God’s Unfathomable Ways
You know what I am going to say even before I say it, LORD. You go before me and follow me. You place your hand of blessing on my head. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great for me to understand.
(Psalm 139:4–6)
Who hasn’t been tempted to shake a fist at God and cry, “What are You doing?” A child is kidnapped and brutally murdered. “God, what are You doing to us?” A husband drives to the hardware store on Saturday morning and is hit head-on and killed by a drunk driver. Just that quickly he is taken from his wife and family. “What in the world is God up to?” A young mother has routine surgery, develops unforeseen complications, and dies. “God, what are You doing?” It is unfathomable.
So many things that happen in this life are past searching out. I can’t explain His plan. I can only unfold from the Scriptures how unfathomable it really is. David wrote,
Even before there is a word on my tongue,
Behold, LORD, You know it all. (Psalm 139:4 NASB)
God knows what I’m going to say before I say it. Before I ever have a thought, He knows it’s on its way. He knows when it strikes my brain and what’s going to come as a result of it. He knows it long before I have the thought. Yet we still have the freedom to think that thought and follow through on that action. This is part of the unfathomable nature of our God.
For Christmas one year we bought our children what was called “Ant City.” This consisted of clear plastic plates on either side, filled with sand and ants. From our vantage point outside and above, we could see what these busy little creatures were doing underground. We watched as they tunneled their way around, leaving a maze of trails.
In a similar fashion, God scrutinizes our paths. From where we are, tunneling along, all we see is the sand immediately ahead, behind, and beside us. But from His vantage point, He can see exactly where we’ve been and precisely where we’re going. He is intimately “acquainted with all my ways” (Psalm 139:3 NASB).
God knows each one of us individually. He numbers the very hairs of our head (which is a bigger challenge for some than for others). The hopes, the wayward thoughts, the directions, the decisions, the indecision, the motives, the words we think but don’t say . . . He knows everything. Unfathomable!
Taken from The Mystery of God’s Will by Charles R. Swindoll. Copyright © 1999 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. Used by permission of HarperCollins Christian Publishing. www.harpercollinschristian.com
