Have you ever over analyzed something? Tried to figure something out that is simply beyond your ability to comprehend? I have.I remember as a kid trying to figure out how God could have always existed. My finite mind thought as far back as it possibly could until my brain hurt! But try as I might, I could not understand how God could have had no beginning and no end.
Psalm 145 verse 3 states: “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; And His greatness is unsearchable (beyond our ability to understand).”
There are a lot of things that I personally don’t get. Take a car’s engine, for instance. My husband can tell you all about pistons and rotors and intake valves and spark plugs, whereas I’m just happy if I can get behind the wheel and the thing runs. He understands about changing the oil every 3000 miles. If he hadn’t told me that, I would run the car until the engine died, never knowing the difference.
My inability to understand the inner workings of a car’s engine does not mean that engine does not exist or that someone else doesn’t understand it better than I do. It simply means that I don’t know everything, and there are things out there that are bigger than I am.
People are another mystery to me. I spend my days trying to imagine the motivation behind the behavior of people in Scripture for my stories, but then I make the sometimes costly mistake of trying to assume motives for real people I come across in my daily life.
One is fiction and those people aren’t going to care whether I got it wrong – at least not this side of eternity. But the other can affect a relationship if I jump to a wrong conclusion. Ever done that?
Boy is it easy to assume and be wrong! And the truth is, it comes down to the fact that we just don’t know everything. We cannot search the unsearchable depths of the human heart.
What makes us think then that we can understand the deep mysteries of God?
Proverbs 8 talks about wisdom and how wisdom was with God when He created the earth and “When he established the heavens, I was there; when he drew a circle on the horizon.” What kind of God commands the seas, builds the mountains and fields, calls stars by name, establishes the skies, creates all that live on land and in water or inhabit the skies and breathes life into human beings?
A God whose greatness is unsearchable.
A God who is knowable yet unknowable.
A God we will never fully understand yet knows us intimately and understands us fully. And loves us anyway and always.
Just because something is beyond our understanding or ability to search out does not mean we should toss it out as either nonexistent or unworthy of our attention. Perhaps we are assuming something that is not as it seems.
Perhaps we simply don’t know as much as we think we do.
Selah~
#livegrace #searchingwhatwedontunderstand
