How Faint a Whisper We Hear of Him

And these are but the outer fringe of his works; how faint the whisper we hear of him! Who then can understand the thunder of his power?”

Job 26:14

A while back I got bored with reading Scripture. I tired of going to church. I wasn't quite arrogant enough to say I knew everything there was to know about God, but I was convinced I'd read it all before and there really wasn't anything new for me to find in the Bible. You have to understand, I've been in church since I was four. I was convinced I'd heard all the stories, learned all the lessons, and sat through all the sermons. But I couldn't have been more wrong! This was nothing more than a tactic of the Adversary. I was deceived. Satan had actually succeeded in convincing me that learning about God - the most beautiful, powerful, interesting, and exciting being one can imagine - was boring. Today's verse captures well just how blind I was. 

The heart of theology is to know God; and when you set out to know an infinite being, you can never be finished learning. If God is infinite, there simply cannot be an end to what you don't yet know about Him. All that I have learned about God in my many years of church attendance and seminary study barely scratches the surface of what His Word reveals about Him. Even if I plumbed the depths of His revelation of Himself through Scripture, even that is only the outer fringes of His works. It's just a faint whisper of who He really is. But oh what a whisper it is! 

If I were to uncover all the mysteries of His creation, if I were to gain understanding of His great wisdom in ordering events and overwhelming chaos, if I were to grasp the unfathomable might of His power that He exercises in all His deeds... even then I still would not be any closer to exhausting all there is to know about our infinite and eternal God. There will always be more to His goodness, His wisdom, His being than we can comprehend. There will always be more reasons to praise Him. Knowing God is truly a lifelong task. Indeed, one lifetime is not nearly enough time, but it is all we have. So let's spend our lives studying what God has revealed about Himself to us in His Word, and then may we know the great joy of spending our eternity studying the fullness of God's glory face-to-face.

For further reading...

• If you are looking for help getting to know the depths of who God is, I suggest a little book written by A. W. Tozer entitled The Knowledge of the Holy.