The Majesty of Mystery E-Book

K. Scott Oliphint

• Herausgeber: Lexham Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 557

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

How can God be three and one?How can God take on a human nature?If God planned everything, how can I be responsible?Do my prayers make any difference in God's plan?Christians may attempt to "know" God to the best of their ability--leading some to limit God as they contain Him within tidy answers for human understanding. In The Majesty of Mystery, K. Scott Oliphint encourages believers to embrace the mysteries of Christian faith: the Trinity, the incarnation, eternal life, and the balance between God's sovereign will and human choices. Drawing from the Reformed tradition and interacting with the biblical text, Oliphint shows how a profound recognition of our own limitations can lead us into a richer awareness of God's infinite majesty.Written with deep theological knowledge and threaded with everyday implications, The Majesty of Mystery connects the dots between humanity and God, belief and practice, mystery and worship. Oliphint invites readers to rediscover the purpose to which all theology aims--the worship of the incomprehensible God who faithfully reveals himself in Scripture.

Leseprobe

THE MAJESTY OF MYSTERY

CELEBRATING THE GLORY OF AN INCOMPREHENSIBLE GOD

K. SCOTT OLIPHINT

LEXHAM PRESS

The Majesty of Mystery: Celebrating the Glory of an Incomprehensible God

Copyright 2016 K. Scott Oliphint

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [email protected].

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from from ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (KJV) are from the King James Version. Public domain.

Print ISBN 978-1-57-799742-9

Digital ISBN 978-1-57-799743-6

Lexham Editorial: David Bomar, Abigail Stocker, Joel Wilcox, Brannon Ellis, Scott Hausman

Cover Design: Micah Ellis

Back Cover Design: Brittany Schrock

To Steve and Paula Cairns

Friends who stick closer than a brother (Prov 18:24)

Contents

Preface

CHAPTER 1

Mystery: Our Lifeblood

CHAPTER 2

The Majesty of the Mystery of the Depth of God

CHAPTER 3

The Majesty of the Mystery of the Three-in-One

CHAPTER 4

The Majesty of the Mystery of the Incarnation

CHAPTER 5

The Majesty of the Mystery of God’s Relationship to His People

CHAPTER 6

The Majesty of the Mystery of God’s Decree and Desire

CHAPTER 7

The Majesty of the Mystery of God’s Providence and Our Choices

CHAPTER 8

The Majesty of the Mystery of Prayer

CHAPTER 9

The Majesty of the Mystery of Our Eternal Joy

Conclusion

Appendix

Selections from the Westminster Confession of Faith

Bibliography

Subject/Author Index

Scripture Index

Preface

For many years, I have taught a seminary course on “The Doctrine of God.” Routinely, as students grapple with God’s incomprehensibility and His self-revelation to us in Christ, many begin to recognize the reality of the God we worship. Nothing will motivate worship more than a glimpse of the glory of our incomprehensible God.

My experiences teaching that course have led to this book, which explores the relationship between God’s character and our worship. Since God’s character is inexhaustible, it is the mysteries of His character and ways that should form the foundation for our worship of Him. I am hoping this discussion will be helpful to anyone in the church who is struggling, or has struggled, with some of these deep and abiding mysteries.

One inevitable source of mystery and paradox for us involves the very reality of knowing God and acting in covenant with Him. Throughout the book, I refer to this relationship in gender-specific terms—that is, as a relationship between God and “man.” Although such usage has fallen out of favor in much biblical and theological writing, I continue to find it helpful and appropriate, for three reasons:

(1) Until forty or so years ago, the word “man,” when used generically, was understood to represent both genders. This usage is rooted in the biblical narrative of God determining to create “man,” male and female (Gen 1:26; the Hebrew word for “man” is adam).

(2) The use of the term “man” in this rich biblical sense tacitly acknowledges that Adam personally represents each and every human being, covenantally speaking. Regardless of gender, all people are children of Adam; there are no “sons of Adam and daughters of Eve.”

(3) “Humanity” is an abstraction by definition, referring only to our common nature. In that sense, ironically, “humanity” is not nearly as inclusive as it seems; it does not represent either gender or any particular individual. In my opinion, this abstract language, even if used in the interests of inclusion, serves in its own small way to further enable the deep and distressing gender confusion rampant in so many cultures around the world. God did not create humanity in the abstract; He created Adam as the covenant representative of all men (male and female), and he created Eve from Adam.

I am convinced that the church can better serve the cause of the gospel by returning to biblical language (and its underlying rationale) in this matter. The editors of Lexham Press were kind enough to leave this style decision to me.

Thanks to Brannon Ellis, David Bomar, and the Lexham team for their work and encouragement throughout the editorial process. It has been a joy to work with them. Thanks also to my wife, Peggy, for patiently reading through each chapter and offering good suggestions along the way. Thanks finally to the students at Westminster Theological Seminary for their constant encouragement.

K. Scott Oliphint, August 2016

Westminster Theological Seminary

Philadelphia, PA

CHAPTER 1

Mystery: Our Lifeblood

Mystery is the lifeblood of dogmatics.… In truth, the knowledge that God has revealed of himself in nature and Scripture far surpasses human imagination and understanding. In that sense it is all mystery with which the science of dogmatics is concerned, for it does not deal with finite creatures, but from beginning to end looks past all creatures and focuses on the eternal and infinite One himself.

