The ads that blanket your world
beckon you to trivial things.
Here is the great, awesome,
and only worthy pursuit.
In my previous posts in this series, we saw that knowing God is the ultimate experience because he is good, perfect, personal, superior, both like and unlike us. In this post we see that…
Knowing God is the ultimate experience because he is mysterious.
People like mysteries. Once we understand something fully, we get bored with it.
So people like puzzles, mystery movies and books, mystery religions, mysterious people, conspiracy theories, and scientific explorations of the unknown.
We love what is new. We like going places we have never been.
This is another reason why knowing God is the ultimate experience. We can never know all there is to know about God.
He is infinite, different than us, and infinitely superior to us. He is inexhaustible and in many ways unpredictable.
Knowing God is like swimming in the deep end of the pool or in the ocean. Everything else we do in this life is like trying to swim in the kids’ wading pool, or in a puddle. We quickly exhaust its ability to delight, challenge, and inspire.
Every surfer is waiting for the ultimate wave. Every classical music fan is looking for the ultimate sound system and perfect album. Every gamer is looking for the ultimate video game.
But in this world the next big thing eventually loses its luster.
God’s Secret Name
There is always the unknown about God. He both reveals and hides himself.
In the Bible God reveals dozens of self-revealing names for himself so that we can know him. But the Bible also says of Jesus that “he has a name written that no one knows but himself” (Revelation 19:12). That means there are things about the identity of Jesus that he will never reveal to us.
We can understand many thing about his ways. Psalm 103:7, for example, says, “He made known his ways to Moses.”
But in many other ways his paths are beyond tracing out and unexplainable.
Romans 11:33–34 says, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! ‘For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?’”
Now that is interesting! That is challenging!
Knowing the Unknowable
Knowing God is like climbing a mountain on which you can never reach the peak.
Knowing God is like writing a book you can never finish because the more you write the more you understand, and the more you understand the more you realize you have yet to learn.
Knowing God is like reading a favorite author who you hope keeps writing more books. You enjoy her writing so much you never can get enough.
The more you know God, the more you see there is to him.
It’s like the experience of astronomers over the last several hundred years. The more they peer into the heavens and the better their telescopes become, the more stars and galaxies they find, the bigger the universe keeps getting.
Knowing God is like the experience of scientists exploring subatomic matter. First they found molecules and thought they had discovered the smallest elements in the created world. Then they discovered that molecules were made of atoms. They thought atoms were the smallest building blocks of matter. Then they discovered subatomic particles like quarks and bozons. What’s next?
If that is true of the material world, which ultimately is finite, how much more is it true of the infinite God?
Of God you can never say, “Been there, done that.”
The apostle Paul was getting at this when he prayed that you “may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:18–19).
God is the ultimate obsession. The more you know him, the more interesting he becomes.
