“Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways! 34 For WHO HAS KNOWN THE MIND OF THE LORD, OR WHO BECAME HIS COUNSELOR? 35 Or WHO HAS FIRST GIVEN TO HIM THAT IT MIGHT BE PAID BACK TO HIM AGAIN? 36 For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen.”
“Since grace is the source of the life that is mine –
And faith is a gift from on high –
I’ll boast in my Savior, all merit decline,
And glorify God ‘til I die.”
J.M.B.
These words we come to study today, even if taken out of the context of Romans eleven, would stand by themselves a complete and accurate declaration of the glory and sovereignty of Almighty God.
Paul has just finished his teaching concerning the state of the Jewish nation in the omnipotent and omniscient will of God and her future according to His predetermined plan, then he breaks into this anthem of praise in which we can almost hear the tremor in his voice; see the tear glimmering in his eye, sense with him the futility of trying to put into words that which is beyond the imagination of men.
“Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!”
Listen to those words! Riches of wisdom and knowledge! Unsearchable judgments! Unfathomable ways!
JB Phillips’ paraphrase says, “How could man ever understand his reasons for action, or explain his methods of working?”
In translating the wording of the second half of verse 33 in this way, Phillips has asked the question in brief that we will inspect today. Now I did not say we were going to investigate. I do not say that we will attempt to answer the question. That is not an answerable question, other than to say, ‘man cannot understand God’s reasons for action, nor explain God’s methods of working’. So we will not engage in folly here, attempting to do what the Apostle has implied with his declaration cannot be done. What we will do, rather than investigate, is inspect. I want to inspect the question itself and focus, not on man’s inability to fathom God, but on the God who cannot be fathomed, to His glory and praise.
QUESTIONS
It is ever the propensity of the fallen nature that men ask the wrong questions. It will always be this way. The nature of mankind since the fall is diametrically opposite of God’s nature; his thinking opposite of God’s thinking – not only infinitely less, but opposite; opposed.
You have heard me say that we are turned around backwards, and I mean that in every way you can apply the word.
It means we want precisely the opposite of what God wants. That means we want glory, we do not want to acknowledge His glory. We do not understand His motives nor His actions; by our nature we ascribe wrong motives and actions to Him.
This is why people ask, ‘why would a loving God allow such and such?’ or ‘if there really is a good God, why does He allow this in my life?’
And it is not only the unchurched who ask these kinds of faithless questions; not only the unbeliever.
The Bible is full of people asking God the wrong questions – reaching wrong conclusions out of their ignorance of God’s thinking and God’s ways – and they are just like us.
Remember Job who finally comes to the place of bemoaning his humiliation and his unrewarded good deeds, and remember that the response he receives is a series of questions from God, asked rhetorically like Paul’s questions in Romans 11, challenging Job to come face to face with his utter helplessness, uselessness and insignificance apart from God who made all provided all, triumphed and rules over all.
Remember Elijah’s grievance pertaining to what he perceived as the total apostasy of Israel, and God’s response to Him. Paul quotes it here in Romans 11 verse 4. “I have kept for Myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal”.
Notice God did not say, ‘Seven thousand have stayed faithful and I’m so glad they did’; no, that would have put God on the same dependant level as Elijah, only one step ahead by virtue of having a response to bring Elijah up to date. Instead, He said, “I have kept for Myself”.
Paul told the Athenian philosophers that God does not dwell in temples made with hands neither is He served by human hands as though He Himself needed anything, for it is He who gives to all life and breath and all things.
Why did the Apostle begin his address this way? Because they did not know these things. They, in their godless pride, had assumed that they themselves provided for themselves all things necessary and desired – as do we all when we are according to the flesh.
We think we have the right questions, which leads us to believe we come across the right answers, even when we find those answers out of the murky darkness of our own sin-twisted minds and our own evil-engorged hearts.
Who has known the mind of the Lord?
In my reading I came across something that struck me as interesting. I don’t know how helpful it will be to you but it made its point with me, so I pass it on here.
As I read William R. Newell’s commentary and he was highlighting this question, ‘who has known the mind of the Lord’, I saw the following.
“Men today come from Italy and boast loudly if they have had a talk with the ‘dictator’ there; or from Germany, and say, The great ‘leader’ of Germany let me in to his plans; or from Washington, and boast that they have had ‘inside information’ concerning those that are prominent there.” and I had a thought about what he was saying, so I turned to the front of the book and discovered that it was published in 1938; and I could not help wondering if Newell had just seen a newsreel about Chamberlain’s return to London from his visit with Hitler, where he had obtained a signed promise from Hitler to leave Poland alone (six months later, the German army invaded Poland). Then that made me think of one of our own politicians during the 2008 Presidential campaign, who boasted that he would sit down and talk with the antagonistic President of one of the Middle Eastern countries and make peace with him.
Now I have no desire to make any political statement here. I just want to note that Newell went on to say:
“But what are these rulers all? Bits of dust! God declares that in His sight the nations are ‘accounted as the small dust of the balance,’ and that ‘the rulers of this age are coming to nothing’.” ROMANS Verse by Verse, W.R. Newell, Moody 1938
(Ps 33:10-12)
Men cannot even accurately assess the minds of other men and cannot predict what they are truly thinking or what they will do.