—Herman Bavinck

Reformed Dogmatics: God and Creation

Have you ever wondered how God can be Three-in-One? Have you been uneasy trying to explain that the One in whom you’ve put your trust has two completely different natures? Have you thought about your affirmation that God is eternal in light of His activity in time and in history? Are you tempted to think that if God is in complete control we cannot be responsible for what we do? Does your confession of God’s sovereignty conflict with your understanding of prayer? Does it make more sense to you to deny that God is sovereign?

If any of these questions has crossed your mind, you are typical of most Christians. You don’t have to be a Christian for too long to begin to see some tensions in what Scripture requires us to affirm. But we also recognize that, even as we affirm certain things, we aren’t capable of thinking about them in the way that we think about so many other things in the world. These are matters that create intellectual tension for us; they seem to conflict in some ways. As I hope to show in this book, this is as it should be. In revealing Himself and His ways in the world to us, God is pointing us to our own limits as creatures. He is reminding us that He is God and we are not.

How, then, do we respond to this reminder? In the course of this book, I hope to spell out what some of these mysteries in Scripture are. I also want to show a proper way for us to see them that should enhance the way we live as Christians—including, especially, the way we worship. Specifically, in light of what Scripture calls us to believe, I will highlight the central reason why we should praise and adore God for the mysteries He reveals to us.

BEGINNING WITH MYSTERY

Nothing should motivate true Christian worship more than the majestic mystery of God. Things that we understand, that we can wrap our minds around, are rarely objects of our worship. We may seek to control them. We may try to manipulate them. We may want to change them. But we will not worship them, not really. If what we are seeking is true worship, it is the riches of the mystery of God and His ways in the world that will produce and motivate worship in us and to Him.

Christian worship, as well as Christian theology, begins with mystery. Mystery is not something that functions simply as a conclusion to our thinking about God. It is not that we learn and think and reason as much as we can and then admit in the end that there is some mystery left over. Instead, we begin by acknowledging the mystery of God and His ways. We begin with the happy recognition that God and His activities are ultimately incomprehensible to us. When we begin with that recognition, we can begin to understand God properly and so worship Him in light of who He is and what He has done.

In his monumental work of theology, Herman Bavinck says that “mystery is the lifeblood of theology.”1 “Lifeblood” is a particularly apt metaphor here. Whenever certain kinds of illnesses arise in the body, one of the primary ways that doctors begin their diagnosis is through an analysis of the blood. Our blood speaks volumes about what is actually going on with specific organs, muscles, and nerves inside of us. Because all aspects of our bodies need blood to flow through them properly, the effect of blood on our bodies and our bodies on our blood is a central diagnostic tool in medicine. If there is no blood, there is no real life (Lev 17:11). What permeates our bodies, and brings life to them, is the blood.

So also, what gives life to all dimensions of our Christian thinking and living is the “lifeblood” of the mystery of God’s character and His working in the world. If we think that mystery is no part, or only a “leftover” part, of our understanding of Christian truth, then what we think is Christian truth can actually be a dry, “bloodless” idea, with no real life remaining in it.

Suppose, to carry the metaphor further, we pick up one of the latest Christian books that deals with the topic of salvation. As we begin to read it, we notice that there is something wrong with the way the author is thinking about his topic. Suppose, for example, that he wants us to believe that the faith that we have is self-generated; we produce it, and God responds to it. How do we begin to diagnose what exactly the problem is with this view?

We might begin by looking into what God actually says about salvation, in all of its multifaceted beauty and complexity. As we do that, one of the first things we could ask in this circumstance is whether, and how, the biblical notion of mystery fits into the author’s thinking about salvation. Is it possible, we could ask, that the reason he wants to argue that our faith is from ourselves (and not from God) is because if it were not from us it would not be our responsibility to have and exercise it? It has to be only and completely our faith, self-generated, he maintains, or we could make no sense of the biblical command to have faith, or believe in, Jesus Christ.

But is that how Scripture views our faith (just to cite one example, see Ephesians 2:8)? Could it be that Scripture affirms both that the faith that we have is ours and our responsibility to have, and at the same time that we cannot have it unless and until God changes our hearts and gives us that faith? Could it be that the view set forth in our imaginary book has yet to give due credit to the “lifeblood” of biblical thinking? We might then want to explore whether our own view of faith undermines the biblical truth of the mystery of God’s salvation to us.

In other words, because—as we shall see—there is mystery at every point of our Christian thinking and living, it is important to give a proper, biblical account of that mystery as we think through the various truths of Scripture. If mystery is absent from our considerations of biblical truth, it may be that we will need to reconsider those truths in light of the “lifeblood” of theology. It might just be that the reason we have come to believe certain things about God, or about Scripture, or about salvation, or about anything else in Scripture, is because we are less than comfortable with a robust, majestic, biblical view of the mystery of God and His ways.

THE RATIONALIST REFLEX

But if mystery is indeed the “lifeblood” of biblical truth, what would make us wary of mystery in our attempt to understand that truth? There are many answers to this question, but chief among them, at least historically, is that we have a natural (i.e., sinful) tendency to ensure that everything that we believe is easily and obviously palatable to anyone at any time.

We can see this clearly in the history of ideas. For example, John Locke, a 17th-century philosopher, wrote a small book titled The Reasonableness of Christianity. In that work, Locke set out to discover just exactly which truths in Scripture could be grasped fully by the human mind. He argued that only “reasonable” truths were worthy of belief. He was deeply concerned to cull out all mystery in Scripture, since our usual ways of thinking could not contain such things. Consequently, Locke’s view of Christianity was “bloodless”; it had no life left in it. For him, Christianity could teach only what was comprehensible to limited (and sinful) minds like ours. Thus, Locke created a dull, empty, minimalist religion. Locke’s “rational” religion was a far cry from the glorious and majestic mysteries of the truth of our Christian faith.

