Christian Living

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We will always regard God as doing things he shouldn’t. In ancient times men looked at the sky and assessed everything by sight. When the rudimentary telescope was invented in the Netherlands in 1608 men saw things very differently. Later still, when the Hubble telescope became a reality when it was carried into space by the space shuttle in April 1990, men saw things still more different. In time to come something else will be invented and men will see that they were wrong all along and the process will continue. Just as men could not know, never less define, nebula or galaxy or quarks or black holes not necessarily because they were stupid, but more because they did not have the technology or knowledge to do so. In like manner humans do not possess the cognitive tools to assess God, neither in the general, nor the specific other than in the minute fragments that God chooses to reveal and even such trifling fragments give men enormous headaches. It is like blind worms living in liquid in the belly of a deep-sea fish coming across for the first time a grain of sand and from it trying to conceptualize Mount Everest.

Most pets are intelligent, but some things are quite beyond them. Play one of Mozart's sonatas on the hi-fi and ask your dog to articulate the merits of the piece and suggest how he might improve the ending and you will get a sense of his limitation. Man is but a dog when compared to the task at hand, but instead of a respectful silence we get endless, gratuitous barking in an exercise of limitless self entertainment. At least the dog knows when it is out of its depth and does not venture into the realm of utter stupidity and brainless inanities. Unlike man.

Man is a creature of numerous physical limitations and generally he is not ashamed to admit to such for we all know that man cannot walk on air, or fly, or live in water like a fish, or walk on his head, or lick his elbow, or slam dunk without hands. Yet man is afraid to acknowledge his limitations, and would be ashamed if he did, when we are dealing with cognitive issues. The world is cursed with these so-called thinkers, we laughably call them philosophers, who dream up childish concepts and dress them up in adult clothing and offer them to a vacuous world dying to hear and accept anything remotely resembling knowledge or new concepts. You have only to check the writings of the so-called great philosophers, ancient and modern, to see how they have explained away Almighty God, how they have reduced Him to some meaningless abstraction or to some nebulous generality to see my point.

The undeniable truth is that mankind at his very best, and here I am talking perfection, cannot conceptualize God as he is and the sooner we accept this and move on the sooner we will develop the right mindset towards God and all things eternal. Far too many people cognitively are permanently resident at the airport terminal conflicted if the airplane can really fly and bamboozled by the zillions of what if and wherefores and therefore never enjoy the beauty of flying or the exotic distant destinations awaiting them.

Ponder if you will, this knockout question; Canst thou by searching find out God? And the other half of the verse asks, canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? A king asked one of his philosophers these questions and the philosopher asked for one day, then another day and then another to give his answer. Eventually he told the king that each time the questions get more remote and unanswerable. You Bible scholars will recognize that the verse is taken from Job 11:7. You will not ask a man to jump up and catch the moon for, you know that would be an exercise in futility and yet we tolerate conceptual moon catchers and we even give them honours.

Take but one example to demonstrate my thinking. Take Plato, who along with his teacher Socrates and his pupil Aristotle are regarded as the Fathers of Philosophy. Plato has been acknowledged as the greatest philosopher who ever lived and such a mighty honour has been unchallenged, even to this day and his ideas are contained in what is called "the Socratic Dialogues". Yet look how the greatest philosopher that ever lived described Almighty God. In his dialogues, or to be more precise in his lecture "On The Good" (Plato claim not to write down anything of his thoughts and ideas so that others can abuse them, but spoke of those ideas and concepts to close associates only; he was a believer in logos the spoken only) Plato is reported to have said (by those who attended his lecture) that The Good is identified with the One (which he called the Unity) the fundamental ontological principle. To be more precise Plato rejected all material things as images and unreal and only those things that you can find out through reason and logic are real; hence his "Allegory of the Cave". Lest we forget Plato was a pagan philosopher and we should expect nothing less from that source.

Christians do not use the ontological argument for God's existence since that principle is clearly absurd. This argument essentially says that if you can think of something it exists, otherwise you could not think of it. They say your thinking about it is confirmation that it exists. This line of thinking leads to madness (is there any wonder why so many philosophers end up committing suicide?) because you can create a fantasy world and convince yourself that it is real and everything else is false. This might be the stuff of metaphysics or some people's perception of metaphysics but to escape from the real world and take refuge in absurdities does not address the question of God and how we relate to him.

The question I asked earlier, "Canst thou by searching find out God?" suggest that the answer is clearly no. Even the greatest philosopher could not get anywhere near to giving a proper answer and it is not difficult to find out why. Some things are impossible with man and this is one of those things. This is not a defeatist attitude, or a cop-out. This is more than a fact it’s a truth for all time and eternity. Mankind has parameters that have imposed limits on what he can and cannot do and his freewill cannot transcend those limitations.

