For those of us who have spent time reading theology, we are familiar with coming across particularly difficult passages in our books and having to sit back to take a breath. The more we read, the more we are made painfully aware that we are incapable of comprehending God in the entirety of His being. We grasp futilely for words to describe Him and to make sense of whatever He has said about Himself, only to realise at the end that it still is not enough to do justice to the magnificence who is God.

What we have encountered is the incomprehensibility of God. This attribute refers to the complete and utter unknowability of God. In and of Himself, God is incapable of being known nor understood except by Himself. This is why when the Son said that only He knows the Father and the Father knows Him (Matt 11:27; Luke 10:22), He is doing nothing less than calling Himself God. When Paul said that the Spirit of God knows God (1 Cor 2:11), he is attributing deity to the Spirit. To creatures, God dwells in the impenetrable depths of majesty and mystery, so unlike everything else.

The incomprehensibility of God therefore necessitates a doctrine of revelation. If God is in Himself unknowable, it follows then that any knowledge we do have of Him must first be revealed to us. Man stands apart from the rest of creation because we alone have the privilege of being called the image of God (Gen 1:26-27). Through the light of nature, He reveals to us His eternal power and divine nature (Rom 1:19-20). Through the person of Christ (Heb 1:1) and the Scriptures that testify of Him (Luke 24:27), He reveals to us His triunity and His desire to reconcile creation to Himself (Col 1:20).

What revelation means therefore, is that while we stand too puny to even begin fathoming God in His very essence, He has condescended to reveal Himself to us through word and deed. His mighty deeds display His glory and power, while His authoritative words confirm and explain His deeds to us. The clearest example would be Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” God performed the mighty deed of creating all things ex nihilo, while the Scriptures tell us that He did by written word.

Therefore, everything we know of God is freely-given truth. He accommodates Himself to us, using our finite language to convey truths about His infinite being. He did not need to communicate Himself to His creatures and thus all revelation is gracious – it is not owed to us. It is our privilege and to our benefit that we are able to know God and worship Him. In Him is joy and peace overflowing; all He has done is to bring us within Himself who is joy and peace eternal. The God who is eternally communicative between Father, Son and Holy Spirit freely communicates from the Father through the Son in the Spirit to us.

We must then remember as well that our language is never univocal, but analogical. We are able to say true things about God because of what He has revealed to us, but these things, though true, are still ultimately qualitatively different in God. For instance, we say that God is grieved and enraged by our sin. Yet, we know that God is impassible and thus cannot be moved into emotional states by us. Therefore, while it is true that God is offended by our sins, what it really means for God to be offended is very different from the way we understand it. Mystery is a necessary consequence of the incomprehensible God making Himself comprehendible to minute creatures like us. This should keep us humble in our theologising: as eloquent as we may be about our vocabulary (or jargon), it still is never a full and comprehensive mapping of God. As Sproul was fond of saying, “We can never comprehend God, but we certainly can apprehend Him.”

There is a certain beauty to the frustration we experience in trying to use stumbling words from stumbling lips to accurately describe the One who made Man’s mouth (Exo 4:11). At the end of the struggle, we can only throw our hands up and fall to our faces in worship of the One who cannot be named. Herein lies the glorious essence of the Christian religion: that this One who cannot be named, has still given us a name upon which we can call for help and salvation.

- Isaiah 55:9