What is ironic about Locke’s book is that he was trying to combat the Deism of his day. Deism believed in a god, but it was not a god who was present in the world. Around the same time as Locke published his work, John Toland, a deist, published a work with the long and formidable title Christianity not Mysterious: Or, a Treatise showing, That there is nothing in the Gospel Contrary to Reason, Nor above it: And that no Christian Doctrine can be properly call’d A Mystery. Toland’s deism was set forth so that we would have no more difficulty in conceiving of God than conceiving of anything else in the world. Toland’s view, for example, was that we should view God’s character in the same way that we view human characteristics. It must all be reasonable to us; nothing could be left to mystery.

Locke wanted to combat this view, but his own response to Toland was too similar to the view he wanted to reject. For both Locke and Toland, our beliefs were restricted to only those things that could be comprehended by the human mind. For Locke, Toland, and others, Christianity could not be mysterious. If it were, it could not be “adequately” understood, and if it could not be adequately understood, they thought, it should not be believed.

These ideas undermine the glories of Christianity at its root; they make the human mind the sole judge of what is true. If the mind is the judge, only what is able to be contained by our typical ways of thinking can be affirmed by us as true. As with Locke, the depths of the riches of God’s ways are drained dry, and nothing but a shallow pool of superficial affirmations remains.

This view of things is light-years away from the “lifeblood” of Christianity. We are called to love the Lord with all of our minds, but we are not meant to seek to contain Him with our minds. If we approach our Bibles as Locke did, seeking to expunge anything that goes against our natural ways of thinking, then we will, in the process, lose the heart and soul of the Christian faith. This is a price not worth paying; its cost requires that we miss the glorious mystery of God’s triune majesty.

MYSTICISM OR MYSTERY?

When it comes to biblical mysteries, the temptation that most Christians face is the one we just discussed—i.e., to favor our own thinking, to trust our own minds. If we do this, however, we exclude the rich mysteries of the Christian faith.

But there is another, though not as pervasive, tendency that also could be a temptation. Trusting our own way of thinking buries the biblical notion of mystery, but so does its opposite. The mystery that is the lifeblood of Christian truth is not compatible with a trust in our own minds, but neither is it compatible with a denial of the use of our minds, sometimes called “mysticism.” Mysticism, in the way we’re using the term here, seeks to promote and praise a total lack of understanding and of thinking. It prizes the ineffable above all and sees reason and thinking as obstacles to true faith.

A somewhat obscure example of this can be seen in the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart. As a mystic, Eckhart determined that a lack of understanding was the best way to relate to God. For example, in Eckhart’s sermon on Matthew 5:3 (“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”) we see an example of a distorted view of mystery.

Eckhart’s sermon had three points. He focused on a poverty of the soul, which he called a “stilling.” His first point was that there must be a stilling of the will if we are to be poor in spirit. His second point was that there must be a stilling of the intellect, so that our goal would be to have no conceptual knowledge of God at all. In attempting to make that point, he says:

Why I pray God to rid me of God is because conditionless being is above God and above distinction: it was therein I was myself, therein I willed myself and knew myself to make this man and in this sense I am my own cause, both of my nature which is eternal and of my nature which is temporal. For this am I born, and as to my birth which is eternal I can never die. In my eternal mode of birth I have always been, am now, and shall eternally remain. That which I am in time shall die and come to naught, for it is of the day and passes with the day. In my birth all things were born, and I was the cause of mine own self and all things, and had I willed it I had never been, nor any thing, and if I had not been then God had not been either. To understand this is not necessary.2

Any reader or hearer of this sermon would be happy to hear the last sentence—“to understand this is not necessary.” Not only is understanding this sermon not necessary, it may not even be possible! But what Eckhart has in mind in that last statement is that it is better not to understand with the mind what he is attempting to communicate. To the extent that you do understand, you miss the real import of who God is. The way to “know” God, in other words, is by not knowing him (or it).

This is a view that sees understanding and intellectual effort, particularly with respect to God and His character and ways, as detrimental to a proper relationship to God. The best way to know God, the mystic would say, is to affirm that we cannot in any way really understand who he is. All that is left for us is an “experience” of God.

Are there parallels to this kind of temptation in Christianity today? Perhaps. I remember when the phrase “let go and let God” was a mantra for some Christians. The idea was not simply to cease trying to earn salvation—which would be a good thing. The phrase was meant to emphasize that it is best for Christians to take a docile, experiential attitude toward their faith. The more intensely you try to understand or obey God, the less you rely on Him.

There is nothing wrong with relying on God, or with recognizing the importance of experience in our Christian lives. But if experience is our primary way to God, or if it begins to take the place of our efforts to understand what God has said in His Word, we are moving toward a mystical view of Christianity.

Here is the paradox: A true, biblical view of mystery has its roots not in a lack of understanding, but in the teaching of Scripture. As a matter of fact, it is just the teaching of Scripture that gives us the biblical truth of that which we hold to be mysterious. A biblical view of mystery, in other words, is full of truth. It is truth that has real and glorious content. That content includes truths that we must affirm as well as falsehoods that we must deny, statements that are necessarily a part of a biblical understanding of mystery as well as exclamations that point us to its truth. So mystery, if we understand it biblically, is infused through and through with the truth that is found in the Word of God. Mystery is the lifeblood of the truth that we have in God’s revelation; it flows through every truth that God gives us.

