Where could I go to escape from you? Where could I get away from your presence?
If I went up to heaven, you would be there; if I lay down in the world of the dead, you would be there.
If I flew away beyond the east or lived in the farthest place in the west, you would be there to lead me, you would be there to help me.
I could ask the darkness to hide me or the light around me to turn into night, but even darkness is not dark for you, and the night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light are the same to you.
-Psalm 139:7-12
I’m not ashamed to admit it. I try to run from God.
I love God’s church, and I know I’m supposed to love the people of God, but too frequently, I find myself running from both— and in doing so, I run from Him. I run from reading my Bible. My growing Internet addiction and desire to be entertained by the flickering of my TV screen are simply more appealing to me.
I also run from prayer. I have a hard enough time trusting people, let alone trusting a God I can’t see. Praying, in my view, is a dangerous sport. If I ask for patience, I might just be given a situation that will build patience. If I ask to have a closer relationship with God, I figure God might just eliminate some human relationships in a painful and unpleasant way to get me there—or I might find myself with a rather unsavory illness that will make my relationship with God all the more important.
Yet— despite all of my attempts to escape— there stands a carpenter from Nazareth. Whatever road I run down, regardless of which direction I turn, that old Galilean beckons me. “Where are you going?” He says. He puts His hand on my shoulder and leads me back, “Come with me, and learn my love. Learn to put your Trust in Me.”
Despite my worries and my lack of faith. In spite of my struggles with whether or not God is really good, without regard to any of my doubts, Christ finds me and brings me back. I have nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, and that is a good thing, because the choices I make when I try to escape the grace of God are just bad for me. What I think is a good move or a wise choice—often causes me ten times more pain than if I stayed put and let God lead.
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Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it. –Psalm 139:6
“God works in mysterious ways.”
“His thoughts are not our thoughts.”
“God’s ways are not our ways.”
These oft-quoted (and absolutely Biblical) phrases tend to come to mind during a time of personal struggle or deep tragedy, but just as the verse quoted above, they speak to a far deeper truth.
Our mind is finite. It has boundaries. We have a mental capacity and a cap on the knowledge we can attain. God, on the other hand, is infinite. He is the creator of all knowledge and the origin of all wisdom.
We have been on a quest throughout our entire existence to try to figure out ourselves, our world, our universe and our God— and try as we may, regardless of the answers we come up with— our collective knowledge will always add up to a tiny blue dot on an infinite canvas we can neither fully see nor fully grasp.
God’s knowledge is so high above ours that it goes beyond all we can fathom—and yet, what does Psalm 139 tell us about the focus of this omniscient God’s thoughts? It tells us that He has searched our souls, that He knows when we sit and when we stand, that He knows what we’re going to say before we say it, He knows what we do and He knows where we are.
This amazing God with all this infinite knowledge chooses to make the business of the creatures on this tiny blue dot in an alarmingly large universe His business.
Not only is the knowledge of God too wonderful and high for us to attain, His knowledge of every one of us is much loftier than we could ever grasp.
I know I cannot comprehend the knowledge of God. I know how finite I am. But if the knowledge of God is something I will never be able to wrap my mind around, the love of God is even more puzzling. I cannot understand why a God so great and mighty and above all things would bother with a poor, helpless sinner like me. It reminds me of the lyrics from an increasingly popular song titled “My Savior, My God” by Aaron Shust:
“That He would leave His place on High
And come for sinful man to die,
You count it strange,
So once did I,
Before I knew my Savior.”
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