Romans 11:25-36 “Inscrutable”

My wife Helen came back from her long journey around the world on Wednesday. She did literally travel once around the planet–so she lost a day of her life doing that–or she is younger now than as if she had never traveled. Time is a fickle thing to contemplate to be sure.

On the night that Helen came back, she wanted to see the comet that has been visiting the night sky this last week. It appears only every 80,000 years apparently. See it now or wait. So, she went out into the front yard and looked west after sunset. I tried to point the comet out to her, but it took some trial and error. Finally she did spy the faint tail of the celestial iceball for herself.

So, the next time we will see this comet is in 80,000 years. Where will you be? What does a comet look like from heaven looking down? Or, even more fanciful, can I ride on the tail of a comet if I want to in heaven? We really are so limited in our ability to see what God Almighty is up to in the universe. We strain our eyes and imaginations! That is what our scripture for today is all about.

You know, I have struggled to translate the first few words of our Scripture for today into the actual sense of what Paul wants to convey in English. Our own pew bibles say “So that you may not claim to be wiser than you are. . . .” Whereas this translation is certainly valid, I find it does not reflect the intensity of Paul’s words in the Greek. My translation would sound something like: “I do not want you to be delusional ignoramuses. . . .” Maybe I should not use such strong language in the church, but that is almost word for word what Paul says from the Greek. I will stand by my translation.

To be sure, what is happening in Rome is that there are people in church leadership positions who are making statements out of their own ignorance that are hurtful to the message of salvation, the Good News, for all people.

I am so glad that there are not people out there today who speak from ignorance when sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ! That is supposed to be funny! This is funny because we all speak from a standpoint of ignorance. There is not one person who has ever lived, since Jesus of course, who knows the mind of God! Honestly, we can barely see a comet! We can name one by one all of the great evangelists, all of the well-remembered Popes, all of the great philosophers and theologians—makes no difference! No one can know the full wisdom of God.

I want you right now to turn to look at the person sitting next to you or behind you. Just look at somebody else in the church right now. If you are on-line, then look at the cat! Do you think that you could ever even know all of the wisdom of that person? Do you think you could ever come to understand everything that was ever learned through countless experiences in that other person’s life? Even just knowing the full wisdom of another person is impossible. I dare you to try to do that with God’s wisdom! We should not and truly cannot claim to know God’s Holy Wisdom.

English is the only language I have ever encountered in which the verb to know a person and the verb to know a fact are the same word. I think that this creates so much confusion in English. It may even cause us to vainly aspire to “know” others in ways we simply cannot. I know my wife, my friends, and my children. I also know the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Pythagorean theorem, and even how to file my income taxes. Truly, we cannot know people in the same way that we know facts.

I bring this up because despite our total inability to know God, we must in fact come to the point in our lives when we say, “We know God.” I know my wife. That does not mean that I know her every thought—even though she is thinking some really great thoughts. We must know God in our lives—though it is impossible to know the full wisdom of God.

Anybody here remember the story of Rasputin, the last religious advisor to the Romanovs in Russia? He claimed to be the voice of God in Russia. He claimed to know the mind of the Almighty. He advised the last Czar of Russia, Czar Nicholas. Of course, Czar Nicholas was eventually banished to Siberia then called back to Moscow to be assassinated. Rasputin himself was shot in the head and thrown from a bridge to his death. Russia shortly thereafter was overrun by atheistic communists. Today we look back at that whole history and question if Rasputin was not just plain old delusional and ignorant. If he had known the wisdom of God, he would not have allowed himself to be assassinated. He would not have caused the fall of the monarchy and Russian Duma.

And, who can forget Haile Selassie of Ethiopia who thought he was God? No offense to Rastafarians who still think he was God, but look, he too was assassinated and his body was stuck under a latrine until it was found recently. Idi Amin of Uganda was another strange self-proclaimed divine body. The list of people claiming the wisdom of God in heaven is so long in human history. Paul is right on when he talks about people who are delusional and ignorant. If you want to claim that you are wiser than you are, be aware that that has historically not worked well for others!

When I picked Helen up at the airport, something happened that had never happened before in my life. I was recognized by a complete stranger. Helen was waiting at the curb outside of baggage claim when I pulled up in the church van. She opened the side door and quickly threw her luggage in. Just then a man whom I had never seen before yells in through the front window of the van, “I liked your book!” I was shocked. “Which one?” I responded. “The one about Waimea! I got it at the Talk Story Bookstore.” “Wow, thank you!” I remembered that indeed my picture is on the back cover of the book, and the van has signs on the side that say Waimea Church. But, to be known by some measure of celebrity by a complete stranger is really a spooky thing. They seem to know you, but you do not know them.

then my theological mindset kicked in: What if Jesus pulled up in a van? “I know you! You wrote that book–what is it allied?--the Bible!” Would we recognize Jesus from what we have read? Through the Bible, we can come to know Jesus, but would we recognize him at the airport?

The greatest fear of every pastor, every Christian, is that Jesus would show up and we would not recognize him! Or worse, that Jesus would not recognize us!

Paul himself makes the statement that the Wisdom of God is “unsearchable and inscrutable.” Well, actually we read that his “judgments are unsearchable and his ways are inscrutable.” Still, we have an unsearchable, inscrutable God. We search for God, but God is unsearchable.

I think everyone understands what Paul means when he says that God is unsearchable. I am not going to waste time telling you what you already understand. Science will never be able to come up with the real “God Particle” even when they choose to name a certain kind of boson the “God particle.” A scientific search can never yield the true finding of God which takes place in a person’s heart with that other kind of knowing.

What does it mean that God’s ways are inscrutable? Many different Bibles will translate this line very differently. The Greek word here, ανεξιχνίαστος, literally means “cannot be traced or tracked.” The word for “way” in our text literally means “path.” Paul is saying that we cannot track God’s path. We might think that we are on God’s path, but invariably we find ourselves on our own path or simply the wrong path that someone else has put out for us who also does not know the way to God.

I have often wondered why C.S. Lewis in his Chronicles of Narnia series portrayed God as a lion named Aslan. Of course the Bible does have a reference to God as the “lion of Judah.” Yet, I wonder if C.S. Lewis also had this idea that humanity tries so hard to find God as if we were on a hunt for lion in the forest. We think we can know where God will be and that we can somehow track God and finally come to meet God in doing this. This very idea presupposes that God is alive and moving always. But, we know that God cannot be tracked that way.

Yet, we know that there is a path to God. It is not a path that can be tracked like one would track an animal’s paw prints. In John 14:6, Jesus tells us that He is the Way. He is the path to God. When we know Jesus in our hearts, then we know the path to God.

Just before that line in John 14, we can read John 13:33, “I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going you cannot follow.’” We know of course today that Jesus meant that he was going to be with God in heaven once more. That was a path that Jesus had to go alone-- through the Cross and Resurrection. Jesus is the Way for us. He comes back to us. He shows us the Way to God in heaven.

No, we cannot know God’s wisdom or track God and find God in any human way. We come to God through knowing God’s Son Jesus. We are then carried along that path back to the Almighty. There is no other way. Surrender yourself to Jesus. Come to know God.

Amen.