#1 in the “Mysterious God” Series

I believe the primary reason is because He is.

You may say, “well, of course.  We all know God is unfathomable.”  It’s an easy concept with which to agree, but a much harder one to truly believe.  I think we are often quite blissfully unaware of the chasms that exist between our hearts and our heads.

I’d like you ponder the issue of safety.  It is a desire nearly as organic as our breathing.  We don’t realize how much we depend upon it until we lose it.  Then it suddenly thrusts itself upon us as one of our basest of human needs.  We want to feel secure, free from threat, able to relax, like a bird high upon a tree, out of sight of predators, who fluffs himself up and settles in for a nap.

Much of this sense of safety rides on our knowing what to expect, or of feeling that things are generally in order, in their place, behaving as they should.  A simple picture of this is your home.  Your home is one of the places where you most expect to find safety.  One does not generally open the door with caution, uncertain about who or what you will find inside.  You proceed into each room with an easy familiarity.  You assume your home is safe, not even thinking about an alternate reality, unless you have experienced it before.  Our innate protective bubble of safety only gets popped when life sticks a pin into it.  The person whose home has been vandalized will always know the unforeseen could happen again.

I believe that those who suffer from the extremes, whether it is paranoia or recklessness only exemplify how strong a force it is.  And those who have lived in a continual state of physical risk, such as an abused child or the persecuted church can understand more fully how traumatic it is to live without it.

Because the desire for safety is so nearly instinctual, we may not even realize how often we avoid the threat of losing it, even when it comes to our perspective of God.  The fact we must face is that a mysterious God is not a safe one.  He is profoundly different in character from the vandal or the persecutor, but the very presence of the mystery is a threat to our sense of safety.  To be vulnerable to change, to the unknown, to a God so incomprehensible is to invite possible peril.  It is by force of His love and nature within us that we rise above this reaction to embrace His absolute goodness.  Left alone, we may easily agree with the concept of the Mysterious, while quietly and even subconsciously dismissing any real emotional engagement with the idea.

But to embrace anything other than this idea is to make God something less than He is.  The plain fact is that He IS mysterious and unfathomable, both in gloriously predictable and unpredictable ways.  Whether our motivation for embracing a different view is fear or woundedness, when we fashion God into an image of our own making we create an idol.  Now, I am acutely aware of our finite minds – we will never in our lifetimes see an entirely accurate picture of God.  That is the very paradox of the thing!  Yet at every point which is in our power we must attempt to embrace the reality of His nature, so that we truly worship Him.

A secondary reason I believe that God must remain mysterious is because it reminds us that while we were made in the image of God, we are not gods ourselves.

I believe it is part of our design to know, to understand, to find the patterns of the universe, to explore the “why” of our existence.  Through this relentless curiosity we are expected to encounter the Creator, to worship at His feet, to be overcome with awe at His handiwork.  He is the ultimate answer behind the biggest Why proposed by the greatest scientist or philosopher.  However, sin introduced a virus into the system and the quest to know became corrupted.  The more questions we can answer, the more arrogant we become, the more power we crave, the more like gods we feel.  The seeds of Lucifer’s pride are in our souls.

It is crucial for us to continually remind ourselves of our true size and place in the universe.  Yes, we were set to rule over the rest of creation, but we are still part of the created.  We are a chip off the old block, but we are not the block itself.  Our corrupted design, unredeemed, recoils from the kind of vulnerability necessary to keep these facts plainly in our view.  If we can’t figure out God, we can’t control or predict Him and we are therefore subject to His whims.  The lie the serpent told Eve was that God was holding something back from them, and that fear still plagues us now.  It is again the transformational power of God that transports us to a place of trust in His goodness but it is a process we must intentionally embrace.  It does not happen on its own.

It is my goal in the following articles to make you think, to break you out of established patterns, to plant the seeds of growth and expansion in your spirit.  Most of all, I hope to instill in you a passion of unrelenting discovery and overwhelming encounters.  Every time we are moved to awe, we at least for that moment, have some real perspective of what it means to serve a Living God.  Much of what I share will be from my own growth experiences and journey, which are themselves still very much in process.