The Bible tells us “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). Speaking of God the Son, John writes, “All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:3). One of the implications of these verses is that God is eternal, that is to say, he is not a temporal or spatial being. God created time and space. Yet “before” he did that he “was/is.” This is a great mystery to the human mind because God created us as spatio-temporal beings. Things only make sense to us in terms of space and time. Everything we know we know at some time and in some place. Pointing to that which is beyond space and time is incomprehensible to us. We can affirm that such a being exists, but it will never really make sense to us how such a being can be. It is outside of the framework of intelligibility God gave us. In other words, God’s being is a mystery to us. He is Yahweh (Jehovah), the “I AM,” that is, the eternally existing one. He is the LORD (which is how the name Yahweh is usually translated in the Old Testament). The LORD is the mysteriously eternally existing God. That’s how he revealed himself to Moses, and through him to us.

But it’s not just God’s being that is a mystery to us. His knowledge is a mystery as well. The Bible tells us that God is all-knowing. He knows every detail of everything. He not only knows what was, is and will be actual, but he also knows all possibilities. His knowledge is infinite and perfect, that is, complete. But since God is eternal (timeless and non-spatial), he doesn’t know as we know. We come to know things temporally, bits at time. We reason discursively, that is, running through a series of thoughts. We do not know the future. God, however, knows everything “always” in the eternal moment. He is outside of time, yet he knows everything in the course of time – including the future, because there is no future for God, and what will be our future God has always already planned out in detail. Though it is not yet actual for us, it is for God. That type of knowing is a mystery to the human mind. Again, we can know that it is, but it doesn’t really make sense to us because it is radically other than the way we know. God is a mystery! Praise him for it. Thank him for revealing himself to us so that we can know him sufficiently.