🔥🐟 What Is Fire To A Fish?

🐟 The Deep-Sea Fish and the Hidden Sun

Imagine a fish born and living its whole life at the bottom of the ocean. It has never seen the sun, never experienced daylight, and may not even possess the biological capacity to perceive or comprehend it. If you tried to describe sunlight—"a fire in the sky that gives warmth, color, and life"—it would be meaningless to that creature. Light is not in its vocabulary of experience. You might use analogies—bioluminescence, warmth from volcanic vents, or rhythms of tidal currents—but they would be shadows of the real thing.

This fish does not deny the sun—it simply has no frame to conceive of it. And even if it somehow heard of it, what it pictured would be hopelessly inadequate.

👁 Human Vision of God: The Same Struggle

Humans trying to describe or understand God is like that fish trying to understand the sun.

Scripture says:

• “No one has seen God at any time” (John 1:18).
• “Now we see through a glass, darkly...” (1 Cor. 13:12).
• "His ways are higher than our ways" (Isaiah 55:8–9).

We, bound by time, flesh, and sin, are trying to grasp eternity, Spirit, and perfection. Visions, metaphors, and symbols are all we have—burning bushes, thrones of sapphire, rainbows, smoke, lightning, creatures with wings and eyes. Like the sun to the deep-sea fish, these are not the thing itself, but representations tailored to our limited sensory and cognitive world.

Even Paul, who was caught up to the "third heaven," said he heard things that "no man is permitted to utter" (2 Cor. 12:4). Not because God is hiding, but because language and perception break down at the threshold of glory.

🧠 Cognitive Humility: Knowing That We Can’t Fully Know

Like the fish cannot evolve an eye that sees the sun overnight, we cannot evolve a mind that fully comprehends God in this life. The gap is ontological—a difference in being, not just information.

The humility this calls for is immense:

• Theology becomes not the systematization of the infinite, but the stammering of children describing fireflies, thinking them stars.
• Prophecy and visions are often symbolic because symbols are bridges across the unbridgeable—an invitation to contemplate mystery, not reduce it.

🌌 Hope: A Future Surfacing

But here's the beautiful twist. Unlike the fish, we are promised that one day we will see the Sun:

“They will see His face...” (Rev. 22:4)
“We shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2)

Our current state is one of preparation, like the fish being slowly drawn toward the surface—eyes adjusting, body adapting. Spiritual growth is the evolution of capacity for glory.

🕊 A Final Thought: The Spirit as the Light Within

Even now, we are not entirely without light. The Spirit gives us "the mind of Christ" (1 Cor. 2:16), and that light does not originate from us—it’s implanted, like a bioluminescent glow that points us upward. Faith is the deep-sea compass that points to a sun we’ve never seen, but which beckons us home.