The Limitation of Language

I got to see something really cool the other day. It was water with big waves and rocks with caves.

Isn’t that a moving description? (Hint: your answer should be no)

How about this?

On Wednesday, I got to see gorgeous waters! Indigo blue where it was deep, and a pale, sandy, cyan when it came closer to land. The powerful waves kept the water a pure white where it met the towering, craggy cliffs, sloping at a diagonal away from the water.

That’s a much better description, isn’t it? But does it really capture everything about the picture below?

I could keep adding descriptive factors, but it would still just be words that could never fully capture the full experience of the picture. For that matter, even the picture fails to do it justice, but it’s the closest I could share with you, without you experiencing for yourself.

Here’s the thing:

God’s the same way.

It doesn’t matter if I have the vocabulary of a four year old or an intellectual genius. I will never be able to describe God as He truthfully is, because He’s so much bigger than language could capture!

The most beautiful description of Him will still fall short. The perfect word will never truly be perfect. You could speak only truth about a single aspect of God for your entire life, and you’d still be missing… something.

Because God is so much more than language could describe

And the sad thing is, we’re so often so dependent on language, that even when we’re experiencing an outstanding God moment, we can blind ourselves to what we’re truly feeling as we look back on the moment. We’ll start to believe it was less than it was, because when we try to share what happened, we have to simplify it to fit it into language.

I share this to encourage you to discover God on your own. You’ll never really know what I’m talking about, if you never experience it for yourself! Dive deep into His heart, and you’ll learn so much more than you could have ever dreamed of!

And eagerly be looking forward to the day when we’ll see Jesus face to face, and we’ll no longer be limited from experiencing His full love through a body that operates in polarity or a mind that operates through language and past experiences. We’ll get to know Jesus as He truly is.

And that, is a very good thing!