Who has known the mind of the Lord? Who has anticipated Him? Who has read His mind?
Who has become His counselor? Who has risen to the office of His aid or His advisor?
Rhetorical questions for which mankind in his infinite folly presumes to have answers. But we do not, my friends. We don’t have answers; not even one!
How can we, when we don’t even have the right questions?
ANSWERS
Well, Paul asks some of the right questions here, if we are willing to look at them in the proper light and with the help of the Holy Spirit and admit that the reason our answers have to be in the negative is because to try and give a positive answer is to demand to share God’s glory, and that He will not share with anyone.
Who has known the mind of the Lord? Negative reply: none and no one.
Who became His counselor? Negative reply: none and no one.
Who has first given to Him that it might be paid back to him again? Given to Him? What could be given to the One who has created and given all that exists? If a small child finds a penny on the study floor and wraps it to give her Father for his birthday, whose penny was it in the first place?
Who can fathom, who can aid, who can provide for the One of whom the Psalmist under divine inspiration wrote:
“Thou are clothed with splendor and majesty,
Covering Thyself with light as with a cloak,
Stretching out heaven like a tent curtain,
He lays the beams of His upper chambers in the waters;
He makes the clouds His chariot;
He walks upon the wings of the wind;
He makes the winds His messengers,”
Flaming fire His ministers.” Ps 104:1-4
Perhaps it was the words of this psalmist that inspired Cowper to pen;
“God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.
Deep in unfathomable mines
Of never-failing skill
He treasures up His bright designs,
And works His sovereign will.” William Cowper
How could we in the church have drifted so far away from these magnificent revelations of the wonders of God and His might and His majesty and His glory?
How have we come to this place of speaking and thinking glibly about our Lord and Creator and Savior, that in our minds He has been whittled down to an idol of our own imaginations; something that is small enough to fit in our pathetic little theological boxes?
He declares through the prophet Isaiah that He has created us for His glory! That is the answer to the age old, ‘why was I born’ question; the ‘why am I here?’ ‘what is the meaning and purpose of life?’ This is it! You were born to glorify God! The meaning and purpose of life is to glorify God!
That is why the very first question and answer of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, a question and answer with which Christians of past generations even greeted one another so they wouldn’t forget, is “What is the chief end of man?” Answered with “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever!”
How could we have drifted so far away from that simple but absolutely fundamental truth, that we have sunk to singing repetitions of choruses that focus more on ourselves than God, and hearing so-called preaching that instructs greedy and self-centered attendees on how to play up to God so He’ll make them prosper and keep them in good health?
People of the church, you were created for God’s glory. He caused you to be born again to a living hope for His glory (1 Pet 1:3). He called you, justified you, sanctified you and glorified you for His glory; not for yours, for HIS!
Someone says, ‘I know that, why are you going on like this? We’ve heard this and we know’.
Uh-uh. I think that we don’t really know when we try so hard to get the attention and make things about us. I think we don’t really know that all the glory is His, when we refuse to believe what the Scriptures say about Him and about His absolute sovereignty in the plan and completion of regeneration and redemption.
Robert Haldane, writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, gave us this to consider.
“In every part of Scripture, Jehovah is seen to be glorified; in His judgments as well as in His grace, in His wrath as well as in His mercy, in those who are lost as well as in those who are saved. However disagreeable this may be to the mind of the natural man, it is truly reasonable. Can there be a higher end than the glory of the Divine character? And can man, who is a fallen and lost creature, share with His offended Sovereign in the glory of his recovery? Such a thought is as incongruous as it is unscriptural. If there be hope for the guilty, if there be recovery to any from the ruin of the fall, it is the voice of reason, properly exercised, as well as of the Divine word, that it must come from God Himself”. ROMANS, Robert Haldane, circa 1839, MacDonald Pub Co
Christians, if there is any point at which we will balk at ascribing all glory, all authority, all sovereignty and lordship to God, then we have taken the first step to worshiping an idol.
We ‘tsk-tsk’ at the godlessness and the man-centeredness of our fallen society; not without cause. As my friend, Josel so succinctly nailed it – and bear in mind that I’ve plucked her words out of the middle of a conversation – when she said, “…one of the big problems is our culture which gives people the impression they are much more important than they actually are. ‘Have it your way’, ‘You deserve a break’, ‘it’s all about you’ – No it’s not!!! I have fallen for it so many times in my life and it’s only really been recently that I have realized how backward our culture is”.
Well, Josel, in that case you are already light years ahead of many even in the church, where this sort of thinking has so successfully seeped in.
We pay pretty good lip-service to the idea of letting God be God and putting Him first and above all, but there is an ever-present undertow in our worship and in the expression of our thinking of bringing it back to our self.
