The Vastness We Cannot Hold: Living in the Tension of Knowing God
Living in New York City as a child afforded me some amazing opportunities. Many times I visited the American Museum of Natural History on the west side with my dad. One of my favorite exhibits there was the Titanosaur. I wanted to slip under the velvet rope and climb on its back, wrap my arms around one of its massive legs. It towered over me like a two-story building. I knew I could not possibly contain what stood before me, yet something in my heart insisted I should try. I imagined grabbing onto it and declaring with perfect confidence, “I got it!”
This is us before God, always.
We stand before the Infinite with our finite arms outstretched, constructing our careful theologies, our systematic frameworks, our doctrinal hierarchies—sometimes believing we can capture the ineffable itself. We gather our Hebrew roots and Greek participles like children collecting seashells, certain that if we arrange them just right, we’ll capture the ocean. And here is the beautiful, humbling truth: God smiles at our efforts. He invites them, even. But He also whispers, like a father to his child straining to carry a boulder,
“You cannot hold all of Me, but you can hold My hand.”
The God Who Contradicts Our Categories
Scripture presents us with a God who shatters every box we build for Him. He is the Lion who is also a Lamb. The King who kneels with a towel and basin. The Judge who is judged in our place. The Eternal One who enters time. The Omnipresent One who promises, “I will never leave you,” as though proximity matters to One who fills all things.
Consider the great tensions that have occupied theologians for millennia:
Mercy and Justice stand facing each other across the canyon of Calvary. How can God be perfectly just, demanding full payment for sin, while simultaneously being perfectly merciful, forgiving freely? Our minds want to emphasize one at the expense of the other, to smooth away the paradox. Yet at the cross, both meet in a wonder that resolves nothing in our logic and everything in our salvation. As Chesterton observed, Christianity embraced contradiction—insisting on both truths at once—and in that creative tension found reality.
Sovereignty and Human Responsibility create another fault line in our theology. Does God ordain all things, or do our choices matter? The Calvinist and the Arminian have argued for centuries, each holding up different verses like mirrors reflecting different facets of the same diamond. But perhaps God never meant for us to solve this equation. Perhaps, as with light behaving as both particle and wave, the paradox itself is the point. We are called to pray as though everything depends on God, and work as though everything depends on us—not because we’ve resolved the contradiction, but because we’re learning to live inside it.
God’s Transcendence and His Intimacy form yet another paradox. The God who “dwells in unapproachable light” (1 Timothy 6:16) is the same God who knows the number of hairs on your head, who collects your tears in a bottle, who formed you in your mother’s womb. He is the High and Lofty One who inhabits eternity, yet He makes His dwelling with the contrite and lowly in spirit. He needs nothing, yet delights in our prayers. He is complete in Himself, yet calls us friends.
Tim Keller once noted that every religion except Christianity teaches either God’s transcendence or His immanence—never both fully. But the God of the Bible refuses our either-or thinking. He is the burning bush that is never consumed, the Holy One who becomes flesh and moves into the neighborhood.
The Kingdom’s Presence and Its Promise create yet another creative tension. Jesus declared, “The kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15), yet taught us to pray, “Your kingdom come.” We live in the overlap of ages—citizens of a kingdom that has broken into history but awaits its full consummation. The King has come, yet He is coming. We are already seated with Christ in heavenly places, yet we groan with all creation, waiting for redemption. This “already but not yet” reality means we live with confident hope and patient longing simultaneously, celebrating victories while acknowledging battles remain.
Our Boxes and God’s Bigness
When we approach apocalyptic literature—Revelation, Daniel, Ezekiel’s visions—we often bring our measuring tapes and blueprints. We draw timelines, decode symbols, debate millennium frameworks. We construct elaborate systems to contain what resists containment, to domesticate the wild.
But have you ever noticed how Revelation reads less like a systematic theology textbook and more like a fever dream painted by William Blake? John doesn’t give us neat propositions; he gives us a dragon and a woman clothed with the sun, a beast from the sea, a city descending like a bride. The images pile on top of each other, numerological and symbolic, resisting our tidiest interpretations.
Perhaps that’s intentional. Perhaps apocalyptic literature is meant to expand our imaginations, not merely satisfy our need for control or comprehension. This isn’t a dismissal of serious study—John expects us to listen carefully—but a reminder that the genre itself resists our desire for total mastery. Like C.S. Lewis’s Aslan, who is good but not safe, the God revealed in Revelation is recognizable—it’s Jesus, the Lamb who was slain—but He’s also utterly beyond our categories. He has eyes like blazing fire and a voice like rushing waters. This is not the Jesus of our felt-board Sunday school lessons.
A.W. Tozer warned us: “The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him.” But he might have added: the essence of wisdom is knowing that all our thoughts about God fall short of Him, even the true ones.
Holding Loosely, Clinging Tightly
Here’s where we must make a crucial distinction: there’s a difference between holding our theological systems loosely and holding God loosely. We’re called to the former precisely because we’re called to the latter—to cling to Him with everything we have.
Think of it this way: a child learning to ride a bicycle grips the handlebars white-knuckled, rigid with determination to maintain control. But an experienced cyclist holds the bars lightly, making constant micro-adjustments, responding fluidly to the terrain. The child’s death-grip creates instability; the cyclist’s lighter touch creates balance.
So it is with our theology. When we grip our interpretations too tightly—insisting our view of the sacraments is the only faithful one, that our understanding of predestination settles the matter finally, that our grasp of the atonement exhausts the divine complexity—we create the very rigidity that makes us fragile. When new information comes, when Scripture seems to speak from an unexpected angle, when the Spirit moves in ways our system didn’t predict, we either crack or we contort Scripture to fit our boxes.
