Can you explain God in so many words?

Can you explain God in so many words?

When a teacher assigns to students an incomprehensible task that he knows they cannot solve, he waits to see which one will say, “It’s impossible to explain the mystery of God!”  

Of all the divine attributes, only God’s omnipotence is named in the Creed:  to confess this power has great bearing on our lives.  We believe that his might is universal, for God who created everything also rules everything and can do everything.  God’s power is loving, for he is our Father, and mysterious, for only faith can discern it when it “is made perfect in weakness.”  (CCC 268).

Of course anyone of us might attempt to unlock all of the mysteries of God, and fail to barely scratch the surface of intellect that ends as it began, holding a blank page of defeat.  Man was not created to completely understand the who and why of God.  He was created to receive the love that is God himself and to learn how he may find and return the same attribute to God.  Even when God, in the Incarnated person of Christ, called 12 apostles to follow him and take up the task of calling millions, using priests, deacons, and dedicated lay-people, to spread the good news for our redemption.  A premise that might have helped the young students to search a little deeper and attain a preview into the explanation of why God sent Christ into this world.

Augustine pondered the mysteries of God and fell short of understanding any of them.  Each of us will also be left without any more information just as we had in the first place.  It is a quest that may boggle our minds when the one mystery that enters our presence is the total forgiveness that God gives us after we repent and he does not remember what it was that he used mercy for our weakness.

It is I, I, who wipe out, for my sake, your offenses; your sins I remember no more. (Is 43: 25).

“This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, declares the Lord.  I will put my laws on their hearts, and write them on their minds,”  then he adds, “I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.”  (Heb 19: 16 - 17).

Is there even one person that can understand and place a descriptive assertion that makes any sense for the rest of us what the reason God chose to forgive man and not remember what the sin was?

Only the light of divine Revelation clarifies the reality of sin and particularly of the sin committed at mankind’s origins.  Without the knowledge revelation gives of God we cannot recognize sin clearly and are tempted to explain it as merely a developmental flaw, a psychological weakness, a mistake, or the necessary consequence of an inadequate social structure, etc.  Only in the knowledge of God’s plan for man can we grasp that sin is an abuse of the freedom that God gives to created persons so that they are capable of loving him and loving one another.  (CCC 387).  

If God would constantly hold our sins against us then it would remove his supreme love of not really showing mercy.  There is no way that a mortal, no matter how much he repents, would ever reach a level of freedom from the sin he did not create on his own.  God is so perfect and loving towards his creation of humanity that his perfection is beyond any possible explanation that in itself still remains a mystery we may never understand. 

It is impossible to explain the mystery of God!

Ralph B. Hathaway