Appearances can be deceiving

R. Scott Clark said:

This passage gets us closer to the heart of the problem, his apparent revision of the traditional Reformed doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God. As a matter of truth, God's essence is a dark, unrevealed entity. God, as he is in himself (in se) is hidden from us...We know that God's hidden essence is but we don't know what God's essence is. We're not capable of knowing or understanding that essence. We know what God has revealed of himself to us. God has given us pictures, illustrations, analogies, but he has not revealed himself as he is in himself...The Reformed want to affirm both the mystery of God's hiddenness and the utterly reliability of his self-revelation.

This seems to allow for the possibility that God could be a sort of chaotic evil God. More like the Norse god Loki who was a liar and a trickster than the God of the Bible. After all, we don't know God's true essence, and God has not revealed himself in Scripture "as he is in himself," so perhaps even what he's revealed to us doesn't necessarily reflect who he truly is.

On the one hand, we don't and can't know God's essence. But on the other hand, God doesn't reveal his essence to us except by "pictures, illustrations, analogies." So who's to say there's much truth in even the "pictures, illustrations, analogies" God has given us in Scripture? At best, it'd seem to be verisimilitude. The appearance of truth rather than truth itself. But we don't know to what degree, if any, the appearance is true to the truth.

As such, Clark's statement seems to allow for the possibility that God gave us half-true or even false pictures, illustrations, and analogies about himself in Scripture.