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CHAPTER 5
WHAT IS REALLY INCOMPREHENSIBLE ABOUT GOD ?
We have been looking at information, and the grand nature of this vast and instructive category, and in the process noted the wonder of the information not only about the creation, but from God direct. As to that, let us make the matter yet clearer, and consider the exquisite clarity of the information FROM God to us direct, as persons, just as He has ordered an amazing practicality about the information from which each babe's body is made. Thus information is both corporal and mental, both constructive and instructive, both dynamic and didactic. The status of the written information has been shown in the preceding Chapters. What of its clarity ?
In the Westminster Confession of Faith, we find of God a particular word which needs here to be examined. It is the term 'incomprehensible.' The Confession cites Psalm 145:3 relative to its use of this term.
Terminology
There is, however, a great deal of difference between "unsearchable" as is the base meaning in the Psalm, and "incomprehensible." The Westminster Confession, in giving Psalm 145:3 for its concept of God as "incomprehensible" (Ch. 2, I) is not giving enough. The term used, as considered in the Theological Word Book of the Old Testament, from Harris, Archer and Waitke, is one for searching, for enquiry, and can be used of anything from mining information to heart information, the searching of the heart.
If you are making a search, you may find or you may not, the data which you seek. If a subject is unsearchable, then there is more to it than you can discover, and set out in due form before yourself. It gives the sense of something going on, and on, like mountain ranges, seen from some elevated position, as they supply themselves seemingly unending, to the eye which beholds them. But there is no sense of being beyond any understanding in having something of a continuity vast and massive, infinite even in disposition. That is a related, but analytically quite distinct concept. The one may be true without the other being applicable. There is no notion of marriage between them.
Thus if you interview a sportsman and find a range of exhibits stretching from room to room, you might comment that they were endless, meaning beyond what is in hand for checking each one. Any concept of their being incomprehensible would be alien, as in many other cases, for the ideas are distinct. "Your sins are unending" again, does not mean that they are beyond comprehension. It does not say so.
There is obviously a difference between what is too hard in NATURE to grasp, and what is too long in retinue, to cover. A clarity of brilliance may be associated with something, which yet is not able to be compressed into formulae, or made subservient to the mind in systematic oversight, as if it were a plan for a rocket. It is not subject to simple enumeration, or being set up as a system. God is not subject to this since He is NOT a system, or a series of events or ideas or container units, as in a container ship, to be laid out for the clerical mind! His greatness is unsearchable.
By no means does this make it the subject of confusion, illusion, competing concepts of a contradictory kind, any more than the awards to a sportsman, or the teeming words of some vast encyclopedia. In ADDITION to being vast and beyond the immediate reach of knowledge of detail, there may in something deemed 'incomprehensible' be a certain obfuscatory element, one which defies understanding, which leaves the mind gasping, or the intelligence gaping, wondering how on earth or in heaven, for that matter, some things are to be reconciled with others.
Of the Lord's Terminology and its Meaning
On the contrary, concerning the WORD of God, Proverbs 8:8 tells us, indeed concerning the WORDS of God, that they are "all clear to the one who understands." There is nothing obscure or perverse in them; for indeed they are a light to the path, and it is not darkness but light which is infinite in God (I Timothy 6). In His light, we see light (Psalm 36:9). There is so far from anything presenting a blockade to understanding, in the biblically defined word and revelation of God, in fact a superb and supreme understandability.
Thus His words are in principle ALL clear; and to anyone who understands (not who CANNOT understand, for that is not the one in view here), they are ALL clear. There are no blocs of obscurity. Much about God is to come, when we see face to face, and know as we are known, as distinct from the relative dimness now (I Cor. 13). But to see something dimly, like say flowers in a background of seeping mist amid the trees of a vast wood, is not a matter of the comprehensible and the incomprehensible, but of the actually visible and that more which is awaiting total revelation.
Failure to be understood is certainly not something posited of God in the Bible. The opposite as in Jeremiah 9:24, is His distinctive; it is a distinctive to be gloried in, not a compromised spattering to be ashamed of; it is to be accompanied by the writing of His law upon the heart. Even before the New Covenant, He was as a husband to them as He took them by the hand, and His beauty was what David sought perpetually to behold (Psalm 26:7). As in Hebrews 8:11, the intimacy upon the exhibition of the exact image of His Person - Hebrews 1, is so great that there will (as in essence in I John 2:27) no need for every man to teach his brother, since in the whole corpus in view, " all will know me, from the least of them to the greatest."
