On the Secrecy of God, the Truth as a Person, the Word as Living

You shouldn’t listen to me. I am a layperson with no special theological education. I am not ordained. I do not have a PhD.

Adoro Te Devote

God is in secret. Why. Why not reveal self to all. why did Jesus teach in parables. Whose are the eyes that see. Does this imply deeper layers to the Text. Isaiah 45:15. Contrast with Rom 1:19 - That which can be known about God has been made manifest. vere latitat. Matt 28:17 - they worshiped but some doubted, even after seeing all. Luther: faith is wrestling with doubt. Your sins have hidden His face from you. Though He is not far from anyone.

The hidden things belong to the Lord, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children. God can speak, and speak clearly, without speaking fully or simply.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_hidden_God

“Indeed, you are a hidden God, you God of Israel, the Savior.” (Isaiah 45:15).

I kept silent for such a long time that you forgot to fear me. Isaiah 57:11.

Declaring the end from the beginning. Is 46:10. Is not the same thing as existing simultaneously at the end and the beginning (and in between). Nor is it the same as being outside the end and the beginning. It is also not the same thing as declaring the end of an arrow’s flight from it’s beginning. The world need not be a watch unwinding through a predetermined path for God to keep his promises. If the I Am is, if The Almighty is always present in the present, and has the power to accomplish his purposes, then he can be sure of the end from the beginning. He need not already be at the end. God’s plan is not a book to be read, or a path to discover (or perhaps miss out on). His plan is himself. His plan is that he is. My plan will take place, I will do all my will.

John 10:24. If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly. I did tell you and you don’t believe.

1 Corinthians 2. We speak God’s hidden wisdom in a mystery.

1 Corinthians 8. Those who think they know, do not yet know as they ought.

1 Corinthians 9. So not muzzle an ox = pay the apostles. The law isn’t literal.

1 Kings 8:1-21. The Lord said that he would dwell in total darkness.

Hebrews 9:5. The cherubim overshadow the ark.

Gen 1:2. Darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit hovered over the surface. So the Spirit was hovering in darkness over the deep darkness.

Standeth God within the shadows.

1 Timothy 1:17 now to the king, eternal, immortal, invisible, God only wise.

Hebrews 11:20-40. Moses persevered as one who sees him who is invisible.

1 Timothy 6:16 he dwells in unapproachable light.

Hebrews 11:27. Moses persevered as one who sees him who is invisible.

Ps 18:9-11. Total darkness beneath his feet. He made darkness his hiding place, dark storm clouds his canopy. Fiery coals.

Strong’s 5769 - olam. Eternity = hidden. As in Gen 21:33 or Ecc 3:11.

Judges 16:18 - even his name is beyond understanding.

Numbers 12:8 - he speaks in riddles

Nothing beyond what is written. 1 Corinthians 4:6

“The Holy Spirit was making it clear that the way into the most holy place has not yet been revealed while the first tabernacle was still standing.” – Hebrews 9:8

God hides because of he showed himself we would be undone. Isaiah 6. Even the angels cover their eyes.

Job 24:13-26:14. These are but the fringes of his ways; how faint is the word we hear of him, who can understand his mighty thunder.

Luke 8:16. Be careful how you hear.

If they don’t listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead. Luke 16:31. The people at Sinai had been enslaved in Egypt, had seen the plagues, had walked through the red sea, had eaten manna, and then were standing at the mountain and heard God speak out of the cloud. And they still didn’t listen. This people asks for a sign [to prove that God exists] and none will be given then because signs never persuaded anyone.

A God who exists for me or for other people is a small god.

Only God is holy. He is holy both in his perfect separation from the sinful world and in the establishment of his sanctuary in the midst of that world. Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, ch 31.

In the holiness of God, all extremes meet – infinite mercy and justice, infinite love and endless hatred of sin, infinite power and limitless condescension to the weakness of His creatures. His holiness is the cumulation of all His other attributes, His being in its infinite transcendency, His otherness and utter difference from every other being. ¹

Is the Bible true? “True” is a loaded word. It carries the weight of millennia of Western philosophical debate. How about the Bible is effective. The text contains all and only the words it needs so that the Spirit can use it to accomplish all he wishes. His word goes out into the world and accomplished all he desires.

God spoke to Moses as a man speaks to his friend. But to the prophets he speaks in dark sayings. Does God speak to you face to face? No, he speaks to me soul to soul as a father to his son. But that Spirit speaking is not the letter. The Text is dark sayings recorded. We are not people of the book. We are the people of God. He has given us the book, but not only a book – he has also given us His Spirit and His Son.

The kingdom of God does not come with seeing.

Romans 10. Faith comes by hearing, but not all obeyed the gospel. I revealed myself to those who were not asking for me. How can they believe without hearing about him.

