Not only is “the Hidden God” marked by the “no trespassing” sign, God Hidden also points us to the God revealed in Jesus the Messiah and the Scriptures which bear witness to Him.
However, sometimes the unfathomability of the goodness of this Hidden God elicits adoration, reverence, praise, and celebration. It is almost impossible to impress many twenty-first century North Americans, and not much easier to extract deep appreciation from them. We live in a world totally touched by human hands, and too often we are able to figure out that with a little dexterity development or the right search engine we could do just as well as anyone else, whatever the task at hand may be. But on occasion, God, without explanation, accomplishes something in our own lives or the environment around us which causes us to say, “Wow! or “Whoa!”
In the person of Jesus Christ, God has emerged from His hiddenness for good reason: So we might know Him through the One He has sent. Through Jesus we not only find out all we need to know about God, but we also find our true selves in Him, the original design for our own humanity. Therefore, it is only reasonable for us to focus our thinking and living on the Revealed God. But that does not mean we can avoid running into God Hidden.
He is lurking within our sight but just outside our grasp when we look at nature, from the grandeur of mountains or oceans, or the grandeur of the human body or the human mind, with all their intricate mechanisms ticking away. But the larger framework of how we are constituted and how we function as human beings eludes us, to say nothing of our bafflement in the face of a host of other natural phenomena which hint at the majesty and glory of the Creator. Many of those around us are not able anymore to see the glory of God in themselves or in the world around them, at least not right off. Sometimes many find it easier in fire and storm, flood and hurricane force winds, or the whirl of the tornado, when they need some source to blame. Then people like us react with anger, which is always a symptom of facing dilemmas we do not control; a sign of defensiveness, trying to reestablish our lordship or domination. That kind of attempt to pierce the mysteries that vex or provoke us ultimately fails because the definitive answers are dependent on trusting the One who has come as the Word made flesh, the One who has presented Himself through the words of the prophets, evangelists, and prophets. Apart from His special revelation, God lets us have only a vague sense of His shape in the dark. Such ventures presume we can figure out more about God than He has revealed in Scripture. Therefore, they always carry with them dangers of trying to pierce the veil and bring God into our explanatory categories. Then we truly end up with a god or gods created in our own image. Thanks be to God, this seldom works for long, despite the fact that our capacity for self-deception often seems endless.
In the person of Jesus Christ, God has emerged from His hiddenness for good reason: So we might know Him through the One He has sent.Christians, however, who try to respect the boundaries which prevent us from being swallowed up by the full majesty of the totality of our Creator’s divinity, still sometimes piously try to trespass into the mysteries of how God works in His world. We want to invent excuses for God when bad things happen in other believers’ lives. Such explanations are intended to give us calm clarity, but at best they lead us to find comfort in our explanations rather than in the person of our Lord Jesus Himself. Such a foundation crumbles quickly.
Often, this happens when people try to put a positive spin on very negative events, from the death of a loved one to a general rise of godlessness in the public behaviors of our society. The defenses we put up for the God who controls human destiny and human history usually do not make God look better and certainly do not tell us all, if anything, about His actual way of directing our lives, even if it may be true when a member of the family or the circle of friends dies that death has relieved suffering, and it is certainly true that being with the Lord so soon has advantages over enduring what might have come. It may also be true that we can take solace in knowing the collapse of values of civility and decency in our society is God’s just judgment on us as well as our fellow self-indulgers. But in all such cases, true solace comes only from the promise that the Crucified One is with us, our Immanuel, in the midst of the mysteries of death and decay which defy completely satisfying explanations.
In Lent we are often tempted to explain why God had to become a human being to rescue human creatures from their own doubt and willfulness. Luther suggested it was because only God has the power to conquer sin, death, and the Devil. Anselm’s tradition explains that a human being had to make recompense for breaking the covenant with God. What Scripture does tell us is sinners must die, and we have been delivered, not with gold or silver, but by the shed blood of the innocent, unblemished Lamb of God. Like a soldier on the battlefield, Jesus paid the price for giving freedom from their enemies to His people, the citizens of His kingdom. Trying to go beyond such biblical presentations of our rescue from sin and evil may let us think we have explained God’s actions or defended his decisions, but they can distract from the awesome mystery of God’s dying on the cross and the overwhelming enigma of His corpse coming back to life. Our conjectures do not harm us if we do not make them into the source of our consolation and assurance. But the person of our suffering and dying Lord dare not be obscured by our need for reasoning out the why and how of His love.
On sunny days, trying to peek behind God’s veil may seem like good sport. However, on stormy days we go through those moments in which explanations do not seem to matter as we experience the goodness of our God in the midst of an evil world, apart from any plausible explanation we can event. Luther distinguished between the Revealed God, in whom we should revel and find rest, and the Hidden God, who lies outside the limits of our creaturely acumen and aptitude. This distinction provides helpful guidance in those situations when we seek explanations for what God is doing in our lives or who God is in and of Himself. Not only is “the Hidden God” marked by the “no trespassing” sign, God Hidden also points us to the God revealed in Jesus the Messiah and the Scriptures which bear witness to Him. Both our experiences of the Hidden God and our conversations with the Revealed God fill in some details about our Creator’s plan for and involvement in our daily lives. He knows the plans He has for us, plans for our well-being, and not for evil, to give us a future and a hope. These are the future and hope our Lord Jesus secured for us by dying and rising in order to put our sins away forever in His tomb and restore us to the righteousness of being His children who will one day rise in Him. What mysteries He has hidden in Himself could be more interesting than the love He has revealed suffering on the cross and bursting out of His empty tomb?
More from 1517
