Bible Stories

No analysis of Christian belief in God is complete without one further point. The God of the Bible is great, and his worshippers acknowledge that ‘his greatness is unsearchable’. Christians speak of the mystery of God, using ‘mystery’ to mean, not a puzzle that can be solved, but a reality which surpasses our understanding.

A two-year-old boy whose father has a brain like Einstein’s can know his father in a happy parent-child relationship. This is knowledge of the most important kind. Yet the boy could understand very little of what is in his father’s mind, however much his father tried to put it into words for him. There are limits to what a two-year-old,

Who among the gods is like you, 0 Lord? Who is like you — majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working

Wonders?

However affectionate, can grasp. In our relationship with our Creator we are similarly like very young children before him. We know him in a full and rich sense, for he loves us, he has shown his love in redeeming us, he shows it still in daily mercies, he has opened his hand and his heart to us, and speaks to us still through the Bible. But intellectually God remains wholly mysterious to us at some points, and more or less mysterious at all points.

With Calvin, Christians recognize that in the biblical revelation God stoops down to our limitations and uses the equivalent of baby-talk in telling us about himself. They recognize too that, although God has told us a great deal in the Bible about himself, there is certainly far more that he has not told us. In this sense God is incomprehensible — meaning not that we understand nothing about him at all, but that it is beyond us to understand him fully. This is so both because of our own limitations and also because he has told us only what we need to know in order to grow into spiritual and moral maturity here and now.

So when Christians ask questions about God and the meaning of things, and the Bible does not give specific answers, they will try not to pursue these questions into the realm of speculation, lest their guesses should trip them up. Rather, they will be humbly grateful for all that their heavenly Father has shown them about himself — so grateful that they will be happy to worship him as he is — partly unknown, partly well-known to them. And they will pray for patience to wait for the day when things that are now obscure will be made plain as God reveals more of himself. They will resolutely relate the ‘laws’ of nature, the ups and downs of history, and all the circumstances and events of each individual’s personal life, to the overruling hand of God.

Christians are sure that God, in his sovereignty, ordained what is past, controls what is present and will shape everything that is to come. So for the present they will try to rest content not to know the how and the why of so much of God’s work, trusting that all their questions will receive a full answer one day. For, as Paul wrote, ‘now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.’

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