Mysteries of God

Why is God Mysterious? It’s not a mystery that Sherlock Holmes could solve. There is a book that speaks about our grasp of God’s nature as the “cloud of unknowing.” A belief in the mystery of God is essential for understanding what you can know of God and his ways. That will affect how you pray.

Questions for God

Why do Christians who trust in Jesus have to suffer? I think most Christians have pondered this question. The Bible gives some possible answers, and there are books on the subject. At the end of the day, no one has offered a truly satisfying answer.

How does God make the decision of whom to predestine to know him and be saved? There are multiple possibilities, and beliefs, but at the end of the day, we don’t know.

What exactly will happen at the end of the world? There are some clues in the Bible, but we don’t know in detail what is going to happen.

It is clear in Scripture that Jesus was fully God and fully human. How did the Incarnation of Jesus work?

What are the answers to such questions? We don’t know and never will in this life, if we are honest about it. How should this affect our prayers?

God’s Ways are Often Beyond Us

Can we understand all of God’s works and ways? Isaiah answers this for us:

In Isaiah 55:8-9, God says, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, declares Yahweh (a.k.a. the LORD). For as the heavens are high above the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, so also are my thoughts above your thoughts” (my translation). Pause and think about that for a moment.

God is declaring through Isaiah the prophet that God’s thoughts and actions are far beyond human comprehension. Unless God chooses to reveal something to us, his thoughts and ways are beyond us.

Philip Yancey in Where is God when It Hurts says that the God who created the universe and manages it, and works in the lives of people, cannot be grasped fully by humans. He is beyond our comprehension. Therefore, you are not going to be able to answer fully any of these and many other questions. God is mysterious, and we need to accept that when we come to him.

There are things that God has revealed to us. He shows us some of what he is like in and through Jesus, who is himself fully God. As Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9b). We need to acknowledge when we pray that God knows far more than we do and works in ways that we wouldn’t. You can think to yourself, “If only God would do such-and-such.” However, you should not expect God to do things the way you would.

We Can’t Understand it all

However, God has revealed to us what we need to know him and love him. He has revealed the path to come to him–it’s through Jesus. As frustrating as it may be, we need to accept that and learn to be content with it.

Christians have been asking such questions starting in the first-century A.D. and Israelites before them (see Psalm 73). We don’t know the answers fully nor understand God’s ways fully.

This calls for humility when you worship or pray. God is greater than we can imagine. You might pray for something and expect God to accomplish that in a particular way. However, God will do what he is going to do in a way that you might not understand and probably wouldn’t think of. This is not simply a theological truth. We need to abandon the idea that in prayer, we can tell God how to accomplish something. He does not need our advice and won’t take it.

On the night before Jesus’ death, he prayed in the garden of Gethsemane that God would take his cup of suffering from him. God said “no” to that prayer. Jesus prayed and accepted that God’s will would be done.

When I look at things in my life or the lives of many others, I wonder why God won’t do the obvious, like healing a friend who died of Parkinson’s Disease, heal my eyes, or help someone who is in serious financial need. No one can explain these situations accurately, and some Christians often harm others by assuming they know what God has not revealed.

I once heard a speaker who told of his daughter at ages 4 and 7 almost dying from a terrible disease. Someone who had never met him or his daughter told him in a letter that his daughter was sick because of sin in his life. He examined his life and determined that the letter writer was wrong.

You may have heard someone say to a person who had just lost a family member that the reason is that God needed another voice in the heavenly choir. To quote that great statesman, Jabba the Hutt, “Bantha fodder.” If God needed another voice in the heavenly choir, he could create another angel.

We should not be offering “false comfort” that has not been clearly revealed to us by God.

Prayer that God doesn’t grant

This is not my attempt to explain unanswered prayer., even if I could, which I can’t. That’s why prayer involves God’s “cloud of unknowing.”

God already said through Isaiah that our thoughts are not his thoughts. His thoughts are higher than the heavens above us. This can often hurt a lot. We can often feel ignored by God or rejected by God, but this is not the truth.

We can feel bitter toward God because he did not do what we asked, at least not the way we might have expected. At that point, we need to trust in God’s goodness and love, even when that seems hard or makes no sense to us. Keep praying.

God’s choices and the way he works have mystery in them, but that doesn’t mean that you should throw up your hands in despair. God has revealed much, both in Scripture and supremely through Jesus, that we should consider.

