Honoring Mystery
In my last post, I wrote about our standing invitation to seek after the “more” of the Lord – to pursue mystery. There is another dimension to this thought, however. At the same time that we are invited to explore the depths of God, we must also maintain a respect and honor for His mystery. What I mean by that is we cannot force an unveiling. We can pursue, but we cannot force or manipulate God to reveal.
This certainly applies in a prayerful sense, in which we enter into relationship with God embracing a disposition of awe, wonder, and godly fear of the Lord, but it also has very practical repercussions in the way we approach our lived day-to-day experiences.
Right now, we are stewarding an era in time commonly referred to as the “already but not yet” – the initiation of God’s Kingdom on this earth as a reality that is already here in some measure, but is not yet complete; it remains in-process until reached in its fullness, at which time all things will be restored to their proper order as God designed and under His perfect dominion. In other words, we are in the time frame between Jesus’ first coming and Jesus’ second coming, which is transitional. We know where this story started, and we know where it is meant to end. But we’ve been placed in the middle of it, with a role to help it advance, and that advancement comes through process. It comes through a gradual increase of the realities of heaven on earth “until His glory fills the land” – not all at once. The Bride is in a preparation process for the wedding of all weddings, which is set to mark the remainder of eternity. That kind of preparation doesn’t take place overnight. In our short lifetimes, we see bits and pieces – glimpses – of the restoration, healing, purifying, unifying, and beautifying that furthers things in this direction, which has been underway for over 2000 years. But we are still in-process, awaiting the day that the brokenness of this earth will be fully displaced by the perfection of heaven.
This presents an interesting situation and set of considerations for those of us who are helping to usher this Kingdom in. It means that we have the weighty responsibility – and trust of God – to hold in tension the “already” and the “not yet.” To hold in tension the truth that God right now is King, powerful and victorious over every force of darkness and has defeated death once and for all… and the fact that our lived experience does not always reflect this truth. We have to hold in tension the truth of who God is, a good, kind, and perfect Father who loves, protects, and provides for His children… and the very real pain and suffering that still exists in our world. The temptation in the face of these discrepancies is to diminish one or the other – to either reduce the character, nature, and identity of God… or to ignore or dismiss the impact that suffering has on us. The temptation is very real to seek resolution by favoring one or the other: either God is not who He says He is and we must water down the gospel in order to explain our lived experiences… or suffering is simply part of life and we must accept and move past it without question, hesitation, or attention.
But as Christians, it is crucial that we learn how to steward this transitional era. We live in the midst of a creation that is not yet what it ought to be, but is on its way to something – a process that is wrapped in mystery and led by a God who is Himself mystery. We simply are not privy to see every facet of this progression, nor do we have the capacity to do so in our limited and broken human faculties. But we do see evidence of what is underway, glimpses of what we are becoming, promises of what is to come. As St. Paul states it, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then [when the time of perfection comes] face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully” (1 Cor 13:12). And our place in this process as people of faith will require us to hold these two things in tension – the “already” and the “not yet.”
This tension is not easy, and holding it requires intentionality. There is a natural desire in us to reconcile discrepancies when we find them, to bring order to chaos. This is a good instinct, however it carries a danger. I think in our attempt to alleviate the strain of this tension, we’ve become masters at softening or re-writing the truths of Scripture to find a way to explain our lived experiences. To account for the gap between the promise and our experience. It’s a coping mechanism to deal with the pain of hope deferred, and it’s completely understandable. But the trouble is, it’s not faith. There is a reason why faith is difficult – not because of some set of rules that we may feel Jesus has imposed on us – that’s simply performance. But because when we face moments that fall short of God’s promises, we have to choose what we will hold onto: the security of having an explanation that connects the dots and gives us a sense of understanding/control, or God Himself. Faith is believing unwaveringly that God is who He says He is and He’ll do what He says He will do. It means that in Scripture, when Jesus sets the bar for us at a certain height, come hell or high water, we keep it there. And when our experiences fall short of that bar, we don’t lower the bar or negotiate our belief; we challenge our experiences.
Randy Clark puts it this way: “I will not lower the standard of the Bible to the level of my experience. Instead, I will insist that my experience rise up to the standard of the Bible.”
