Excerpt from chapter 1: God is mystery.

Continuing from yesterday. Here is an excerpt from a possible first chapter of God with Ten Words.

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So the first word to help picture God is mystery. God is infinite. We can’t understand infinite except that it isn’t finite. Even the universe, as incomprehensibly vast as it is, is not infinite. God is “transcendent.” That means God extends beyond this universe, whatever that might mean. I certainly can’t comprehend it, and I wouldn’t believe Einstein if he said he could.

The Bible and Christians sometimes use another word as well for God’s Godness: holiness. To say God is holy is to say that God is God. It is to say that God is fearsomely awesome. A man named Isaiah caught a glimpse of this awesomeness of God, and he immediately fell flat on his face (see Isaiah 6). A man by the name of Rudolph Otto once called this aspect of God the “tremendous mystery.” The Latin he used makes it sound even better—mysterium tremendum!

So we need to keep in mind as we go through the other nine words that they all ultimately come back to this first word—mystery. We can know pictures of God, analogies of God. We can know broad strokes about God, like the fact that God is loving. But our understanding of what that means will always be colored by our cultures and background. We can know that God is just, but our understanding of what that means will always be partial and insufficient.

We can know what God is not, like the fact that God is not finite. God is not limited by our universe. There is no rock that God could create that God would not be able to lift. But in the end, “there is no finding out his understanding” (Isaiah 40:28), at least not on a fully literal level. When we have reached the limits of our comprehension, God will barely just be started.