Friday 22 June 2007

God's Iceberg

How can we know God, and what do we know about him? In many ways, that is the most fundamental question we can ever ask, even more so than 'Why are we here?' The answer to the first question is that God is revealed to us through his Son – in him and through him we can know God, the Father, Son and Spirit (John 14:9-11, Colossians 1:19). Today, we can know the Son, Jesus, through the word of God, the Bible (Colossians 1:25-26).

What do we know about God when we look at Jesus in the Bible? Here's the bit which we often forget – we know all that God tells us, and nothing more. And God has not told us everything, but only what we need to know to enable us to know how to be saved and to know how to live God's way (2 Timothy 3:15-17).

As the sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin put it quite helpfully, we don't know all of God, we only know God 'as he is to us'; in other words we know only what God has chosen to reveal of himself through his Son. And the Bible tells us that that wasn't everything; for instance, while on earth Jesus didn't know when he would return (Mark 13:32). There is much of God that we do not know, and since we're human and he is the divine Creator, it is wise not to guess too much, and if we must guess then it is essential not to insist that our guess is the right one. If we didn't have God's Word, everything we thought we knew about God would be a guess; because we have his Word, we can know what it tells us and only what it tells us is definitely true. So for example God's favourite colour may or may not be blue; but since Scripture doesn't tell us, I can only guess and I could never tell you you were wrong for thinking God preferred red.

A picture I find fairly useful (and always remember that any picture has its limits and weaknesses) is an iceberg. Icebergs look huge above the surface, intricate and beautiful yet also somewhat scary; yet 7/8 of an iceberg is below the surface, unseen. So it is with God. We can see so much of him, enough for us to know that he is holy, he is loving, he is a perfect judge, and that in his love he saves people from his judgement. What we know of him in His Word to us is like the top of that iceberg; it's all interlinked, and it's huge, and you can spend a lifetime learning more about it and how wonderful God is.

But there are things that we are not to know, at least this side of the New Creation. And that means that there will always be things we cannot understand about God. Imagine a crag coming up from the iceberg at an unlikely angle, an angle that doesn't fit with the rest of the iceberg we can see. Why that crag is as it is can only be explained by what lies beneath the surface, and we can't see that. We don't decide the crag isn't really there, we just accept that we can't fit it with the rest of the iceberg that we can see.

So it is with God. We can never know anything about him without his Word; but we can never know everything about him from his Word.

Sometimes he tells us in Scripture a truth about himself, or a truth about how he deals with us, which we can't fit in with everything else we know about God from His Word. We say 'That doesn't seem to make sense.' But that doesn't mean it's not true, it's just that we can't work out how it's true. And it's at that point that we have to remember that God is God, and we aren't. We can never know everything. But we can know enough to be saved and to know how to live Christlike lives, and we should be eternally grateful to God that he has revealed that to us.

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