A MANY-SIDED THING

But perhaps we are not tempted by rationalistic deism or by mysticism. Maybe the views of Locke or Toland or Eckhart do not appeal to us. There is, however, a more insidious and subtle problem among many Christians today. It is a problem that has reached epidemic proportions in our culture and has seeped into the church, although we might not have noticed. The problem has its focus in the paucity of thinking and knowing in our Christian walk. The Lord is concerned that we think, learn about, and know Him. This is a significant part of Christian obedience. But for many of us, the obedient use of the mind might be something of a foreign idea.

On one occasion, Jesus was responding (as was His custom) to a number of His detractors (Mark 12:13–34ff.). They had come to trap Him and to show their superior knowledge of Scripture (i.e., the Old Testament) over His. The Sadducees and Scribes came to ask Him questions that were, for them, doctrinal conundrums. The Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection from the dead, asked Jesus to explain to them how the notion of resurrection could be made compatible, in the afterlife, with (their view of) marriage.

Jesus said to them, in very plain terms, that they were wrong. But they were not simply wrong about some minor matters; Jesus was not rebuking them for getting details wrong. Rather, he made plain that they were wrong about Scripture, and they were wrong about God (Mark 12:24).

Not to be deterred, one of the scribes, who had overheard Jesus’ answer and was impressed by it, decided he would enter the discussion:

And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength’ ” (Mark 12:28–30).

Most Christians are well aware of Jesus’ answer here. And most are aware of the reason that this answer is given. It does indeed sum up our responsibility toward God. If we have a love for God that includes the entirety of who we are as people, then the rest of what Scripture says will be solidly in place in our lives. What is sometimes overlooked, or minimized, in this greatest command, however, is that in loving God with all of our being, we must love Him with our minds.

In our overly romanticized culture and context, “love” and “mind” do not readily go together. We cannot imagine a love story where the boy says to the girl, “I love you with all of my mind.” Nor could we find a Hallmark card that trumpeted the depth of someone’s mental love for someone else.

The mind, so we tend to think, is the realm of the abstract, the cold, the calculated, the aloof. It is the polar opposite of the typical view of the “heart.” The mind, we may think, dwells in cool detachment from the “real world.” It may concern itself with sports statistics or recipes. Beyond that, the mind is more a hindrance to love than a help.

But we are commanded to love God with everything that we are—with our hearts, our souls, our strength, and with our minds. Our love for God is to permeate every aspect of who we are as people. If we love God with only part of who we are, then we really do not love Him as we should. Suppose, for example, that we commit to love God with all our strength, but that we neglect completely to love Him with our hearts. What would that love look like? It would be an external, vacuous love, a love that might work hard and long, but a love in which, literally, our hearts were not in it. That kind of love is not biblical love; it is a perversion of it.

So also if we neglect to love God with our minds. But what does it mean to love God with our minds? At minimum, this means that we are to know God—that is, we are to read and understand what Scripture says about God, and to submit intellectually (and otherwise) to that teaching. We are to think God’s thoughts after Him. Those thoughts are found in God’s revelation.3 When we read Scripture, when we study it, we are to see it as the only true description of what reality is like. We are to reorient our thinking, so that the things around us, and within us, take on the truth that God has spoken.

This requires intellectual effort. But, we should recognize, it does not require advanced academic degrees. What it requires is that the “people of the Book” be those who think about, who meditate on, and who long to understand just exactly what “the Book” is saying to us—about God, and about everything else.

Here is a test. If you’re reading this brief section on loving God with your mind, and your initial reaction is, “But we shouldn’t make Christianity overly intellectual,” then you are probably more entangled with the spirit of the age than you might think. The spirit of the age is largely anti-intellectual. It is, we could say, more in line with the game show Wheel of Fortune than with Jeopardy. In Jeopardy the use of the mind is required. Without it, one cannot even be considered a contestant. In Wheel of Fortune on the other hand, all that is required is the luck of the spinning wheel, knowledge of the alphabet, a basic ability to spell, and the enthusiasm to yell, “Big money! Big money!”

Our culture is often more like Wheel of Fortune than Jeopardy. We have a basic knowledge of the alphabet—enough to send a text message or write an email. Beyond that, life, for many, is the luck of the wheel and a hope that “big money” will come our way.

Has the church imbibed a Wheel of Fortune mentality? Are we content with the basic “alphabet” of Christianity? Do we conduct our spiritual lives according to a superficial trust in God and a hope for a big reward in the end?

Remember the lament of the author to the Hebrews? His concern was for the Christian growth, the holiness, of his readers. Without that holiness, he warned, they would not even see the Lord (Heb 12:14). But he was deeply disappointed in their level of Christian maturity. He wanted to write to them about the deep things of Christ and His ministry, but he knew them well enough to know that many could not digest the strong meat of biblical truth:

About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity (Heb 5:11–6:1).

These professing Christians were in danger of falling away from their expressed faith. One of the reasons they were in danger was that they had not loved God with their minds. They were infants, unable to think, unable to digest the solid meat of the truth of God. This was no incidental malady; it was central to their inability to follow and to know Christ. Notice how the author puts it: If they want to grow in Christ into mature adults, they need to leave the elementary doctrines of Christ behind.

