Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

This morning, we read an oracle in which the prophet Isaiah proclaims the absolute sovereignty of God, declares that that sovereignty is a sovereignty of righteousness, puzzles over how human beings think they can gainsay the righteous sovereignty of God, and announces that God plans to lead the nations to glorify and restore God’s people even as they’re brought to worship God with God’s people. It’s a wonderful, multi-faceted oracle!

And there’s this verse toward the end, 45:15, that sticks out as slightly odd: “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.” The idea of a hiding God might be a difficult one to wrap our minds around, but it’s worth wrestling with!

I don’t think for a moment that God’s hiddenness here means God’s absence, though there are certainly times in our lives when we may think that God is, indeed, absent: times of great tribulation, sorrow, suffering, woe. Yet we know, through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, that God desires to show us that God is actually in the thick of things, that God is in the midst of tribulation, sorrow, suffering, woe, bringing life to the tombs, bringing light to darkness, bringing love to our lostness, working out the sovereign purposes of the Righteousness. God is not absent from us in our darkest hours, whatever they may be, but with us: deeply deeply with us.

Rather, I think the hiddenness of God in Isaiah is an expression of awe and wonder, a way of talking about God’s constant upending of human expectations just by being God. It’s as if Isaiah is saying: “Who could have thought this? Who could declare God’s astounding purposes?” Who could have thought that God desired restoration and mercy, that God would reverse the exile of God’s people, that God would bring help from unexpected quarters, that God would bring all nations into one fold? As the Psalmist sings in Psalm 139:6, “Such knowledge is too wonderful and excellent for me : I cannot attain unto it.” A little later in Isaiah 45:19 (which we’ll read in the Office tomorrow), the prophet reports that God does not speak in secret, but declares God’s righteousness openly. The hiddenness of God, then, is a paradoxical manifestation (!) of God’s inconceivable goodness. And the hiddenness of God is also a function of our propensity to think we know what God is up to, or what God is capable of: our unwillingness to be surprised by God’s overwhelming wonderfulness.

Beloved, if we think we have a handle on God, we can be sure that the only thing we really have a handle on is an idol: something that conveniently conforms to the limits of our imaginations and desires, something we can control. But if, by grace, we allow God to have a handle on us, if we relax into the goodness and love we cannot imagine but which, unseen, holds and upholds us, we’ll discover our imaginations shaped by a wonder beyond us, our vision of God’s traces in the world around us and within us clearer, our awe deepened, as we know more and more fully (in and through love!) that the Hidden One is always present to us, and that one day we will know more fully, even as we are fully known.

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+