24. “Our Unfathomable God” (Romans 11)

So, in the past few weeks, as we’ve been studying Romans 9-11, we’ve been considering two things. At one level, the explicit focus of our passage is the confusing story of Israel. How is it that the people God loves, the people God has made promises to, could fail and reject Jesus? Last week, that examination came to a conclusion: though there’s much we don’t understand, what we do know is that God hasn’t given up on Israel, and one day he will restore them.

At the same time we’ve also been addressing the more universal issue of doubt and disbelief. When we encounter things that make us question whether God is good, or even, whether God is real, what do we do with that? Which is an important question, right? Christianity teaches us that we are most whole, most human when we come to know and worship and offer ourselves to the true God. But how can we sincerely worship a God that we’re not sure is even real?

This an especially pertinent question in our day. Until fairly recently, nearly everyone everywhere believed that the material world is only one small portion of what is real. That there is much more to the human person than biology, what we might call a soul, and much to this world than what we can see and touch. Almost everyone everywhere believed in some kind of god, even if there were deep disagreements as to what that meant.

But as we know, that has changed. Atheism, though still a minority position, has become much more common. And, even more significantly, with it has come a much broader feeling of religious uncertainty. Can we really even know, can we really be sure of anything that science doesn’t prove? There seems to be so much reason to doubt that God is real. So many disturbing questions.

Could it be that we’ve all just made God up? In the 19th century, philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach suggested that the reason people believe in a god is because we need an ideal image of what we should become. God is a projection, where we imagine what the very best of humanity could be: someone truly loving, truly strong, truly wise, and we call him God. But he isn’t real. We just made him up to inspire us. Have you ever wondered this—could it be that we made up God because we need to believe in him to give our lives meaning or hope?

Also is it irrational to believe in God? British philosopher Bertrand Russell argued that we should not believe in something for which there is no proof. He says, “Imagine this. Imagine if someone told you there was a teapot in outer space on the opposite side of the sun, maintaining an orbit such that the sun always blocks it from our view, a teapot too tiny for a telescope to see, just hanging out there in space. Trust me!” Why in the world would we believe that? And he says, “Well, that’s the way belief in God works. There are no experiments that can demonstrate his existence, no telescopes that can see him. Why then should we believe in God any more than we should believe in a teapot?” We feel the weight of this, right? I don’t need anyone to prove to me the existence of gravity. I just need to drop something and it falls—experiment shows it’s real. But what experiment could I do to prove God? What reason do I have to believe?

In fact, if anything, don’t we find evidence that seems to disprove God? Atheist Richard Dawkins is one of many who have argued that suffering demonstrates that it is unreasonable to believe in God. “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” And again, we feel the significance of this, right? Shouldn’t God, if he is truly in control and truly good, act differently than this? Shouldn’t the world look different than this if God truly is?

In our day, there just seems to be so much reason to doubt that God is real. And how can we worship a God that we doubt? How can we sing praises of one if we’re not sure he exists?

Romans 9-11 is meant to help address this very question. It begins with a possible reason for doubt: what’s going on with Israel? And here, in these verses, we see where it all goes: heartfelt worship. How does he do this? How does he move from doubt to doxology?

This morning I want us to notice an important idea that God’s Word communicates to us here. When we find ourselves doubting whether or not God is real, we first need to ask a simple question: who or what is the God that we don’t believe in? When we find ourselves doubting God’s existence, who exactly is the God that we doubt? Because here’s the thing: it is right to doubt and even disbelieve in all sorts of gods. And I would suggest that the god that many people are doubting today, the god that these philosophers argue doesn’t exist actually isn’t any more real than Baal or Zeus or the tooth fairy. We often doubt because we have made the god we imagine is not the real God.

There are two quotes from the Old Testament in this hymn of praise, and both of them are significant for this point. Verse 34 asks, “Who has known the mind of the Lord or been his counselor?” and that comes from Isaiah 40. Why is that important? It’s being spoken to people who are doubting. Israel is in exile, despondent, and they don’t believe God when he says he is going to rescue them. Why in the world would God do that when they’re such failures? And what does God say? Your problem is that you think you understand me. You think I’m like you—but I’m not. You can’t imagine me forgiving you because you can’t imagine loving in this way. But here’s the thing. I’m GOD. I’m so far above you. You doubt me, because you have shrunk me into someone I am not.

The second one, verse 35, is from the book of Job, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago. Job experienced tremendous suffering that seemed senseless, for he had done nothing wrong. And so he doubted God’s goodness. And then God appears to him, and basically says to him, “Job, you think we’re on the same level, so that you can understand me; or even maybe you could loan me something when I’m in need. No, Job, no. I am so far beyond your ability to comprehend.” You doubt me because you have shrunk me into someone I am not.