This does not mean they leave behind what they know. It means, rather, they move from the church nursery to the sanctuary; they move from the kindergarten of biblical truth to adult education. They are to take the things they know and integrate them more and more fully into the teaching of Scripture. They are to meditate on the things of Christ, in His Word, and think about them in such a way that the Scriptures make more and more sense to them and thus explain more deeply who Christ is—and who they are in Him. They are to probe the depths of Scripture so that they begin to think as adults. All of this probing and thinking is not, however, simply to make them smarter. If they grow into spiritual adults, it will show in how they live. Only then will they be able to be engaged in the “constant practice of discerning good from evil.” According to this passage, the mental effort that believers are required to make concerning the truth of God’s Word inevitably shifts to the practice of discernment. In thinking properly, in other words, we learn to live properly, and thus to glorify God. This takes mental effort; it requires meditation and thought. But it is as essential to Christian maturity as ingesting something besides milk is to growing into adulthood.

But why talk about the importance of Christian thinking in a book that focuses on mystery? Isn’t mystery, by definition, something that is beyond the bounds of our thinking?

It is. But here is the biblical irony of it all. In order to worship God for His incomprehensibility, it is necessary to know Him deeply. Or, to put it differently, in order to confess properly what we do not know, we have to be clear about what God has given us to know. The only way to understand what these mysteries are is by understanding, from Scripture, what it is that causes us rightly to confess our inability to fully comprehend them. We have to know in order to know what we cannot know. The only biblical context for what we do not know is knowing.

If we are influenced by the temptation to ignore the mind in our Christian walk, we may not see—even worse, we may not want to see—the majesty of these mysteries. But if that is the case, then we will remain infants, able only and always to take in milk and never able to grow up into the maturity of Christ (see also, for example, 1 Cor 2:6, 14:20; Eph 4:13; Phil 3:15; Col 1:28). In the chapters that follow, we will be challenged to think, and to think deeply. There is no substitute for this. There is no better time than the present to “go on to maturity.”

As we think about the biblical view of mystery in the following chapters, we will be addressing questions that are on the lips of many serious Christians (as well as who do not believe): How can God be three and one? How can God take on a human nature? Can an eternal and unchangeable God also act in history? If God planned everything, how can I be responsible? Do my prayers make any difference in God’s plan? Will we finally know everything when we get to heaven?

These are questions that recognize some of the mysterious tensions that Scripture presents to us. They are good questions, but wrong answers to good questions can rob us of a full, and fulfilled, Christian life, and they rob God of His proper glory. Proper answers—answers that allow the mystery of God and His ways to shine brightly—will evoke in us proper worship, preparing us for an eternity of worship with Him, in which, because of the majestic mystery of God’s triune character, we will be “lost in wonder, love, and praise.”

Finish, then, Thy new creation;

Pure and spotless let us be.

Let us see Thy great salvation

Perfectly restored in Thee;

Changed from glory into glory,

Till in heaven we take our place,

Till we cast our crowns before Thee,

Lost in wonder, love, and praise.

—Charles Wesley, “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling”

CHAPTER 2

The Majesty of the Mystery of the Depth of God

Whenever then we enter on a discourse respecting the eternal counsels of God, let a bridle be always set on our thoughts and tongue, so that after having spoken soberly and within the limits of God’s word, our reasoning may at last end in admiration.

—John Calvin

Commentary on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans

The great truths about which Paul was writing to the church at Rome caused him to explode in doxological praise in Romans 11:33–36. This praise passage, which exalts the incomprehensibility of God and His ways, carries with it some of the richest truths and teachings in all of Scripture.

OH, THE DEPTH …

It may help us to think of the epistle to the Romans in terms (roughly, at least) of two distinct but related sections. Generally speaking, chapters 1 through 11 present the doctrinal data of the Christian gospel, and chapters 12 through 16 focus on the practice of that doctrine. This does not mean that we, or the Bible, artificially separate doctrine from practice. Thinking obediently is as important as—is even a prerequisite for—living obediently. But Paul’s “therefore” in Romans 12:1 is a definite movement toward putting into practice those truths that have been so wondrously set forth in previous chapters.

It is remarkable, then, that at the transition point between doctrine and practice, at the place where Paul moves from a more didactic emphasis to a more practical one, he interjects a glorious and majestic doxology:

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

“For who has known the mind of the Lord,

or who has been his counselor?”

“Or who has given a gift to him

that he might be repaid?”

For from him and through him and to him are all things.

To him be glory forever. Amen (Rom 11:33–36).

Notice that the construction of this passage demands that we see it as praise. Paul’s “oh!” is an exclamation, a cry of worship and delight in God. Nowhere else in the New Testament does a passage begin with this use of the particular term “oh!” It is a term of joyful and satisfying surprise, and deep wonder. It evokes and initiates an attitude of reverence, awe, and worship. This one term, “oh,” has the effect of pointing us to that which is transcendent, that which rises above the normal and the mundane. It causes us immediately to move beyond the immanence of this world and to set our spiritual eyes on the unapproachable light and glory of God Himself. This one word, “oh,” sets the tone and tenor for the rest of what Paul says in this doxology. And what he says, he says in praise to the true and Triune God.

There is a reason why the Holy Spirit inspired the apostle Paul to write in this particular way. What would we think, for example, if Paul had said, “The riches of God’s wisdom and knowledge are deep”? That would have been perfectly true, of course. Indeed, that is exactly what Paul is saying in 11:33. But simply to state it in that way lacks something; it omits a central and crucial aspect in Paul’s communication of God’s depth.

