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There’s a lot about God that doesn’t make sense to humans and never will. Take, for example, the interplay between God’s sovereignty and man’s free will. If man has free will to do whatever he wants, doesn’t that infringe on God’s sovereignty? But if God is so sovereign that he controls everything, doesn’t that infringe man’s free will? I’m not going to solve that little controversy in this post; the debate is thousands of years old and still raging. But I do want to point out something interesting about it.

That thing is that people today get squeamish when you raise the notion that there are things about God we don’t, and possibly can’t, know. We live in such a hyper-scientific age that we’re expected to have a logical answer for everything. If someone asks where God came from and our answer doesn’t make sense to them, they discard it. There’s no inherent problem with science, but something that often piggybacks on it is the notion that man’s intelligence is the extent of truth.

Think about it. There’s no way, scientifically speaking, to explain where the universe came from. The best they’ve done so far is the Big Bang, which basically says that there was nothing, and nothing exploded, and now there’s everything. Boy, that’s convincing! Science’s obsession with explaining where the world came from stems from one simple source: they have a problem accepting God’s existence. To accept his existence is to accept that he might have some say in what’s the right way to live, and we can’t be having that, now, can we? So the world’s smartest people create the world’s dumbest ideas in an effort to come up with a possibly-plausible explanation for the meaning of life. Why? Because if it doesn’t make sense to them, they can’t accept it.

That sets up man as the ultimate judge of what’s true and what’s false. The fact that matter and life cannot possibly have originated outside of God doesn’t seem to faze these people; they’ve decided what they believe, and truth doesn’t enter the equation. They find God’s existence to be illogical (less so, somehow, than the notion of matter coming from nothing) so any perspective that includes God doesn’t count because it comes from the realm of the absurd.

Then we stumble along, saying that God exists, but that there are certain things about him we don’t know. That doesn’t win us any bonus points. "You say there’s a God, and you can’t even explain how his sovereignty squares with my free will?" You can see there that the listener’s acceptance hinges not on whether God objectively exists, but whether he chooses to accept the proposition of God’s existence. The dual problems resulting from this predicament are that we go overboard trying to reconcile these "contradictions" in God’s character, and we lose appreciation for the fact that we can’t explain him.

I for one am pretty grateful that God is so big that I can’t understand him. He wouldn’t be much of a God if my puny mind could completely figure him out. But we treat his hugeness as a liability when dealing with analytical minds; we rue the fact that we have to concede a lack of knowledge or grudgingly admit a contradiction. Shame on us. We don’t need to have an answer for all the deep questions people might ask, no matter how much we feel like we need to. We don’t need to bust our brains figuring out a God who’s infinite, cause we’re not going to get it. And guess what? That’s okay.

God was never meant to be figured out intellectually. He wants to be experienced and loved, to have relationships with us, to inhabit our hearts with his Holy Spirit and to change our lives through the power of his love and grace. He wants us to know him – not to know about him, but to be powerfully intimate with him. No one in the Bible ever got closer to God by having the right answers about him. They met God by going up onto the mountain and spending time in his presence. Go and do likewise.

Copyright Jim Barringer