The second half of Romans 10 starts by asking “how can they believe it’s they haven’t heard, and how can they hear unless someone in sent to tell them.” But then Paul says they have all heard and quotes Psalm 19, “their voice has gone out to all the earth”. Whose voice is it in Psalm 19? It’s creation. The heavens declare your glory. It seems like there’s this tension in Paul’s writing, even from chapter 1 of Romans, between people need to be told, and people already know because God has revealed himself through creation. What makes the argument in Romans 10 even harsher is that here Paul is talking about the Israelites. They hadn’t just heard the voice of creation, they had heard the unmediated voice of God from the mountain. They had the testimony of the prophets. They had heard, they had understood, and they had rejected. All day long I held my hand out to an obstinate people. So, does faith come by hearing?

If encountering God is what changes us, then shouldn’t preaching be about that - pursuing Truth, encountering Him? Rather than saying what the Text says with the structure, tone and spirit of the Text, but for some reason in different words than the Text. Any jackass can stand up and talk about how they interpret/apply the Bible, or expound their own wisdom/learning. If your preaching doesn’t require the Spirit both to deliver and to receive, then what value does it have?

Titus 1:3. He has revealed his word in the preaching with which he entrusted me. This is post Hebrews 1, so God speaking through sermons not only the text.

God is in secret. Parables. Why? What does that mean for evangelism? What does that mean for interpreting or applying the Text? That God is in Secret has huge ramifications for understanding the Text. His revelation of Himself in words should not be expected to be any less mysterious than His revelation of Himself by any other means. To those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. Therefore, not the plain/surface meaning of the Text. The attempt to reduce the Text to propositions is an attempt to take another bite of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. If I can turn the truth into math, then I can comprehend it (in the way that darkness has not comprehended the light), I can control it, use it. I can become like God.

Progress of the Kingdom of God. Growth. That we should not find our ideal in the past, but rather build upon it. Examples: Trinity, slavery, women, divorce (allowed in OT, prohibited in NT), polygyny, children, Protestantism. We should sing new songs. Our worship should be new, more enlightened. The Kingdom grows not just in geographic extent or population, but in wisdom, understanding, power. The Spirit will lead you into all truth. You have no need for anyone to teach you because the Spirit indwells you and teaches you. The first century church was not the ideal to which we should strive. Their beliefs/understanding ought not constrain us anymore than the Jewish covenant and community were not the ideal of the first century church nor a constraint on the growth of their understanding. Traditions exist to remind us of our past and guard us as we walk along the path, not to chain us to one unchanging moment. Progressive revelation. The promise of the New Covenant is the Spirit. If we learn to let our old men dream dreams and our young men see visions, rather than constraining our practice to the dissection of traditions of textual interpretation, then we can begin taking further steps in the progressive revelation of God to His people.

But see Jeremiah 6:16.

The Bible is not propositional or axiomatic. No languaging is or can be. Words don’t work like that. The Text will not submit willingly to being treated as propositions. You can do violence to the Text. Kill it. Make it black marks on dead trees. Then you can have your way with the corpse. But it is then no longer the living Word of God. As against [[jrnl/Complete_Word_of_God]], [[jrnl/The_Bible_and_Propositional_Truth_Claims]], and [[jrnl/Inerrancy_and_Harry_Potter]]. The value of words is the change they provoke, not the accuracy of their map. Hypothesis: the old testament was given for many reasons - it is a true revelation of God - one of those reasons was to prove its own inadequacy. The Law demonstrates that the Law cannot restore us to God or rather restore God to us. The old testament narrative demonstrates that the Mosaic covenant isn’t enough to redeem us. And it points us to the Messiah and new covenant. Could something analogous be said of the new testament - that it represents simply another step in the progressive revelation of God, not the final step. That it demonstrates its own inadequacy - the words and work of God through the apostles is not enough to “lead is into all truth”, to unify the Church, to resolve even many of the larger questions of theology or church practice, or ultimately to to make us disciples of Jesus. The OT said the Father and these words are not enough, you need Jesus. The NT said the Son and these words are not enough, you need the Spirit.

Try not to think of it as right and wrong. She is a guide who will show you the way. … She told you exactly what you needed to hear. Nothing more. … There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. – The Matrix.

Bible is a tool for the Spirit to use on us. Not a weapon for us to use against other people.

Sanctify them in Your truth, Your word (Word?) is truth.

Magician vs card shark. Same slight of hand – one to deceive, one to entertain, one to reveal.

Treat the NT like the Jews treated the OT: a written tradition intended to be brought to life by a corresponding oral/discipleship/scholarship tradition.

God dwells in us. Vs the prophets. We have this treasure in jars of clay. You are the temple of God, He dwells behind the veil

Phil 3:16 - let all who are mature think this way. And if you think differently, God will reveal that to you also. In any case, live up to the truth to which you have attained.

