The God Who Hides Himself

With gratitude to Gene Edwards.

There is something about God that religious certainty has never known quite what to do with.

He hides Himself.

Isaiah says it plainly: “Truly, you are a God who hides himself” (Isaiah 45:15).

We might have expected the opposite. A God who wanted to be known would surely explain Himself. He would tell us precisely what happened in the beginning, what He intended through history, and how to recognize Him when He came.

Yet He gives us a garden, two trees, a sleeping man, a woman taken from his side.

He gives us a promise whose fulfillment will take centuries.

He names a little town, then allows generations to pass before a child is born there.

He reveals something real while leaving much of what surrounds it unexplained.

At times, He almost seems coy.

I use that word carefully. I do not mean dishonest or indifferent to our confusion. I mean that He seems willing to disclose something of immense importance without satisfying every question His disclosure awakens.

We want Him to finish the explanation.

He continues the story.

And perhaps we ought to ask whether the thing He wants to give us can ever be received merely as an explanation.

God is not primarily a historian.

He is not writing an objective account of the world for detached observers. He is not a scientist assembling data for our intellectual satisfaction. He is not an impartial commentator standing outside the events, explaining every cause, sequence, and detail.

He is the Father pursuing one purpose.

He wants His Son to be all in all.

He wants Christ to fill everything, to have the first place in everything, and to become the content, life, and expression of the one new man. Scripture is not centered on our curiosity about origins, chronology, or hidden populations. It is centered on God’s Son and on the people who will share His life.

The Bible tells us what serves that purpose.

It leaves much else in shadow.

The World Outside the Garden

Consider Adam and Eve.

Many of us were taught to read their story as though it answered every question about humanity’s beginnings. But the narrative is remarkably selective. It brings us into a garden and fixes our attention upon a particular encounter between God and man.

Then Cain leaves.

He fears that someone will kill him. He has a wife. He builds a city.

Suddenly, we find ourselves asking about people whose beginnings the immediate narrative has not described.

Who are they? Where did they come from? How much time has passed?

The story does not stop to provide a census.

Some readers understand those people as descendants of Adam and Eve whose births have not been individually recorded. Genesis later mentions other sons and daughters, so that is a coherent traditional reading. Others consider the possibility that Adam and Eve stand within a wider human population—that the garden account concerns a particular relationship and calling rather than the first biological appearance of human beings.

The passage does not establish that second possibility. We should not turn its silences into proof. But neither should we confuse the small number of people named in a narrative with a complete account of everyone who existed.

Suppose, for a moment, that Adam and Eve were not the first human beings biologically. Would that possibility erase the question the garden places before us?

There is still a man before God.

There is still the offered tree of life.

There is still the temptation to reach for something independently of Him.

There is still the terrible movement from openness into hiding.

Whatever conclusion we reach about human origins, those matters remain before us. The account presses a question that reaches into our own existence: How will we live in relation to the One who made us?

More deeply, it asks whether we will receive God’s life or insist upon a life of our own.

We can spend a lifetime arguing about the population outside the garden and scarcely notice the tree within it.

That is precisely the danger. We can turn the biblical record into a historical puzzle and miss the divine intention. God is not trying to satisfy every question about the past. He is showing us the beginning of His purpose: a human being who will receive His life, and ultimately a corporate man in whom His Son will be all in all.

A Question God Already Knows the Answer To

After the disobedience, God asks Adam where he is.

Surely God has not lost track of him.

The question opens a place in which Adam must answer. It brings the hiding man into speech before the God from whom he has withdrawn.

God does something similar with Cain. He asks where Abel is.

Again, He already knows.

There are questions God asks because He intends to uncover us.

And there are answers He withholds that uncover us just as surely.

Our demand to know everything can expose how frightened we are to trust Him. Our insistence upon a complete explanation can reveal how much we want to stand outside the relationship, examining it, before we consent to enter.

I know that movement in myself.

I would like enough information to make dependence unnecessary.

But a living relationship with God continually brings me back to dependence.

God’s purpose is not to make me an informed observer. It is to make me a vessel of His Son. He is not trying to turn me into an expert on the past. He is bringing me into Christ, where the old independent man gives way to the one new man.

Bethlehem Was Named, Yet Christ Was Missed

The prophecy named Bethlehem.

It did not supply everyone with a complete picture of the child who would be born there.

In Matthew’s account, the religious authorities know where to direct the visitors. They can locate the answer in Scripture. Yet the visitors are the ones the story follows to the child.

That should trouble us.

It is possible to know where Christ ought to be found and still fail to seek Him.

And when He grows into manhood, the difficulty becomes greater. He comes among people with settled expectations about what God’s intervention should look like.

He does not fit.

They can see His face, hear His voice, and observe His works while remaining unable—or unwilling—to receive Him.

The hiddenness of God is therefore more searching than the absence of information. Sometimes He is standing before us, and we cannot bear the form in which He has come.

We expected something grand enough to confirm our importance.

He comes in humility.

We expected Him to establish the world in which we know how to succeed.

He calls us to lose our life.

We expected a religious system that would make us knowledgeable and secure.

He gives us Himself.

