Job 36:26: “Behold, God is great, and we do not know Him; nor can the number of His years be discovered.”

December 31st, 2023 by Pastor Ed in devotional

As Elihu continued his rebuke of Job, he correctly stated that “God is great, and we do not know Him.” But his aim in saying this wasn’t so much to magnify God as to impress upon Job the mystery of God’s ways so that Job would finally have to admit his own wickedness. We know this wasn’t true of Job, but let’s set that aside for a moment and consider the magnitude of Elihu’s statement: “God is great.”

We believe this to mean that God is intrinsically infinite; and since we as humans are finite, we are unable to completely understand Him. Technically the word finite means to have a countable number of elements. Since God is infinite, we might say then that He has an uncountable number of elements to His Person. And that is why His greatness is beyond our human comprehension. In fact, the more we come to know Him, the more we find there is to know about Him. When we consider this statement, “God is great,” as fact rather than debatable opinion, we can’t but be humbled.

God has lovingly given us the Bible so that we can trace the walks of men and women down through the ages who have sought to know Him. We can compare our own path with theirs, making sure we don’t wander off into unorthodoxy. Even though in our earthly state we can never know Him in His entirety, we can still confidently seek Him because He has promised that when we do, He will be found by us. We have to be satisfied now with a limited knowledge of Him, but we look forward to eternity and all that we will come to know of Him there. We are confident that being in God’s presence will never become boring, because God is anything but boring. Since He is infinite, it stands to reason that our enjoyment of Him will also be infinite.

“Thank You, LORD, for revealing Yourself to Your creation through Your word and to us personally when we seek You. Walk with us today we ask in Jesus’ name.”