Every love song is really about God. No human can live up to them. The only honest love songs are breakup songs. The ache you feel to find your one true love who completes you and fills you. The deep center of eros. The fire you feel against injustice. The wrathful vengeance you would unleash on those who prey upon the weak. The pride you long to experience by having a great king. The courage and sacrifice you’d prove following him to fight for a true cause. The small sadness you feel at the end of any great story when that part of you remembers that the story isn’t real. That no king is worthy. No justice is true. No love eternal. That’s the mark of God on your soul.

I think about it like one of the paradoxes that try to express a truth that is beyond us. God is transcendent and immanent. He is both beyond us and among us. In his transcendence, he holds eternal plans, he assigns a time for us to die, he establishes and uproots kingdoms. In his immanence, he experiences our lives with us, walks with us, mourns with us. Jesus weeps at Lazarus’s death, and then commands him to rise. Let us go down and see what they are building [at the tower of Babel] and then with a thought he scatters and confuses humanity. The heavens and the earth are created from nothing with a word, and then he squats down in the mud and uses his hands to fashion a man. God is always both beyond and with. Abraham, take your son, He-Who-Laughs, your only son whom you love, and sacrifice him to me on the mountain I will show you.

His arm is not shortened that it cannot save, but your sins have hidden his face from you.

Your need to be seen is a symptom of a disease. God does not need your attention, your praise or your affection. He is all he needs because he is a trinity. You are the one in need. You need acceptance and affection from him and you need to give praise and affection to him. Without that you a chasing after the wind.

Loaves and fishes. God’s miracles are often hidden. In plain sight - sun and rain. Or perhaps it’s his provision that is hidden. Miracles are done to prove the authority of the agent to speak. The loaves and fishes were secretly multiplied, pulled out of a basket without watching the basket. Make room for God to work in secret. Cast your bread upon the waters. Allow God to provide in secret.

Why He should ask us to pray, when He knows what need before we ask Him, may perplex us if we do not realize that our Lord and God does not want to know what we want (for He cannot fail to know it) but wants us rather to exercise our desire through our prayers, so that we may be able to receive what He is preparing to give us. His gift is very great indeed, but our capacity is too small and limited to receive it. That is why we are told: Enlarge your desires, do not bear the yoke with unbelievers. The deeper our faith, the stronger our hope, the greater our our desire, the larger will be our capacity to receive that gift, which is very great indeed. – Augustine of Hippo (354-430) in Sermon 92 as recounted Milton Walsh in Witness of the Saints: Patristic Readings in the Liturgy of the Hours (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012) 662.

We treat God as though he were a genie who exists to answer our prayers, and the purpose of my life is to be comfortable. That his being “good” means doing what makes me happy. Because he’s just like me, he’s just an old man in the sky. Not more Worthy than I am, simply more powerful, maybe. The problem of evil is that this god who is just like me and who exists for me hasn’t done enough to make my life easier.

God’s modus operandi is long slow processes, not instant miraculous transformation. A lifetime of repentance and progressive sanctification. 500 years of patiently inviting the Canaanites to repent while Israel was held in Egypt. Invitation not compulsion. Community of the imperfect inmeshed in the world, not an enclave of the saints.

“Change the world” is a mistaken goal. Live a quiet life, mind your own business, work with your hands. Jesus’ gospel was a declaration that the Kingdom is here, repent. Not a call to arms to spread or defend the kingdom. You will always have the poor with you – not war on poverty. Daniel did not fix Babylon. His friends obeyed, rather than demanding obedience. Pray for the shalom of the city where you are exiled, plant gardens, have babies – not assign yourself the goal of bringing shalom to the ends of the earth.

https://c.pwm.fund/wiki/jrnl/Pope_on_Bible_Interpretation/

Unsaved kids practicing spirituality. How do you show the internal reality rather than just the external practice. How do you show God is real in your life. Fear that they will learn that prayer is just saying words at the ceiling, that worship is singing a bad song in a group, that without the Spirit the liturgy and traditions prove empty.

My ideal vision for the way the church should establish doctrine and even be operated day to day is modeled on Moses on Mount Sinai. The only doctrine is what God himself writes on the stone. Questions about doctrine are answered by the man he chooses going back up the mountain to ask him directly. Day to day operations of the church are run by that chosen guy and his faithful deputies as we all follow the pillar of smoke and fire. But all of my ideal is the opposite of how Christ established and runs the church. We didn’t send a man up the mountain to receive God’s written doctrine. He came down to us and spoke in parables. We don’t have a Pope and pillar of fire. We have a bickering committee of apostles and then a bunch of bickering committees of elders, and a hidden God. Our doctrine and daily operations are both created and evolved through messy broken political processes. For example, the phrases we use to express the doctrine of the Trinity were invented by a majority of bishops specifically in order to exclude a substantial minority of bishops. That majority used tricks and lies to lure the leaders of the minority to their deaths. Despite the ugliness of the process, I think the doctrine is correct. This fractured petty political organizational structure is what Christ established as the Church. The disciples were cliquey and bickering while he walked among them.

