Incomprehensibility!

One responsibility of the under shepherd is to scout future feeding opportunities for the sheep under his leadership. While we are currently feeding on The Gospel According to Mark on Sunday mornings and evenings and Ecclesiastes on Wednesday nights, there must be some work done on where we are going next. The book of Hebrews could be the next Wednesday night study. And I am beginning work on a needed series on the Attributes of God for either Sunday morning or Sunday evening. I don't want to make it a long series covering all the attributes at one time but a series that covers several of them each year. So we may cover 3 or 4 in a series this year, 3 or 4 more next year and so on. All that is up to the providence of God, of course.

In a pursuit to know God, the first truth to come to grips with is that you can't know God. Philosophers say that God can't be known so that all we can know about God is what he is not. Gnostic's claim that God is absolutely unknowable and we should be silent. What I mean is that God cannot be known--fully. We cannot know God in his essence. Every description or name for God is inadequate, for human language struggles even to say what God is not. Theologians call this limitation the incomprehensibility of God. While God certainly and infinitely surpasses our understanding, imagination and language we can know him in terms of what and how he has chosen to reveal himself to us. Through the gift of revelation we can have some knowledge of God. We know God through his works and in his relation to us, his creatures. And this knowledge of God is relative and finite rather than comprehensive. God can be known but only as he reveals himself to us and only by the means he reveals himself to us.