Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 254 · September 11
Past Finding Out
“O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!”
Picture a weighted line dropped over the side of a boat. It runs out through your hands and keeps going, and it never touches the bottom. "Depth" is Paul's own word here, and that is the feeling he is after.
Notice where Paul is standing when he says it. He is at the end of eleven chapters of hard thinking. In them he raised the hardest objections himself and answered them one at a time: "Hath God cast away his people? God forbid." "Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid." His song of praise comes after all that work, as the thing he had left when the work was done.
The questions that follow come from older Scripture. "For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counsellor?" echoes Isaiah, who asked something very like it of exiles who said, "My way is hid from the LORD." The next question, "who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again?" sits beside what God said to Job out of the storm: "whatsoever is under the whole heaven is mine." Job had cried out his questions for chapter after chapter before God answered, and God answered with more questions: "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?" Job's reply at the end is where Paul lands too: "I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not."
Then Paul ends the passage with this: "For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen." That is the promise in this passage. Nothing you cannot get to the bottom of lies outside of God. The part of your life that no one can search out belongs to the same God as the part He has already explained, and you can rest in Him even where your line runs out.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 254 is Never Far Away (Acts 17:27).