By T.C. Lo (盧天賜); March 18, 2016
As we learn and grow in the knowledge of the Bible, we, the learners, begin to discover some hidden difficulties previously not recognizable. The flip side is that this may result in less-fruitful discussions. But I view this as a positive indicator of growth and believe that with proper attitude toward these huddles, our burden may be lightened and defused if most likely not removed. It is to this purpose that this article is written. Let me begin with one Bible verse as my starting point:
Deuteronomy 29:29 says, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.”
If this verse is taken to be a guide to develop our attitude toward hard sayings of God, it must itself not be one of the secret things or else we have no way to follow its words. If this verse is plain and understood by all Bible readers which it is, it begs the question of why God keeps something secret in the Bible rather than simply not mentioning them at all.
The reason why God did not explain the secret things, to my mind, is because our spiritual capacity is so finite that it is not possible to absorb the profound explanations from God. For example, God keeps our time of death a secret because God knows our spiritual capacity is too weak to handle such knowledge. Is it not a good thing that God keeps us from knowing the exact times and places of our death so we may live without anxiety? As parents, do we also know that many things we could not simply explain to our young children? When my daughter was very young, she read the Bible about the story of Rehab; one day she came to asked, “Dad, what is a prostitute?” After a long pause, I answered, “A prostitute is a very bad and greedy girl who gets married.” Was my answer wrong? Not really, but it is not exactly right either; the true answer was too weighty for a girl of her age! But that was the best answer I could think of for my little innocent girl at that time. When she grew up, she got the answer for herself without my explanation. In the same manner, when we grew up in heaven, we shall understand more things because Jesus will guide us into truth. For now, more answers produce more new questions, and it is an endless cycle if we fail to respect God’s will of keeping something secret.
Since God knows we cannot handle certain secret things, why would he even mentioned them in the Bible in the first place? First of all, we must realize that Christianity is a belief system of logic and reason and the truth therein is testable and found coherent and consistent with reality. But on the other hand, Christianity is also a belief system of faith. Faith is a means to know the unknown but the unknown is sustained by the things that are known. This is why, time after time, the Bible is proven correct after centuries of scrutiny. If the Bible is not true when it speaks about this known world, how can we trust it when it speaks about the unknown world-to-come? So there is an interplay between faith and reason. It was said that “God has put enough information in the world to make faith in him a most reasonable thing, and he has left enough to make it impossible to live by sheer reason or observation alone.” (Ref. 1)
When God said, “The secret things belong to the LORD,” it gets into the discussions of privacy. We must respect God’s privacy just as we respect other people’s privacy in our civilized societies. God has privacy too, you know! Having said that, this does not mean we cannot pursue God, nor can we recklessly hand-wave away the difficulties. Our pursuit may not (and should not) lead to humanly satisfactory answers—if indeed the underlying pursuit belongs to the category of God’s privacy, but the byproducts of such endeavor is our broadening understanding of the Bible. One time, I wrote an article attempting to investigate the tradition belief that Jesus was born on December 25th. I faced many criticisms—ranging from “This is not important” to “this is not essential to our salvation” to “If God didn’t say, don’t guess” to “knowledge makes one puffing up.” To the last accusation, I retorted, “Knowledge is bad if I use it to lord it over other people, or use it to show off how knowledgeable I am, or use it as sophistry to distort the truth to benefit myself.” But if I use the knowledge, however limited, with edifying people in view, it is good. In fact, the Bible instructs us to increase the knowledge of Christ so the glory of God can be shown. If our attitude is bad, every good thing (not just knowledge) is bad. If our attitude is good, everything falls in places. After I have written that article (Ref. 2), though I still don’t have 100% certainty to claim that my argument was right, my knowledge in other areas of the Bible increased in a much broad perspective. This is the byproduct of my endeavor.
When we encounter Bible difficulties, we should not easily say, “Why ask? This is the mystery of God.” This is a cop-out for one’s laziness. Some of the issues in the Bible required even hundreds of years to discover that the answers were indeed buried in the Bible. Don’t make ease conclusion that this is a secret of God and stop right there.
When we talk about the secret things of God, one must keep this perspective in mind: More than 90% the text is understandable by common people because the Bible was written for all people. ALL the text concerning our salvation is crystal clear insofar as human responsibility is concerned. Our unbelief is liable for the final judgment without excuse.
We must also bear in mind that for most Bible difficulties and hard sayings, God simply made declarations without explanation. For example, the doctrine of Origin of Sin. How could sin invade the world that God made good? To this great question, the Bible gives no theological answer. It only narrates how it came about; so it remains a mystery. There are many more important doctrines:
• God is a Creator. Did God explain? Fewer verses to describe the process of creation than did the processes of building of Noah’s ark and the Tabernacle. Do you realize that? We must ask ourselves a question, “What God really wants us to know in this passage?” (Ref. 3)
• The concept of Trinity. God implicitly declared in the Bible through human experiences without explaining why he is a Triune God although we can keenly sense its reality.
• The Doctrine of Election. God did not provide humanly satisfied comprehensible answer. Yet the twin pillars of human freewill (not absolute) and God’s (absolute) sovereignty permeate in the entire Bible. (Note)
• The doctrine of Incarnation. God merely made declarations without explicitly explaining it in humanly conceivable terms.
The above is an incomplete list. Our “explanations” are all derived from tiny hints and traces (蛛絲馬迹) here and there throughout the Scripture. Human responsibility is to put our all-out effort to study them and at the same time recognize out cognitive limitation and our fallibility but never dismiss the questions lightly for our convenience. If these difficulties still raise doubt in your mind or haunt you in your spiritual pursuit, remember what Paul has taught to his spiritual son, Timothy, “Even though you don’t understand this and that, but one thing you ought to remember is to know whom you have believed (2 Timothy 1:12).” The Person and Work of Christ is the centrality of the Gospel which should be the main thrust of our pursuit. I believe this is the attitude we ought to have.
References:
1. This rhetoric statement is from “The Real Face of Atheism” by Ravi Zacharias; p.113.
2. When Was Jesus Born? 耶穌在那一天出生?
“https://hocl.org/blogs/tincheelo/?p=253”
3. Genesis Chapter One—What God wants us to know?
“https://hocl.org/blogs/tincheelo/?p=508”
Note: I contrast the qualifiers “not-absolute” and “absolute” here in order to allude to the common misconception that there is a violation of the Law of Logic at work. The Law of Non-contradiction states that “A and NOT-A cannot be true at the same time and in the same sense.” The subtle phrase “at the same time and in the same sense” is commonly overlooked. When one is not absolute while other is absolute, they must NOT be “in the same sense”. So there is not a contradiction but a paradox.
