Every, single time our family comes to a new place – whether a friend’s home, a hotel, a new part of the city, and particularly somewhere in nature we haven’t been before, I can count on my son, Joshua, to have virtually the same reaction:

“Let’s do some exploring.”

Don’t you love that?

I do. I love that he carries with him a sense of expectation with him wherever he goes, that here, before him, is something fresh and different. Something unknown. Maybe even a little wild. And possibly an adventure awaits behind the next rock or inside the next room.

Because it’s so apparent in Joshua right now, I can’t imagine him standing at the edge of some unknown place and having the opposite reaction. I can’t see him at the edge of a forest or a cave or a building and saying, “That’s pretty big. It looks exciting. Let’s not explore it. Because, you know, it’s so big; we’ll never be able to see everything in it.”

In fact, in our children we see the antithesis of this statement. It’s precisely because things are unexplorable that they want to explore them. They aren’t intimidated by the vastness; they are energized by it.

It’s a similar sense of wonder that the apostle brought with him to the depths of the wonders of God. Look what he says in his awe-inspired closing of the first half of Romans:

Oh, the depth of the riches
both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God!
How unsearchable His judgments
and untraceable His ways!
For who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been His counselor?
Or who has ever first given to Him,
and has to be repaid?
For from Him and through Him
and to Him are all things.
To Him be the glory forever. Amen.

It reads like a song, doesn’t it? But not just any song. A song of adventure. A song of new horizons. A song of excitement. Can you imagine, then, Paul reacting to the vastness of the wonders of God by saying, after these lines, “You know, there are some mysteries I just won’t ever know the answer to. It’s in God’s hands, and I’m content with that. I don’t think I’m going to explore. God is so vast; I’ll never get to the end. I’ll be content with what I know from my current vantage point.”

Of course not.

For just as children are lured by the unexplorable to explore, so are we called into the depths of the wisdom and knowledge of God. We go there not because we expect to find the end; we go there because we know we cannot.