September 24, 2019 – Job 36:26

How great is God—beyond our understanding!
—Job 36:26

I am tired of the known and the knowable, tired of saying this star is fifty millions of miles in circumference, and yonder planet is five million times larger than the earth.82 It is mere gossip in polysyllables, getting importance by hugeness.
It is in this manner that people want to make God pronounceable in words! Failing this, they suppose they have destroyed him by saying he is Unknowable and Unknown.
Human soul, if you would truly see—see the boundless, see the possible, see God—go into the dark when and where the darkness is thickest. The light is vulgar in some uses. It shows the mean and vexing detail of space and life with too gross a palpableness, and it frets the sensitivity of the eyes. I must find the healing darkness.
Deus absconditus. God hides himself, most often in the light; he touches the soul in the gloom and vastness of night, and the soul, being true in its intent and wish, answers the touch without a shudder or a blush. It is even so that God comes to me.
God does not come through human argument, a flash of human wit, a sudden and audacious answer to an infinite enigma. His path is through the pathless darkness—without a footprint to show where he stepped; through the forest of the night he comes, and when he comes the brightness is all within!
My God—unknown and unknowable—cannot be chained as a prisoner of logic or delivered into the custody of a theological proposition. Shame be the portion of those who have given him a setting within the points of the compass, who have robed him in cloth of their own weaving and surnamed him at the bidding of their cold and narrow fancy!
For myself, I know that I cannot know him, that I have a joy wider than knowledge, a conception that domes itself above my best thinking, as the sky domes itself in infinite pomp and luster above the earth whose beauty it creates.
God? God! God! Best defined when undefined; a fire that may not be touched; a life too great for shape of image; a love for which there is no equal name. Who is he? God. What is he? God. Of whom begotten? God. He is at once the question and the answer, the self-balance, the All.
—Joseph Parker