God: Incomprehensible

God: Incomprehensible

Answer to a Hard Question
"Mother, who made God?" "That's a hard question, Jimmy. Why don't you go out and play for awhile?" answered the puzzled mother. When Jimmy insisted on an answer, the mother was inspired to take off her ring and hand it to her little boy, saying to him, "Here, Jimmy, show me the beginning and the end. God is the same way, Son. He has no beginning and no end." Were You There?
An amusing radio comedian of many years ago, known as the Baron Munchausen, used to spin wild and improbable tales. When anyone challenged him he would ask, "Vas you dere, Sharlie?" God was there before there was any beginning; He was there when His only begotten Son came into the world, for He entered into human flesh through Him. He was there on the cross, for in Christ He suffered, bled and died for you and me. To anyone who questions this, you can retort, "Were you there? God was, and I prefer to take His Word for it." The Great "I Am"
Bishop Beveridge gave a wonderful illustration of one of the names by which God has chosen to call Himself, "I AM": "He does not say, I am their light, their guide, their strength, or tower, but only 'I AM.' He sets, as it were, His hands to a blank, that His people may write under it what they pleased that is good for them. As if He should say: Are they weak? I am strength. Are they poor? I am riches. Are they in trouble? I am comfort. Are they sick? I am health. Are they dying? I am life. Have they nothing? I am all things. I am wisdom and power. I am justice and mercy. I am grace and goodness. I am glory, beauty, holiness, eminency, super-eminency, perfection, all-sufficiency, eternity. Jehovah, I am. Whatever is amiable in itself, or desirable unto them, that I am. Whatsoever is pure and holy, whatsoever is great or pleasant, whatsoever is good or needful to make men happy, that I am."

Don't Reject the Medicine
The mysteries of God are like a bottle that contains medicine. It is the medicine that cures you, not the bottle. Without even questioning it, you accept the fact that the medicine could not be presented to you without its container. You do not reject the medicine simply because you do not understand the composition of the bottle. The Infinite God
The late Dr. Clarence Edward Macartney, while a theological student, visited the home of a skeptic. The skeptic's argument was as follows: "If a man tells me that he has a horse which can trot a mile in three minutes, I tell him to bring out the horse and prove it. If you tell me that there is a God, I ask you to produce God and prove His existence." Macartney replied, "No Christian claims to know God, nor would want to know Him in that way. By that kind of searching we cannot know the Almighty to perfection. The Christian believer does not say, 'I know God,' or 'I see God,' or 'I think there is a God,' but 'I believe in God.' "

One God
A little boy, on being asked "How many Gods are there?" replied, "One." "How do you know that?" "Because there is only room for one, for He fills heaven and earth." He was right. How, then, can puny little man expect to see Him in all His majesty and glory? The Glory of the Creator
"You teach," said the Emperor Trajan to Rabbi Joshua, "that your God is everywhere, and boast that He resides among your nation; I should like to see Him." "God's presence is indeed everywhere," replied Joshua, "but He cannot be seen. No mortal eye can behold His glory." The Emperor insisted. "Well," said Joshua "suppose we try to look first at one of His ambassadors." The Emperor consented. The Rabbi took him into the open air at noonday and bade him look at the sun in its blazing splendor. "I cannot," said Trajan. "The light dazzles me." "You are unable," said Joshua, "to endure the light of one of His creatures, and can you expect to behold the resplendent glory of the Creator? Would not the brightness of His glory annihilate you?" This same thought is expressed in the Bible in 1 Timothy 6:16, "Who only hath immortality, dwelling in light unapproachable; whom no man hath seen, nor can see: to whom be honor and power eternal. Amen." (Author's translation.) The Great God
We have discovered new worlds in the splitting of the atom. Democritus, the ancient Greek physical philosopher who coined the word "atom," would never have believed it. With our telescopes we find a system in every star, but with our microscopes we find a world in every atom. There surely must be more things that we don't know than those things we do. It is logical, then, to concede that we cannot know the God of the universe in His full essence. The Great-a Mystery
Why does Paul call all that God bestows upon us "mysteries"? Not because they are myths, but because they are facts that we can neither understand nor explain. As Joseph Parker points out: "We know how easy it is to reduce everything to the mystery of darkness and to suppose that, because we can't see, therefore all things that are declared to be in existence cannot possibly be where they are said to be. When night comes down upon us, and the sea is covered, and the great rocks around our coast are all hidden, what would you think of a man who said, 'There is no sea; there are no rocks; there are no mountains. I deny it; I swear there is no sea!... Why, if there was an ocean, should I not see it? If there were rocks, would I not behold them?' He forgets that he is surrounded by conditions that have obscured from his vision the facts which he so emphatically denies. It should not surprise us that God's actions and providences are mysteries to us. It is natural; it could not be otherwise." "The great must always be a mystery to the little," continues Parker. "The arch must always be a mystery to the column; God must always be a mystery to His creatures. If I could understand all, I should be all. Only the whole can comprehend the whole. Only God can understand God."

Blind Men and the Elephant
Six blind men approached an elephant. Each man put out his hand to touch some part of the elephant's anatomy and thought he had grasped the whole. To one the elephant was like a tree, to another like a wall, to a third like a fan, to a fourth like a snake, to a fifth like a spear, and to a sixth like a rope-depending on whether they had touched his leg, his side, his ear, his trunk, his tusk, or his tail. The poem in which this fable is contained concludes that all of them were right, though each of them was wrong. It takes a synthesis of all aspects of God and His creation to get a complete picture of Him-and none of us is so gifted as to be able to comprehend this, though we make some progress as we open our hearts and minds to the various facets of truth we encounter on our heavenward journey. Where Is God?
A youngster returning from Sunday school sat by a man in a bus. The man, apparently an unbeliever, seeing her Sunday school paper, decided to make fun of the child and said to her, "Tell me where God is and I'll give you an apple." The little girl thoughtfully turned to her fellow passenger and said in return. "Sir, if you tell me a place where God isn't, I'll give you a basket of apples."

Manifestations of the Light
"God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5). Light is a synonym of all that is beautiful and glorious in the universe of God, whether in the material or in the spiritual realm. Perhaps the most magnificent declaration ever uttered is that recorded in the book of Genesis by Moses: "God said, Let there be light: and there was light" (Genesis 1:3). Light is the most perfect emblem of purity we can imagine. We cannot conceive of the possibility of its defilement. Light is the source of beauty; we could have no concept of beauty without it. The colors of the rainbow, the endlessly varied and pleasing pictures portrayed before us in the flowers, the ever-changing shades in sky or forest, the delicate tints in the plumage of the bird, the flush of health on the human cheek, the glory of the sunrise, the splendor of the sunset-all these and ten thousand other manifestations of beauty are creatures of the light.