Session 23 confessed who God is — three Persons, one God. This session asks a harder, more personal question: can that same God actually be known, or only confessed?
“My plans are not like your plans, and my deeds are not like your deeds… just as the sky is higher than the earth, so my deeds are superior to your deeds and my plans superior to your plans.”
If God is genuinely beyond your full comprehension, is pursuing Him even worth the effort?
This session holds two claims together that feel, at first, like they can’t both be true: God is knowable — invitingly, rewardingly, really knowable — and God is unknowable, genuinely beyond the reach of a finite mind. Both are biblical. Neither cancels the other. Learning to hold both without collapsing into either false confidence or despair is most of what this session is actually about.
Consider This
If someone who had never met you tried to describe your personality after reading only your grocery lists, how accurate would their picture be? Now consider: how much of your own picture of God has come from something similarly partial — a feeling, a single hard experience, a preacher’s offhand comment — rather than from what He’s actually revealed about Himself?
Opening Prayer (Say this aloud!)
Father, You are perfect, and You want to make Yourself known to me. Flush from my mind any thought about You that isn’t from You. Enlarge my capacity to think accurately, and give me peace with what You haven’t chosen to reveal. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Every wrong idea about God has the same root, and Scripture names it in its very first pages.
“The serpent said to the woman, ‘Surely you will not die,’ for God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will open and you will be like divine beings who know good and evil.”
The serpent’s actual strategy wasn’t to deny God existed. It was to suggest something false about God’s character — that He was withholding something good, that His restriction was selfish rather than protective. Adam and Eve didn’t stop believing in God. They started believing a smaller, more suspicious version of Him, and then acted on that belief. That’s the pattern behind essentially every idolatry that has followed since: not usually outright denial, but a quiet substitution of a god who conforms to what we’d prefer for the God who has actually revealed Himself.
The Psalmist names exactly what happens next to people who make that trade:
“Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see… Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them.”
This is a spiritual law, not merely a poetic warning: you become like the god you worship. A god imagined as distant becomes an excuse for distant, uninvolved faith. A god imagined as a harsh accountant becomes the reason for a joyless, performance-driven Christianity. A god imagined as a permissive grandfather becomes the reason sin stops feeling dangerous. None of these gods are the God who has actually spoken. Every one of them will be worshiped anyway, quietly, by someone who has never noticed the substitution.
This isn’t a merely academic mistake. A low view of God has visible, practical consequences: it’s the quiet cause behind treating sin as manageable rather than deadly, behind a victim mentality that blames God for what the enemy actually did, behind a joyless faith that experiences God’s commands as handcuffs rather than the guardrails they were designed to be. “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is present, there is freedom” (2 Corinthians 3:17) — a God rightly known produces freedom. A god wrongly imagined produces exactly the opposite, no matter how sincerely he’s worshiped.
Illustration
The Fall itself is the illustration. Adam and Eve had unbroken access to God’s own voice, walking with them “in the cool of the day” (Genesis 3:8) — about as direct a revelation as a human being has ever received. And they still chose the serpent’s smaller, more suspicious picture of God’s character over the God who had been plainly present with them. Access to true revelation has never, by itself, guaranteed that a person will actually believe what’s been revealed rather than what they’d prefer to imagine. That’s still true of every reader working through this curriculum.
Pause & Reflect
Where might you be worshiping a smaller or more suspicious version of God than the one Scripture actually reveals — one shaped more by a hard experience, a cultural assumption, or a preference, than by His own self-disclosure?
Against that warning stands an equally strong biblical invitation: this same transcendent God genuinely wants to be known, and rewards those who pursue Him.
“If people want to boast, they should boast about this: they should boast that they understand and know (יָדֹעַ) me.”
Word Study
יָדַע yada H3045
“know” · Jeremiah 9:24
Range. Yada is one of the Old Testament’s richest verbs, and BDB is emphatic that it’s never merely intellectual. It spans simple factual awareness, but its deepest uses describe relational, experiential, even covenantal knowing — the same word used for marital intimacy (Genesis 4:1) and for God’s own covenant selection of a people (“You alone have I known of all the families,” Amos 3:2).
The sense here. Jeremiah doesn’t invite boasting in intellectual mastery of facts about God. He invites boasting in yada — a knowing that binds head and heart together, the kind Moses pursued when he asked God directly, “let me know your ways, that I may know you” (Exodus 33:13).
Why it carries the argument. This is the biblical answer to the Thinking Biblically section’s warning. The remedy for imagining a smaller God isn’t merely correcting facts — it’s actual relational pursuit, yada-knowledge, the kind that changes a person rather than just informing them. Knowing God, in Scripture’s own terms, was never meant to stay theoretical.
