A Sacred Mystery

Every year I step into a sacred mystery that began in the courts of heaven when Satan asked God’s permission to test Job. I see the loss and grief that God allowed Job to suffer, and then I listen as Job’s friends attempt to defend God by heaping guilt on Job. I read aloud each argument as these men try to explain God. I begin again to see the holiness of God. 

Isaiah opens our ears to the voice of God, and we can hear Him explaining His holiness this way, “‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not My ways.’ This is the Lord’s declaration. ‘For as heaven is higher than earth, so My ways are higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts’” (Isaiah 55:8). Part of this sacred mystery is not only the holiness of God, but the invitation to know Him.

When I was a child I felt like I knew and understood God. He was my friend. When I was a teenager I went through a very difficult time that shook my world. I could not fathom why He would allow me to go through such a confusing time. It was the first time that I began to recognize the holiness of God. It was a humbling experience. I was confronted with the choice of walking away or pursuing a sacred mystery.

With a trembling heart I chose to accept the invitation to, “Seek the Lord while He may be found; call on Him while He is near” (Isaiah 55:6). It was during this time in my life that I began to understand what it meant to fear the Lord. In the Scriptures whenever the temporal is intersected by the eternal it brings with it a sense of awe. To come into the presence of a Holy God with a heart of awe and wonder is to begin to find wisdom.

I have found that the longer I live the more aware I am of the sacred mystery of God. Through the pages of Scripture I am invited with the angels to see God seated on His throne and to listen to what they never stop saying day and night: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God, the Almighty, who was, who is, and who is coming” (Revelation 4:8). Like Job, I will never truly be able to understand or explain a holy God, but like Job I can declare, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will stand upon the earth” (Job 19:25). Until that day, I am content to, by faith, live my life in sacred mystery.