The Incomprehensibility of God, Parts 1-3

The Incomprehensibility of God, Part 1

When talking about God, one of the first things to mention is His incomprehensibility.  There are a couple of important things that renders God incomprehensible to humans.

The first, should be obvious – it’s our sinful state and present condition.

One important requirement to understand and know God to a certain extent is to have the Spirit of God.

“The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit” (1 Cor. 2:14). 

Here the natural man is the unsaved man.  He is unsaved and therefore void of the Spirit of God. When a person believes in Christ and trusts Him alone for eternal salvation and the forgiveness of sins, that person immediately is given the Holy Spirit (Rom. 8:9; Eph. 1:13-14). 

Who authored the Bible? The Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21).  Therefore, if a person is not saved and does not have the Holy Spirit living within him or her, understanding the Bible’s message apart from having the author is impossible.

We are spiritually incapacitated and therefore we do not have the faculty for understanding the word of God.  For example, in the room or area in which you are sitting or standing, there are scores of radio waves all around you. You cannot hear the sound. But if you have a device which is able to pick up on the sound and transmission of those radio waves, such as a radio, you can hear what’s going on around you.

The Holy Spirit is God’s spiritual receiver that enables people who have Him to understand the spiritual message of the Bible. Without Him, receiving the message of the Bible is impossible. This is why for so many people who are void of the Spirit and therefore, unsaved and in their sinful state, God is incomprehensible.  Not even the Bible can help here.

End of Part 1

The Incomprehensibility of God, Part 2

Man’s present state of sinfulness makes God incomprehensible. When Paul wrote to the Ephesian Christians, he said:

They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. ¹⁹ Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed (Eph. 4:18-19). 

Notice man’s understanding is darkened.  There is also separation between God and man. Then there is ignorance.  Then to top it all, there’s the hardening of the heart. 

So when you hear people say, “Where is God when I needed Him?”  God is always present. It is man’s sinfulness that makes Him incomprehensible.

In Ephesians 4:17, we read: “This I say therefore, in testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart.”

Again, look at what is being said:  Man is alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them because of the blindness of their heart. The hearts are blind that produces ignorance resulting in alienation from God and the darkening of the understanding.  The outcome: God is incomprehensible.

But besides man’s state of sinfulness, there’s another reason why God is incomprehensible.

More on this in Part 3

The Incomprehensibility of God, Part 3

God is not only incomprehensible because sins limits our comprehension of Him, but secondly,

2. God is incomprehensible because of His infinity or infiniteness.

About God, the Bible says this:  “Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen (1 Tim. 1:17).   

God is eternal, invisible, He is an infinite being and because He is infinite, He is eternal, and because He is eternal, he is infinite.

Over to another passage:  “Who (God) only has immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see: to whom be honor and power everlasting. Amen” (1 Tim. 6:16). 

God is infinite. Because He is infinite He is incomprehensible to finite man. Now I think the logic of this should be very obvious.

Isaiah asked these series of questions:  “To whom then will you liken God? Or what likeness will you compare Him to? (Isa. 40:18). In other words, what on earth can you compare God to and what can you use to accurately describe Him?

He is incomprehensible.  The finite cannot grasp the infinite. I hope we know and understand this.   You ask, “Why?”  Because a God that is comprehended is no God at all.

If we could really know God in the fullness of His being, we would be gods ourselves. The only person who can know God is God. This is why Jesus said “no one knows the Father except the Son; and no one knows the Son except the Father” (Matt. 11:27). 

BTW, I would also take this to mean that even in heaven when we are in our gloried bodies, where there will be no sin to hinder us, yet even in that perfect state of being, we will never fully comprehend God.

Did you think you would?  Sorry to disappoint you.  You will not.

Of course we will come to know a lot more about God than we know now, when we are in His presence.

God’s divinity escapes all human senses. God may choose to reveal certain features about Himself to us, but such features are only a small part of His overall infiniteness. In fact, there is a sense in which when God reveals Himself, He is still hidden. This is true because there are things about God we shall never know.

The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us (Deut. 29:29).  Pour over the Word of God and learn all you can about the “revealed” things of God. Don’t worry about the things that are not revealed. There are some things that are not even going to be known when we get to heaven. You know one of the things that’s going to make eternity interesting is the fact that our knowledge of God is probably going to be an increasing / growing knowledge.

Here is something interesting to think about. Remember, Paul said that, “There abides faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13).   He writes this in the present tense. He says, there “abides” faith, hope and love.

Some people say that when we get to heaven we’re not going to have faith and hope anymore we’re just going to have love. That’s not true according to what Paul said.  He said there “abides” (present tense) faith, hope and love. When we get to heaven we’re going to have new revelations from God and we’re going to exercise faith and hope in them as we see them come to pass.

And when I read from the Bible these words:  “For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd; ‘he will lead them to springs of living water.' 'And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’” (Rev. 7:17). I take this to mean that there is going to be an increase and development of not only my intellectual life, but also of my emotional life.  All my experience of God will be developing in heaven.

Yet, as eternity continues, God will then and forever be incomprehensible.

End of Series