We are more like the Pharisees than we want to be made aware of, who when the man healed from blindness in John 9 was brought before them, out of jealousy for their position and a desire to cling to their traditions, demanded that he give glory to God and in the very same breath called Jesus a sinner. (Jn 9:24)
Even standing there looking at a man they all knew well as a blind beggar from birth; someone they had walked past coming into the Temple for many years, day by day, and now witnessing him seeing, they could not accept what had happened outside the walls of the Temple as legitimate, and they would not affirm this miraculous work as that of the Messiah because it happened outside the scope of their own power and authority.
This is the reason people, even Christians, balk at the truths relating to God’s absolute authority and work in salvation; in His sovereign right to elect or pass over. They don’t want to give everything over to God. They want some power, some credit, some glory…and they kick and fuss at any doctrine that tells them they can’t have it!
If Josel was correct in saying that a problem in our culture is that it elevates man, we also have to confess that a problem in the church is that in our contemplations of God we do not elevate Him enough.
TO GOD BE THE GLORY
In their book on divine sovereignty, Thomas Schreiner and Bruce Ware write the following:
“Ours is a culture in which the tendency is to exalt what is human and diminish what is divine. Even in evangelical circles, we find increasingly attractive a view of God in which God is one of us, as it were, a partner in the unfolding drama of life. But lost in much of this contemporary evangelical theology is the full omniscience, omnipotence, splendor, greatness, supremacy, rulership, and unqualified lordship of God. In contrast, the vision of God affirmed in these pages [referring to their book] is of One who reigns supreme over all, whose purposes are accomplished without fail, and who directs the course of human affairs, including the central drama of saving people for the honor of his name, all with perfect holiness and matchless grace”. Thomas R. Schreiner and Bruce A. Ware, eds., Still Sovereign: Contemporary Perspectives on Election, Foreknowledge, and Grace (Grand Rapids, Mich: Baker, 2000)
There is a song that has been playing on the radio that asks, what if God was one of us; just a slob like one of us; just a stranger on a bus trying to make his way home. (Joan Osbourne)
I was reminded of it when I read this excerpt from Schreiner and Ware’s book, when they said “Even in evangelical circles, we find increasingly attractive a view of God in which God is one of us, as it were, a partner in the unfolding drama of life”.
This radio song serves as a glaring example of the diminishing of God in our society and in our very minds and hearts. Sadly, the song never answers its own question.
Christians, God is not one of us – and it ought to make us cringe inside just to hear the speculation that He might be a slob, or a stranger on a bus. Just to hear Him referred to that way should grieve our spirits.
Please don’t call this poetic license. There is no such thing when talking about the God who owns us.
God is above all and there is nothing that He did not call into being; not what we call ‘space’, not all that fills it in a material sense, not all that exists beside Him in the spiritual realm, not even the fallen and demonic ones, not Lucifer himself.
God is exalted above all and so should He be in our thinking, in our doctrine, in our theology, in our conversation, in our church, in our lives.
“For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen”
Do we really understand what the Apostle has said? When speaking of ‘all things’, he leaves nothing out including our very souls. For a moment forget the material universe and think about this. Everything about us that makes us, us, is through and to and for Him.
Not only did He conceive of and create us in the beginning, but when we rebelled and each went our own way, He purchased us back at the dearest of cost to Himself.
Paul employs this same language in other places to Christ.
1 Corinthians 8:6 “yet for us there is but one God, the Father from whom are all things, and we exist for Him; and the one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through Him”
Then in Colossians 1:15-18 Paul teaches things about Jesus Christ that make it clear He is God and that He and the Father are one.
“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him. 17 He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. 18 He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything.”
Fellow Christ-followers, I submit to you that it is in our fallen nature to seek happiness and joy and fulfillment for ourselves, but according to the Bible the only happiness, the only joy, the only fulfillment there truly is, exists in giving all glory to God and His Son our Lord Jesus Christ.
When a believer comes to the place of knowing in his or her very heart that they are saved and eternally secure only because the Father chose them, the Son redeemed them with His blood and the Spirit brought Life to them, that is when and only when he or she finds the kind of joy and fulfillment that comes down from Heaven itself and lifts the believer to heights untouched by this sin-riven world.
“Worthy are You, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power; for You created all things, and because of Your will they existed, and were created.” Rev 4:11
To Him be the glory forever. Glory to God alone.
Folks, I’ve heard talk over the years about revival. Christians want to see revival. I think that in most cases if they had to write it all down on paper we’d discover that what they’re really wanting to see is many people coming into the church. Church growth.
And that’s a good thing, if people are truly being saved and discipled. We’d all like to see that and it is a Biblically blessed desire, of course.
But what we really need to be praying for and looking for and hoping for and proclaiming, is a new reformation in the whole body of Christ in this world, as she turns back once more to the doctrines that exalt God alone, Christ alone, the Scriptures alone, acknowledging that salvation is through faith alone by God’s grace alone, and ascribing to Him all the glory forever.
I believe that is when revival would come; and oh, that we would see this day before the Lord calls us home. Glory to God alone.
“How blessed are the people whose God is the Lord!” Ps 144:15b