Instead of simply stating the truth, Paul exclaimed it, beginning his doxology with “oh!” The etymology of the word “exclaim” is “to shout out.” In other words, the meaning of Paul’s exclamation is embedded in the form of his expression. When we exclaim, we do not simply say true things in a matter-of-fact kind of way. Rather, we, metaphorically or actually, “shout out” an exclamation; that’s the purpose and the meaning of it. We affirm the truth that is contained in the exclamation, but we also call forth a response by the way that we state it; an exclamation is a truth that requires, when affirmed, an action. In exclaiming, we are not content simply to say something. The exclamation itself, then, as a particular grammatical style, communicates the content, but also says much about how we are supposed to acknowledge that content. The exclamation tells us reams about how we are to think of the content in the statement as it is given to us.

Think, for example, of one of the differences between teaching and preaching. Granted, there are many points of agreement between the two activities. Oftentimes, however, one of the differences can be seen in how the truth of God is communicated. If I am teaching a course on the doctrine of God, I may lay out some specific points affirming, say, God’s infinite knowledge, or that He is unchangeable and independent. Or I may say that God’s simple knowledge is not added to Him, but is instead identical with His infinite character and being. Or I may say that God’s knowledge is exhaustive; it lacks nothing. All of these things are true of God, and they are things that all Christians should affirm.

If I were to preach on the same subjects (which I have been known to do while teaching!), however, I would want the congregation to be taken up with the glory and majesty of such truths.1 I would want each person who hears to be moved and committed to embrace the reality of God’s infinity, His simplicity, His exhaustive knowledge. The purpose of what I say is directly related to worship. So, when preaching, I will present the same truths in exclamatory ways. After affirming God’s infinite knowledge, for example, I might exclaim, “What a glorious God we serve!,” or “How majestic this God is!,” or “Oh, there is none like this God!” These exclamations are specific, grammatical ways of directing those who hear them as to how they are to hold and believe what they have heard. They are to hold them and believe them not simply as true statements, but as truths that bring about a response of worship, adoration, and praise. They focus the mind more on the person—God Himself—in light of the glorious truth of the content.

The Holy Spirit, through His servant Paul, wrote, “oh” in Romans 11:33 in order to direct us as to how we might affirm the truth of what Paul has said previously, as well as what follows after his exclamation. He means for us to hold such truths in a way that will issue forth in praise, wonder, and worship. We are not meant simply to affirm what Paul says here, but to affirm and to praise the Lord because of the mystery and majesty of God and His ways in the world.

Stop and think about the fact that Paul ends this more doctrinal section of Romans with praise and worship. Maybe the structure of Paul’s letter here can help us think more biblically about our own Christian walk. Does Christian teaching move us naturally to the worship of God? A now-famous dictum handed down to us from the medieval period says that theology “comes from God, teaches about God and leads us to God.”2 Does what we know about God lead us to Him, or does it lead us simply to more facts, more data? Theology is to be God-centered; it comes from Him, it should teach us more and more about Him, and that teaching should lead us inexorably to praise Him. Does our theology do that? Is it centered on a God whose truth moves us to exclamation?

As crucial as it is for the sake of our holiness to be learning more and more about God, it can be all too easy when one is learning much about God and His Word and His ways in the world to begin to think that, as a matter of fact, we happen to know Him quite well, thank you very much. And once we think we know something well, it is our natural tendency to think we have mastered it, to get bored with it, and to move on.

In a discussion with a few faculty members of an evangelical college a number of years ago, I asked them what they saw as surprising about their current group of students. One of them responded that a number of students were moving to the Roman Catholic Church. In his estimation, the reason for the move was because of the differences these students saw between their own, tired, practice of worship and the Roman Catholic mass.

But worship is not an isolated activity. It carries with it distinct views of who God is, who Christ is, and who we are. Changing denominations simply because of “worship” is like picking a movie based only on the theater. Worship is not simply a context; it is a response, meant to flow from our understanding of God. What is all-important in worship is the content that must be the substance and motivation of our worship. It may very well be that a tendency to change denominations because of worship betrays a spirit that has become complacent in or indifferent to the true knowledge of God. There is a theological reason the Catholic mass is what it is, just as there is a theological reason that Protestant worship is what it is. The substance of that reason is located in the view of God that is meant to bring us to worship Him in the first place.

Could it be, we might ask, that some who move from church to church have become lax or disinterested in knowing the depths of God, in loving Him with their minds? Our experience of worship is vitally important for our Christian lives. But the motivation for our worship must not be the experience itself. For a Christian, it must run much deeper than that. Worship is supposed to be the natural product of our knowledge and love of God. But if we become lax or disinterested in knowing God better, then we might begin to think that all we need is to change our location of worship. If that is how we are tempted to think, then Paul’s doxological declaration will begin to move us back in the right direction. It will help us to see the end goal of all our theology and of our worship, and the foundation of our Christian lives.

So Paul’s design in this passage is to provide for us a fitting conclusion and climax to the doctrine that he has, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, so eloquently set forth. Moreover, because Romans 11:33–36 is a transition passage (roughly) from doctrine to practice, this doxology provides a fitting foundation and resting place for living out our Christian lives, as well. Paul is overcome with the transcendence, majesty, and incomprehensibility of God as he writes, and he cannot help but exclaim. But what exactly motivated this exclamation? The commentators are not at all sure if what Paul has in mind as he pens this doxology is the entirety of the preceding epistle or just the preceding section in this chapter, but it really doesn’t matter. One thing is for sure: that at least what Paul has in mind in verse 33 is verse 32.

In this letter to the church at Rome, Paul has been attempting to discuss the difficult doctrine of the ways of God with respect to the salvation of the Jews first, and also of the Gentiles. And as he concludes that discussion, notice what he says in verse 32:

For God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all.

