Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out! (34) “For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has become His counselor?” (35) ”Or who has first given to Him And it shall be repaid to him?” (36) For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever. Amen.
The letter to the Romans was written by the apostle Paul. Having just presented God’s plan of redemption in view of all the glories of divine dealings with men, Paul bursts out with this doxology praising the wisdom, goodness and sovereignty of God; God is all and man is nothing. The principal idea here is God is the source, means and end of all comprehending knowledge, all the circumstances of man’s being and all the means necessary for the accomplishment of the divine purpose. Verse 34 confirms what Paul has just written; that in His purposes and dispensations God is perfectly independent.
The general idea is that there is nothing man can do to place God under obligation. The faithful are not justified by their merit but the merit of Christ; they are chosen and called to eternal life not on the grounds of anything in them but according to God’s election and purpose. God is the alpha and omega of salvation. God is the source, means and end – God‘s glory is the purpose of salvation history. Human knowledge, power and virtue are just glimmering reflections – shadows of the thing itself.
I love to quote c.s. Lewis writing from the Weight of Glory: “ The books or music in which we thought beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things – the beauty, the memory of our own past – are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”