The Simplicity of One

If you ask certain people in the Church to tell you who the One God is, they will refuse, claiming that God is a mystery. They’ll say “He is beyond our understanding. He is transcendent.” But don’t fall for it. This is an escape mechanism—an easy way of avoiding the question “Who is God?” It’s a cop out.

Making God out to be incomprehensible is some people's way to come across as being spiritual, but is it true that we can’t grasp the reality of One God? Why is one such a difficult concept? Isn’t the essence of monotheism simplicity?

Monotheism is simple. In fact, it’s so simple that it offends people who would prefer for God to remain vague, distant, and unknown. It's offensive to those who would rather show off their complex theologies than deal with simple reality: There is One God, the Father.

You’ll not find a Bible passage that says that God Himself is a mystery. He’s not. He is One, and singularity is not mysterious. A person could argue that ‘As the heavens are higher than the Earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts’ (Isaiah 55:9) proves that God is unfathomable; but they are not interpreting the passage properly.

The passage says that God's ways and thoughts are higher than ours—not that God Himself is beyond our understanding. It does not say that we cannot know God. In fact, we must know God if we're going to have eternal life! Jesus said so.

[Jesus prayed to his Father] … this is eternal life, that they may know you, the Only True God (John 17:3).

Job’s Struggles

What God does and how he does it is expressed very articulately by Elihu, Job, and God Himself in Job 38-41, four chapters you must read. In them, God says that the basis for his rebuke of Job is that Job doesn’t understand what God does. Hence, God says, Job should not question God. Yahweh's correction of Job is based on Job not understanding God's actions, purposes, or plans. Job repents of his error regarding these things [that's what he calls them] with these words:

I know that you can do all things; no purpose of yours can be thwarted. You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’ Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know (Job 42:2-3).

Job’s confession was never that he couldn’t know God, but that he couldn’t understand God’s ways. Job could not fathom the things God does, God's purposes, God's plans, and the things for which God is responsible. Those are the things which all believers humbly recognize we don’t understand.

Elihu (who gave good advice, unlike Job’s other three friends), like Job, also made a case for how God’s ways are beyond our understanding. This is what Elihu's argument looked like:

He does great things beyond our understanding (Job 37:5).

So, Elihu recognized that God does things that go beyond our understanding. Elihu never said that God Himself is beyond our understanding... or did he? It depends on what version of the Bible you're using. There's another passage that we need to look at.

Unsearchable Antiquity

Elihu did state something that someone might interpret to mean that God is beyond our understanding, especially if they are using the New International Version. Consider what Elihu said in Job chapter 36.

Behold, God is exalted, and we do not know [him]. The number of his years is unsearchable (Job 36:26; NASB).

Although the pronoun him is not in the original, and the original Hebrew simply says we do not know, adding the pronoun him jives with the natural flow of the passage. We have no problem with the translations that include him. But if the pronoun him will lead people to conclude that God is a mystery, they're mistaken. The Hebrew parallelism on which this verse is based proves otherwise. The parallelism proves that Elihu was expressing wonder at God’s antiquity—his age. In other words, Elihu's point is that no one can fathom how old God is.

The Father is called the Ancient of Days for a reason: He is filled with days! He has been around. Elihu wonders about this, about how God has been around so long. His idea is that God’s experience surpasses the comprehension of the human mind. There's nothing in the context that should move us to interpret this verse any other way.

Young’s Literal Translation (YLT), one of the most literal Bible translations available, renders the verse this way:

Lo, God is high, and we know not the number of his years. Yea, there is no searching (Job 36:26; YLT).

That's a perfectly good translation. We cannot do an investigation into God's age. He's been around for too long for us to try that.

The Mystery of God

Those who hold to the position that God is a mystery have taken an indefensible posture. Grabbing at straws, they may resort to Colossians 2:2-3; arguing that it speaks of the mystery of God. 

However, this verse also states that whatever once was a mystery is now understood. And the mystery never was who God is. The mystery was never God, but the Messiah of God. So Paul is saying that God owns the mystery of the Messiah. But Paul is also saying that since Jesus’ first coming, we know who the long-awaited Messiah is.

Here’s the passage:

My goal is that... they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:2-3).

As you can see, Paul never says that the mystery is God Himself, but that the mystery is God’s. So, what has not been understood until this present age, the Age of the Gentiles, and what has been for many generations difficult to comprehend is who the Christ is—the identity of the Christ.

The mystery has never been the identity of the One God. His identity is something we all know very well. We'll state it concisely: The One True God is the Father. Indeed, Jesus affirmed that the Father is his God just as much as the Father is our God.

I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God (John 20:17).