5.11.2026 - Matt Hekman

May 11

Greetings readers. My name is Matt Hekman. I’m one of the elders currently serving on our church council. This week I will be writing our devotionals around the topic of God’s Incomprehensibility. Let’s jump in.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. - Isaiah 55:8-9

Since late high school, and certainly throughout my college years, I had an interest in what I would later learn is called “systematic theology”. Over the years I have studied quite a lot. I like to think about the way things work. It’s why I’m an engineer. My mind works the way it does – thinking about how everything fits or works together – no matter what I’m thinking about, even when pondering about the things of God. Making sense of things brings me great satisfaction. And yet, no matter how tidy my systematic theology is in my own mind, or how much I think I see how things all work together throughout God’s word, I must admit that I’m a million miles from having it totally figured out.

This is what we mean when we talk about the Incomprehensibility of God. It’s not that we can’t know about God, or even that we can’t know him, at a deep and personal level. It means that no matter how much we know, we can never know him fully. Every characteristic of God, his love, justice, grace, patience, power, holiness, is far greater than we can comprehend. Everything that God is, he is perfectly and completely. It is literally too much to take in.

For the next week we’ll be considering the Incomprehensibility of God. Take a moment and read Deuteronomy 29.

The context of Deuteronomy 29 is the establishment of the Mosaic Covenant. The Israelites are about to enter the promised land, ending their desert wanderings. God is giving them this covenant as a way to establish them as his people, and him as their God. He is making a covenant with them to set them apart as his holy people. They are called to enter this covenant by faith and obedience.

God gives the Israelites a degree of revelation. Out of a desire for his people to know him, he gives them enough. He tells them to remember all of the great things they saw him do. But he also tells them of the judgement that is coming because they will go their own way.

Why? I don’t think any of us would write that story. The great God of the bible saves his people from slavery and the sustains them for forty years in the desert, and then gives them a covenant he knows they will break. And he tells them so (v.25-28)!

Then verse 29.

The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law. Deuteronomy 29:29

God’s plan for all of it is hidden from us. It doesn’t make sense, and it might seem kind of backwards. But yet, he reveals himself to the Israelites, so that they might obey.

God does much the same thing with us by giving us his word. He acts first, revealing himself to us by his word. We learn the history of his loving pursuit of his people, of his providence, of his discipline, and ultimately of his salvation for those he loves. It starts with God, and what he gives us. We have enough to know that there is a God, that he loves us, and that he desires our obedience. We don’t know all there is to know about God, but he gives us enough to follow him.

Thank God today that HE has a plan. Thank him that he reveals himself to us – enough that we might know him and obey him. Above all, give thanks for his incomprehensible grace that He showed us in Jesus.