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I confess to you right up from that I am not going to do justice to this amazing doxology bursting from Paul’s heart at the end of Romans 11. I can say that we cannot think too highly of God or too deeply of God. God is infinite in all His being. From our unforgettable “None Greater” study a few years ago, God’s quiddity is ineffable, which means His essence, or quiddity, is too great to be expressed in words, ineffable.
Isaiah 57:15, For thus says the high and exalted One Who lives forever, whose name is Holy, “I dwell on a high and holy place, And also with the contrite and lowly of spirit In order to revive the spirit of the lowly And to revive the heart of the contrite.
Psalm 145:3, Great is the LORD, and highly to be praised, And His greatness is unsearchable.
Anselm from the eleventh century said God is a being than which none greater can be conceived. You can’t think of a greater, higher, or deeper being than God. He also said all that God is He is supremely. God is supreme essence, supreme life, supreme reason, supreme health, supreme justice, supreme wisdom, supreme truth, supreme goodness, supreme beauty, supreme immortality, supreme incorruptibility, supreme immutability, supreme happiness, supreme eternity, supreme power, supreme unity. Let’s add God is supreme holiness, mercy and grace. He is without qualification, without reservation, the supreme being, “than which none greater can be conceived.” (None Greater, Barrett, p. 54). He is self-existent and sovereign over all His works. What a great and awesome God we have! Let’s read together.
Romans 11:33-36, Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways! 34 For WHO HAS KNOWN THE MIND OF THE LORD, OR WHO BECAME HIS COUNSELOR? 35 Or WHO HAS FIRST GIVEN TO HIM THAT IT MIGHT BE PAID BACK TO HIM AGAIN? 36 For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen.
Paul’s heart overflows with adoration and exaltation of God Almighty. He has spent 11 chapters detailing the glorious gospel of God, how man in sin deserves God’s wrath, how God provided justification by faith alone through His Son, how believers are brought into union with Christ, given the Spirit to overcome the flesh, promised no condemnation from His wrath and no separation from His love, the sovereign rights of the Potter over the clay, sovereign election of vessels of mercy, God’s plans and purposes for the Jews and the Gentiles and His irrevocable promise to restore Israel, and he gets to this point and he just overflows with worship! He ascribes glory to the God of intrinsic glory, lost in wonder, love and praise.
We learn wonderful things here. Truth must always lead to worship. Theology must result in doxology or giving heart-felt praise to God, doctrine to devotion, revelation to adoration. We are here today to exalt God as highly and deeply as possible. We aren’t here to entertain you or amuse you. We aren’t here to make you feel better about yourself or boost your self-esteem. We are here to truly worship God by exalting Him and extolling His glorious being. And this doxology certainly exalts and extols our God. With God’s help we are going to unscrew the inscrutable this morning. We’ll divide it into four digestible portions:
GOD’S CHARACTER OR ESSENCE IS INFINITELY DEEP
Romans 11:33, Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!
Just notice how Paul begins with this note of exclamation, “Oh!” Oh, what a God we have! He is deeper than the deep. You can’t plumb the depths of God’s infinite deepness. When a sailor lowers his lead weight on the end of a rope to see how deep the water is, he is “plumbing the depths.” Paul says you can lower that weight forever. You’ll never come to the bottom. God is a bottomless depth.
GOD’S RICHES Is Paul talking about two deep things or three in this verse? ESV says three: riches, wisdom, and knowledge and the Greek agrees, so Paul first extols God’s bottomless riches. What kind of riches? The riches of His saving grace. He is rich in kindness and mercy. In Romans 9:23 Paul speaks of the riches of His glory on vessels of mercy! Romans 10:12 says God abounds in riches for all who call on Him. You will never plumb the depth of the riches of God’s saving mercy and grace and love. Ladies and gentlemen, do you realize how richly God has blessed you if you have called upon the name of the Lord. We have no reason to murmur or complain!
GOD’S WISDOM God’s wisdom is brilliantly and infinitely deep. Tozer says God’s wisdom is devising the perfect ends and achieving those ends by His most perfect means. We see God’s wisdom in creation all around us every day. How God could design a sun with enough fuel to last all these thousands of years, to design the gravitational pull to keep the earth orbiting around that sun at just the right distance and velocity at 67,000 miles per hour (we’d get to Philadelphia in just under 38 seconds at that rate), and keep the moon from bolting off into space unhinged from earth’s gravity. There was an article this week about blackholes. Something about gravity being so strong light can’t escape. Another article said a supercomputer has discovered that humans only have 250 million years until we go extinct. I don’t think these scientists know as much as they think they know. We may be able to join egg and sperm together through a microscope in a petri dish or delve down into the chromosomes of the DNA strand, but it was all brilliantly created and there for us to work with, all out of God’s creative wisdom.