People may presume in misconception, generalise in grossness, draw incorrect conclusions from the given data, as when someone imagines that because the unspiritual person, the "natural man" does not receive the things of the spirit of God, that he cannot have some knowledge of them, notwithstanding this. Such is categorically found in Hebrews 6 and 10, even spiritual data with which a man rejoices, as in the parable of Christ, though only for a season. Such knowledge and such joy comes when the word of God germinating in the heart, yet dies through the shallowness of the roots allowed by the hard and superficial layer of soil. Yet, in the interim, such a person has gained, some intimation of God being "once enlightened," and of "the power of the age to come."
That is what the word of God says. Indeed these things are statedly not only clear but stunningly so, and are held down (Romans 1:17ff.), by intervening and positive obstruction. Balaam is an excellent example of such warped concourse, such partial knowledge, such weird movement in a duplicitous heart.
Put differently, their time is near; they are almost born; but as excitement for the journey into life appears, so death ensues. The word itself stirs in them, but guilty sham stirs the more; the dawn seems to come with all its colour, but the sun is not there.
Indeed you do not have to fail to have a certain measure of comprehension, even of intimacy (note the prophecy of Balaam!), because you are inimical and bound in a remorseless conflict. There is nothing reliable, as in faulty glasses, there is distortion, but there are apertures through the mist, there are gleams through the self that will not die, till death itself claims it as its own.
Such a fraud may create, and will, some confusion and total unreliability, for there is unfaithfulness from the outset and unbroken sinfulness in the onset; but this is not the same as being something impenetrable by the working of the Spirit of God (Hebrews 6:4), or being immune from an act such as this, to "have tasted the heavenly gift" or even become in some sense, "partakers of the Holy Spirit," while never swallowing what they taste, or imbibing that of which they partake, like restless companions on a tour, who look this way and that without subversive enterprise, unsatiated and wandering even as they walk. Remember Saul, thought of once as one of the prophets, for a little while! Yet his heart had not changed.
Leaving out the work of God Himself, as so shown, when considering the limits of the "natural man", as in I Corinthians 2:14, with his natural inclination, is not wise. There are those who may not as such be in transformation, be impressed with spiritual things to the heart, yet their unseeing eyes gain impressions, and their dormancy of spirit gains experience. It is in some ways rathe like being temporarily intoxicated with the sheer wealth of wondering found upon his doorstep, glimpsing it and doing a dance; and then turning away, not entry to the home of one's own spirit being gained by the Lord. This is the case both illustrated in example and described in principle in the word of the living God. When God acts, things natural, like the earth when hit by an asteroid, react. It is not like an invited guest, but the impact is real enough.
Indeed, God is NOT to be left out of anything concerning Himself, and this is not an exception. Penetration of the impenetrable, light into darkness, these are things of no extraordinary character with God (John 16:7ff.); so that seed rooting itself, albeit superficially, sprouting indeed, but then dying because the rocky soil underlying did not signify the necessary repentance, the heart being hard, this is not amazing but one of the chief categories in the parable of Jesus Christ (Matthew 13). To be sure, the seed represents here the word of God, not the soul to be born again, but the ground IS penetrated, however much it is limited to the surface, and the joy is quite real as shown in Matthew 13:20.
It was not fundamentally that the person did not understand, but did not understand or receive the necessity to repent, to embrace unreservedly, to capitulate, to surrender. Indeed, to be a transformed ground, underneath broken up,
Romans 1 speaks of those who, though they knew God, did not "glorify Him as God." It was not knowledgeability but reception which was the problem. It was a knowledge tussling with darkness. It was not incomprehensibility but aversion from that which was all too comprehensible which is the cited problem in this assessment from the Lord in His own word.
In essence, from the word of God, then, one finds that "unsearchable" does not equal incomprehensible, any more than it does in English. What is in some sense beyond enquiry is not as such, beyond comprehensibility. For the believer, as distinct from the dabbler, it may be deliciously, delectably magnificent in an intensity of being and brilliance which in its very self, amazes with its splendour, expresses itself unendingly to the apprehending mind, astonishes with its sheer beauty and illimitable incandescence, its multitudes of graces and harmonies (Ephesians 1:17-21); but this is far from meaning incomprehensible. God has not been seen as such, but the Son has led Him forth (John 1:18).