Now whatever one wants to think about Paul’s reasoning in verse 33, whether he has in mind the whole of the book up to this point or just the preceding section, there can be no question that what has occupied the thought of the apostle is the mysterious ways of God in eternity and in the process of salvation—salvation that God has now provided for all his people, “to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Rom 1:16). More specifically, notice that Paul insists that it is this transcendent and majestic God who has shut all men up in disobedience (cf. Rom 1:18ff., 3:9ff.).

We know that Scripture nowhere lays the blame of sin on God. Paul has attempted to make that abundantly clear in this epistle (e.g., Rom 9:19–20). But it is equally true that nowhere does Scripture teach that God is somehow aloof or lacking control when it comes to the intricate details of all that happens in the world, including sin.

How does Paul explain these two? How does he express both God’s activity, from eternity-past and into history, as well as our responsibility for all our decisions? We’ll peer into this in more detail in coming chapters. For now, though, we see that Paul’s solution to this quandary is not simply to tout the mystery of God’s character, though that would have been true enough. Paul’s solution, first of all, is to proclaim the mercy of God. As he says, God has shut up all in disobedience that he might show mercy to all. And it is that dual truth of man’s disobedience together with God’s mercy that causes Paul to begin his doxology.

In other words, Paul is not satisfied simply with the reality of man’s universal disobedience. He moves immediately to God’s response and action to that disobedience in us—the purpose of disobedience is that God might show mercy to all kinds of people, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. So it was in times past that God shut the Gentiles up in disobedience that he might show mercy to the Jew. But now, he has shut up all, both Jew and Gentile, in disobedience so that His mercy might be manifest in all, both Jew and Gentile.

It is this mystery (compare Eph 3:6ff.)—the mystery that God has mercifully brought together both Jew and Gentile, in Christ—that motivates Paul’s praise. To know God’s merciful plan for His people is to praise Him for it.

This truth deserves our thoughtful attention and meditation. Have we meditated on the fact that everything that we are, all that we will be, the hope that is ours in Christ, the justification that comes to us because of Him, the adoption that is given to us in the Spirit, the assurance that we have that nothing will separate us from the love of Christ—all of these are a product of God’s sheer, undeserved mercy? None of them are in any way earned by us, nor could they be. None of them came because God looked down on us and saw our worthiness, or our dignity as human beings, or that we were not as bad as some others, or that we had done some “good” things. All that we have from God, we have from His all-merciful and sovereign hand. We have it, we have it for eternity, and we do not, did not, and will not ever, deserve it; if we deserve it in any way, it would not be mercy.

Can you fathom the depths of that? Paul says you can’t. But you can know that it is true. And you can wonder why. As you wonder why, you won’t be able to comprehend the mind of God. So we exclaim its truth; we praise Him for that rich and deep truth of His sovereign mercy to us, in Christ.

Paul uses a word in verse 33 for depth (the Greek word bathos) not as a superlative, but as a word that is meant to describe a completely different level of existence. Paul does not say here that the riches of God’s wisdom and knowledge are the greatest there is. That would put the plan and counsel of God on a continuum with other plans. It would have the effect of saying that there may be plans, some bad, some extremely bad, at one end of the continuum, and others fair, in the middle, but God’s is the greatest plan there is. That is not what Paul is saying. This word “depth” is no word of comparison. Rather, Paul is saying that the depth of God is beyond anything in creation. It is of a different quality than any “deep” thing we might envision in creation.

Paul is speaking of a different level of existence. He is speaking of the depth of God’s character and ways. And he is not even telling us how deep his character is. Indeed, he could not tell us that. The Spirit knows the deep things of God (1 Cor 2:11), but we don’t, nor can we as finite creatures. So Paul is exclaiming that God’s riches are deep, so deep that one should think of and proclaim that depth, in doxology, as an affirmation of its truth.

A number of years ago, a chess match was set up between Garry Kasparov, the reigning chess champion at the time, and a new IBM computer. The computer was called “Deep Blue” and it was able to calculate two hundred million chess moves per second. Can you fathom that? Two hundred million moves per second. It is virtually incomprehensible. But the fact of the matter is that it can be calculated. At two hundred million moves per second, that’s two billion moves every 10 seconds. Not that we can accomplish that ourselves, but we can understand something of it by putting an accurate number to it.

But the depth of God’s riches of wisdom and knowledge is deeper than Deep Blue. The depth of God’s character is so deep that it cannot be calculated, or even accurately estimated. God’s depth is beyond anything created. And when something is beyond anything created it is, by definition, beyond us. That’s what Paul means us to understand here.

Think about it. Paul is not saying that there are a multitude of things that we know about God, so we praise Him for those things. We certainly do praise Him for those things, and Scripture gives us myriad examples of such things. But Paul’s point is almost counterintuitive. Paul is praising God for what we do not and cannot know! The focus of our praise, if we are to think biblically, is on the very fact that God cannot be comprehended, ever, by any creature—not in this life and not in eternity.

Paul goes on to reflect on just what that wisdom and knowledge of God include.

How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways (Rom 11:33)!

After a general exclamation of praise, we are now directed to the depth of God’s wisdom. When we think of wisdom, we are thinking of what God determines to do. The wisdom of God just is His knowledge, but, like human wisdom, it is knowledge that is put into action.

