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Why Does God Hide?
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Isaiah 55:8,9 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. (NRSV)It seems that my God is so much bigger than my nice, neat little piles of doctrines. Just as well, I say.
Listen to the radio broadcast of Why Does God Hide?
Download audio fileLet me ask you something. If you were God, would you kind of hide yourself away, the way He seems to do, or would you make it plainly obvious to all and sundry that you are in fact the almighty, powerful God?
Here’s a crazy thing. Jesus is coming down from a mountain top. There’s been an amazing miracle up there called the transfiguration. And He says to His disciples:
Matthew 17:9 Don’t tell anyone about what you saw on the mountain. Wait until the Son of Man has been raised from death. Then you can tell people about what you saw.
Why does He do that? Why doesn’t He make it blindingly, glimpsingly, obvious to everybody exactly who He is?
I used to imagine that one day, if I studied the Bible hard enough, I’d have God all figured out. If I could have this nice neat little doctrine over here and that little theology over there … well, I’d understand Him.
But the more I get to know Him, the more I realise the truth of what He tells us about Himself:
Isaiah 55:8,9 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. (NRSV)
It seems that my God is so much bigger than my nice, neat little piles of doctrines. Just as well, I say.
Here’s the thing. God doesn’t reveal Himself to us completely. And that mystery, that ‘cloud of unknowing’ as one writer of old puts it, is part of the awe and wonder of our relationship with Him.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.
Comments
Martha Dickson
God has revealed Himself in the Old Testament and the New Testament. If there was anything else that He wanted known about Him, He would have already put it into Scripture.