You may look at some text book and find passages of admirable kind, moving on from the known to the unknown in glorious composure, all of a kind but needing more and more movement into the not entirely assimilated exposure; but this does not make of them any kind of incomprehensibility.
The term 'incomprehensible' CAN mean: lacking scope for the work of mind; irrational; insusceptible to grasping in full and so on. Hence the use of this term concerning the Christian's knowledge of God certainly has its defects when you simply wish to refer to what is so great, that its entire spreading out before the mortal human mind is too much to ask, so glorious that one needs resurrection in the eternal format for eternal life, before you see it, as personal, "face to face."
The Purvey and Supply of Even the Deep Things,
Even from All Things Searched out
Crucial is the point that though you only know in part know, as in I Corinthians 13, yet you know this, that EVEN THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD (I Corinthians 2:9ff.) have been searched out by His Spirit, and presented, both the substantial reality and the words being in view, the former statedly the work of the Spirit of God, and the latter of the deposition in words given by Him. Such is the magnitude of the revelation of God accorded to man, by His sole authorised, written declaration to mankind, in His own name. The book of the Lord is one and not many, just as the Saviour is one and not many (Acts 4:11-12), and has already come and been rejected (Isaiah 49:7, Acts 2:23ff.), indeed murdered, that He might by the plan of salvation from the Almighty, taking a body from the womb (Psalm 40, Isaiah 7, 9) become man. Then in perfect exhibition of the name, the nature of God, as man He has ransomed and as God He has risen from the broken body, the same restored in wonder (Luke 24:39, I Corinthians 15:1ff.).
It is He who declared that eternal life is to know God, and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. This is something possessed by many NOW (John 5:24, 6:47, I John 5:12-13). If you are to know God, it is not as something obscure, that is not knowledge, not as something incomprehensible in the sense that it pillages, defies or obscures understanding. That is precisely NOT to know. To be sure, you COULD use the term 'incomprehensible' to mean no more than this, that you cannot lay it all out as a plan, and see "how it works" as if it were subordinated to your schema so that you could predict what in any given instance, it would do. That is a TYPE of comprehension, but not the only type.
The term may be well meant in the creed concerned; but it is not here well used, being susceptible to the false dogma, for example, that there is an incomprehensibility about the fact that God would have all to be saved, and yet sovereignly does not elect some. This allows very significant error in theology, based on a view of the perspicuity of the word of God, contrary to its own testimony concerning itself. If the deep things, yes, if you look, yes these as part of the ALL things: if then the deep things of God are through His Spirit searched and presented, revealed, then as in I Corinthians 2:9ff., there is no room for having obscurities which draw meaningless tensions in truth, or even contradict what is given.
ALL things ... EVEN deep things, such as Paul lists, these are impenetrably comprehensive, and undeniably what God has to say. It does not mean that everything is disclosed, but that for the disclosure, everything is searched out, there is no categorical omission, let alone distortion or false premiss. Thus even the things which eye has not seen, the things which God has prepared for those who love Him, THESE HAVE BEEN REVEALED to us through His Spirit. Though this is not necessarily - and not in fact - an exhaustive revelation, it is one based on an exhaustive revelatory readiness and base for export.
NOTHING in principle consisting of contradiction or omission to the principles and the power, the majesty and the mind of God is omitted. The domain is ALL THINGS, and the concept is that of a revelation where this being the base, the export in revelation to man is correlative in kind, if not in detail.
Thus for example, when we read that IT PLEASED God, having executed the plan of salvation in terms of the blood of Christ - who was Himself executed in the mission of God NOT to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved (John 3:15-19) - to reconcile, ALL THINGS to Himself, it is a final datum. It will not be withdrawn, the issue and the issuance in words being guaranteed by God to have come even from the depths. This is no more subject to contradiction than is the statement that God is love (I John 4:7ff.). Thus, just as the Spirit searched in terms of revelation, so God has sought in terms of love; and just as ALL was searched, so ALL are sought in this love. It is statedly so.
Nothing contrary to love is to be found in His heart (I John 4:8), and if, love having done all, then judgment is the residue for those who prefer darkness to light, the divinely stated criterion for differential results for the destiny of mankind, as in John 3:19, then this is in no way contrary to the dimensions of love. In what way is this the case ? Doubtless in many ways, but for this moment, let these suffice: LOVE has done ALL, and there is nothing left out in sacrifice, plan, performance, magnificence of lovingkindness and glorious provision, acute suffering or willingness for wicked hands to carry out what love provides. What it took, He did. Where He was to go for the consummation of provision, He went.
