My thoughts wandered this morning on my prayer walk. I kept bringing my mind back to prayer, but my mind was wandering from my very first steps. I decided to use the Lord’s Prayer to guide me — I sometimes do this when I’m struggling with mind-wandering — but I still had trouble concentrating on prayer. (By the way, I don’t normally concern myself about some , but this was more pronounced than usual.) As I sought to turn my heart in the direction of “our Father in heaven” and reflect on God’s holiness (“hallowed be your name”), I started wondering whether my view of God was too small.

Then my mind wandered into thinking about that: Of course my view of God is too small. How could it be otherwise? The gap between an infinite-in-power-and-wisdom God and clay-pot me is inestimable. But as I continued to mind-wander, I reminded myself that God himself knows about the gap between him and me. He doesn’t expect me to know him completely — such knowledge is utterly impossible — but he does want me to embrace, respond to and be in awe of whatever he has communicated about himself through his word.

This helped, but I still found myself thinking about how incredibly small my view of God is — even compared to what God has revealed about himself in the Bible. So I prayed about that. I specifically asked God to help me re-expand my view of God. (I also considered that I might benefit from asking for counsel from one of my colleagues who seems to have a large view of God.) Then I started praying the Lord’s Prayer again, this time about God’s kingdom rule (and so on through the Lord’s Prayer — with lots of mind-wandering interruptions…I don’t know what was up with me this morning!).

When I returned home after my prayer walk, I sat down and opened my Bible, as is my custom. Today’s reading was from Romans 9. I slowly and deliberately followed the argument Paul was making. Paul asserts that the promises God made to Israel have not failed. That’s because it isn’t the children of the flesh but the children of the promise who are God’s children. God works with us in such a way that “God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls.” Paul then asserts that there is no injustice on God’s part, even though “it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy.” Our sovereign God “has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills.”

Then I came to the objection: If this is so, why does he still find fault? Who can possibly resist God’s will (9:19)? As I read this morning, I felt the objection. Yes, how can God find fault if he does whatever he wants?

Paul offers an answer, but his answer isn’t satisfying for a philosophically-inclined person. Paul doesn’t seem to feel the need to assuage anyone’s intellectual concerns. He wants to make sure that his readers are struck with the truth that God is God. God is the Maker; we, the thing made. God can do anything he wants with what he has made (9:20-24). Rather than giving me the answer I hoped for, Paul turned the screws. My finitude was on display.

As I wrestled with Paul’s answer, slightly frustrated that he didn’t go intellectual on me at this point, but instead drilled deeper into his assertion that God can do anything he wants, I found my view of God expanding. I felt a small part of the vast differences between God and me. I had been wanting God to intellectually come down to my level and offer an answer that would assuage the questions of my cantaloupe-sized brain. But God is God — and he does not have to answer me in the manner I want him to — or even answer me at all. I realized again that I am too small to understand how all of God’s purposes work together (even if I keep making the attempt!).

At that moment, I realized that the thing I had been struggling with during my prayer walk — that is, during my mind-wandering contemplations — about my small view of God, was getting partially addressed. As I read a difficult section of Scripture, my view of God grew just a little bit.

This all happened because I was receptively reading God’s Word. It only occurred because I was cogitating on one of the harder sections of Scripture. By thinking deeply about something difficult for a human like me to receive — that I really don’t have any rights, that God is the Maker, that he can do whatever he wants with what he has made — I found my view of God expanding.

Have you ever boarded a gondola, like the aerial tramway in Palm Springs, California? As the gondola ascends the steep ascent up the mountain, the passengers’ view of the valley expands. The further the gondola moves upward, the broader the view becomes.

When we wrestle with deep theological sections in the Bible like Romans 9, or the judgment passages of Isaiah, or Habakkuk’s questions about God’s justice, or the pronouncements of Moses against Pharaoh’s hardness of heart, or Jesus’s words about the eternal fate of “the goats,” our view of an infinitely greater-than-us God expands.

It seems that one way God chose to thwart the human tendency to domesticate God — our attempt to place God into a neatly wrapped box with a bow on top — was to include difficult passages like Romans 9 in the book he inspired. The deep passages of Scripture are profitable (2 Timothy 3:16), not merely because of what they teach us about salvation and holy living, but because they expand our view of God.

That’s something I really needed today. It was a partial answer to a prayer uttered this morning by a distracted Christian who was struggling to keep his mind from wandering during prayer.

That is, the morning I originally wrote this post.

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