The Pressure of Knowing: When the Finite Mind Meets the Infinite God
My friends, from my home in Akasia, north of Pretoria, I see the night sky—a tapestry of stars flung across the void, a silent proclamation of a majesty that defies our comprehension. My mind, this small vessel of thoughts and fears, tries to grasp it. It tries to grasp everything. The rising price of maize meal. The scan of a medical report. The silent dread when a child is late coming home. We live in an age that worships at the altar of knowledge. We carry supercomputers in our pockets that promise every answer, yet our national soul feels more fractured, more anxious, than ever. We are a generation under immense pressure to figure it all out—the economy, the future, the purpose, the pain. We believe if we can just understand the “why,” we can control the outcome. We believe our peace is on the other side of comprehension.
But I tell you today: this pressure is a burden God never asked you to carry.
The ant understands the grain. It knows its texture, its weight, how to carry it home. But does the ant comprehend the mountain under which it lives? Does it fathom the tectonic forces that birthed it, the rains that carved its valleys, the forests that clothe its slopes? No. Yet, that same unknowable, immovable mountain provides the ant’s shelter, its ecosystem, its entire world. The ant is safe not because it understands the mountain, but because it lives within its reality.
So it is with us and God. Our minds are finite vessels trying to contain the Infinite Ocean. We are ants scurrying across the foothills of Eternity, convinced we must survey the entire peak to feel secure. This is the heart of our modern exhaustion. The Human Rights Report tells us our nation is sick—with violence, corruption, and a deep spiritual poverty. The think-tanks analyse our Gen Z, calling them “hustlers” who save R1,800 a month from meagre earnings, who are digitally brilliant but spiritually adrift, scrolling through 10,000 messages a day in search of a connection that sticks. We diagnose the symptoms: power abuse, xenophobia, collapsing infrastructure. But our frantic search for a socio-political “why” often misses the foundational, theological truth: we are trying to heal a spiritual cancer with intellectual band-aids.
We have elevated reason to the throne and exiled faith to the shadows, calling it superstition. Yet, the Patristic fathers—the great defenders of our faith like Augustine—never saw such a divide. They spoke of Christian philosophy, where the revelation of Scripture and the gift of human reason were integrated in the single, glorious task of knowing God. We have severed them. We try to use reason alone to build a just society, only to watch it crumble because its builders rejected the chief cornerstone (Psalm 118:22). The result is what scholars call a crisis of “spiritual intelligence”—the awareness of a supernatural, moral reality that guides our use of power. Without it, knowledge becomes a weapon. Understanding becomes pride. And the pressure to know it all becomes a tyranny.
Let us be clear, then, and define our terms with the uncompromising biblical foundation our time demands:
· Finite Understanding: The inherent limitation of the created human mind to fully comprehend the nature, purposes, and ways of the uncreated, infinite God (Isaiah 55:8-9).
· Spiritual Intelligence: Not mystical emotion, but the awakened capacity to perceive reality through the lens of God’s sovereignty and moral order, leading to wisdom that transcends mere data.
· Trust (Biblical Faith): The active, willful resting of one’s entire weight—one’s fears, questions, and future—upon the character and promises of God, even in the absence of complete understanding.
Now, a common, powerful objection arises from our modern, scientific minds: “But if I cannot understand God’s ways—why suffering, why injustice, why silence—how can I trust Him? Isn’t blind faith dangerous?”
This is a fair question. But it is built on a false premise: that trust without exhaustive understanding is “blind.” Is a child’s trust in her loving parent “blind” because she does not understand macroeconomics or the complexities of adult relationships? No. It is based on the known character of the parent, proven over time. Our faith is not a leap into darkness, but a step into the light of who God has revealed Himself to be.
The argument can be formulated thus:
1. We can only fully trust a being whose ultimate character is definitively good and loving.
2. The character of God has been definitively and historically demonstrated as good and loving in the Person and work of Jesus Christ.
3. Therefore, even when His specific ways are inscrutable, His trustworthy character is not, giving us a rational foundation for trust.
Where is this demonstration? Look to the Cross. There, on the hill of Golgotha, the infinite God allowed Himself to be framed by finite, human evil. The One who holds galaxies submitted to nails. In Jesus Christ, the Unknowable made Himself known. The “why” of His broader plan for your specific hardship may be hidden in the shadow of the mountain, but the “who” He is for you in that hardship was carved into the wood of the cross. He is for you. This is the scandalous, historical, and philosophically robust core of Christian apologetics—God entered history to redeem it.
So, what does this look like in the dust and diesel of South African life?
It looks like the young professional in Sandton, anxiety buzzing like a trapped fly in his chest over the next round of layoffs. He closes the news app forecasting economic doom, opens his Bible, and reads: “Look at the birds of the air… your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” (Matthew 6:26). He chooses to trust the character of the Provider over his understanding of the market. That is spiritual intelligence.
It looks like the mother in Freedom Park, her shack flooded again, her belongings ruined, telling Amnesty International, “We have no help from anyone… where will we go?” And in that desperate, truthful cry, there is a prayer. The promise is not instant dry land, but this: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you” (Isaiah 43:2). Her trust in that darkness is a louder, more costly praise than any sung in a sunny, comfortable chapel.
It looks like confronting the syncretism that plagues our land—the dangerous blend of ancestor veneration with Christian worship. This is not cultural sensitivity; it is theological compromise. The Bible declares unequivocally there is “one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). To seek answers or protection from any other spiritual source is to tell the Infinite Ocean it is not enough, that we need a puddle beside it. We must sound the alarm against this. True liberation from fear is found only in submitting to the Lordship of Christ, not in appeasing the spirits.
Therefore, my brothers and sisters in this beautiful, wounded nation, the call is not to stop thinking. It is to redirect your thinking. You are not an ant tasked with mapping the mountain. You are a beloved child invited to live securely on it.
Your assignment this week is not to solve a mystery, but to perform an act of trust. Take that one overwhelming “why” you have been carrying—the unresolved injustice, the lingering illness, the financial dead-end—and consciously, prayerfully, place it on the altar of God’s known character. Say, “Lord, I do not understand this, but I trust You.” Then, open your eyes to the grain He has given you to carry today: a task of kindness, a moment of forgiveness, a faithful work. Tend to that.
The peace you seek does not lie in the storm ceasing, but in discovering the Anointed One sleeping in the boat beside you, master of both you and the storm (Mark 4:38-41). Rest in the majestic, unknowable ways of the One who holds the galaxies and who, in Jesus Christ, has proven He holds you.
https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/the-peace-in-mystery/id1506692775?i=1000742838964
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