Secrets!

It is August, and "Grace Every Day" has become more like "Grace Every Month or So..." It is not that I am not experiencing God's grace everyday and really every moment of my life, but rather how can I do all these stories, of God's unbelievable grace, justice in a blog?

Since I am unable to write about everything going on in my life, today, I will just write about secrets.

My family has never been good at keeping secrets from each other until recently, and now all of the sudden everyone is good at it. They don't tell me anything they shouldn't, and I don't them anything I shouldn't. We all get frustrated with each others new ability to be discreet. However, God has shown me the grace found in secrets. This is really weird for me, but I no longer HAVE to KNOW what going on or what is coming. In fact it is pretty much fine if I never know... Here is what I am learning about secrets:

There is a verse about secrets in the Bible (Proverbs 25:2) that says, "[It is] the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings [is] to search out a matter."

What kind of secrets does God have? What is He concealing? How do these secrets bring Him glory? I can think of two big things God conceals. He conceals Himself. He conceals the future.

Sometimes God conceals Himself completely from a person. They never understand salvation in this life. They never understand His power, or His Deity, or even the fact that He is the their Creator. The fact that some people will never know God as their Savior does not at first glance seem glorifying of God at all. It is a very offensive truth with which lots of us struggled. God is not mean, right? However there are even secrets the children of God will not understand this side of heaven. There are still parts of His character and many of His ways and decisions that we do not understand. Wouldn't it be nice to know NOW? How is this secret keeping glorifying to God?

One way God's secret keeping brings Him glory is that it forces me (and all people) to realize that this life is NOT ABOUT ME, it is about Him. God does not owe the understanding of His character or His ways (I thought He did until I read Job 38-42:6). He does not owe me or salvation or grace. He is above and I am below. I am His creation; He is my Creator. When I understand who He is, the Lord of all, who answers to no one, and is yet perfectly gracious and holy, I can no longer have a problem with what He has chosen to do? And yet I must continue doing what is right in His eyes though I don't know/understand what is going on. It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, if only for the purpose of reminding me of my place and of His place in life as I know it. How gracious He is in reminding me of this truth.

Now God's concealment of the future is tough. There are times when I would give my front tooth to know what was coming. :-) But that isn't how it works... and lately it isn't how I want it to work. How does this concealment of my future bring Him glory? Boy, do I know the answer to this question. When He conceals my future, even the next moment of time, I am forced to cling to His promises, to His Word, to Him. This is so gracious, because I know myself. In the pride of my heart, were I to know what was coming, I would forget about God and do things my own way. I would "lean" on my OWN limited and depraved understanding of things and make my decisions accordingly.

God's concealment of things does bring Him glory, and He is worthy of that glory. But that wasn't the end of the verse, though it could have been. The end of the verse said that it is the honor (Honor spelt with an "ou" to be exact. KJV, you know :-)) of kings to search out a matter. Those of us to whom God has graciously revealed Himself, and even those to whom He has not yet revealed Himself, have the great honor of looking into the secrets of God. It doesn't mean we will understand all of these secrets (though we may), but we have the honor of a personal relationship with the Almighty God who is willing to reveal His glory/His secrets to us. What an unspeakable honor! I'll take it! :-)

So here is the moral of this blog post: Secrets can be really really good things, but only when they are kept and revealed at the right time. So don't tell your secrets and don't force others to tell theirs, until it is time for those secrets to be revealed. While we are waiting for all of those delightful secrets to come out, we have plenty to occupy our minds with looking into the deep secrets of our God.

Daniel 2:20-22 "Daniel answered and said, Blessed be the name of God for ever and ever: for wisdom and might are his: And he changeth the times and the seasons: he removeth kings, and setteth up kings: he giveth wisdom unto the wise, and knowledge to them that know understanding: He revealeth the deep and secret things: he knoweth what [is] in the darkness, and the light dwelleth with him."