Is God Rational? The answer to this question depends on what is meant by “rational.” If one means to ask whether God in the Bible is comprehensible to a sensible person, the answer is “yes,” though more or less so, depending on intellectual development or ability and the text being considered. Yet, anyone who studies the Bible very long and deeply eventually realizes that he cannot fathom all it says. To express this more exactly so as to make an important distinction, the Bible reader might understand what God says in the Bible but not why He says it or how He can say it. Indeed, people can ask some questions whose answers defy human rationality. Some classic examples are: how can the Trinity constitute one God? How will God judge those who never had access to the gospel? How can an eternity in the torment of hell be a just condemnation for all sinners, regardless of the differing magnitudes of their sins? Attempts have been made to answer these and other questions raised by what the Bible says about God, and some of these efforts have yielded partial, but helpful, answers. However, the Bible does not answer every question people might think to ask about God. Anyone who asks enough questions will eventually “hit the wall” of his capacity to comprehend any answers. There are limits to what he can understand. This is true, whether he is contemplating God or his own existence. For instance, everyone believes that space is infinite, though no one can fathom that. Likewise, the Bible repeatedly asserts the same about God, as when He says through Isaiah, “‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts’” (Isa. 55:8,9). This should not be surprising. God being who He is and humans being who they are, could it be otherwise? This is inherent in the very distinction between God and humans. It is only as God has chosen to reveal His mind to humans in the Bible that they can understand Him, and He has simply not chosen to reveal the answers to some questions, even if people deem their faith to be dependent on the answers. In fact, God sometimes challenges their humility and faith by presenting Himself so as to raise such questions without providing answers to them. This does not mean that God is irrational but, rather, that He is supra-rational! He has the answers to such questions, but humans do not, and cannot, have them now. On the other hand, it is important to emphasize here that this does not mean that God can be inconsistent. If lying is sinful, then He cannot lie (Tit. 1:2). Again, if He says that partiality is unjust (Lev. 19:15), than He can neither portray Himself as partial, nor allow others, such as Calvinists with their doctrine of particular election, to portray Him dismissively as such (Rom. 2:11). So, to fail to fathom God, or to disagree with Him, does not make Him irrational. In other words, He does not always give the answers, but when He does, they are always self- consistent. When the prophet Habakkuk pressed God with questions which deeply troubled him and whose answers he did not comprehend, God finally told him, “The righteous will live by his faith” (Hab. 2:4). That this answer reverberates though the heart of the gospel testifies to the fact that it is the one which all such enquirers must ultimately embrace in this life (Rom. 1:17; Gal. 3:11; Heb. 10:38). One can either fall on this stone and be broken to pieces or have it fall on him and be ground and scattered like dust (Matt. 21:44).