I had always understood Isa 55.7-9 not as a statement of general transcendence, but as the incomparable otherness of God from our expectations of him, in terms of grace: the wicked man forsaking his thoughts means that he should stop thinking of God as someone stingy and miserly and unwilling to treat with sinners. He should start thinking of God as ready and happy and willing and bending over backward to receive repentant, evil people. I don't know that Owen will ever win an award for "Greatest English Prose Stylist," but he expresses this more powerfully than I had ever thought to:
"God himself doth really separate and distinguish his forgiveness from any thing that our thoughts and imaginations can reach unto; and that because it is his, and like himself. It is an object for faith alone, which can rest in that which it cannot comprehend. It is never safer than when it is, as it were, overwhelmed with infiniteness. . . .
"For the most part, when we come to deal with God about forgiveness, we hang in every brier of disputing, quarrelsome unbelief. . . . Want of a due consideration of him with whom we have to do, measuring him by that line of our own imaginations, bringing him down unto our thoughts and ways, is the cause of all our disquietments. Because we find it hard to forgive our pence, we think he cannot forgive talents. . . .
"Were he a man, or as the sons of men, it were impossible that, upon such and so many provocations, he should turn away from the fierceness of his anger. But he is God. This gives an infiniteness and an inconceivable boundlessness to the forgiveness that is with him, and exalts it above all our thoughts and ways." -Works, 6:499-500.
"God himself doth really separate and distinguish his forgiveness from any thing that our thoughts and imaginations can reach unto; and that because it is his, and like himself. It is an object for faith alone, which can rest in that which it cannot comprehend. It is never safer than when it is, as it were, overwhelmed with infiniteness. . . .
"For the most part, when we come to deal with God about forgiveness, we hang in every brier of disputing, quarrelsome unbelief. . . . Want of a due consideration of him with whom we have to do, measuring him by that line of our own imaginations, bringing him down unto our thoughts and ways, is the cause of all our disquietments. Because we find it hard to forgive our pence, we think he cannot forgive talents. . . .
"Were he a man, or as the sons of men, it were impossible that, upon such and so many provocations, he should turn away from the fierceness of his anger. But he is God. This gives an infiniteness and an inconceivable boundlessness to the forgiveness that is with him, and exalts it above all our thoughts and ways." -Works, 6:499-500.
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