Living His Word

Isaiah 55:8-9 ERV: The LORD says, “My thoughts are not like yours.
Your ways are not like mine.
Just as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so my ways are higher than your ways,
and my thoughts are higher than your thoughts.

We have been designed, but God is the designer. We are creatures, but God is the creator. We are limited, but God is not limited by anything. We control some things, but God is in sovereign control of everything. We have some power, but God is all-powerful. We know some things, but God is all-knowing. God, in other words, is beyond us in every respect. There is a lot of mystery when it comes to God.

It’s true that God reveals things to us, including things about Himself, but He doesn’t reveal everything to us and, as a result, there are a lot of things we don’t know. Further, when God does reveal things about Himself, He does so in creaturely terms. He has to, since we are creatures. But when He does this there is still an element of mystery. God, for example, is revealed in the Bible as a “rock” (Deuteronomy 32:4,18), but we know He’s not a physical thing. We implicitly know that the words and concepts used in the Bible to refer to God---father, rock, shelter, strong tower, etc.---are figures of speech that never fully reveal the reality of God. God always seems to escape any attempts to categorize Him, limit Him, or put Him in a box.

The same is true with respect to God’s thoughts. Just when we think we have God figured out, He does something totally unexpected. We have to confess at those times that His thoughts are not like ours, that His thoughts are higher than ours. Our thoughts are not like His not only because we are sinful people and He is a Holy God, but also because we are limited creatures and He is the unlimited creator of all things.

At those times when what God is doing in our lives is hard to understand or figure out, we must trust Him. After all, His thoughts are not wrong thoughts; they are just higher thoughts. We must trust that “in everything God works for the good of those who love him” (Romans 8:28).

When it comes to God, trusting Him trumps understanding Him every time.