This is In the Word, on the Go, the podcast where we look at one verse from God's Word for 10 minutes of your day.

Champ Thornton: (00:00)
Welcome to In the Word, On the Go. I’m your host, Champ Thornton. Whether you’re listening by yourself or with the family, this podcast is here for you to spend 10 minutes in God’s Word while you go about your day. In each episode, I get to interview one person about a favorite verse from the Bible. And today I’m glad to welcome back my friend, Jared Kennedy. Jared is the author of several books, including one of my favorite Bible storybooks, The Beginner's Gospel Story Bible. Also, a new book has just come out, Jesus Rose for Me, a preschool storybook for Easter. He’s also written several VBS programs, including Proof Pirates and Clap Your Hands, Stomp Your Feet. That sounds like a really noisy VBS. Jared is also husband to Megan and father of three girls, Rachael, Lucy, and Elisabeth. Jared. It's always great to have you on the podcast.

Jared Kennedy: (01:41)
It’s so good to be with you, Champ.

Champ Thornton: (01:42)
All right, man, what you got for us today?

Jared Kennedy: (01:44)
I have Psalm 145, verse 3. I’m reading from the NIV and it says, “Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise; his greatness no one can fathom.”

Champ Thornton: (01:57)
All right. I love it. Why don't you put that in your own words for us, Jared? What is this verse saying?

Jared Kennedy: (02:01)
The first thing it says is that we should praise the Lord even though we can’t fully understand him. Another thing that it says is that if we’re going to praise the Lord, we must have some level of understanding about God. In fact, because God has revealed himself to us, we have a true understanding of God. But we can never have a complete or exhaustive understanding of him because he is deeper than the ocean.

Champ Thornton: (02:29)
Yeah, I think it was A. W. Tozer who said “God's given us not every bit of information about himself, but enough to ravish our hearts and cause us to worship him.” So, Jared, what's the story here? How did this verse come to be one of your favorites?

Jared Kennedy: (02:42)
Well, this is one of those verses that I didn’t really learn growing up. I’m certain that I read it, but I didn't memorize it. I discovered it in adulthood while teaching this passage to children. One of the things I do when I’m teaching a passage to kids is that I look at the passage in multiple Bible versions, and I found that the word that the NIV translates as “fathom” is translated really differently in other Bible versions. And so the NIV says fathom while the ESV and the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible, says “unsearchable.” In the New Living Translation, it's “measureless.” When I first read the word “fathom,” I thought about someone saying, “Oh, I can’t fathom that.” So I took it to mean “I can't understand that, I can’t fully understand God,” but, you know, if you read it that way, you might think God is the sort of being who you can’t understand at all. But in reality, God has revealed himself to us. He expects us to have a true understanding of him, but we can never have an exhaustive understanding of him.

Champ Thornton: (03:48)
So what’s the context of this verse? This is talking about God’s greatness, and he’s so great that we can see some but not all. And we praise him for what we can see, but what’s surrounding this pretty amazing verse.

Jared Kennedy: (04:00)
It’s really cool. I’m going to answer your question with a little bit of a word study. The word “fathom” there comes from something that sailors actually would do in ancient times. So, in ancient times, boatmen would use something that’s called a sounding line to measure the depth of the water. They would take a long, thin piece of rope that would have a heavy piece of lead attached to the end of it so that it would sink all the way down to the bottom of the ocean. And they would mark off certain lengths on that rope. So the marks they made were called fathom points, and they would be made at equal intervals along the rope so that the sailors would be able to see how many fathoms down the rope went. So, in ancient times, a sailor would just stretch out his arms and measure from fingertip to fingertip and that was a fathom—basically everything you can get your arms around.

