According to David, lowering lofty eyes requires us to get to the place in life where we stop concerning ourselves “with great things” that are “too profound” for us to understand. To attempt to figure out infinite things with our finite minds is to toil at a task most exasperating. It is to torment the soul with haunting questions, the answers to which are like apparitions that are impossible for human minds to grasp.  

It is an unfortunate characteristic of many modern-day Christians to attempt to reduce profound things to simple quips that fit on bumper stickers. Many a preacher believes he can answer life’s most difficult questions with three points and a poem. Yet, we all know that life often leaves us dumbfounded and without any satisfactory explanation for things that occur. We can always peddle our well-worn clichés in the midst of life’s catastrophes, but they will serve as no real solace to us or others.

The Bible teaches us that God’s thoughts and ways are not only different from ours, but as high above ours as the heavens are above the earth (Isaiah 55:8-9). Try as we may, we will never understand in this life, apart from divine revelation, the mysteries of God (Deuteronomy 29:29). Many balk at a God that they can’t understand, but I bow before Him, realizing that if I could understand Him He would be no bigger than I am.

The Bible, God’s answer book, does not provide us with answers to all of life’s profound questions. It tells us all that we need to know, but not all that we want to know. It instructs us to trust God even when we can’t make sense out of our present situation or comprehend our current circumstances. We are assured by the Scripture that God knows best, even when we don’t know what’s going on. Regardless of how things appear, God’s will for us cannot be improved upon, since it is perfect and the product of God’s perfect love for us (Romans 12:2; 1 John 4:18). Therefore, we are to fall back into God’s arms in simple childlike faith every time we find ourselves in incomprehensible circumstances.

Many a soul sentences itself to a lifetime of fretting and fuming over its inability to hold in the palm of its finite hand the infinite ocean that is God. Rather than resting in the biblical assurance that God knows best, many tormented souls insist upon reducing God to their finite understanding so that they can fit Him into their hip pocket. However, God is too big to be grasped by finite minds, held in the palms of human hands, or put in anyone's hip pocket.

To calm the soul we must be willing to trust God even when confounded by His ways.