Beyond What I Have Known

“…You have searched me, LORD, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise… you are familiar with all my ways… Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.”
Psalm 139:1–3, 6 NIV

We have never known what it is like to be unlimited. We cannot give our attention everywhere, understand everything about another person, or be present for everyone who needs us. Those boundaries are so ordinary that we rarely notice them. They are simply part of being human. But they also shape every relationship we have ever known. When relationship with God enters that familiar world, something easily goes unnoticed. We may know that God isn't like us while still expecting our relationship with Him to work within the same kinds of limits that have shaped every other relationship we know.

David, an ancient king of Israel who wrote many of the Psalms, describes a relationship that stretches beyond those familiar limits. He begins, “You have searched me, LORD, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise… you are familiar with all my ways.” Then his words stay surprisingly ordinary. Sitting down. Getting up. Going out. Lying down. “Before a word is on my tongue you, LORD, know it completely.” David seems amazed that the God he is speaking to is involved with his ordinary life this closely.

“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.” David has reached something we know well. There are things about God we simply cannot get our minds around. But understanding everything about God was never the requirement for being fully known by Him. We can be deeply known by God even when much about Him remains beyond our understanding.

That distinction matters whenever we reach the edge of what we can understand, do, or see. Our natural assumption may be that what lies beyond our limits is simply beyond anyone. But God says, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways” (Isaiah 55:9). Reaching the end of what we can understand does not mean we have reached the end of what is possible in our relationship with God.

Maybe we do not need to understand how an unlimited God can relate so personally to limited people like us before we begin discovering that He can and does. Paul told people still searching for God that “he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:27–28). What might become possible if we entered today without expecting our human limitations to limit our relationship with God?

Prayer

Father, I bring You my limited understanding and the life I have today. Help me stop measuring what is possible with You by what I have known, and open me to discover more of You. Amen.