God is not interested in producing objective commentators on Christ. He wants Christ to become our life. He wants a people who do not merely study the Son but express Him together as the one new man.

What Was in His Heart?

Here I find it helpful to step back from the habit of treating Scripture as a collection of religious problems to solve.

What if we read with a different question?

What was in God’s heart before any of this began?

The Christian story opens into something larger than the correction of human misconduct. It speaks of a purpose in Christ before the foundation of the world. It moves toward union, toward a people indwelt by God, toward the marriage of the Lamb.

There is desire in that story.

There is the giving of Himself.

There is a people brought into participation in a life they could never produce.

The garden, the bride, the dwelling place, the body—these images invite us to consider how deeply God intends to share Himself.

But the center is not even the people themselves.

The center is the Son.

God wants His Son to be all in all. He wants Christ to fill the universe, the church, and every member of the one new man. He wants the Son to be the content of His people, the life within them, and the expression through them.

The one new man is not an accessory to God’s plan. It is the corporate expression of Christ. God is not merely saving isolated individuals and preparing them for separate spiritual experiences. He is creating one new man in which Christ can be fully expressed.

We should handle such connections humbly. An image does not authorize us to invent whatever story pleases us. Yet neither should we flatten these living pictures into a religious handbook and imagine that nothing has been lost.

God’s purpose reaches into our being.

He intends that His Zoe become our Zoe.

He intends that Christ become all in all.

The Mystery Within Us

Paul speaks of a mystery hidden through the ages and now made known: Christ in you.

Consider where that revelation leads.

After all the searching, all the promises, all the generations looking forward, we arrive at an indwelling Christ.

Zoe.

The divine Zoe received in our spirit.

And even here, God’s manner remains quiet enough to be overlooked. We may be waiting for an extraordinary outward event while neglecting the One who has made His dwelling within us.

We may know the doctrine of indwelling and seldom turn toward the indwelling Lord.

We may defend the word Zoe while drawing our daily existence from ambition, resentment, religious accomplishment, and the hunger to be recognized.

The mystery has been announced. Yet its reality must be lived.

This is where my questions become personal.

Am I willing to become quiet before Him when there is nothing impressive to report?

Will I yield when His Zoe interrupts my cherished opinion?

Will I surrender the need to be someone so that Christ may have room in me?

And will I allow Him to join me to others in the one new man?

God does not want merely to place Christ beside my existing identity. He wants Christ to become my life. He wants the independent self to lose its central place so that the Son may have room to fill me.

The goal is not that I become a better religious individual.

The goal is that Christ becomes all in all.

We Must Not Pretend to Know Why He Is Silent

There is also a painful hiddenness.

People seek God through grief and hear no answer. They pray with sincerity and cannot discern His presence. We should be very careful about telling them that their uncertainty proves pride or spiritual failure.

Scripture itself gives us faithful people who cry out because God seems absent.

We are permitted to cry out with them.

Nor can we explain every silence as a carefully arranged lesson. Sometimes we simply do not know why God has not made Himself clearer.

Faith need not disguise that ignorance.

Perhaps part of reverence is refusing to manufacture an explanation on His behalf.

We can acknowledge the darkness and still turn toward Him.

But even here, we should remember what God is and is not doing. He is not obligated to satisfy every question that arises in us. He is not an objective commentator explaining the meaning of every event. He is the Father bringing all things toward His Son.

That does not make suffering small.

It does mean that our unanswered questions do not stand at the center of reality.

Christ does.

And in Him, the one new man finds its life.

The purpose of God is moving toward the day when the Son will be all in all.

Beyond the Explanation

I suspect there are things God has left outside the frame of His telling.

He has described a situation without explaining its entire setting. He has given a promise without revealing its hour. He has shown us something of His purpose while leaving us astonished at the way He fulfills it.

We should investigate those questions honestly. We should allow our interpretations to be questioned.

But we should also recognize the limits of what God has chosen to reveal. He is not writing a history textbook, a scientific manual, or an objective commentary on the universe. He is revealing His Son.

The Bible is not primarily about everything that happened.

It is about Christ.

It is about the Father’s desire to have Christ expressed in a corporate people.

It is about the one new man.

It is about the Son becoming all in all.

But I do not want to spend my remaining years demanding that God account for everything while giving Him so little access to me.

I want to gain Him.

I want the living Christ to have room in my thoughts, my reactions, my loves, and my ordinary hours.

I want to be joined to others in the reality of the one new man, where Christ is not merely admired but expressed.

The God who hides Himself has also given Himself.

That is where I return.

I may never settle every question surrounding the garden. But I can turn toward the Zoe it places before me.

I may not understand why the road has been so obscure. But I can yield to Christ where I meet Him today.

I may not know every detail of the world outside the garden. But I can know the Son who is the center of God’s purpose.

And perhaps the most searching question is no longer whether God has told me everything I want to know.

Perhaps it is this:

Is Christ becoming all in all in me, and am I willing to belong to the one new man in which He is expressed?

Even with all my questions remaining unanswered.

My status before God unknown.

My usefulness in doubt.

“And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.” —Matthew 11:6