By Ife J. Ibitayo
I love reading mysteries. My favorite book is Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge, a sci-fi murder mystery set in the ever-further future. Just as soon as you think you’ve figured out who the killer is, a new wrinkle enters the picture. The author is always one step ahead, breathlessly carrying you along until the ecstatic climax when all the puzzle pieces fall into place. I love reading mysteries, but I hate living them.
I’ve always snobbishly looked down on those who skip to the last chapter of books, having to know the end from the beginning. But if I had the novel of my life, you know I’d already be there! I can’t stand the real-life tension of not knowing.
Miserable Mystery
But life is full of mysteries. I don’t know when I’ll meet my special someone. I don’t know if I’ll be fired next fall or promoted next spring. I wake up each day not knowing if it will contain sorrow or joy. And this stresses me out to no end! How can you control what you can’t understand?
Then there’s God, the most unfathomable being in all existence. God declares to us, “‘My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts’” (Isaiah 55:8-9). Therefore, God is inherently other. Jesus is not Superman, the paragon of mankind, an example of what humanity at its best looks like. Rather, He is a being so beyond our imagination that we can only glimpse a shadow of His true nature.
And so, I’m tempted to despair. If my life is in the hands of a being beyond my comprehension, how can I know the outcome of all my sufferings and hardships, my trials and tears, my burdens and sacrifices?
Marvelous Mystery
The apostle Paul, arguably the most brilliant theologian who’s ever lived, was also confronted by the mystery of our God: “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable His judgements, and His paths beyond tracing out” (Romans 11:33)! But his response was very different from my own. He cried, “To Him be the glory forever!” (Romans 11:36).
Paul rejoiced in a God beyond His comprehension because that offered the perfect explanation to the inexplicable. Only a transcendent God can redeem our terrible circumstances. Good men can mitigate others’ personal hardships. Good countries can ameliorate a suffering world’s issues. But only a good God far above everything can keep this promise: “I cause everything to work together for the good of those who love Me” (Romans 8:28).
Conclusion
In a TV show I watched, I was struck by a particular scene between a mother, who was a district attorney, and her daughter. The daughter kept asking her mother for answers concerning a young woman who was wrongfully murdered. But her mother said she had her reasons for not giving them to her. However, her daughter hacked into her computer. Then she understood why her mother was acting the way she was. When her mother found out about this, her daughter asked her, “Why didn’t you just tell me?” And her mother replied, “Why didn’t you just trust me?”
There are millions of mysteries with millions of answers that we’ll never know here on this earth. We can spend our lives asking God, “Why didn’t you just tell me?” Or we can believe that even more than any mother, any district attorney, or any superhero, our God is trustworthy.
“As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things.”
(Ecclesiastes 11:5)