Be absolutely clear and have no doubt that we can know things about God, but that will never be because man has initiated the process which rewards us with the relevant information. If we know anything about Almighty God, it will be because God has chosen to reveal himself to us either in the written word, The Scriptures, or by direct revelation; visions, dreams, and the like. Someone wisely said, "Every attempt to understand God that grows from man’s limited intellect leads to humanistic philosophy or false religion. It leads to a man made belief system that lacks any real insight." And I say Amen to that.

I have searched far and wide to try to understand why cognitively man is incapable of finding God and to assess these limitations to see if they are real or imaginary. Assumed limitations may be transient, perhaps awaiting a better strain of human and a different set of circumstances, but real, existential barriers are here and now and need to be recognised and factored into the cognitive equation. I have found many barriers to man's ability to fully conceive and articulate God and I have synthesized them to a list of ten as shown below.

Man has cognitive limits with respect to God and they are caused by or related to the following:

Everything that follows is based on two premises. 1) God is completely and utterly inaccessible to us by any means available to mankind unless and until God determines otherwise. 2) God has provided just two sources through which his Holy Spirit communicates; The Holy Scriptures and Revelation. The corollary to this is that if we are to know anything about God, we can do so only by reverently submitting ourselves to the authority of the Bible or else opening our lives to the direct revelation of God through the Holy Spirit. In practice these two things work in concordance and are supportive of each other. All other access routes are non-existent for compelling reasons as follows:

1. The carnal mind is forever opposed to an accurate perception of truth. Fallen man has acquired certain characteristics that prevents him from naturally acquiring certain truths just like the short wave radio band cannot receive long wave transmissions. Just like some atheist ask us to show them proof of God and every proof given is mindlessly dismissed. Paul puts it this way, "Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be." (Romans 8:7) The carnal mind produces false thinking and false conclusions and relish opposing God and John Gill puts it this way, "…because the carnal mind, the wisdom of the flesh, is not only an enemy, but enmity itself against God: against his being; it reasons against it; it wishes he was not; it forms unworthy notions of him; thinks him such an one as itself; and endeavours to bury him in forgetfulness, and erase out of its mind all memorials of him: it is at enmity against his perfections; either denying his omniscience; or arraigning his justice and faithfulness; or despising his goodness, and abusing his grace and mercy: it finds fault with, and abhors his decrees and purposes; quarrels with his providences; it is implacable against his word and Gospel…" (John Gills Bible Commentary on Romans 8:7)

2. The natural constraint of the human mind and thought processes. However much we wish for it, we know that the pint pot cannot ever know the experience of embracing a gallon measure. This is by no means the fault of the pint pot; it is simply that the pint pot is made to hold one pint, and not one gallon. The Bible says this, "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!" (Romans 11:33) The finite mind of man is not equipped to embrace infinity and the attempt to do so is patently absurd. People often forget that man was not created a celestial being, like an angel, but a mortal being with all the tools necessary for survival on this terrestrial planet and the glaring fact that man has survived shows the foresight and wisdom of Almighty God. I like the way Adam Clarke summed this up, "Who can pretend to penetrate the counsels of God, or fathom the reasons of his conduct? His designs and his counsels are like himself, infinite; and, consequently, inscrutable." (Adam Clarke's Bible Commentary on Romans 11:33).

3. A deficiency in spiritual discernment. This may be due to the presence of sin or lack of the gift of discernment, but in effect it is like marbles in the deep mud that cannot appreciate the beauty of the roses or like asking a blind man to describe a breathtaking landscape. The mind of man is closed off, shut tight against such enlightenment and however much he tries the fog of obscurity is just too great to overcome. And most times man is not trying because of the other impediments mitigating against his puny efforts. The Apostle Paul put it very well like this, "But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." (1 Corinthians 2:14)

4. The inadequacy of human communication. Too often we hear and use the term "words are inadequate" but in this case this is precisely so. It's like asking the croaking frog to explain the theory of relativity or a pig to describe the first moon landing. Let us face it and be realistic; it just will not happen. Even when we try to transcribe one terrestrial language into another, say from Mandarin Chinese into English, we are stumped because certain Chinese words have no English equivalent and we use an approximation. Paul recognized this when he wrote to the Corinthians and he wrote this, "Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual (1 Corinthians 2:13). There is a very good reason why communications from God come to us and from us to God via the Holy Spirit for that is a special function of his office as here described, "Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God." (Romans 8:26-27)

5. The resistance to the process of truth revealing. This is like trying to access truth from the source and just like deep sea exploration the deeper you go the more pressure you meet and the more tenuous the results. Let's face it, human beings do not want truth or anything associated with it. The preference is for spiritual anarchy, doing exactly as one pleases and completely ignoring the duties and obligations towards God. The time was when every messenger of the gospel was putting his life at risk whenever he ventured forth to proclaim the message of salvation. Not just people have been resistant to this, but entire organizations and governments. Even today in some countries propagating the gospel of Jesus Christ carries risk. That resistance to truth revealing can so dominate people that even Christians who are not sufficiently mature can fall victim to it. Jesus recognizes this and so he said this to his disciples, "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now" (John 16:12). It takes supernatural power to break this resistance and liberate the mind before you can receive spiritual insights. For good reasons the Bible says "Ye must be born again" (John 3:7) if you want to comprehend things spiritual.