Psalms 104:24, O LORD, how many are Your works! In wisdom You have made them all.
But God’s wisdom shines most brilliantly in the whole scheme of salvation. For the triune God to choose sinners to be redeemed and restored to His loving fellowship before He created the whole shootin’ match, and then to wisely and brilliantly guide the passing of time so as in the fullness of time to bring His own Son to join the human race by a virgin conception, for His Son to be betrayed and crucified on a Roman cross fulfilling His plan to bear the sins of all those He chose in eternity, to be perfectly just and yet to justify guilty sinners by faith alone, by His grace alone, for His glory alone, to defeat death and ascend to the Father’s right hand, now waiting to return and rule this planet in perfect righteousness. Oh the depth of God’s infinite wisdom.
GOD’S KNOWLEDGE His knowledge is bottomless. His wisdom devised His great purposes and His knowledge of everything guides wisdom’s plans to the perfect end. God knows everything, actual and potential. Tozer wrote: “God knows instantly and effortlessly all there is to know.” He never learned anything. He eternally knew everything. We keep no secrets from God’s infinite knowledge. Psalm 139:4 says before there is a word on my tongue, God knew it all! We may delete our digital footprints, but God knows it all. God knowing everything should humble and convict us. We can lie to people, but God sees right through it. God knows all about all of our sins of thought, word, deed, and loves us still. He’ll never find something out He wasn’t aware of, “Wait! I didn’t know that about you.” That should motivate us to love Him above all and live for Him above all this world has to offer.
GOD’S JUDGMENTS AND WAYS If all this wasn’t enough, Paul includes God’s judgments or decisions and His ways to ravish our hearts! His judgments are His decrees and His ways are how He implements His decrees. Both are beyond our comprehension. Unsearchable means you will never figure out all God’s decisions. Deuteronomy 29:29 “The secret things belong to the LORD our God.” God never forgets where He put something – I often do. Unfathomable means you can’t track down and discover all the whys and wherefores of what God decides to do. Have you ever tried to track a deer through the woods? I have – twice. I never did find them. They found me though, twice! You cannot track God’s ways. How small we are! We don’t know what God’s going to do next. His ways include the invisible hand of His sovereign providence.
The Philippian jailor had no idea how God was going to change his life when he locked up Paul and Silas in the back of the jail in the stocks that night. He was just doing his job when at midnight God in His inscrutable ways shook his world with an earthquake that knocked open the prison doors and broke all the chains off all the prisoners. He whipped out his sword and was about to kill himself when Paul yelled out, “Don’t harm yourself! We’re all here.” That jailor never heard such wonder words. He ran in, brought Paul and Silas out, and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved.” That man’s whole life changed that night because of God’s ways that he’d have never tracked down ahead of time.
GOD DEPENDS ON MAN FOR ABSOLUTELY NOTHING
Romans 11:34-35, For WHO HAS KNOWN THE MIND OF THE LORD, OR WHO BECAME HIS COUNSELOR? 35 Or WHO HAS FIRST GIVEN TO HIM THAT IT MIGHT BE PAID BACK TO HIM AGAIN?
Do you know what God is thinking? No, you don’t. Has God made an appointment to see you to get help for pulling off His grand plans? No, He hasn’t. Have you given God stuff that He owes you back? No, you haven’t. God depends on man for absolutely nothing. Man depends on God for absolutely everything.
Isaiah 40:13-14, Who has directed the Spirit of the LORD, Or as His counselor has informed Him? 14 With whom did He consult and who gave Him understanding? And who taught Him in the path of justice and taught Him knowledge And informed Him of the way of understanding?
Job 41:11, “Who has given to Me that I should repay him? Whatever is under the whole heaven is Mine.
Can you imagine God’s infinite mind? You don’t know it! Today we’re dealing with artificial intelligence. We should use the natural intelligence we have. We can’t even tell the difference between and man and a woman. It sees the smarter we get, the dumber we get. But no amount of data would even be a trace compared to the thoughts of God. His mind is infinitely broad and deep. He knows stuff we would never even dream about knowing. Our knowledge is so limited. There are arrogant fools who think they know better than God. But they are fools. They think they have the power to change life according to their plans and goals. They think they can literally change a man into a woman. They think they can change the earth’s environment or save the planet from climate change. They think they can live without God’s restraints of conscience. They think they can live without God! Carl Sagan declared the cosmos is all that was, is, or ever will be. The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.”
