The Sense of Scripture: Studies in Interpretation . . .

THE NONDISCLOSURE OF THE BIBLE 

Now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. - I Cor. 13:12 

The burden of this installment is to show that while the Bible is the primary source of God's disclosure of himself to man, it is also an instrument of nondisclosure. The Bible is two-sided: it reveals the mind of God and yet it conceals the mind of God. Again and again the Bible makes it clear that we are not yet ready to make use of all that God will eventually reveal. And even that which is revealed is sometimes so obscure, and so subject to varying interpretations, that we cannot be sure that we understand aright.

Another way to say it is that the Bible has its treasures, those nuggets of truth that wonderfully enlighten us, but they cannot be raided. They must be mined with great care, and even then we never seem to penetrate the deeper veins of gold. We are faced with a contradiction that God must have intended: the Scriptures are simple and yet complex; they are easy and yet difficult; they are comprehensible and yet incomprehensible.

As the apostle Paul pondered the mystery of God's ways with man, he was moved to write: "Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!" (Ro. 11:33)

It is remarkable that an inspired apostle of Christ, one who could say "But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit" (I Co. 2:10), would see God's ways as unsearchable and past finding out. Perhaps he is saying what old Socrates said hundreds of years earlier: the more we know the more we realize that we do not know. If revelation is seen as a circle, the outer edge of which touches the unknown, then the larger the circle the larger the area that touches the unknown. And so, the more we know about God the more we realize that his judgments are unsearchable and his ways past finding out.

That is the essence of the apostle's amazing concession in I Co. 13:12: "Now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face." Phillips renders it: "At present we are men looking at puzzling reflections in a mirror. The time will come when we shall see reality whole and face to face." The old KJV puts it starkly: "Now we see through a glass, darkly." In modern idiom that would be: Up to now we are in the dark.

Commentators tell us that the "mirror" that Paul refers to was of burnished bronze, the only kind they had, polished so that it gave dim reflections. If an apostle would refer to his understanding as dim reflections, how much more should we realize that we don't know much?

This should both humble us and comfort us. It should humble us because we are like a child wading along the edges of a vast ocean in that we are no more than in the shallows of God's overwhelming truth with the illimitable sea of reality stretching out before us, unfathomable and inscrutable. It should comfort us in that the great God of heaven, who, according to Isa. 45:15, pleases to hide himself, has indeed revealed his will to us, and we can understand sufficiently to respond to his overture and enter into a covenant-love relationship with him.

John Henry Newman caught the beauty of this truth in that great line from his Lead, Kindly Light: "I do not ask to see the distant scene - one step enough for me." There is light for our journey when we walk by faith, one step at a time. The mysteries and the unanswered questions will be there as "puzzling reflections," but the good news is that we can join the great apostle in declaring, "I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep what I have committed to Him until that Day" (2 Tim. 1:12)

Our religion would not be true religion if we could comprehend the God we worship. A religion void of mystery and awe would be sheer humanism, a religion of our own creation and one no greater than ourselves. This is why the Bible, a human book as well as a divine one, can only "in part" reveal the mind of God. If the mind of the omniscient God could be reduced to paper and ink, he would be neither omniscient nor God. We can only say something like: to the extent that the magnanimous mind of God can be reduced to the pages of a book the Bible is the disclosure of the mind of God.

The nondisclosure of the Scriptures is nowhere more evident than in the teaching of Jesus himself. In one of his recorded prayers he thanked the Father that "You have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and have revealed them to babes" (Mt. 11:25), and yet "the babes," including his own disciples, had difficulty understanding. And so the parables, calculated to reveal the truth only to the initiated, are often wrapped in obscurity, even to the initiated. It is apparent from the records, especially in Mark, that even his own disciples often did not know what Jesus was talking about.

It seems odd that Jesus would ever have to say to his own disciples, "How is it that you do not understand?," as in Mk. 7:18, and odder still that when they didn't understand they were afraid to ask him to explain: "But they did not understand this saying, and were afraid to ask Him" (Mk. 9:32). They sometimes drew a blank even when he spoke a parable, causing Jesus to say to them, almost impatiently, "Are you thus without understanding also?" (Mk. 7:18).

But we can hardly fault the disciples, for after two millennia of study and research we hardly scratch the surface in understanding what Jesus meant by the kingdom of God. And have we even begun to comprehend the nature of Christ himself? As the psalmist was moved to say of God's knowledge of him, we are moved to say of the mystery of Christ, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; It is high, I cannot attain it" (Ps. 139:6).

That humble attitude of the psalmist is the point I wish to make in this essay. If we approach the Scriptures with bowed head and hat in hand, recognizing that "It is too wonderful for me," we might begin to mine some of its fine gold. The Bible's great truths are like the treasure that a man found and buried in a field, and, as Jesus told the story in a parable in Mt. 13:44, he sold all that he had and bought the field. And Jesus says he was motivated by joy in what he did. When we are moved by the joy of learning what God wants us to know, the obscurity of the Bible will be less of a problem.

One way to deal with the Bible's nondisclosure is to accept the fact that there are things we will never know, and take heart in the truth that we do not have to know. It would be interesting to know if there is an eon of time between the first and second verses of Genesis I. Some scholars, including Donald Grey Barnhouse, insist that there was an earlier creation of a perfect universe, but because of a rebellion God destroyed that earlier creation, and so Gen. 1:2 says, "The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep."

