TLB Deuteronomy 29:29
There are secrets the Lord your God has not revealed to us, but these words that he has revealed are for us and our children to obey forever.TLB Daniel 2:28
...but there is a God in heaven who reveals secrets, and he has told you in your dream what will happen in the future.ESV Luke 8:10
To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.
Why is this ponderable?
Throughout the Bible God speaks to his People through Moses, the Prophets, Jesus, and the Apostles. Few of us, if any, can say we have heard God speak to us personally. In fact, even the people whom Moses led out of Egypt were fearful of this all-powerful and awesome God. Word on the street was that no one who got close enough to see God would live. So for Moses, Daniel, and Jesus to say that God has secrets begs the question: How did they know this and were they privy to those secrets?
We do know that even Jesus in his human state was not privy to God the Father's timeline for the End of Days. In Mark 13:32 Jesus himself tells his Apostles, “But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."
This tells us that God the Father does have secrets. He will share them in His own good time and then only with those chosen to hear them. The rest of us may learn them when we are gathered around God's heavenly throne with Jesus and the 24 Elders.
One of the advantages of being a Catholic is that it confers a complete intellectual freedom to examine any and all phenomena with the absolute assurance of their intelligibility.--J J Zavada
On one level, God's having secrets seems like "na, na, na, na, na, I know something you don't know."
ReplyDeleteOn another level, I believe it is impossible for our minds to understand the mind of God.
I feel like the teachers (family, school, church, friends, etc.) I had in my early life presented it the first way, unfortunately.
Now I know better.
I share your view. The more I study the Bible and ponder God, the more I realize why God's Chosen People were warned not to try and visualize God or even use His name in any earthly conversation. Doing this only leads to personifying God. We give God a makeover into our own image and likeness. As a result of the "na, na, na, na, na, I know something you don't know." kind of religious instruction we received as children many adults now visualize God as that WASP elderly gentleman with a long white beard sitting on a golden chair on some cloud. He is a cross-over between Santa Claus and Merlin the Magician. And we aspire to be the Magician's Assistant.
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