"God moves in a mysterious way" is a Bible verse

William Cowper wrote the poem "Light Shining out of Darkness" in 1773, in the shadow of a severe depressive episode that led him to attempt suicide by drowning. The hymn is generally read as his own hard-won affirmation of providence written from inside real darkness, not detached devotional writing. His friend John Newton, the former slave-ship captain who wrote "Amazing Grace," published it the following year in their joint collection, Olney Hymns (1774). It was the last hymn text Cowper wrote before his illness worsened.

The hymn expresses a real, recurring biblical idea: God's ways exceeding human understanding runs through texts like Isaiah 55:8-9 ("my thoughts are not your thoughts") and Romans 11:33 ("how unsearchable his judgments"). But the specific, quotable line belongs to Cowper's 18th-century poetry, not to any verse.