Sleepless in Susa

Transcript of the segment on Knowing the Unknowable God:

God is in himself invisible and incomprehensible. Because we cannot see him and because we cannot fathom him, it is easy for people to disregard him. Some have taken this disregard for God to a philosophical level and they posited that God is dead. Of course, they don’t think that God ever existed by their thinking of God as a concept, God as an influence, God as a power in the world, God as something that has to be reckoned with. God is dead. That’s the conclusion that many people in our society would draw today. There are many people who simply wish that God was dead or they act as if his influence has been eradicated from the world. This book of Esther has been helpful, really, in addressing that kind of context, because it is written without any direct reference to God. It’s as if the book sees the world the way so many of our contemporaries see the world, as a closed system, a system from which God is consciously and deliberately excluded. Of course, what we have discovered as we have read through the book of Esther is that God’s fingerprints are all over the book, just as God’s fingerprints are all over everything that God has made. You just need to read Romans chapter 1 to discover that creation, in all of its parts, displays God’s glory. God is only known to us creatures from what has been made. We cannot know God as he is, in himself. That is incomprehensible and incredible. It’s beyond our understanding. We can only know God through the things that God has made. He’s known by his actions.
“Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”
Gautier: “Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he does