day no. 15,793: God isn't merely what we don't know

“How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. For the frontiers of knowledge are inevitably being pushed back further and further, which means that you only think of God as a stop-gap… We should find God in what we do know, not in what we don't.” -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A Testament to Freedom

God is not what we don't know. God is not merely a stop gap between that which we have mastered for ourselves and that which remains mysterious.

"The God of the gaps recedes before scientific advance as the gaps are narrowed.” -- John Cobb

If God is merely what we don't know, He is diminished by each and every advance of knowledge. His rule and reign only preside over that of which we remain ignorant. He is all fog and no illumination.

"Here again, God is no stop-gap; he must be recognized as the centre of life, not when we are at the end of our resources; it is his will to be recognized in life, and not only when death comes; in health and vigour, and not only in suffering; in our activities, and not only in sin." -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A Testament to Freedom

God is not a placeholder for what we don't understand. He is not the periphery that hovers just outside of all we know and do. He is not only for when we throw our hands up or meet an obstacle too heavy to carry or too complicated to understand. God is revelation. He is not to us all that remains darkened, but our light. He is light that shines in the darkness. Light which cannot be overcome. God is not boxed out by darkness; the darkness, rather, is diffused and dissipated by His light.

"Let there be light," and the darkness was done for.

God does not live in the dark. He lives in the light.

1 John 1:5

This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.

John 1:4-5

In him was life, and the life was the light of men. L The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.