And what about becoming God’s counselor. Imagine God, who created the entire universe in six literal days with the breath of His mouth, needing man’s counsel. Imagine God calling in His team of cosmic engineers to figure out how to maintain the proper oxygen levels on this planet He decided to place man. Imagine God looking for help to fine tune the eyes and ears of man and animal so they can handle darkness and bright lights. Or help to design a muscle that would pump blood through 60,000 miles of blood vessels and capillaries. Or figuring out how to make a cell that could perfectly reproduce itself, called mitosis.
Even greater, who did God consult with to figure out how to remove the guilt of sin and impute a perfect righteousness so He could save sinners? Who became the Almighty’s counselor?
And who has ever lent anything to God that He has to repay? Whoever did stuff that God is obligated to reward? Everything comes from Him. God doesn’t owe us squat! And you can’t buy God off. In 1 Chronicles 29:14 David honored God with a large offering to pay for Solomon’s temple but then praised God, “But who am I and who are my people that we should be able to offer as generously as this? For all things come from You, and from Your hand we have given You.” We deserve nothing from God. He owes us nothing. We owe Him everything. Are you finding the joy of giving back to God a portion of what He gave to you?
GOD’S ALL-ENCOMPASSING GLORY
Romans 11:36, For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen.
Imagine an evolutionist writing this final line: “From nothing and through nothing and to nothing are all things. To nothing be the glory forever.” Blasphemy! Start with “all things.” That is all inclusive – earth, moon, sun, planets, stars, galaxies, all things. Everything in your personal existence, your bones, skin, joints, kidneys, heart, lungs, brains, eyes and ears, bone marrow. Everything in creation – air, oxygen, all the elements, all food, all rain and snow and babies, spiders, flies, anteaters. All things.
All things come from God, originally ex nihilo, out of nothing but the triune God. All things are sustained by Him every moment of existence. Colossians 1:17, “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” Speaking of Christ, Hebrews 1:3 says, “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.” He upholds, sustains all things all the time. And all things have their end and purpose in Him. To Him. He is the Alpha and Omega. Let’s apply that to the most important issue of life, your salvation. He planned it; it came from Him. He executed it; through His Son. And it was all designed to bring Him maximum glory.
Paul has reached the summit of this theological Mt. Everest (the book of Romans) and couldn’t have ended it better: “To Him be the glory forever. Amen.” God is glorified in everything He does, everywhere, all the time. Haldane wrote, “In every part of Scripture Jehovah is seen to be glorified: in His judgments as well as in His grace, in His wrath as well as in His mercy, in those who are lost as well as those who are saved.”
He is our God of intrinsic glory, and we were created to ascribe glory to Him. MacArthur wrote, “The goal of everything that happens in the universe is the glory of God.” The heavens declare the glory of God. Moses begged God to show him His glory. When Christ came John wrote, “We saw His glory.” When Christ returns, it will be with power and great glory. The heavenly Jerusalem in Revelation 21 will come out of heaven having the glory of God. And the eternal city will have no sun or moon because the glory of God will illumine it.
True worship always leads to this, that God be glorified, that God be honored, that God be exalted forever and ever. With Paul and his heart aflame for God’s glory, we want to exalt God as He really is, our hearts amazed at God’s attributes, humbled by God’s sovereign plans and ways, wisdom and knowledge, joyfully confessing our complete dependence on God, and desiring nothing more than that our lives ascribe to God the greatest glory, in the name of His Son, and power of His Spirit.
1 Corinthians 10:31, So whether then you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.
Thomas Watson’s first message in The Body of Divinity deals with the first question in the Westminster Confession: “What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” We glorify God by trusting Him, praising Him, thanking Him, maintaining sexual purity, confessing our sins, bear fruit, and many other ways revealed in Scripture.
Are you fully aware that you exist for His glory? The whole purpose of your life is to reflect the glory of God in this world. The way to start reflecting God’s glory is to repent of your sins and trust in Christ alone as your Lord and Savior, who bore our sins on that cross and rose from the dead. Have you done that? Paul expressed it like this in Philippians 2 where he describes Christ’s humbling Himself to become a man and going all the way to the cross to die for sinners.
Philippians 2:9-11, For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus EVERY KNEE WILL BOW, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.