The ripple and the hairpin: part 1
I've never been a big one for diagrams really. Give me a nice bulletpoint list any day. Or even better, a nice block of undifferentiated prose. Yum...
But I will concede that sometimes a diagram can be tremendously clairfying. Plus, as a picture is worth a thousand words, I can afford to write less and still count this as a decent-length post.
Two diagrams, then, that I've found helpful in thinking about the Christian life: the ripple and the crescendo. I'll explore the ripple today and tomorrow, and come back to the hairpin another time.
The ripple
Imagine that, on the day you were converted, a stone was dropped into a pond, and a ripple was formed. This ripple represents your new knowledge of God. The fact that the ripple exists is a miracle! By God's grace, your eyes have been opened by his Spirit, and you have truly come to know the Lord of the universe through his Son Jesus.
The inside of the ripple is everything you currently know about God, and the perimeter represents the known limits of your knowledge - what you know you don't know about him. That is, you are aware that there's more to know about God "out there", and you perhaps know some of the contours of your ignorance. You know there's stuff in the Old Testament you haven't read or don't get, and you haven't quite figured out how God can be Three and also be One, and you don't really know how prayer works. But you're happy in Jesus, and you begin to grow in your knowledge by reading the Bible, listening to sermons, asking older Christians, and perhaps reading a Christian book or two. The ripple on the pond starts growing.
But now notice what has happened. The area of your knowledge of God has increased, but so has the perimeter. You've read some more of the Old Testament, but there are whole books you've discovered that you didn't know were there. You now know that describing the Trinity in terms of a three-leaf clover or ice, water, and steam is heretical, but you're not sure exactly what you should say instead. You're more convinced you should pray, and you've memorised the Lord's Prayer, but what next? So you ask, and you read, and you listen, and the ripple grows... So you know more; and you know that you know less.
The nature of knowledge
Now, this is true in every area of knowledge. The famous Dunning-Kruger effect describes this path in more nuance:
In the early stages of knowledge acquisition people tend to think that they know pretty much everything there is to know about a topic (because the perimeter of ignorance is comparatively small), and so they are embarrassingly confident, and completely wrong. As the ripple grows and we get a glimpse of just how much we don't know, we plunge into despair, yet with hard work and perseverance we begin to get a handle on our subject and even develop an expert facility with it.
But this expert facility usually emerges in a field which is limited; a small enough pond that eventually the ripples start to reach the edge, and there are genuinely few areas that you know nothing at all about. This is the goal of a PhD: to scope a research project down to a small enough area that you can genuinely comprehend the state of the art - and advance it - in just a few short years. As Nicholas Butler famously put it: “An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.”
But in the case of knowledge about God, the pond is infinitely large. There is no edge, because the object of our knowledge has no limit. The ripple will always keep expanding. As Alistair Begg puts it, talking specifically of God's love for us:
You have the provision of God to you and his love shed abroad in your heart by the Holy Spirit. You have the evidences of it, the indications of it, you see it in the lives of one another... but ultimately there's always more; and even as you enjoy this divine love, accurately describing or adequately defining it is always beyond you.
Alistair Begg, Pray Big
This has some profound implications for us. I'll explore two of them in a follow-up post tomorrow. But for now, consider this: because God is infinite, growth in our knowledge of him is always possible. There is always more to learn about the love of God, the power of God, the grace of God, the strength of God - and therefore always more to praise him about. If we give ourselves to learning about God through his word, we will never get bored. In fact, that's what we'll be doing for all eternity!
On the other hand, we must give ourselves to learning about God. We should never think "I probably know enough - that'll do" - rather, we need to love the Lord our God with all our minds (Matt 22:37), so that we can know the love that surpasses knowledge (Eph 3:19) - the infinitely glorious love of the infinitely glorious God.