This He did for the poorest of mankind, the most criminal or the proudest alike. The Redeemer did enough for all (as in I John 2:1-2), and though all are not then bought, the adequacy was ample. Again, it is no part of love to force, and potential for reciprocity is of its essence. All are in view in the eyes of loving desire; and deep is the weeping of Christ for what would not realise the day of its visitation (Luke 19:42ff.). God is like this in character, in nature, in willingness to nurture.
God does not exclude them without the eternal criterion: that light, that of Jesus the Christ, in whom dwells the fulness of the Godhead in bodily form (Colossians 2:9), has come into the world and men have preferred darkness. This is the scope of the plague (Romans 6:23), and this is the scope of the critical exclusion. He may in His original foreknowledge - in which the ONE WHO Christ is was operative as in all things, leading on in result to predestination as in Romans 8:30ff.. Whatever in nature and character Jesus the Christ has shown Himself to be, that He has always been, and in all phases, even before out time began, He is the same, for of Him, it is written, "You are the same," and "His years will not fail." The heavens by contrast "will perish," but "You remain."
The same indeed, in and for all times, He may, then, act sovereignly, but this is with the PRINCIPLE and CRITERION given in John 3:19, and shown in John 15:22ff. If HE had not come and done and spoken what none had ever said or done, they would have no sin. What then ? sin would not be their hanging scaffold; but now there is NO EXCUSE, the Lord declares. Why ? He states that it is for the reason that they have both heard and seen Him in His revelation in Himself, at work; and even then, rejecting Him, they reject the kingdom and the conferment of pardon. As now, so always, is the Christ of God, before our time, past it, reliable as the Rock, sure as the Saviour, expressing the first as the finale, as deity.
It is true that there is a resultant hatred, as in Romans 9, such as before sin ever entered, acted for the voiders of the love He gives, the salvation He offers. It is this appeal which He makes, that a reality which is intrinsic to the nature of God, be received in a prodigy of mercy in repentance by sinful man, gained through a ghastly harrowing of pain, the suffering of His soul its quintessence, of His body, the declaration of its essence (Hebrews 5:7, 12:1ff., Luke 22:39-46). It is with this in background that He exhorts as in Proverbs 1 and I John 4, and with this is the remedy which is provided freely in the Gospel of redemption (Romans 3:23ff.). This offer of divinity, this proclamation of pardon in Him, if disdained, ignored or sidestepped, toyed with or invaded with pollution, however, has its effect. Thus there is a resultant of John 3:16 in terms of John 3:19, with an end in terms of 3:36! From the absolute love at the outset, with the absolute criterion of John 3:19 preventing defacement of its purity or relegation of its actuality, one defending His love, there come results as in John 3:36. Before sin became a differential amid man, foreknowledge knew its own.
This thrusting aside occurrence (as in Romans 9:13) of those who do not receive Him, first foreknown by God apart from merit or attainment, then becomes predestinative, a logical phase well down the line from foreknowledge. Application in conviction of sin is of the Spirit as in John 16, in various manners; but WHAT is applied is as in accord with all that God says, even He who would have all to be reconciled to Himself, and this, statedly in view of what He has done through the blood of Christ. This He declares with quintessential clarity (Colossians 1:19ff.); and results in heaven or hell: these follow.
This is a marvel of comprehensibility in the Bible. As soon as obscurity is imagined to come into the word of God, there is room for falsity. It becomes like a filter over one's glasses, an improvised and improvident filter, leaving but a dull residue.
As to this, His word, it is CLEAR, even if you have to chew. There is milk and meat, but meat tends to strengthen. Nevertheless, in chewing, do not thrust in, with philosophical fragments of your own, so that you break your teeth of comprehension on these, and spit out the word of God, as if by mistake, amid the pain! When then you come to the word of God not sidestepping, countermanding or using the variety of distancing technique both known to and often used by man, and rigorously accept and apply its principles, there is a marvel, such is the intense purity and faithfulness of the word of God. When this is done, not only is the wonder of the plan of salvation clear and gloriously apprehensible, but the very nature of God is revealed in such a harmony and depth that it is not only something of profoundest beauty, but brings answers in all directions, starting from within itself.