So also are His judgments and His ways. God determines what He will do, and then He acts to accomplish what He has determined. Both His judgments and ways go together. And Scripture is expressing here—again, by way of exclamation—that God’s judgments cannot be searched out! With all of the searching power of Google at our disposal, it is not possible to type “God’s judgments” into your Internet search box and produce a satisfactory answer. As creatures of God, we are unable to search out the majestic, infinite, glorious character of the Triune God. “Whatever the LORD pleases, he does, in heaven and on earth” (Psa 135:6; cf. Psa 115:3). When we cannot tell why the Lord does what He does, we rest content that He does what pleases Him, and we praise Him for that.

IT’S A SECRET

There is a fundamental, and monumentally important, biblical principle here that will guide the whole of what we are setting forth in this book, and that should guide the whole of our Christian worship and living. It is given to us concisely in Deuteronomy 29:29:

The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.

Here we see, in summary form, two basic aspects of God’s ways with us. There are things revealed by God, and those things belong to us and to our children forever. They are covenantally directed by God. That is, they are given by the covenant God to covenant families, and they belong to the Lord’s people “that we may do all the words of this law.” They belong to us in order that we might glorify God as we live according to His character (law). In other words, they are meant to produce and promote holiness in us.

Then there are those things that belong only and wholly to the Lord our God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These are secret things. God has told us all He wants to tell us at this point. He will tell us more later, when Christ comes back and we live with Him for eternity. For now, though, God has told us all that we need to know in order that, in this life, we might please Him. But it may be that He has not told us all that we might want to know. What are we to do when we find ourselves wanting to know those secret things?

Why, for example, did God decide to create anything at all? Or what was God doing before he created? Augustine supposed this latter question, and had a ready answer for it:

I answer him that asketh, “What did God before He made heaven and earth?” I answer not as one is said to have done merrily (eluding the pressure of the question), “He was preparing hell (saith he) for pryers into mysteries.”3

The sarcasm of Augustine’s answer notwithstanding, the substance of his response is crucial for us to see. Those who would want to pry into the mysteries of God are actually denying Him of His own prerogatives as God. They are wanting what God has chosen not to give, and thus are, at bottom, in danger of a subtle rebellion against Him.

Part of what Paul is saying in the doxological text of Romans 11:33–36 is that it is not for us to ask questions that God has determined not to answer. John Calvin made a similar point:

Let us, I say, allow the Christian to unlock his mind and ears to all the words of God which are addressed to him, provided he do it with this moderation, viz., that whenever the Lord shuts his sacred mouth, he also desists from inquiry.4

There are, in other words, questions that should not be asked. They should not be asked because the questions themselves attempt to impinge on and undermine the majesty and mystery of God’s glorious character. To ask them, we could say, is to betray in our own thinking a less-than-majestic understanding of who God is. The better part of holiness, Calvin is saying, is to “desist from inquiry.” God’s judgments and His ways are beyond our ability, or our right, to discover. They are contained in “the secret things.” The word translated “inscrutable” in Romans 11:33 carries the idea of footprints that cannot be tracked. In other words, there is no way to look at the evidence around us, and then, by that evidence, to find out exactly what God is up to and why. God leaves no footprints behind as He works in the world. His ways cannot be traced. He determines and He acts according to His own sovereign plan, and that plan, though complete, remains fundamentally top-secret to us. It is for God’s eyes only, and not for ours. We cannot trace the works of God from here to His infinite wisdom.

In his doxological praise of God’s character, Paul goes on to ask a series of questions:

For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor? Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid? (Rom 11:34–35).

The questions are, of course, rhetorical; the unspoken answer is supposed to be obvious. But it would help us to pause and think for a minute about what Paul is saying in these questions.

In an allusion to Isaiah 40:13, Scripture turns our attention both to the knowledge and wisdom of God (referring back to Romans 11:33). “Who has known the mind of the Lord?” is a question requiring the following affirmation: “No one is able to know God’s own knowledge.” No one, that is, except God Himself (see, for example, Matt 11:27; Rom 8:26–27).

The passage from Isaiah 40 is instructive for understanding the scope of Paul’s thinking here. Just after exclaiming, “Behold your God!” (Isa 40:9), Isaiah lifts our thoughts up to the transcendence of God’s glory (40:12):

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand

and marked off the heavens with a span,

enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure

and weighed the mountains in scales

and the hills in a balance?

In using vast and almost immeasurable aspects of creation, Isaiah is giving us a picture of the vast and immeasurable glory of God’s character—again, by using rhetorical questions. The picture Isaiah is giving us is this: Gather every speck of dust on the face of the earth and place it in one container. Or take every mountain that now stands across the globe and place them all on a scale to be weighed. When you’ve accomplished this, you have a small glimpse of God’s majesty.

The only way such things could be accomplished is if there was one who so transcended every aspect of creation—the small (dust) as well as the great (mountains)—that he had masterful, meticulous, and mighty control over every single aspect of creation. But what kind of might and power would have to be involved for such things to happen? What does this power and might look like? Isaiah’s answer: “Behold your God!”

This is what the Lord wants us to see in this passage. As Paul quotes from Isaiah he wants his readers—many of whom would have been quite familiar with the truth and context of Isaiah’s prophecy—to be overwhelmed with the majestic mystery of God and His ways (see also 1 Cor 2:16).

Not only so, but just before the passage quoted above, Isaiah says this:

He will tend his flock like a shepherd;

he will gather the lambs in his arms;

he will carry them in his bosom,

and gently lead those that are with young (Isa 40:11).

Remember what motivates Paul’s praise? It is his amazement at the ways in which God is carrying out His perfect plan of salvation (cf. Psa 77:10ff.