6. Our absolute love of darkness and fear of light. This is like an alcoholic, brutalized and scarred by alcohol, yet clinging to the accursed drink as if his life depends on it. This is one of life's quirky ironies in that the very thing preventing us from attaining true enlightenment, we regard as the core of our existence. We know the reason for this because the Bible tells us this, "And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil" (John 3:19). The plain truth is that we have so cultivated and adopted darkness and all its evil associations that we regard light as the enemy to be feared and to be resisted by all means at our disposal. It is, to some extent, like some subterranean worms that have lived so long in the bowels of the earth in the deep darkness, that they have lost entirely the faculty of sight.

7. The silence of The Holy Scriptures. The Bible tells us many things and everything that is necessary for salvation, but it does not tell us everything we want to know. This is like a dear friend showing us around his house for the first time and choosing not to show us a certain room. Even if we knew of the existence of that room we would be wise to respect his wish not to show us that room at this time. With God, we should be even more respectful, for the Bible says this, "The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law." (Deuteronomy 29:29) There are lots of things God has not revealed to us and it is pure presumptuousness and prideful arrogance to demand that he does so. To defy God's silence on these matters some have even ventured to speculate and some have gone even further and teach their conjectures as if they are Bible doctrine.

8. Our partial knowledge of The Holy Scriptures. This is like being faced with an intricate jigsaw puzzle and having pieces missing or trying to decipher an ancient manuscript and great swathes of the text are missing; lacunae as it is known. It is a very brave or very foolish person who would affirm that he has a perfect knowledge of the Bible. Even the Apostle Paul, who spent time with all the apostles and saw Jesus personally, said this, "For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away." (1 Corinthians 13:9-10) The truth is that at times we are not seeing what God is showing us much less understanding the text and in humility we plead like David, "Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law" (Psalm 119:18)

9. Our primitive state of science and technology. It is very easy to be puffed up with our contemporary cutting-edge science and state-of-the-art technology, but should the world exists for, let us say, another six thousand years they would then look back at our science and technology and see them as pathetic and terribly laughable. God knows, and time will surely declare, that this generation that thinks it know it all is undergoing a dearth of true knowledge of historic proportion. If we were remotely as knowledgeable as we ought, we would be making routine intergalactic journeys by thought propulsion, mapping the flight paths of supernatural entities, performing remote internal surgery by brain waves, taking a ride to the edge of the universe and watching and reporting live on its expansion and such like and the list goes on. And all of this would not even be called "advanced" in God's eyes.

10. The creation and cultivation of the faith phobia. This is in large measure the result of atheist hostility and the pseudo-intellectuals wannabe who seek notoriety by attacking the community of faith and publishing self serving books and articles. These people demonize and ostracize the very medium we need to access spiritual enlightenment. Many of our scholars and in academia and the professions now think it’s "hip" and fraternal to heap derision on those who still have faith in the Almighty and some see this attitude as helpful for advancing their careers. Alas, what it does is exclude them from receiving deep revelations of the Almighty and the concomitant graces one normally gets so freely and abundantly.

These then are the reasons why God cannot be assessed by human cognitive tools and any attempt to do so by the world, and here we mean unregenerate people, whether they be scholars, academics, mystics, philosophers, professors or any of the intelligentsia, is folly and pure pomposity. Any findings from these sources are plainly useless and should be regarded as exercises in self-entertainment and academic horseplay. God tells you that he hides things from the great and mighty and reveals them to babes or as the Bible puts it, "At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes" (Matthew 11:25). Note the key word - revealed - for if we are to access the deep things of God, it will be because God reveals himself to us, and not through some philosophical or intellectual process.

Enough said.

Books by this author you may wish to read.

THINGS EVERY CHRISTIAN SHOULD KNOW (e-book)
Volume 1 – Five tough facts to be faced
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004YX5NSI

STAND UP TO THE DEVIL (e-book)
Volume 1 – You must first identify him
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005BQVLSS

BASTARD: A STORY OF REDEMPTION(e-book fiction)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006OF3SD6

ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT ON GOD’S CLOCK (Hard copy)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002X78D16

ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT ON GOD’S CLOCK (e-book)
http://tatepublishing.com/bookstore/book.php?w=978-1-60799-630-9

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