God Hiding and Hidden – Proverbs 25:2

One attempt to explain why God remains relatively hidden comes from the Augustinians of the Assumption: “To be like God, though, means to share God’s life, which is to share God’s way of loving and being Love. If God became visible as God, in the divine essence, before us, we would fall in love, quite naturally with that which is perfectly Good and True and Beautiful. But that is not how God loves. God loves us, who are not good nor true nor beautiful. God loves us as sinners. God loves us in our weakness, our ugliness, and our brokenness.  If our love is to be like God’s, then God must remain hidden so that we are able to learn to see one another and all of creation as God sees it.”  According to Proverbs, God does not only stay hidden Himself, but conceals how He does things.

It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out. (Proverbs 25:2, ESV)

There have been many times when I have wished God would show us why He has done something or allowed something to happen.   It most often revolves, for me, around why He has let little children suffer.  I haven’t thought of it as His glory that He hasn’t revealed that.  I may find it easier to glorify Him because He hasn’t revealed how all of His creation works.

He has told us that His thoughts are higher than our thoughts (Isaiah 55:9).  But He does not hinder us, necessarily, from searching things out and trying to discover His ways.  It is just that we might find that impossible at times.  And the reason is that we don’t have the capacity to understand.  He is infinite and we are finite.  It would be expected that we would not entirely understand Him or what He does.  He sees and knows more than we do or can.

Nevertheless, it is the glory of kings, and all leaders for that matter, to search things out.  Solomon was a perfect example of this, studying God’s creation and learning much from it, and studying human nature and behavior and learning much from it.  God encourages botany and astronomy and psychology and all that we have called the scientific endeavor.  He encourages searching out business and leadership and governance and politics and on and on.

He made us to be discoverers, and leaders, in particular, need to be discoverers because it is leaders whose vision we follow and who see clearer than we do where we need to go to improve our lot.  Are you a leader?  Then you are a searcher and discoverer.