Hiding in Plain Sight
Monday (October 13)
Hiding in Plain Sight
Psalm 16:11
You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
The atheistic cosmologist of yesteryear, Bertrand Russell, was allegedly asked what he would say to God if he found out that God really existed, and Russell sarcastically responded, “I’d say to God, ‘Why did You take such great lengths to hide Yourself?’” Well, Russell missed the simple call of discipleship expressed in various ways throughout the Bible, through Scriptures like, “You will seek Me and find Me when You seek Me with all your heart,” and “You have said ‘Seek My face; Your face do I seek’,” and “blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.” The life of faith is a seeking life as much as it is a finding life.
Russell got one thing right, though. God has taken lengths to hide Himself, hasn’t He? Look at the face He wore when taking on our human form. It wasn’t an attractive face, was it? And wasn’t His birthplace a manger on the outskirts of town? And didn’t He grow up in a poor house in a backwater town? And isn’t that part of the reason why so many people walked right by Him and didn’t recognize His deity immediately? Isn’t that why it took His disciples time to understand? If Christ had been ten feet tall and radiated like the sun and rode on clouds through Jerusalem and spoke in thunders and lightnings, then even Pharisees would’ve recognized His deity. So why did He conceal His glory in robes so poor and homely and common? Why did He cloak His will in so confounding a form? The answer’s never been a secret: so that we’d find Him by faith and not by sight.
Saints like Job and David and Habakkuk can all testify to feeling forsaken by God during their times of trial, oh, but their laments don’t end there! They resolve in the abiding truth of Psalm 16:11. In fact, the reason David can pen words like, “in Your presence is fullness of joy,” is because those seasons of loneliness led him directly into deepened intimacy with the Almighty. Likewise, he can only write, “at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore,” because those dark, shadowy valleys emptied him out into boundless meadows of revelation.