Biblical authority. The “complete” Word of God. Bible is not propositional algebra.

There is no English Quran. The Quran has authority in itself. The Bible is not. There are English Bibles.

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me. – John 5:39 (NASB)

If we hold that God progressively reveals Himself – that, for example, the nature of the Trinity was not revealed as clearly to the old testament writers as it was to the new testament church – then why do we appear to hold that God’s revelation ended with the Apostles.

A sincere man is not so much one who sees the truth and manifests it as he sees it, but one who loves the truth with a pure love. But truth is more than an abstraction. It lives and is embodied in men and things that are real. The secret of sincerity is to be sought in a love for real people and real things – a love for God apprehended in the reality around us. - Merton, p. 198

Therefore, every scribe who has become a disciple of the Kingdom is like a master of the house who brings out of his treasure things new and old. Matt 13:52

Wrestling with God/Text. The Truth is discerned by arguing with the Text, with God as a Person. Not mere submission. Text is written to be argued with. Example Ecclesiastes.

Hypothesis: the old testament was given for many reasons - it is a true revelation of God - one of those reasons was to prove its own inadequacy. The Law demonstrates that the Law cannot restore us to God or rather restore God to us. The old testament narrative demonstrates that the Mosaic covenant isn’t enough to redeem us. And it points us to the Messiah and new covenant. Could something analogous be said of the new testament - that it represents simply another step in the progressive revelation of God, not the final step. That it demonstrates its own inadequacy - the words and work of God through the apostles is not enough to “lead is into all truth”, to unify the Church, to resolve even many of the larger questions of theology or church practice, or ultimately to to make us disciples of Jesus. The OT said the Father and these words are not enough, you need Jesus. The NT said the Son and these words are not enough, you need the Spirit. ?

Tim: So you’re trying to tell me that the God Who created all things, may be more than the books canonized as the end of all revelation by people who would have called the internet and cellular communications a mystical witchcraft of Satan???

Tim: If the old covenant did not succeed, and the new covenant is for the now and until judgment, will there be a renewal of life without a covenant, making the knowledge of the Word a breath inhaled rather than a book observed. To live, move, breathe, in Him.

I don’t think there’s another covenant coming. The promise of the new covenant is the Spirit. If we learn to let our old men dream dreams and our young men to see visions, rather than constraining our practice to the dissection of traditions of textual interpretation, then we can begin taking further steps in the progressive revelation of God to His people.

be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, proves that the earth was incomplete, imperfect. the presence of the tree of knowledge proves it.

I think we err when we point to what the people of God believed/understood/lived at a moment in the past and hold that out as the truth to which we should return. God’s method seems always to be one of growth. Forward progress. Building up. To put away the childish things and press on to maturity. This is marked even in the beginning by the two pillars in the garden - the tree of knowledge and the command to be fruitful, fill the earth and subdue it. Both reveal that the garden was a beginning not an end. A place to grow out of, not run back to. Creation was “very good” not because it was perfectly complete, but because it was perfectly suited to accomplish His ends. God does not create things that merely exist. He does not construct buildings that require maintenance. He breathes life. His work flourishes, fruits, fades and is reborn multiplied and new. The New Earth is not a return to Eden, but altogether better. Eden, like all things, points us forward. Growth does not end at Judgement.

Bible doesn’t speak plainly because God is in Secret

The chasm between is and ought can only be crossed by the gods.

Bible intended to be argued with, not submitted to. Even the 10 commandments, written in stone by the hand of God, are supposed to be argued with. There’s really only 2 commandments and they aren’t even in the 10.

We may hold the right theory of salvation, and never be saved. We may believe every word of the Bible literally or figuratively, and be lost. It is not enough to believe in the way, we must actually follow it. – Joseph Fort Newton, Everyday Religion

The Text doesn’t have authority based upon who spoke it back then, it who wrote it down back then. The Text’s authority is grounded in who speaks it now. If God isn’t speaking to you, preacher, then why are you speaking. If the Text only has authority because the Spirit spoke by the prophets, and the Spirit no longer speaks, then why are you doing anything beyond reading aloud.

Start with a creedal statement about the Bible – what parts can’t be equally said of Hamlet or Harry Potter?

Need to reconcile the “provocative theory of meaning” with the essential core “content of the faith”. What is that content if not words. If it is words, how do they mean.

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1. Merton 11.6↩︎