None Greater By Matthew BarrettSample

Day Four: Can We Know the Essence of God? Incomprehensibility

Scripture: Isaiah 40:12-15, 17-20, 22-23, 28

What is abundantly evident from Isaiah 40 is that this God is not just a greater being than us, as if He were merely different in degree, a type of superman. No, this God is different in kind. He is a different type of being altogether. He is the Creator, not the created. 

From this fundamental difference—what theologians have called the Creator-creature distinction—every other difference follows. He is not placed into the hands of the creature, but holds every person—even entire nations!—in the palm of His hand. He is not limited to a specific place, to be put up on a stand, like the idols crafted out of gold, but He transcends any one place and is everywhere at once with His whole being. 

Even when He “sits,” so to speak, He sits on His heavenly throne judging the nations. 

He is not a god whose ears have been fashioned from melted stone but a God who hears the prayers of His people, knows their every need, and therefore can and will save them from their enemies.

There is no one like this God. He is, as Isaiah 40:28 says, “unsearchable.” That word “unsearchable” is key. His power, His knowledge, His presence, and His wisdom are inexhaustible and unfathomable. No one ever has known, and no one ever will know, the depths of His essence, the scope of His might, or the height of His glory. 

He is, in a word, infinite. That we cannot say of anyone else. “I am God, and there is none like me” (Isa. 46:9). “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (55:8–9).

Thomas Aquinas says something similar with a statement that is echoed by all theologians after him: “The infinite cannot be contained in the finite. God exists infinitely, and nothing finite can grasp him infinitely.” Aquinas concludes, “It is impossible for a created mind to understand God infinitely; it is impossible, therefore, to comprehend him.”

Even the names for God in Scripture—Elohim, El Shaddai, Sabaoth, Yahweh—reveal God truly, just never exhaustively. Never was this God’s intention. To do so would be to compromise His very own existence.

Sit a while with the mystery of God’s incomprehensibility. Thank Him for revealing Himself in ways that both honor His glory and invite you to know Him.