The secret things
Right down the middle! I had hit my golf ball right down the center of the fairway, and now I couldn’t find it. We had all seen it bounding toward the flagstick and glory but, alas, it was nowhere to be found. After due time I had to abandon the effort and concede the ball as lost to the fate shared by multitudes of socks surrendered in scandalous pirate dryers throughout the course of history.
As I ponder the fate of my golf ball, and the millions of other golf balls lost to the mystery of logic, I am reminded that there are questions to which we may never know the answers; is there formidable life beyond our solar system? Does Pi have a terminus? Who killed J.R.? And, of course, where do all those orphaned socks go?
That same predicament of knowledge applies in regard to things about God as well. Deuteronomy 29:29 affirms this conundrum, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may observe all the words of this law.”
Just what those “secret things” are is not clear; um… that is sorta why they are called “secret things.” What is confirmed here is that God has imparted a certain body of knowledge for us to know and understand. What God has given us to know are those things which are essential, and those things that we are to be sharing with our families. What it also tells us is that there are certain things which we are not needing to know at this point in time if ever. The other mysteries are those which are beyond our “need to know” status.
Whether or not we will ever be allowed to comprehend those mysteries is the sovereign call of God, however, it is those things which He has made known to us for which we are responsible. In the Old Testament, He did that through His spoken word, through His prophets and through His written Word. In the New Testament, He did that through the incarnate Word (Christ), his prophets, and apostles, and again through His written Word. How does he do that today?
1 Corinthians 2:10-13 says, “For to us God revealed them through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him?
Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God, which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words.”
In context, the “them” in the first part of the verse refers to those things about God. Thus, we see that the Holy Spirit is intimately involved in communicating the mind of God, the character of God, the nature of God, and the fact that God desires a relationship with His creation. We don’t need to learn theology by trickery in our theological quest to look behind
God’s back to find out the truth. We simply read His Word and let the Spirit speak to us. Thankfully, today, God communicates these things through His Spirit and the Scriptures.
We do not need to know how many angels can fit on the head of a pin, much less dance on it, or if in fact angels are fundamentalist Evangelicals with a “no-dancing” policy. We don’t need to know if Adam and Eve had belly buttons. If God had felt it urgent for us to know such things, He would have revealed them to us (not their belly buttons, but those truths).
As we finish off another year and open the pages to a new one let’s remember that God has made Himself known through Christ, His Spirit, and the Word; what better way could we possibly invest ourselves than to focus on Him this year!
Happy New Year!