Thought of the Day: Unsearchable

As I hold my head with a pounding headache this morning, I begin to laugh.  Not my normal response, mind you, and certainly not when under the weather, but it just occurred to me that all I have at my human disposal for comprehending the one infinite and eternal God is a wrinkled organ housed in a fragile orb that I can hold in the width of my hand.  It's comical, really.

This quickly led me to a brief survey of the use of the word "unsearchable" in the ESV (copied and pasted from biblegateway.com):

Job 26:14:
"Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways,
    and how small a whisper do we hear of him!
    But the thunder of his power who can understand?"

And from Job 36:
²² Behold, God is exalted in his power;
    who is a teacher like him?
²³ Who has prescribed for him his way,
    or who can say, ‘You have done wrong’? 
²⁴ “Remember to extol his work,
    of which men have sung.
²⁵ All mankind has looked on it;
    man beholds it from afar.
²⁶ Behold, God is great, and we know him not;
    the number of his years is unsearchable.


Or Psalm 145:1-3:

1 I will extol you, my God and King,
    and bless your name forever and ever.
² Every day I will bless you
    and praise your name forever and ever.
³ Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised,
    and his greatness is unsearchable.

From Isaiah 40:28:
"Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
    the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
    his understanding is unsearchable."

Then there's the end of Romans 11:
³³ Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

³⁴ “For who has known the mind of the Lord,
    or who has been his counselor?”
³⁵ “Or who has given a gift to him
    that he might be repaid?”

³⁶ For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.

And finally, for now, the words of Paul in Ephesians 3:
⁸ To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, ⁹ and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things, ¹⁰ so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. ¹¹ This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, ¹² in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him.

Did you catch that last one?  The eternal purpose of God was that through Christ Jesus our Lord, the church (that's us who believe in and completely depend on Jesus for access to relationship with God) would make the manifold wisdom of God known to the rulers and authorities in heaven?!  Now that's crazy to me.  And yet, we've come full circle.  What's completely incomprehensible to me is somehow made comprehensible by God through Jesus, and not just to us finite humans, but to the rulers of heaven, too.  Simply amazing.

Praise God for condescending to my level of understanding through the Holy Spirit and the work of Jesus so that I can grasp anything of him at all. Without Jesus being both "The Author and Perfecter of our faith" I would truly have no chance at all of fitting such a great God into my infinitesimally small box of human logic or reasoning. Again, laughable.

Thank you God for loving me in a way that allows me to understand any measure of you. Even that much is cause for me to stand (and simultaneously crumble to the floor) in awe of the glory that is You. Amen.