Finally, in this first section, let us note one thing with emphasis. Paul speaks of the things prepared for us, the whole of this, the magnitudes beyond magnitudes, the magnificences past splendour, what is waiting in heaven for the Christian, in I Corinthians 2:9. That is the explicit topic in verse 9. This realm is missing from the unconverted, in its total state, for their spiritual astigmatism tends to distort, and their wills to resist. However, when it comes to the status of those who belong to God, whose futures are here in view, with special emphasis on the things not known by mere work of thought, things special and particular to God, aspects in the very midst of His counsel and the depth of His mind and intention, what then ? It is this: these things "GOD HAS REVEALED TO US."
That is the fact. There is nothing distorted, beyond expression in the overview involved at the doctrinal level. This, these things, are manifest BECAUSE they have been revealed. It is not to some people with peculiar or select spiritual apparatus, but "to us". It is not in Mars; it is here and now and to us. It would apply to Mars, if that planet were relevant. It is fact far more applicable than that could ever be.
The purvey of the plan of salvation and the orbit of its application, the desire and the intent, is operative from God, not only toward things on earth, but to those in heaven! as in Colossians 1:20. He loves, He creates, He foreknows, He predestinates, there being neither mistake nor uncertainty. These things are past psychic twitching, deceptive sinuousness on the part of man, and known to God, applied by Him (Romans 8:29ff., John 1:12). He would redeem all, but not defiling the reality of what is created in His image, He lets love speak and find (John 3), what sovereignty then endues with certainty (John 6:65), so leaving none to be lost for whom darkness is not preferred, and hell unattainable except through such preference, known to God, and administered in His own faithfulness, to meet the unrelenting claims of mercy.
Of such, heaven becomes in operation, the zenith of condemnation, the light of unbearable exposure. Conscience itself has its warrant, and truth disdained becomes judgment maintained.
Let us review it a little.
In telling us more, giving more information, on this FACT of what is the status and stature of revelation as now given, the apostle is moved to write this in I Corinthians 2.
Firstly, God has revealed these by His Spirit (cf. I Peter 1:10ff;, II Peter 1:19ff.).
Secondly, there is a reason why this is so. It continues therefore with the explanatory conjunction, "FOR" ... "for the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God," I Corinthians 2:10. This being the reason, we are told that the resource for the revelation of even the most special and deep things in kind, is this, that ALL things have been searched. The fruit of this relevant enquiry or search, is that we have been told the result (I Corinthians 2:13) in words not in themselves of men's wisdom, but as freely donated by God.
There is a search by Him who CAN search all things, with limitless competence, divine facility. On this basis, there is a revelation of even the deepest things. More is to come in detail as in I Corinthians 13, but the scope of what we have is to the uttermost depth of God, nothing omitted in the purvey, for the purpose of revelation that we might know God.
Indeed, in Jeremiah as in John 17, we find that while we are NOT to glory in wealth or such things, in power or its ilk, we are even to GLORY in this, and here is the quintessential emphasis, that we KNOW God AND UNDERSTAND Him. How then is what is understood incomprehensible ?
If someone might say that something in this field is near to incomprehensible, it is how people could deem what is understood to be incomprehensible! That might perhaps be a sounder use of the term!
Any use of this term in this revelatory context is potentially disastrous, for it is often misused, and leads to the folly of obscurantism whereas all the words of God are clear to him who understands. There is nothing IN KIND unclear. It is indeed precisely this which is one of the chief features of the word of God, that there is nothing inharmonious in it, and it explains and gives basis for understanding that is unique and totally competent in ALL areas (cf. Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ). One has never found any phase of wisdom or knowledge in principle, which is impenetrable, in kind, when one starts with the word of God. Nor is there to be found anything which does such work of harmony and clarity, comprehensibility and resolving power, without it. Truth is like that.
This then is the testimony to the intrinsic clarity of the word of God, and a warning to the brethren to beware of allowing idle words slipping out with good intention, but infelicitous potential.
Sighting the Situation
God, then, is not incomprehensible except to those who do not know Him. The word may perhaps be so used with indifferent accuracy by some who do not mean what it most readily implies; or as a diversion by those of another aim, or in lack of due care, or even slackness. It is however not only of the word, that our concern is aroused, but the fact. Knowing God and His essential characterics is crucial to eternal life. He is not known as it were, with Kant (cf. SMR Ch. 5, Predestination and Freewill); but in reality. He is not known a bit, as with a first glance at a charter; He is not known in the main type only, with who knows what in the 'smaller print'. He is known as He is and this is elemental to eternal life. He is not known exhaustively; but He is known accurately if one follows His written word remorselessly and relentlessly, as for a treasure, which it is. Psalm 119 expressly this rigorously.
