God is best known in not knowing him.
Augustine of Hippo, On Order, II.16
Every time I write an article about theology proper, I think “Man, I should have started out with this one.” There are so many doctrines that define how we interact and understand other doctrines. Take divine simplicity, for example. Once you understand that God is identical with His attributes, it informs the way we think about His omnipotence or omnibenevolence. Or take immutability, and understand how knowing that God does not change informs how we understand impassibility or eternality. This seems especially true when contemplating the doctrine of incomprehensibility. When you understand that God cannot ever be fully comprehended (think of a similar word, apprehended) it informs how we study theology and meditate on the infinite, majestic, unfathomable beauty of our glorious Lord.
Let me start out by saying this; confessing that God is incomprehensible is not confessing that He is unknowable. In common use these words are effectively synonymous, we may use them interchangeably with the same relative meaning, but in theology, these words have different denotative uses. After all, God is not unknowable. Paul admonishes the Church in Ephesus to grow in the knowledge of God (Ephesians 3:19). We can know true things about God.
We can know and confess that God is good, but we can never comprehend the depths of His goodness
We can know and confess that God is powerful, but we can never comprehend the reaches of His power.
We can know and confess that God is eternal, but we can never comprehend the vastness of His existence.
We can know and confess that God is justice, but we can never comprehend His hatred for sin and His perfection in delivering justice.
When we say that God is incomprehensible, we don’t mean that we could measure His greatness if only we had enough measuring tape. Our inadequacy in comprehending God is not quantitative as if we could someday (even in glory) reach the final piece of knowledge about God, it is qualitative because finite creatures can never truly apprehend infinity.
The only being that can truly comprehend God is God. We know that God is infinite, so it takes an infinite knowledge to comprehend infinitude. When we say that God is all knowing, do we usually think of Him knowing Himself? Or do our minds drift toward our world? I know that when I speak of God’s omniscience, I tend to think of things and happenings in our world, the created order. Does it take an infinite knowledge to comprehend the finite, though? After all, there are only so many knowable things in our world. Even though they may be vast, they are finite. Could we not imagine, hypothetically, a supercomputer so large that it knows every single knowable thing in this universe? I think we have to say that it is hypothetically possible. Now, is it hypothetically possible for a supercomputer of the same size to find the last number? The number at which point you can stop counting because you’ve counted them all? No, not at all, because numbers go on for infinity.
There is always one more. I use that example to try to shine a tiny shred of light on just how unfathomable the Almighty is. If we can’t even find the end of a sequence of 10 repeating digits, how can we imagine to find the end of the LORD? For God to know all things in the world is more of an auxiliary feature in His omniscience, the true object of His omniscience is Himself.
So, confessing the doctrine of incomprehensibility is less a statement about our knowledge and the lack thereof (even though that is included), and more a statement about who God is and His unfathomable depths of perfect abundant being
After explaining the doctrine, I’d like to say how this should impact us. When the Bible speaks of the incomprehensibility of God, the goal is not to elicit a frustrated cry from us or cause despair because we can never comprehend the Lord we love. The response should be reverent awe and worship, knowing that, in the words of the classic hymn, “When we’ve been there, ten thousand years, bright shining as the Sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise, than when we first begun.”