But No

If your Christian spidey senses were tingling yesterday as you started to put together the titles from this week's blog posts, you either are familiar with Paul's letter to the Corinthians or you've sung the song - you know that no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind can know what God has in store. 

So where does that leave us? 

Right where we are.

There is no contradiction between a God who has given us eyes to see, ears to hear, and a mind to know and also confessing that none of us has seen, heard, or known it all. 

Our eyes see little glimpses of God, little hints of eternity, but there's so much more that we haven't seen. And that's okay. 

Our ears have heard what God has to say, the Word He has spoken from the very beginning into the formless and void, and yet, there is so much we haven't heard from His voice. And that's okay. 

Our minds know quite a bit about Him. In fact, I would say that we're capable of knowing everything that we need to know to build a solid faith, but there are still things we just can't know. Not here, not now. Not today. And that's okay. 

Listen to me; this is important - it's okay that God is bigger than we can comprehend. It's okay that God is more than our senses are able to grasp. In fact, it's necessary. If this weren't the case, He wouldn't be God. 

God is what we can think of as a knowable mystery. We are able to know just enough about Him to be confident while at the same time being exactly as confident that there is more to Him than we know. This is also truth. 

What we can't do is let ourselves be fooled into thinking that because we can't know everything about God - because we can't see everything, hear everything - then we can't know anything. That's not how this works. God has given us more than enough to know to fall head over heels in love with Him and to start to grasp His glory and His goodness, even if we only ever get it in part. Remember, the same Paul who wrote those words to the Corinthians also told us that we currently see as though in a mirror, but darkly, but that one day, we will see it all clearly. 

That's what we're talking about when we talk about faith. We're talking about seeing what we can see, hearing what we can hear, knowing what we can know...and knowing there is more even beyond this. Then, we put our trust in even what we know we do not know because of what we do know. Because of what our eyes have seen, what our ears have heard, and what our minds do know. 

So what say you, then? Do you have faith?