But when we hold our systems with appropriate humility—when we say, “I think this is what Scripture teaches, but I’m looking through a glass darkly”—we remain flexible enough to follow wherever God leads. We hold our understanding of God loosely so we can hold God Himself tightly.
This is not relativism. We’re not saying all interpretations are equally valid or that truth doesn’t matter. The Apostles’ Creed exists for a reason. Historic Christian orthodoxy provides guardrails. Jesus is Lord, risen from the dead—these aren’t negotiable. But even within orthodoxy, there’s room for wonder, for tensions held in creative balance, for “now we see dimly.”
Saint Augustine, who gave us so much theological precision, also gave us this: “Si comprehendis, non est Deus”—If you understand it, it’s not God.
Living in the Tension
The question becomes: How do we live faithfully in these tensions? How do we pursue truth without presuming we’ve captured it? How do we stand firm without becoming rigid?
First, we remember that knowing God is not the same as explaining God. You can know your spouse deeply without being able to fully articulate the mystery of your union. You can know love without being able to define it comprehensively. As Henri Nouwen wrote, “Prayer is not a way of forcing God’s hand but of laying our hearts open before Him.” Theology at its best is extended contemplation of One who has revealed Himself, not a cage we’ve constructed to contain Him.
Second, we embrace humility as a theological virtue. Paul, who was caught up to the third heaven and heard inexpressible things, still wrote, “Now I know in part.” If Paul claimed only partial knowledge, how much more should we? Intellectual humility isn’t weakness; it’s honest recognition of our creaturely status. We are not God. We think God’s thoughts after Him, but dimly, partially, with toddler-level comprehension of divine mathematics.
Third, we hold fast to what is clear while living graciously in what is unclear. Jesus summarized the entire Law and Prophets into two commands: Love God with everything you are, and love your neighbor as yourself. This is bedrock. Around this we build our lives. The disputed questions—the technical debates about election, the precise mechanics of Christ’s presence in communion, the timeline of Christ’s return—these matter, but they matter less than the great commandments. When we reverse that priority, we’ve lost the plot.
The Mission That Holds Us
And here’s where everything comes together: the point of knowing God isn’t to win theological debates. It’s to love Him and make Him known.
Jesus gave us the Great Commission: “Go and make disciples of all nations.” This wasn’t primarily a call to create systematic theologians in every people group (though theology has its place). It was a call to introduce people to the living God, to invite them into the same loving relationship that transforms us. To make disciples who make disciples—movements of people who know Jesus and help others know Him too.
When we stand before the nations arguing over baptismal modes or worship styles, we’ve missed the urgency of the moment.
The house is burning, and we’re debating the floor plan.
People are perishing without Christ, and we’re splitting hairs over tertiary doctrines.
But when we come as witnesses—as those who have met the risen Christ, been transformed by His grace, and now overflow with love for God and neighbor—we become conduits of the very life we’ve received. We don’t need to have God fully figured out to introduce someone to Him. We just need to know Him ourselves and point others toward that knowing.
Max Lucado puts it beautifully: “God loves you just the way you are, but He refuses to leave you that way.” This is the message the world needs—not our theological precision, but the good news of a God who pursues, who saves, who transforms, who loves.
The Great Commandment and Great Commission aren’t separate mandates; they’re intertwined. We love God, and in loving Him, we love what He loves: people. All people. Every tribe, tongue, and nation. Our theology should launch us toward them, not become a wall we hide behind.
The Titanosaur in the Room
So we return to that child in the museum, imagining his arms wrapped around the Titanosaur’s leg, declaring victory over what he cannot possibly contain.
God doesn’t rebuke our efforts to know Him. He invites them. He gave us minds to think, hearts to wonder, Scriptures to study, the Spirit to illuminate. He wants us to pursue understanding, to grow in knowledge of Him. “Come now, let us reason together,” He says.
But He also wants us to remember our size relative to His. To approach with awe and trembling, with wonder and worship. To hold our conclusions with open hands, ready to be corrected, expanded, deepened. To prize the relationship over the right answer, presence over propositions.
The paradoxes in our theology—mercy and justice, sovereignty and responsibility, transcendence and intimacy, the kingdom’s presence and its promise—these aren’t problems to be solved but realities to be inhabited. They’re like the facets of a jewel, each catching the light differently, together revealing a glory we couldn’t see from any single angle.
So hold your theology loosely. Study with rigor and humility, but don’t mistake your map for the territory. Don’t confuse your understanding of God with God Himself. And hold God tightly—cling to Him with both hands, saying “I don’t know” more often than “I’m certain.”
Let your certainty rest not in your comprehension but in His character. He is faithful. He is good. He is love. He has revealed Himself in Christ Jesus, the exact representation of His being, the image of the invisible God. In Jesus, we see the heart of God clearly enough to trust Him with everything we can’t see.
Then, from that place of knowing and being known, go. Make disciples. Love people toward Jesus. Create movements of multiplication that ripple to the ends of the earth. Let your theology serve your mission, not replace it.
Because in the end, when we see Him face to face, when we know fully even as we are fully known, we won’t remember our debates over secondary doctrines. We’ll only remember that we spent our lives pointing others toward the One worth knowing, the One vast enough to hold all our contradictions, wondrous enough to captivate us forever, and intimate enough to call us friends.
The Titanosaur is far too big to embrace.
But oh, the joy of trying—and the greater joy of being embraced by the One who is bigger still.
