Our level of worship is directly proportional to our level of knowledge. It’s true that the more you know God, the more you can worship God.
But in the words of Edward Wilson, “the greater the knowledge, the deeper the mystery.” Worship always has been and always will be mysterious because God does not fit within the confines of the human mind. Human imagination is amazing, but Ephesians 3:20 says God is “able to do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine.”
“To say that God is infinite,” said A.W. Tozer, “is to say that he is measureless.” Humankind loves to measure. James Gleick says we crave “hyperprecision.” The reason is simple: we can manage what we can measure. It gives us a degree of control. So we measure anything and everything.
We measure money in dollars, time in minutes, height in centimetres, and weight in kilogrammes. We measure wind and rain. We measure the height of mountains and the depth of oceans. We measure sound and light. We measure atoms and galaxies. No matter how big or how small--whether it’s light-years or femtoseconds--we find a way to measure it. We measure everything...except God.
God defies measurement. His grace is measureless. His power is measureless. His wisdom is measureless. Psalm 36 puts it in poetic terms, “His love is meteoric, his loyalty astronomic, His purpose titanic, His verdicts oceanic. Yet in His largeness, nothing gets lost.” In Isaiah 55:8, the Lord declares, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
There is part of us that wants to make God measurable because we can manage what we can measure, but as A.W. Tozer warns, “The end result is a God who can never surprise us, never astonish us, never overwhelm us, never transcend us.”
William Jennings Bryan, mused about the mystery of God, “I have observed the power of the watermelon seed. It has the power of drawing from the ground and through itself 200,000 times its weight. When you can tell me how it takes this material and out of it colours an outside surface beyond the imitation of art, and then forms inside of it a white rind and within that again a red heart, thickly inlaid with black seeds, each one of which in turn is capable of drawing through itself 200,000 times its weight--when you can explain to me the mystery of the watermelon, you can ask me to explain the mystery of God.”
God is mysterious. Just as pocket calculators have computation limits, the human mind can only compute a small fraction of God’s mystery. Dennis Covington says, “Mystery is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend.”
In too many instances, we offer easy answers. Jesus asked tough questions! Philip Yancey says, “Churches that leave room for mystery, that do not pretend to spell out what God himself has not spelled out, create an environment conducive to worship.”
One mark of spiritual maturity is feeling more comfortable with mystery than certainty!
The mystery of God - I pray it awes you into the worship of God as it does me.