The point is the same in both of these passages: Job, Israel, the God you are having a hard time believing in is a god that you shouldn’t believe in, because he’s not the true God. He is just something your imaginations have come up with. In your minds you have made God into someone like you and then are surprised that he’s not big enough to believe in.

That’s not just an Israel problem. That’s a human problem. Throughout the world in times past, people make idols—manageable and understandable depictions of deity, and then they find this shrunken god hard to trust. And don’t we see a similar problem today. Sure, most people don’t make God into a statue that we can pray to, but think of how sometimes people speak of God as “the man in the sky.” A safe, small, remote image. Or in our day, we see God treated almost like a buffet: I like this belief about God from Hinduism, this from Buddhism, this from Christianity—put it all together to make a faith I feel good with. Do you see? It’s a god of our own making, a god we feel safe with. Our society shrinks God into a manageable size, and then we’re surprised when we feel doubts: boy, God doesn’t seem big enough.

But contrast that with the God Paul sings about here. 

Notice how Paul begins this song of praise: “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God.” Consider that metaphor of “depth.” If we were to think of all of God’s riches: all that he can do, all that he can give, his generosity. And if we were to think of his wisdom and knowledge: all that he understands, his mind. If we were to try to imagine the capacity and mind of God as something physical, like an enormous mine, no matter how long you dig, deeper and deeper and deeper you go, you will never, ever come close to finding the bottom.  

I was reading about Veryovkina Cave, located in the country of Georgia, just a few miles from the Black Sea. It lies in an area with massive limestone deposits, which allow for enormous caves to be formed. In 1968 this cave was first explored, and it was found to be over 115 meters deep, more than a football field. That’s deep! Then about 15 years later, explorers revisited the cave and at one point someone noticed steam coming from a vent and thought that was worth exploring further: eventually they found that the cave went 440 meters deep, 4 times as deep as they initially thought. That’s really deep! Given that it often involved narrow crevices, I get claustrophobia just thinking about that depth. 

And then in the early 2000’s explorers visited the cave again, and eventually, after multiple explorations in what they described as a labyrinth deep below, someone noticed a pit that went 100 meters deeper. So they go down it and there they find, find further passageways, opening up what one person said was “geographical features nobody knew existed.” And come to realize that this cave was deeper than 1000 meters. This begins much more serious exploration, and at this point, we know that the cave goes over 2,200 meters down about 1.5 miles deep. It takes 3 days to get to the bottom, camps along the way. And the crazy thing is that they believe they haven’t yet found the bottom.  

Here’s the point. A cave that is so deep that 60 years and the most talented explorers and still much to discover—it is nothing more than something a kid might dig in a sandbox with his plastic shovel when compared to trying to get to the bottom of the generosity and wisdom of God. No matter how far down you go, no matter how long you explore, you will never come remotely close to the limits—for there are none. 

I have spent all my life studying scripture and trying to think about who God is. I have had the privilege in my education of learning from centuries of the greatest thinkers who have also given their minds to this goal. And what I can say from experience: and this is again and again what people in my situation will tell you, is that the more that I understand, the more I realize how little I understand about God, how far beyond he is, how much mystery there is to his ways. I suspect many of you have a similar experience. 

Likewise when it comes to God’s generosity. When we first turn to Jesus, the idea that God could forgive us is pretty hard to understand but pretty great. And yet the longer we live as a follower of Jesus, even as we start becoming more like Jesus, we also become more aware of our failures, and the grace and generosity of God becomes bigger and bigger in our understanding. There is simply no bottom to it. God is unfathomable. “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” 

We will never, ever, ever get our minds around this God, because he’s God. And yet, we CAN know him. How? Because this extraordinary God has decided to make himself known to us by speaking to us.

Earlier I mentioned the philosopher Feuerbach. When Feuerbach says that God is just a projection that we’ve made up, he is rightly naming a human tendency. We want God to be like us, that’s how we think of God. And if we’re left on our own, that is the God we will worship. But the funny thing about Feuerbach is that he falls into the same trap. See, he rejects the idea that God could tell us about himself in the Bible because it doesn’t make sense: why would God entrust eternal truths about himself to silly and faulty scribes. 

But how in the world could Feuerbach know what makes sense in the unfathomable wisdom of God? How could he or anyone know the true eternal God well enough to know that he could say, “Well, God wouldn’t do something like that.” Do you see? He shrinks God, and then finds reason for doubt. 

But if God is truly God beyond our understanding, isn’t it just as possible that he could choose to tell us about himself in this way? And what he says about himself is, verse 36 “From him, and through him, and to him are all things.” That’s the God of the Bible.

If we return to Bertrand Russell’s likening God to a teapot, I hope we can see how irrelevant that is. Sure, if God were part of this universe, something like us, then we would expect that he would be subject to the universe’s laws and something we could experiment upon. But that’s not the God who speaks in the Bible—sure, doubt Bertrand Russell’s god, because he isn’t real. The true God is not part of the universe. He’s the one from whom the entire universe comes. If you want evidence for this God, well, just look at anything.