Christ is the equal of God (Philippians 2, John 5:19ff.), and it is crucial that men realise that His honour is that of the Father. As in Jeremiah 9, so in John 17, knowing Him, even in the sense of "show us the Father," as in John 14, is not a dubiety but an accomplishment. "HAVE I BEEN WITH YOU SO LONG, and yet YOU HAVE NOT KNOWN ME!" asks Christ. He does yjod in expostulation, His thrust attended with the very authority and clarity of heaven!
If He had been in some cardinal or characterisable way different from the reality, or had been truncating it for simplicity, then any claim to know Him, in any sense, would be outrageous. He is as He is shown to be, and what He is, is by no means lacking in exhibition. It is not a matter of some MERELY or REALLY personal knowledge from which comprehension is lacking. Rather the revelation is propositional as well as personal, a matter of abiding in His words as well as in His love. If there is one thing that the Bible makes exquisitely clear in this field it is that here and in Christ, you have not an ember, but the fire, not a suggestion, but commanded words, even from the Father (John 12:48-50), not a symbolism but a substance (Hebrews 1-2, 7-10), not a flicker but the light which the darkness does not COMPREHEND, this being one of its features! (John 1:5).
We know God AND UNDERSTAND HIM, says Jeremiah of the essentials of being the Lord's. Let us review further.
Certainly far more distinctness and fulness on many things awaits one in heaven, but it is like a forest slightly obscured by mist. The trees you know, and can see; their ground, the sky beyond the mist, you can see, and even in cloudiness aloft, you can see the picture of the picturesque; and the way of life of these things is not obscure. Far more is to be learnt; but not in kind. The basics, we know. There is nothing to make of the forest something quite different. We hear the howls of the wolves galloping towards it, but the forest we know, and what seeks to destroy it, of this we are aware.
The fulness of the glory of God will come like a sun-rise; but God has already revealed most clearly who He is.
In particular we know we shall be like Christ in the resurrection and know as we are known (I Cor. 13), though merely redeemed sinners. In Him we have the Shepherd's intimacy and care and knowledge and sharing and friendship. Even now, we know Him; then the intimacy is more obvious (as in Revelation 7:14-17).
Thus, for the biblical Christian, all the things given concerning the Lord are assured to the depths, are not symbol-ridden substitutes for actuality, though symbols as in any speech, may be used. The shadow is already past; the substance is here as Hebrews 7ff. assures us. We do not decline from, but incline to the risen sun We follow Him through the heavens, and are well aware of His ways. His character is known, His word, even to the depths of sublime, divine revelation, as I Corinthians 2 informs us.
It is, to be sure, NOT known as one might know anything else - cause, effect characteristics, what prompts this and what it prompts, because of who God is. He creates things of that kind, and is not one of these!
He is not a piece of machinery, intellectually subjected to us, He is not a system, ground-plan explicable in lectures, as subordinate to our schema. We are subordinate to His! Yet He has CHOSEN so to reveal Himself, and this is the heartland of Christianity, for it includes the mode of remedy. In one Book, in one Christ, for one great purpose, our salvation, and that we might know Him, with many things arising from this, such as the reason for His desire for it and the results of despising it, His very nature is explicitly revealed (I John 1:2-3, 2:27, Hebrews 1). His reason is love; His desire is mercy; His provision is to escape judgment; His cost is vast; His gift is free. It may be jadedly rejected, wilfully eschewed, or disdainfully avoided, indifferently disregarded, but with a willing heart which even went to death, it is the work of His desire, that the world might be saved. His lament is for what has avoided it. It was not a suggestion; it was a necessity, for our current position when without Christ, is one without God and with judgment!
He has intervened. He has done so with the brilliant and express image of His person, His incarnate Son, the heir of all things, the criterion of His nature, the core of His nurture, the securer of His mercy for man by backing the warranty with Himself, His zeal with His sacrificial death, His power with His abolition of death, in Himself first, and for others when the trial stage is over for the whole earth.
