far more mysterious and spiritual. It is not to grasp God but to be grasped by him. It is to have his Spirit testifying to our spirit (Romans 8: 16). We can know God, but not as we know other things that we can see and touch. To know God is to sense that we are seen, it is to be touched by the hand that created us. It is not an experience that can be imparted just with words. Each person must seek and know this for themselves. God cannot sit in the mind as a sum of sensations or abstract facts. He cannot fit in our minds at all. And yet we can know the mind of God and even think his thoughts as he communes with us in wonderful intimacy by his Spirit.
Ask God to lead you to a deeper knowledge of him.
Read Job 42:1-6