Source. BDB, s.v. יָדַע.
Illustration
Moses had already spoken with God face to face, led a nation out of Egypt, and received the Law at Sinai — and it still wasn’t enough for him. “Show me your way, that I may know you,” he asked (Exodus 33:13), and then, more boldly still: “Show me your glory” (Exodus 33:18). God didn’t rebuke the request. He answered it, on His own terms: “I will make all my goodness pass before your face” (Exodus 33:19). Moses is the biblical model for exactly the kind of seeking this session commends — not casual curiosity, but relentless, humble pursuit of a God who had already given him more revelation than perhaps anyone alive, and who Moses still wasn’t satisfied to stop pursuing.
There’s a shortcut through all of this that the Old Testament seekers this session has named didn’t yet have available: Jesus Himself. When Philip asked to see the Father, Jesus’ answer was direct: “The person who has seen me has seen the Father!” (John 14:9). Not a resemblance. Not a partial picture. Whoever wants to know what God is actually like has the clearest possible answer available: look at Jesus. Every attribute this session goes on to survey is safely anchored the moment it’s checked against His life, since He is, in Hebrews’ words already used in this curriculum, “the radiance of his glory and the representation of his essence” (Hebrews 1:3).
The pattern holds throughout Scripture: “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7) — three present-tense verbs describing continuous, not one-time, pursuit. “Without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Hebrews 11:6). Believing God exists isn’t enough — even the enemy knows that much. What Hebrews commends is confident, diligent seeking, the kind God has promised to reward.
Pause & Reflect
Moses had already received more direct revelation than almost anyone in Scripture, and still pursued more. What’s one specific way you could pursue yada-knowledge of God this week, beyond what’s already familiar to you?
Hold that invitation next to an equally biblical warning: however far the pursuit of God goes, it never arrives at full comprehension.
“Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how fathomless (ἀνεξιχνίαστοι) his ways!”
Word Study
ἀνεξιχνίαστος anexichniastos G421
“fathomless” · Romans 11:33
Range. This rare, vivid word is built from ichnos — a footprint or track — with a negating prefix: literally, “impossible to track by following footprints.” Thayer’s defines it as that which “cannot be traced out, that cannot be comprehended.”
The sense here. Paul isn’t merely saying God’s ways are complicated or hard to predict. He’s saying they leave no trail a finite mind can follow back to its source — the way a skilled tracker can follow footprints through a forest until the ground itself stops holding any impression at all. Paul reaches this conclusion at the climax of Romans 9–11, three chapters spent wrestling hard with some of Scripture’s most difficult questions about God’s sovereignty and human history — and he lands not in a tidy resolution, but in worship.
Why it carries the argument. This is the honest ceiling on the previous section’s invitation to seek. Pursuit is genuinely rewarded (Hebrews 11:6) — and pursuit still terminates, eventually, at anexichniastos ground, footprints Paul himself, one of history’s sharpest theological minds, couldn’t fully trace. That’s not a failure of the pursuit. It’s the appropriate size of a finite mind’s grasp on an infinite God.
Source. Thayer’s Greek Lexicon, s.v. ἀνεξιχνίαστος.
Paul isn’t alone in reaching that conclusion. “Things that no eye has seen, or ear heard, or mind imagined, are the things God has prepared for those who love him… For who among men knows the things of a man except the man’s spirit within him? So too, no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God” (1 Corinthians 2:9, 11). Left entirely to natural human reasoning, God’s own thoughts are as inaccessible to us as your private thoughts are to a stranger who’s never met you. What makes any of it knowable at all is God’s own initiative to reveal Himself by His Spirit — the yada of the previous section was never a human achievement to begin with. It was always a gift.
Another Voice
“If we insist on trying to imagine God, we end up with an idol, made not with hands but with thoughts; an idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand.”
— A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (1961)
Scripture reveals genuine, specific things about God’s nature — not everything, but enough to satisfy real inquiry and to steady real faith. Theologians typically sort these into attributes God shares with His image-bearers in limited measure (love, wisdom, mercy) and attributes uniquely His alone. This session surveys a representative handful of the latter, the ones theologians call “incommunicable.”
“God said to Moses, ‘I am (אֶהְיֶה) that I am.’ And he said, ‘You must say this to the Israelites, “I am has sent me to you.”’”