The Christ who has been displayed to us in these marvellous actions, being the very brightness of the divine glory (Hebrews 1), with the intimate reality of the Son, and infinite nearness of God's eternal word (cf. John 5:19-23), is Himself appointed Judge of all (Acts 17:31), in nothing inadequate, by nothing overborne, nestling now as always in the abiding presence of His Father, the incarnation the expression as man, of the eternal God. Indeed, as Creator (Colossians 1:15), He is "upholding all things by the word of His power" and as provider, is also purger, having for the Christians "purged our sins, and sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high," Hebrews 1:3.
Though He left behind the power of majesty, except for Messianic display and use, and the splendour of His magnificence, except when choosing, as in the transfiguration, to exhibit it, for the sake of His mission, He is as eternal as His Father, so declaring, "Before Abraham was, I am," as in John 8:58. Being man, He has come as man to take the rap for man, as many as believed, that we might be wrapped in truth, and not rapt in darkness (John 9:5, 8:12, 16:1, Proverbs 4:19).
It is God whom we see, who know Him, and not another, not a duplicate or index tab. It is as the light of the world He has come (John 8:12), the One providing "the light of life," and for the rest, and it is as One "in the bosom of the Father" that He has declared Him (John 1:18). As such, He has answered all questions, met all queries, satisfied all trials, met all criticisms, shown His entire conformity to the written word of God in every challenge, this being given by the Spirit of God over time, as He Himself came as the plenipotentiary Son of God, with His spoken word the director of nature and the barrier to evil, as when He cast out demons, and met the challenge of the devil in person.
The clarity of His works and words, their scope, directness, unequivocal majesty and exceedingly gracious humility, from His lips as Messiah, leave Him as a lighthouse that in its brilliance suffuses not only night (which is coming), but the days which approach that dreadful hour (I Thessalonians 5). The warranty and the wisdom of God (cf. Christ the Wisdom and the Power of God Ch. 8), His is the clarity which cannot be contained, the light which cannot be invaded, being composed in character, incomparable in penetration and covering all of life. His word is like Him, summoning truth into information, diffusing principles, not only the distillate of wisdom, but its depth and obliging the actions designated, to become fact through act.
Assuredly infinite is His power, wisdom and love, and faithful is His word, from no part of which to the very jot and tittle will He decline; and indeed Faithful is one of the names upon Christ as He comes in judgment, as in Revelation 19. yes faithful AND TRUE. His truth is not in clouds of confusion, mellowed with evaporative imageries, which usurp the issue; He is the truth. He is not left in philosophic quanderies or propositional nightmares, an article for the jiggling mind of man. He has declared Himself (John 1:14-17, Hebrews 1). This is not a contribution from a secretary. It is God Himself in Person.
He does not contradict Himself, for if God contradicted God, infinite power would meet infinite power, and the thing is itself therefore a contradiction in terms at the outset.
Patronising references to the clarity and perspicuity of the word of God are jousting with reality, minimising the deity of Christ, if that were possible, but moving as if to do so; and the use of the term incomprehensible relative to God in view of the Book of the Lord and the Living Word of God, incarnate as Jesus Christ, is as safe, therefore, as is dynamite in the hands of a child, or a sword in the hands of a traitor in the throne room. It is not commendable.
Infinite in depth, unsubjectible to impersonal manipulation or prediction (EXCEPT in prediction, where HE makes it Himself and will thus stand by it, or where He gives a basis for it, for only HE can do this, only He being without limit), He is who He is (John 8:58, Exodus 3:14), and He reveals that unique and eternal reality from knowledge to knowledge, in His word, if not exhaustively, then reliably, truly and in depth.
He exists by Himself without oversight, and has oversight of all. Yet He has made man in His image and has chosen to incarnate Himself in Christ and to die for man that man might know God, without the distancing of the sovereignty of sin, and without mere prelude; for as to Christ, HE IS THE TRUTH (John 14:6), and reveals, quite direct.
The words of the Lord are not obfuscatory or clouded, but are filled with light, give light and bring to confidence the knowledge of the things of eternity, so that while vast is that to come, yet the principles and characteristics, the nature of His love, mercy, peace and nurture, of His destiny for His people and His power, indeed His majesty is all so well known that to pretend we do not know Him, who do, who are daily in the laboratory with Him, in His company, with the security of His propositions all about us on the very walls, is insupportable. It is like disowning a father, or a mother, or saying, "I never really knew you!" Praise God, for this is neither necessary not just, for the Christian whose reception of the grace of God has such dimension and depth (cf. Ephesians 1:17-18).