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Unsearchable
December 1, 2002
By Timothy T.C. McGhee

Psalm 145:3—Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised; and his greatness is unsearchable.

The last word in that verse is particularly intriguing, especially in our times. Searching is practiced much today, but we don't always give the word a lot of thought.

One would do well to consider what is searchable. On the Internet, Google, one of the most successful search engines today, initially works by capturing and saving as much of the Web as possible. Then, after some link analysis, it makes searchable for millions of people worldwide that which it has contained.

If searchable means containable, perhaps unsearchable means uncontainable. God's greatness is unsearchable. He cannot be contained.

It's not as if one can find out all of God's greatness and then explore everything within those limits. In fact, it's quite the opposite. One has only to look at God's creation to see that as soon as one heads off in a particular direction for the height of God's greatness, there's no limit. It goes on forever.

Take for example, a feather. There was once a Pro-Creation conference at Bryan, and a scientist was there giving a demonstration of using an electron microscope to probe deeper and deeper into all of that which makes up the feather. With everything at which he took to looking, it just got better and better. There was more detail and more ingenious developments the deeper he looked at the plumage, the hooklets and the flatness that kept the hooklets sitting properly upright. Utterly amazing.

At the end, he talked about how applying the same microscopic scrutiny to a man-made watch was nothing by comparison. In fact, the closer you get to looking at the gears of a watch, the worse it gets.

There is a distinct limit when man stops. But God never stops. He's unsearchable. Unsearchably powerful, unsearchably just, unsearchably loving, unsearchably merciful. For that we should be forever thankful.

Tim McGhee was a member of Bryan College's class of 1999.