Today, a standard fathom is six feet, which is a lot longer than my fingertip to fingertip. Maybe it’s more like LeBron James; I’m not sure. But most sounding lines back in ancient times measured up to about a hundred fathoms. So, they were really, really long lines. And with a sounding line, a sailor could measure basically any ocean depth close to shore. But then as he sailed out to sea, there came this point when the waters were out of sounding; they were just too deep to be measured. The sailor’s sounding line would go down and down and down and it would never hit the bottom. And so what the psalmist is telling us is that our Lord’s greatness is so deep that we can throw out that sounding line. We can try to measure him with human understanding, and we may even have a true understanding of who he is and what he’s done for us, but we can never get all the way to the bottom of God. We can’t get all the way to the bottom of his greatness, and that should humble us and cause us to praise him.

Champ Thornton: (06:03)
I’m going to read it again. I’m reading from the Christian Standard Bible. Let’s see what this version says, “The Lord is great and is highly praised; his greatness is unsearchable.” And there’s our word: without measure, fathomless; I love it. That’s such a great word picture. So, Jared, we’ve already been talking about what this tells us about God, but do you want to explore that further? What can we say is true about God from this?

Jared Kennedy: (06:28)
Well, it tells us that God is measureless. Just think about that for a minute. God is deeper than the ocean. We can’t measure God. You ou can’t measure God with hours or with minutes, because God is timeless and eternal. We can’t measure God’s length or breadth or with miles or inches, because God is everywhere. He fills all things. We can’t measure God's strength with pounds or tons. God is never going to come to a CrossFit class and max out for us because he’s omnipotent. He is all-powerful. And that fact that we can’t measure God's greatness should humble us because he is bigger and better than us. He’s bigger and better than anything we’ll encounter in this lifetime. And so it should turn our hearts to praise him for who he is.

Champ Thornton: (07:23)
Jared, it’s one thing to say that God is without limits, but when I want to think about how great he is, not in a negative sense that he’s without limits, but in a positive sense, how great he is, how would I go about getting my mind around that? I want to see how great he is.

Jared Kennedy: (07:38)
Well, I think you can look at the rest of the psalm. As it goes on, Psalm 145, verse 9 (CSB) says, “The Lord is good to everyone; his compassion rests on all he has made.” And so God isn’t just so great that we can’t measure him, but he’s also thoroughly good. He’s wise. He’s holy. He’s just. He’s loving. And he’s true. Each person you meet has varying strengths and weaknesses. They have things they’re really good at and things they aren’t so good at. You might, for instance, say that a girl named Sally is really loving, but she’s not very wise because she trusts people indiscriminately. But God is undivided in all of his attributes and he’s perfect. And in all of his attributes, he’s both wise and he’s loving through and through. That’s really important for us to know because we experience real evil in this world.

We experience death, violence, and disease, and you might ask, “Why did God allow this? How can he be sovereign over the circumstances that I’m experiencing and still be loving?” And the answer many times is: “I don't know. I can't measure that out. I don’t know how this works. I don’t fully understand what God is doing in my circumstances.” In fact, on the surface, maybe even affirming that God is both sovereign and loving seems to be contradictory. But even though we can’t fully trace out who God is, God has truly revealed himself to us. And the place where God is most clearly revealed himself is in his Son, Jesus. And in what Jesus has done for us at the cross, he shows us his love and his justice and how they come together. When God poured out his wrath against sin—when Jesus died—he also poured out his love so that he might justify us and save us. That’s where we look. That’s where we see him revealing himself to us.

Champ Thornton: (09:52)
I love it, Jared. Thank you for pointing us to this verse. Would you close our time by offering praise for his greatness and asking the Lord to show us more of it?

Jared Kennedy: (10:01)
Lord Father God, you are so wonderful. We’ll never completely understand you, but we thank you that you have chosen to reveal yourself to us in Jesus and that it’s in Jesus where we see your perfect justice and your perfect love. It’s in Jesus where we find our salvation. So, Lord, we’re so grateful for the fact that you have given your Son for us. Help us to trust you and to praise you. For Christ’s sake. Amen.