Our Bible verse for today: “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” Ecclesiastes 3:11 (NIV)
Our thought for today: “God has created us with a desire to know Him.”
It may seem odd to you that in these first few days I have begun our discussion about “knowing” God by saying that He is incomprehensible. In other words, He is unknowable. To a very great extent that is true, but not entirely. He has chosen to reveal to us some things about Himself – just enough to keep us desiring more.
In a previous message in this series I referred to this as the great adventure of living the Christian life. We can and should be in a constant process of learning more and more about Him, and therefore growing in spiritual maturity. In that same devotional I left you with a quote from author Jim Peterson which explained that however much we have learned about God, there is always more to learn. He is always beckoning us to go deeper with Him. Today I want to conclude our thinking about the incomprehensibility of God by exploring that idea just a little more.
In Ecclesiastes 3:11 Solomon tells us that God has created human beings with a sense of eternity in our hearts. In other words, deep down inside every person knows intuitively that there is more than just this physical world and that this life is not all there is. That’s why virtually every culture that has ever existed has had a belief in the supernatural. They have had gods that they worshipped, and they have believed there were means available to them by which they could interact with the spirit world.
More than 1500 years ago the great Christian writer Saint Augustine expressed it like this: “You have created us for yourself, oh God, and our hearts are restless, searching, until we find our rest in you.” A thousand years later the French philosopher Blaise Pascal expressed it this way: “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of man that can only be filled by God.” In Psalm 42:7 the Psalmist described this great desire of the human heart to connect with God as “deep calls out to deep”.
God created us with a natural inborn desire to want to know Him. Our responsibility is to respond to that innate desire and to actually seek Him. When we do, we will find Him. In Jeremiah 29:13 He told us: “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all of your heart.”
God is mostly incomprehensible, but not entirely. He has created us with a natural desire to know Him and to connect with Him in a deep way, and He has promised that if you will seek Him you will find Him. So I encourage you to seek Him this morning. Spend some extra time exploring the deep mysteries of God.
Oak Hill Baptist Church