Word Study
הָיָה hayah H1961
“I am” · Exodus 3:14
Range. Hayah is Hebrew’s fundamental verb of existence — to be, to become, to happen. BDB stresses it’s never a weak, merely grammatical connector; it carries real emphasis, meaning genuine existence or occurrence.
The sense here. When Moses asks for God’s name, God answers with hayah doubled back on itself — ehyeh asher ehyeh, “I am that I am,” or “I will be what I will be.” Every other being in existence can answer the question “what caused you?” God’s own name is His answer to that question: nothing caused Him. He simply, eternally, is.
Why it carries the argument. This single name grounds the attribute theologians call self-existence — God as uncreated, uncaused, dependent on nothing outside Himself. Every other attribute in this section builds on this one. A God who came from somewhere, or who could cease, wouldn’t be infinite, immutable, or sovereign in any of the ways Scripture actually claims.
Source. BDB, s.v. הָיָה.
Three more attributes round out this session’s survey. God’s immutability means He does not change in His being, character, or promises: “I the Lord do not change” (Malachi 3:6) — not because He’s static or uninterested, but because He’s already perfectly complete, with nothing to gain or lose by changing. God’s omniscience means He knows all things completely, including you — not merely your actions, but your experience: Jesus Himself is “not unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are” (Hebrews 4:15). And God’s omnipresence means there is nowhere His presence doesn’t reach: “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?… even there your hand shall lead me” (Psalm 139:7, 10).
One more attribute deserves a moment, because it corrects a common misreading of everything else in this section: God’s self-sufficiency. He lacks nothing and needs nothing — “it is God who works in you both to will and to do for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13), not because He requires your effort to accomplish His purposes, but because He delights in inviting you into work He was never actually dependent on you for. Session 5 already covered this ground under Kingdom Partnership: you don’t serve God the way an employee serves an employer who needs the labor. You partner with a God who needs nothing from you and wants everything to do with you anyway. That distinction changes what every other attribute in this section actually means for you personally — an infinite, self-existent, unchanging, all-knowing, everywhere-present God has no gap your presence fills. And He wants you close regardless.
Illustration
When Job finally got the audience with God he’d spent thirty-seven chapters demanding, God didn’t answer a single one of his questions directly. Instead: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you possess understanding!” (Job 38:4) — the first of more than seventy rapid-fire questions about creation, weather, animal life, and cosmic order, none of which Job could answer. God’s response to Job’s suffering wasn’t an explanation. It was a display of scale, calibrated to remind a finite man exactly how much of reality he wasn’t positioned to evaluate. Job’s response afterward is the only response that actually fits: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you… therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:5–6).
Pause & Reflect
Job’s questions about his own suffering were never answered directly — he got a display of God’s greatness instead, and it was enough. Is there an unanswered question in your own life where the same kind of encounter, rather than an explanation, might actually be what you need?
This is a real, specific tension Scripture itself creates, not one skeptics invented. God “regretted that he had made humankind” (Genesis 6:6). God “relented concerning the judgment he had threatened” Nineveh with (Jonah 3:10). Samuel says outright that the Lord “regretted that he had made Saul king” (1 Samuel 15:11). Set those texts next to Malachi 3:6’s “I the Lord do not change” or Numbers 23:19’s “God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a human being, that he should change his mind,” and the tension is obvious enough that it deserves a direct answer.
The resolution turns on a distinction theologian Wayne Grudem states precisely: “God is unchanging in his being, perfections, purposes, and promises, yet God does act and feel emotions, and he acts and feels differently in response to different situations.” Immutability was never a claim that God is emotionally flat or that His actions never vary — it’s a claim that His character, His purposes, and His promises never vary. When Nineveh repented, God’s unchanging character — mercy toward genuine repentance — produced a different action than His unchanging character would have produced toward continued rebellion. The action changed because the situation changed. The character behind the action didn’t move at all. A judge who shows mercy to a repentant defendant and justice to an unrepentant one hasn’t changed his principles; he’s applied the same unchanging principles to two different realities. That’s closer to what Scripture means by God “relenting” than any picture of God genuinely reconsidering His own perfect character.
You now hold what this session set out to give you: a warning against imagining a smaller God than the one who has actually spoken (Genesis 3), a real invitation to pursue yada-knowledge of Him without limit (Jeremiah 9, Moses at Sinai), an honest ceiling on how far that pursuit can go this side of eternity (anexichniastos, Romans 11), and a representative survey of what He actually has revealed about His own nature (hayah, and three attributes beyond it).
None of that is meant to end in an argument won. It’s meant to end where Job did.
