By David ReayTuesday 24 Nov 2015LifeWords DevotionalsFaithReading Time: 0 minutes
Transcript:
Read Isaiah 40:25-26
25 “To whom will you compare me?
Or who is my equal?” says the Holy One.
26 Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens:
Who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one
and calls forth each of them by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
not one of them is missing. (NIV)
Theology is the study of God. And when you come to think of it, the word is fairly presumptuous. As our passage indicates, God is one of a kind. He is way beyond our feeble and fallible minds and imaginations. It is a bit like a mosquito studying humanology!
What makes theology possible is that God has chosen to make himself known to us. We see him at work in human history and creation. We read of his acts in the Bible. We supremely see him revealed in Jesus. So he seems to want to be known, and so study of him is not futile or even arrogant.
And yet we need to be wary of any attempt to ‘figure him out’. Our understanding and insight may be sufficient for us to trust him and even articulate our faith in him. But our knowledge can never be exhaustive. We are not meeting him as co-equals. We always approach the Bible and all of theology with humility. As soon as we begin to think we have sorted out the problems and cleared up the mysteries, we have succumbed to pride. And so what knowledge we have is inevitably distorted.
In order to truly know God, we need first of all to know what we don’t know.
Blessings
David Reay