What If you pray hard for something that is a legitimate need, and God seems to not act? Martin Luther, who caused the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, talked about Anfechtungen, which is German for challenge or temptation. For believers, it refers to tools of the devil.

Satan comes along and tells you that when God doesn’t act in response to your prayers, it is because God doesn’t care about you. Or, he might tell you that you have sinned so badly that God has now rejected you.

He might even suggest to you that if God didn’t answer a prayer for a real need like food or shelter (see Matt 6:33), then God must not exist because Jesus said that if we ask, we will receive. Satan may whisper that Jesus was wrong.

All of these suggestions are lies. Jesus himself told us that there is no truth in Satan. When he tells a lie, he is speaking from what he is, a liar. For, “he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44). If a thought springs to mind that God is wronging you or doesn’t care, you need to reject that.

You could say, “Satan, in the name of Jesus, get out of my head.” Remember, Satan hates you and has a terrible plan for your life.

Paul told Timothy, “you have faith and a good conscience, which some have rejected and suffered shipwreck concerning the faith” (1 Tim 1:19). Listening to Satan can only hurt your faith, and he’s very good at whispering lies that can sound so true in difficult situations that it can be hard to distinguish Satan’s voice from God’s. The defense against this is a good knowledge of the Bible. God won’t say anything that contradicts Scripture.

The Mystery of Prayer

We cannot explain fully why many prayers seem to go unanswered, but we must continue to trust in God’s goodness, love, and compassion. God loves us. God’s love and goodness toward me are absolutely not based on what we can offer God. As a song by Point of Grace goes, “What can a poor man lay at the feet of a king?”

Humbly accepting truths about God that you can state but not fully grasp the “how” of ,is essential if we want to know God better. We have to come to God on God’s terms, not our own.

it is extremely frustrating that I can’t figure out what God is doing in the world or even in my own life, but I still need to trust God. As James said, “without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him (James 1:6 TNIV). We need to trust God for who he has shown himself to be if we expect our prayers to be answered. That’s true even if we make the same plea that a man made to Jesus: “I believe. Help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24).

God is a mystery. The sooner we grasp that, the better chance we’ll have for God’s peace. God doesn’t explain himself. To do so would be like trying to explain quantum mechanics (which I can spell but nothing more) to a two-year-old. If you can understand your god, your god is too small. You may have to pray for greater trust in God because you won’t understand all his ways.

This is nothing personal. It is true of all humans. It doesn’t matter how much education one has or what skills one has. A person in a third-world country can understand God’s ways as well as we can, because these are truths that God has revealed.

There is a crucial difference between understanding a doctrine and understanding how that really operates in God. You can read a correct understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity. That does mean that you can fathom how it actually “works.”

In the face of that, we need to accept God’s mysterious ways. If you have doubts about God’s love or care for you, meditating on what God did on the cross for you will hopefully melt those doubts and push aside your questions. Jesus, worshipped by angels, gave up his glory in heaven to become one of us. He lived an ordinary and very hard life. Think no electricity, no cell phones, no coffee bars, no credit cards, no prescription medications, and no indoor plumbing..

If you want to know more about God, learn more about Jesus. Paul said that he gave up all the things he had to be proud of in order to gain Christ, Greek for Messiah (Phil 3:8). He wanted to “know Jesus.” I don’t think that Paul wanted a theology book about Jesus. Rather, he could ignore what he didn’t know in order to know Jesus better personally (Phil 3:10).

That won’t solve all the mysteries of God, but it will bring you closer to God, and that’s more than enough. True trust in Jesus means that we don’t need to solve all the mysteries or answer all the questions about God and his ways, even if we were capable of that. We’re not. Don’t let this turn you away from the Lord. Instead, embrace the mystery and with it, embrace God, who is bigger and grander than anything you could possibly imagine.

We don’t get to know God’s mind. If we look at the cross, we can know that God loved us enough to suffer terribly in our place. When we end a prayer with ”in Jesus’ name,” we are pointing to the mystery of all that God has done for us. As humans, we want to know it all. We don’t and must surrender to the One who does.

Your turn

Have you expeienced a sense of God being a msytery when you prayed? What did you learn from that experience, if anything? Any comments on the post? I welcome your input.