Skip to main content

Daily Inspiration Quote by Oral Roberts

"Well, I can't figure out God"

About this Quote

A televangelist admitting bafflement about God lands like a glitch in the machine. Oral Roberts built an empire on certainty: faith as a broadcastable product, healing as a promise you could tune in for, divine will rendered legible through testimony and fundraising goals. So when he says, "Well, I can't figure out God", the power is in the smallness. It's colloquial, even a little weary. No thunder, no doctrinal scaffolding - just a shrug in the face of the infinite.

The intent reads as pastoral recalibration. Roberts isn't denying belief; he's managing expectations. In a religious marketplace where leaders are rewarded for confident answers, admitting confusion can function as a strategic honesty: it keeps the mystery intact, protects God from being reduced to a vending machine, and inoculates the preacher against failed outcomes ("Why didn't I get healed?") by placing the divine beyond human accounting.

The subtext is also self-defense. Roberts spent decades narrating causality between faith, giving, and blessing. This sentence quietly unties that knot. If God can't be figured out, then no one - not even the man with the microphone and the studio lights - can be held responsible for God's apparent inconsistencies.

Context matters: 20th-century American revivalism thrived on spectacle and certainty, but it also had to answer modern disillusionment, medical reality, and public scrutiny. A brief confession of unknowing becomes a pressure valve. It humanizes the brand while smuggling in a more traditional theology: God as mystery, not algorithm.

Quote Details

TopicGod
SourceHelp us find the source
Cite

Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Roberts, Oral. (2026, January 16). Well, I can't figure out God. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/well-i-cant-figure-out-god-115679/

Chicago Style
Roberts, Oral. "Well, I can't figure out God." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/well-i-cant-figure-out-god-115679/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Well, I can't figure out God." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/well-i-cant-figure-out-god-115679/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by Oral Add to List
Oral Roberts on the Mystery of God
Click to enlarge Portrait | Landscape

About the Author

USA Flag

Oral Roberts (January 24, 1918 - December 15, 2009) was a Clergyman from USA.

2 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

Jeff Foxworthy, Comedian
Jeff Foxworthy
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Novelist
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Architect
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Richard Baxter, Clergyman
Albert Einstein, Physicist
Albert Einstein
Muhammad Iqbal, Poet
Muhammad Iqbal
David Herbert Lawrence, Writer
David Herbert Lawrence