Are God’s Ways Our Ways?

God’s ways are not our ways, says Isaiah (55:8). Occasionally, when expressing frustration about something really difficult, you might hear someone recite this mantra. They likely mean it as comfort, but it always sounds to me like a shrug. It’s as if they’ve said that nothing about this difficulty they’ve just heard shows up on a theological map.

I think the opposite is true. I think that life is hard and confusing because our ways are God’s ways. 

The Mind in the Face

The problem with the “not our ways” sentiment, theologically, is that it implies that God hides God’s true self from us. It suggests that faith means taking what the Reformers called “divine inscrutability” in stride, and being obedient to a will we can never know. 

Shakespeare’s Macbeth explores this theme in the sphere of politics and human action. King Duncan, about to head to the Macbeths’ castle, hears a report of treason. “There’s no art to find the mind construction in the face,” he remarks. It’s sometimes impossible to look into the face even of a trusted confidant and know what he or she is thinking. 

The audience, of course, hears the irony in the king’s words. We know that he’s about to enter as a guest into the home of two trusted friends, and that they are already planning his murder. We’ll hear soliloquies from both Thane Macbeth and his Lady in which they take the stage alone to put into words what they do not put into their faces. 

St. Paul’s 3 Points about God’s Ways

God is no Lady Macbeth. There is no secret mind obscured in the face God presents to us. There is no heavenly stage from which God checks to make sure no one is listening before saying what God is really thinking. 

We get evidence of this in Saint Paul’s account of divine mystery. It comes in three stages.

1. God is, actually beyond comprehension

When he asks, in Romans 11, “who has known the mind of the Lord?” it sounds as if he might be commenting on Isaiah 55. Some late medieval Catholics, before the Reformers, read this verse on its own and developed their doctrine of divine inscrutability. That’s fair—its a pretty good translations of the word Paul uses in verse 33 to describe the mysterious God whose ways lie beyond our comprehension.

2. The Spirit mines the depths of God

But this is not all Paul has to say about divine mystery. In 1 Corinthians 2, he answers his question from Romans. “For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God” (2:10).

Later, in the 4th century, when Saint Basil says that the Spirit, with the Father and Son, is divine, he’s developing Paul’s insight.  The Spirit goes all the way down in God.  There isn’t more of God that the Spirit doesn’t get to see.  

3. This same Spirit is with us

And why does this matter?  Because the Spirit who searches the depths in God is the Spirit that God shares with us.  We have received this same Spirit, Paul says, “that we might understand the things freely given us by God.” 

I find that to be remarkable.We remain human, and we retain human ways of knowing, even as we learn divine secrets. The Spirit who serves as counselor for God counsels us as well.

How We Know and What We Know

Ephesians centers all this revealing work in the presence of Jesus. In all God’s wisdom, God is “making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ” (1:9). The Spirit is the revealer, the Son is the revealed purpose itself. The one is “how we know,” the other “what we know,” you might say. The author here goes so far as to name God’s no-longer-secret purpose. “To unite all things in him, things on heaven and things on earth” (1:10). 

This is why I said that life is hard and confusing because our ways actually are God’s ways. Otherwise, we could actually shrug off the challenges and comfort ourselves by noting that what seems difficult is actually the standard. We might simply assume that we live on the opposite side of the wall of clarity. The sooner we accept this the sooner we stop feeling confused and overwhelmed.

But that’s not the case, if Paul is leading us right. We are given the gift and challenge of discerning a mystery that lies always beyond us. Beyond us, but never closed off to us. So we search the depths: we listen to sermons, we say prayers, we read texts, we engage in conversations about faith with one another, especially those whom we encounter as wise. We do all these very human things, and find that we are receiving the Spirit of God. 

We never get entirely clear answers. But there’s no secret and inscrutable part of God that God has not shared with us, since the Spirit of our discerning work goes all the way down in God. The Spirit offers a diagonal way into our mysterious God.

How Our Ways Become God’s Ways

Yes, alright, but doesn’t that verse from Isaiah simply say “your ways are not my ways?” It does, and that’s because the prophet is telling us about God’s abundant mercy. God’s mercy looks completely different from the unmerciful ways of humans. But when God’s word of mercy goes out to us, “it shall accomplish that which I purpose.” It will, that is, create mercy and joy among us. And when the mountains and hills see our divine joy, they will break into singing (55:11-12).

Our ways are not God’s ways, but because of God’s remarkable gift, they get to become God’s ways. This is the mysterious inscrutability of a God who, in Word and Spirit, refuses to hide God’s inner life from us.