This is a guided worship practice built directly on this session’s tension: addressing what is genuinely knowable about God with confidence, and what is genuinely unknowable with humility — both as worship.
Find a quiet space. Pray each section aloud, slowly.
Confessing what is knowable: “Father, I know You because You have made Yourself known — in Your Word, in Your Son, in Your Spirit’s witness within me. I know Your character: faithful, just, righteous, good. Thank You that this knowledge isn’t something I earned or invented, but something You gave.”
Confessing what is unknowable: “Father, I don’t know why some of what has happened in my life happened as it did. I don’t fully understand Your ways — they are fathomless, past my tracing. I don’t ask You to explain everything today. I ask for the grace Job received: not an answer, but an encounter.”
Together: “You are the great I AM — self-existent, unchanging, all-knowing, everywhere present. I can know You truly without knowing You completely. That is enough. I worship You for both — for what You’ve shown me, and for what remains beyond me. Amen.”
Big Ideas
Kingdom Principle
You become like the God you worship. Pursue the God who has actually revealed Himself, not the one you’d find more comfortable — and hold what remains unknown with worship rather than either false confidence or despair.
Closing Prayer (Say this aloud!)
Father, I can only think, praise, and worship You using words, and my words are wholly inadequate to describe You. Give me new language anyway. You are the Holy One — infinitely knowable and infinitely beyond me, both at once, and both worthy of my worship. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Go Deeper
Accessible
A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (1961). Quoted throughout this session’s source material — a genuinely accessible, devotional entry point into everything covered here.
Substantial
J.I. Packer, Knowing God (1973). The modern classic on exactly this session’s central tension — pursuing real knowledge of a God who remains, in real ways, beyond full knowing.
Academic
Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (1994), chapters on the incommunicable attributes of God. Already referenced directly in this session’s What About — a rigorous, comprehensive treatment of every attribute this session could only survey.
Day 1 Read Genesis 3:1–7 slowly. What specific claim about God’s character did the serpent attack? Where have you believed a similar claim about Him?
Day 2 Read Exodus 33:12–19. Moses had already received extraordinary revelation and still asked for more. What would asking for more look like for you this week?
Day 3 Read Romans 11:33–36 aloud. Notice Paul’s tone. After three chapters of hard theological wrestling, he lands in worship, not frustration. What would it look like for you to do the same with your own unresolved questions?
Day 4 Read Exodus 3:13–14 and sit with the name “I AM.” What does it change to know God’s own self-description is simply, eternally, “I am”?
Day 5 Read Genesis 6:5–8 and Jonah 3:6–10 together. Where do you see God’s unchanging character producing two different actions toward two different human responses?
Day 6 Read Job 38:1–7 and 42:1–6. Job’s questions were never answered. What was he given instead, and was it enough?
Tell one trusted person this week one thing about God you’re more confident of after this session, and one thing you’re at peace leaving unresolved.
If something in this session stuck with you, confused you, or hit harder than you expected, I’d genuinely like to hear it — email me.
Kingdom Essentials · Session 24 · Argument Map
The Unknowable God
“If God is genuinely beyond your full comprehension, is pursuing Him even worth the effort?”
The serpent’s real strategy wasn’t denying God existed — it was suggesting something false about His character. Every idolatry since has been a smaller, more suspicious god substituted for the real one.
Yada — relational, experiential knowing — is what God invites you to boast in. Moses had already received more revelation than almost anyone alive and still asked for more.
Even Paul, at the climax of his hardest theological wrestling, reaches ground too fathomless to trace. Pursuit is genuinely rewarded, and it still terminates short of full comprehension.
God’s own name — “I AM” — grounds His self-existence. Every other attribute this session surveys, unchanging, all-knowing, everywhere present, builds on this one.
Job’s questions were never answered directly. He got a display of God’s greatness instead — and it was enough.
So Now
Every wrong idea about God traces back to the Fall’s own pattern: a smaller, more suspicious picture substituted for who He actually is.
Yada is relational, experiential knowing — the kind Moses kept pursuing even after unmatched access to God.
Even Paul’s sharpest theological reasoning terminated in worship, not a fully traced answer.
God’s own name means nothing caused Him — every other attribute stands on this one.
Kingdom Principle
You become like the God you worship. Pursue the God who has actually revealed Himself, not the one you’d find more comfortable — and hold what remains unknown with worship rather than either false confidence or despair.
Next · Session 25, Knowing God. This session surveyed a handful of God’s incommunicable attributes. Session 25 goes deeper still — into the specific, foundational attributes that ground everything else you’ll ever come to know about who He is.