What is the incomprehensibility of God?
The Bible states plainly that God dwells "in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see" (1 Timothy 6:16) — and Zophar's old question still stands: "Can you find out the deep things of God?" (Job 11:7). The incomprehensibility of God is the truth that the creature can never take the full measure of the Creator; the questions it raises are whether that leaves us in the dark, and what a person is meant to do with a God who exceeds him.
Why the limit exists
The gap is not one of degree but of kind. One writer measures it with an illustration anyone can picture:
A. J. PollockThe distance between a man and an ant is very great, but after all it is only a finite distance. You can weigh a man and you can weigh an ant, and you can work out how much heavier a man is than an ant. But can an ant understand what is passing through a man's mind? Can an ant understand what men achieve? We know it cannot. But the distance between God and man is infinitely greater than the distance between man and an ant. God is the Creator. Man is the creature. The distance between them is infinite. No arithmetic is of any use here.
A God we could measure would not be God
Follow the opposite idea through and it collapses. If our minds could take God in, the being we had taken in would be our own size:
F. W. GrantYet because He is God, there will be that everywhere which will remind us in whose presence we stand. Nowhere can we escape from the mystery that attends His presence. Nor would we, if we realise what it means. A God always comprehensible by us would only be one like ourselves; but you cannot magnify man into God.
So the limit is not a flaw in God, and not an obstacle He has placed in the way. It is what infinity looks like to a finite eye:
F. W. GrantHe goes beyond all knowledge and all thought... And this too is necessary to our idea of God. He would not be God if we could take Him in with our thoughts. But that inscrutability which necessarily belongs to Him, while it leaves room for faith, is and can be nothing other than His perfection. We no longer even say that He dwells in darkness: He dwells in the light that cannot be approached, One whom no one has seen or can see; not because anything blocks the sight, but because infinity lies before it.
Where exactly the limit falls
Commentators locate the boundary precisely: it runs around God's essential being, not around what He has told us. One writer quotes the distinction approvingly:
W. H. WestcottThe Godhead as such cannot be comprehended by creatures; it dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen nor is able to see (1 Tim. 6:16)... The essence or being of God is not a subject of revelation, and I think we may say with all reverence that it could not be.
That is only half the account, and the smaller half. What cannot be found out by searching has been handed to us by Someone who knew it from within:
William John HockingOn the one hand, the inscrutability of God in His essential Being is stated first: "dwelling in unapproachable light; whom no man has seen, nor is able to see"... On the other hand, the same text shows that what the creature could never have discovered has been made known by the Son, who alone knew Him, being the only-begotten Son in the bosom of the Father. What a marvellous revelation this is! For it includes not only God's hand in its almighty power, not only God's mind in its all-knowing wisdom, but also, and chiefly in this passage, God's heart in its infinite and eternal love as the Father.
A moral incapacity, not only a mental one
The barrier is not merely that our minds are small. Sin has damaged the very faculty that would recognise God:
J. N. DarbyNow the understanding of perfect holiness by a sinful nature is, so far as its own capacity goes, impossible. Conscience may understand it enough to see its opposition to sin, and to dread the consequences in anger or terror; but an unholy nature does not comprehend or know a holy one in its separation from evil — in its affections, its will, its delight — for it has the opposite ones. The same is true of love: "Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love."
The response it calls for
Because the boundary is real, pressing past it is not brave but ruinous — and it costs the very thing it claims to want:
E. C. HadleyWe cannot reason these things out. They are beyond the reach of human reason to speculate about. But we can receive them in simple faith as glorious facts on the unquestionable authority of His divinely inspired Word, and worship and adore. Such worship, and the devoted service that flows from it, will expand our hearts and enrich our lives; but to speculate about His inscrutable person will shrivel up our souls and drain away all true communion with God.
There is also a diagnosis behind the warning. The demand to understand everything is a claim about ourselves:
An article on the Eternal SonIf we expect to understand everything revealed about God, we are holding in our minds the thought of equality with God... We are never raised, and never can be, to the status of God in any way — not even in understanding. Faith bows reverently to the revealed, God-breathed Scriptures.
Summary
- Infinite — the distance between Creator and creature cannot be measured, so no amount of human thinking closes it.
- Necessary — a God we could take in would be our own size; incomprehensibility is not a defect in Him but His perfection.
- Light — He is hidden not by darkness but by unapproachable light; nothing blocks the sight, infinity simply lies before it.
- Revealed — His essential being is not a subject of revelation, yet the Son who knew Him has declared God's power, wisdom and Father's heart.
- Adore — receive what is written in faith and worship; speculation past the boundary shrivels the soul instead of feeding it.