I love magic. I love magicians. There are several books on my shelf at this very moment about card tricks and coin tricks and sawing people in half. I have at one point spent upwards of a hundred dollars on a magic kit which taught me several tricks that I am not very good at. In fact, my wife knows, though she won’t admit it publicly, that a great birthday gift for me would be to send me to magic camp for a week.

Ok, so maybe I’m exaggerating a bit. Maybe…

The way I see it, the world can be divided into 2 kinds of people based on their reactions to magicians. There are those of us who love the show and love the tricks and can simply accept that it is entertainment without having to figure out how its done, and there are those of us who sit cynically and watch, looking for the slightest clue to show that what we are seeing is really an illusion and not real. Maybe our minds just work differently that way, but some of us have the ability to accept something as reality without knowing how it works, why it works and the details of the way it works.

Such is the case with grace.

I want to be careful at this point in the post lest it seem like I’m comparing the unmerited favor of God with making a coin disappear. I am not. Jesus didn’t do magic tricks; He operated in the realm of the miraculous. What I mean to say is that in a day where our theological resources are so great, where our access is so free, where we can parse every minute detail and seek to quantify every aspect of faith, that we might just run the danger of over-dissection.

We can easily come to the point where we dissect God’s grace so much that we lose the wonder of it all. And this we should not do.

I love the words of the apostle on this subject to the church at Ephesus:

“For this reason I kneel before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named. I pray that He may grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power in the inner man through His Spirit, and that the Messiah may dwell in your hearts through faith. I pray that you, being rooted and firmly established in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width, height and depth of God’s love, and to know the Messiah’s love that surpasses knowledge, so you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:14-19).

He kneels and he prays for these, his spiritual children, that they would have an ever deeper experience of the love of God. That day by day, they would return with wonder to the very thing that rooted and established them in the first place. That they would comprehend, understand, and accept that which surpasses comprehension, understanding, and acceptance.

To know the unknowable. To experience the incomprehensible. This is but one of the paradoxes of the children of God.

There is a place for theological dissection. There is an occasion for education. But we would do well to heed the words of Solomon here, “But beyond these, my son, be warned: there is no end to the making of many books,and much study wearies the body” (Ecclesiastes 12:12).

In the midst of the knowledge, step back and wonder at that which we can amazingly fully experience and yet never fully understand.