And so, we are told, there might have been millions of years between those two verses, and we thus have not one creation but two, and not one fall and destruction but two. Barnhouse calls it "the Great Interval," and asserts: "That something tremendous and terrible happened to the first, perfect creation is certain" (The Invisible War, p.18). But what he calls certain is only speculation. The Scriptures nowhere indicate any such thing, and the original Hebrew for "The earth was without form and void" can be translated in more than one way, as John C. L. Gibson notes in his commentary.

This is an example of how theologians will build theories on the slightest hint rather than to humbly accept the Bible's nondisclosure.

If God had intended for us to know that there was an earlier perfect creation that somehow went awry and that there is a "great interval" between the first two verses of the Bible, he would surely have said so - and right between those two verses would have been the place for it! Nondisclosure! Do we wish to bring God out of hiding?

Jesus is coming soon! is another example of how we insist on knowing more than the Scriptures allow us to know. I think of the poor Shakers, who started in America back in 1794 under the "inner light" of Mother Ann Lee, who believed that Jesus was coming soon, the world would end, and so there was no time to marry and have families. Besides, sex was a sin. They thrived, gaining 6,000 converts, all sworn to celibacy and communal living, in twenty communities. They were the most enduring of all the utopias of that period, their last community closing only in recent years. They were skilled craftsmen, making the finest furniture in the country. They might have endured had they believed in regeneration - physical regeneration, I mean!

Well, the grass has been growing on Mother Ann Lee's grave for almost two centuries, and Jesus still hasn't come. No one could have made her believe that back in 1794, for she had read all the signs (in the Bible of course!) and she knew. We still have our Mother Ann Lees, just as we had them long before 1794, and they are not likely to weigh the possibility that human history is now only in its infancy, and that it may yet be millennia before it all comes to an end. Because of the mercy of God, if no other reason. Too, God may be up to something on this earth that will yet take a long, long time (as we count time).

Don't misread me, for I accept the fact of Scripture that Jesus is coming "soon," and yet I must recognize that "soon" is wrapped in nondisclosure. The Scriptures close with Jesus saying, "Surely I am coming quickly" (Rev. 22:20). Since 2,000 years have passed since he said that, I must be less than dogmatic about what "quickly" means.

One would suppose that Jesus' surprising disclosure that "But as for that day and hour, nobody knows it, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, no one but the Father only" (Mt. 24:36) would deter the prophets in their prognostication, but it has not. It is noteworthy that some early manuscripts omit "nor the Son" (as reflected in the King James version), probably for theological reasons, for it was too much for some of the scribes to believe that even Jesus did not know the time of his second coming. That underscores God's nondisclosure, for there were some things in the divine plan that were not revealed even to Jesus. Even Jesus apparently could join the psalmist in declaring that "Clouds and darkness surround Him" (Ps. 98:2). How much more should we realize that it is beyond our province to serve as God's counselor, and to realize, as I Tim. 6:16 puts it, that God "dwells in unapproachable light."

The good news is that we don't need to know the time of our Lord's coming, and perhaps it should make no difference, for we should be ready, with our lamps trimmed, whenever it is. Such as I Cor. 1:7 is all we need to know: "eagerly waiting for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ."

God's nondisclosure should also make us slow to judge the eternal destiny of the masses of mankind, whether they be Buddhists, Hindus, or Moslems. It is not uncommon for missionaries to rally support on the ground that "they are going to hell if we do not reach them with the gospel." We have no right to make that judgment, for only He who said "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy" can make that judgment. While the Scriptures condemn the disbeliever, they never condemn the unbeliever, thus distinguishing between those who reject the gospel and those who have never heard it. We also go too far in assuming that God does not to some degree reveal himself in all the great religions of the world. Paul points to both the disclosure and the nondisclosure of God when he insists that among all peoples he has never left himself without witness (Acts 14:17), and has dealt with all nations "so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us" (Acts 17:27).

Can we, like Paul, entertain the prospect that a good Moslem - such as Anwar Sadat? - might "grope for God and find him" in a culture and religion vastly different from our own? If such a thought nullifies in our minds the urgency of Christian missions, then we need to rethink the purpose of missions.

"'My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways.' says the Lord. 'For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts,"' we are told in Isa. 55:8-9, and that points up what I mean by the Bible's nondisclosure. If God's ways and thoughts are so vastly higher than our own, then ascertaining the mind of God, even in the Bible, has its limitation.

Another way of putting it is the way it reads in Dt. 29:29: "The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law." That says it all. The Bible will mean more to us and we will treat it with greater awe when we remember that God has his secrets, and that even those things that are revealed are often "hard to understand," to quote Peter's estimate of some things Paul wrote. How could it be otherwise when the infinite God is revealing himself to finite man?

The essence of it all is that the light we seek is inaccessible and unapproachable (I Tim. 6:16), except in part, and so we can only grope around the periphery. And yet that light has such splendor that the darkness cannot apprehend it, and when we have but its distant glimmer it is sufficient to light our pathway to glory. And after awhile in God's tomorrow when we move somewhat closer how glorious will "the Sun of Righteousness" be to our redeemed souls. As for now, one step at a time is enough, and the light we have is sufficient for that. But even that light is only for those who both love it and seek it. —the Editor