Concretely, that means that when Jesus tells us to heal the sick or raise the dead or multiply bread or calm storms or cast out demons, we do so boldly, expecting results every time. We follow the model that Jesus taught his disciples because that’s the bar he set for us: that impossibilities bow to the name of Jesus; that our missional target is “on earth as it is in heaven.” We do not lower the target to something that seems more realistic or to something ambiguous enough that we’ll never know whether or not breakthrough has come. We pray boldly and clearly, and we pursue exactly the thing Jesus told us to pursue. Jesus never taught us how to deal with unanswered prayers because that was never meant to be our normal – it was never his experience, and it is not meant to be our experience, either. We are designed to experience breakthrough and victory in consequence to our prayers. So as we move through this world and pray according to his command, we choose to keep our hope up, our faith engaged. We lean into the “already.”
And on occasions when we do not see the expected results, we make the deliberate choice to embrace tension. We don’t run from our experience; we don’t deny the weight of disappointment or mask the pain of heartbreak. We allow ourselves to be affected by it, taking whatever time necessary to walk through its impact on us. But in that, we choose to stay unmoved in the conviction of who God is – Healer, Deliverer, Rescuer, Protector, Provider – and that His will for us to experience Him as such has not changed. We follow the model of the psalmist David: we wrestle, we cry out, we emote… we allow our hearts to spill their contents to the Lord, however ugly it gets… and when we land, we choose to land on hope. We choose to let our faith rise once again. We resist the urge to diminish truth in an attempt to protect ourselves from future disappointment.
Embracing this tension means exercising a level of spiritual and emotional maturity that gives room for us to have the faith of a child while being fully alive to the human experience – allowing ourselves to feel and process the full range of emotions that come along with the “not yet” – even in disappointment, even in pain, even in grief. And then to pick ourselves up afterward and return to the childlike faith. We see this even with Jesus – he wept at the passing of Lazarus. And then he raised him.
Chris Gore is the director of a healing ministry who has navigated many such disappointments. When asked by a stranger what he does when a person he is praying for ends up dying, Chris shared that he does five things:
“The first thing that I do with the permission of the family is to pray that they are resurrected from the dead. The second thing I do, if they are not resurrected from the dead, is bury them. Then I mourn with the family. Many Christians think that mourning is wrong. We don’t mourn like the world; we mourn with the knowing that we will see them again, but we can’t allow our mourning to lead us to unbelief. The fourth thing that I do is refuse to be offended at God, and the fifth thing that I do is get up, get back on the front line and go look for the next impossibility to bow its knee to Jesus.” [1]
I’ve found this to be absolutely critical in this hour of history: we must refuse to be offended at God. This is what it means to honor mystery. It means in the face of disappointment, we get comfortable simply saying, “I don’t know.” It means we learn to be comfortable sitting in the middle of mystery and not offering an explanation – to ourselves nor to others. We allow ourselves to simply say, “I don’t know why this happened, but I know who God is, and I refuse to create an explanation that will detract from who He reveals Himself to be.”
This doesn’t mean we deny our pain or sugar-coat situations or make excuses for God. We most certainly have permission and the need to wrestle with the discrepancies, to feel what we’re feeling, to cry and grieve and lament. But honoring mystery means not pursuing an explanation if God isn’t revealing one. We cannot force mystery to unveil. But we can sit, attentive to it, honoring it… and drawing close to God. We can seek His presence over answers. In the midst of our pain, we can seek the presence of the Comforter for our healing, rather than the illusion of comfort in the form of answers.
This is hard. Straddling the line between heaven and earth – seeing glimpses of His glory while still awaiting its completion. Wrestling with the mis-match of things of this earth and things of His Kingdom. Knowing how things ought to be, but not being fully in control of bringing them about. Being patient in the process of creation-wide redemption as it unfolds. It seems discouraging to be “stuck” here, in the “already but not yet” – a tease, almost. That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is to see the tremendous honor of being entrusted by God with this colossal transition. Transition in any capacity is difficult, and can be done well or can be done very, very poorly. This is all the more magnified due to the nature and scale of what we’re dealing with here. In all of history, from the dawn of creation, you and I were selected by God to help manage and further this transition from brokenness to glory. Not to be victimized or tormented by it, but to assist it, to further it. Once we understand and embrace our role in this, the easier it becomes to dwell in this state and to steward the mystery of it all.
1. Walking in Supernatural Healing Power, p.32