Imagine you are in a forest in the middle of nowhere, it feels like no human has been here before you. And as you’re walking, you come upon a toy, maybe a Rubiks cube. Wouldn’t you ask, how did that get there? But the funny thing is, we have just as much reason to ask that about the trees in the forest: how did that get there? About the earth and the birds and the water: how did these get there? Sure, we might think we have some explanations for some of that: there are seeds that are planted, and so on, but eventually we are forced to ask the question, why does anything exist at all? How did any of this come into being? We don’t have a good reason for why we or this world IS. And God tells us, “It’s from me.”

Or think of how this world holds together. How every day the sun rises; every day gravity works; every day e=mc squared. Why? Einstein wrote “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility…The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.” It doesn’t make sense that it makes sense. Likewise, think of how you and I are. One of the things that the rise in AI shows us is that, while technology is capable of great things, there is something distinctive about human consciousness. We have intention. We reflect upon ourselves. We make choices—how? The orderedness of the world is a mystery. Our consciousness is a mystery. God tells us: I hold the world together. You think because I give you thought. It’s through me.

But what about the problem of suffering? What about, as Dawkins points out, the fact that when we look at this world and see all the evil and cruelty and pain, it is hard for us to see the goodness of God? There’s something there in that question that Dawkins and others often miss. See, the very asking of that question reveals that we have a sense that in this world, there is good and evil. Racism and child abuse and genocide are not just the byproducts of evolution—the natural results of a violent world of survival of the fittest. No, we know deep down at our core that they are EVIL. Love and kindness and generosity these are not just things that our evolutionary biology have programmed us to value: when we see the gentle kindness of someone like Mr. Rogers, or the sacrificial love of a mother for her child, or simply the joys of friendship we know they are are good and beautiful. Why? If all that we can see is all that there is, then good and evil must be just our imagination. And yet we know, we know that they are more than this. Why? God tells us: because I, the Lord, am goodness and beauty and love, and this world bends toward me: to me are all things. 

What many people mean when they speak of god today is not god at all. Whether it’s the man in the sky, or a spiritual energy or life force: all of these are ways we have made God feel safe and manageable to us. And so of course we’ll feel uncertain about this god; of course we’ll feel doubts—because he isn’t real. The God of this universe is not like these: he’s not someone that we can explain or experiment on comprehend in the way we comprehend a math problem. Of course not! He’s the one who made math, who made us, who upholds it all. We cannot prove him like that, but in another way, when we allow God to tell us who he is, we see evidence for him everywhere: from him, and through him, and to him are all things. 

With that said, there is something even more extraordinary than these things that has brought Paul from doubt to doxology. There is a theme that lies at the heart of all that Paul has written in this letter: it’s what he first talks about at the very beginning of the letter, and it’s how he closes at the end, and it’s this more than anything that leads him to sing with joyful tears in his eyes. And that is that this eternal, immeasurable God has made himself known in the person of Jesus.  

Paul didn’t always know God truly. He thought he did; he even dedicated his life to serving God, but it was a mistaken, shrunken view of God—not the true God. And then one day, as he was traveling, a bright light from heaven shone upon him and terrified him so that he fell down on the ground. And he heard a voice from heaven speaking to him: calling him by name, and he responds in terror, “Who are you Lord?” What a remarkable thing for a rabbi to say: “Lord, who are you?” And the answer that came: “I am Jesus.”

And from that moment onward, Paul knew God in a way that he never had before. He came to understand something that would defy belief if it were not true: that the mysterious, eternal God is so committed to enabling us to know him that miraculously, he took on human form. He, Jesus, God made flesh, lived among us. He died for us. And he rose again, all to bring us back to him. In Jesus we come to know God. And we come to know that this God from whom and through whom and to whom are all things—this God loves us. That is why Paul in this moment cannot help but sing and worship the God who is, the God who was, the God who always will be.

Look, in this world of sin, where all is not right, we will all get confused; we’ll all at times feel far from God; we’ll all experience doubts. I’m not trying to say otherwise. But if you’re struggling, what I am telling you is don’t accept cheap substitutes. Don’t set your mind on some shrunken, tame, useless vision of God. There is a real God, and he’s the one you should be looking at. If God seems unreal to you, turn your attention to Jesus.

Turn your attention to Jesus. Study him. Consider what he has done, who he is, how he loves. And understand as you are looking at him, that’s the God of the Bible. Do you believe in HIM? And isn’t he—God become man, God who died for us and rose again for us, God who has rescued us and made us his children: isn’t he worthy of all glory? Isn’t he worthy of all praise? Isn’t he worthy of your worship?