When God Hides
“Truly you are a God who has been hiding himself, the God and Savior of Israel.”
The Divine Hiddenness of God is one of theology’s grand mysteries. Can God be truly, fully known? God reveals himself through Scripture and the Incarnation of Christ, but does this reflect the fullness of his character and being? What about the dark and trying times in life, where God seems absent? Did he turn his face away or is he asleep?
St. John of the Cross wrote about the dark night of the soul, that desperate trial in life where God is nowhere to be found. He said that most everyone will undergo a dark night of the soul at one point or another, and that this great wilderness of darkness is both refining and transformative, even while it feels utterly despondent while in the midst of it.
Barabara Brown Taylor, in Learning to Walk in the Dark, describes the innate fear that humans have of the dark and how we’ve been taught that darkness is equivalent to evil. After all, even Scripture says that Christ is Light in the darkness; surely this means that God is absent in the dark.
This may be why children are afraid of the dark, why we assume monsters in the closet or under the bed, and why ghost stories abound. You might say that children are innately afraid of the dark because they recognize the evil present within, but Taylor argues that darkness, while an archetype for all sorts of evil and chaos in Scripture and many mythologies, is not the absence of God. In fact, God can be found in the darkness. At the very least, God is present there, because there is nowhere that God is not present.
It takes a patient soul to wait on God in the dark.
I think the concept of Divine Hiddenness is an invitation to wait on him and to trust that he is present even when it doesn’t feel like it. We are human creatures, created beings who stumble in the dark, while our great Creator sees it as no obstacle. Dark is as light as day to him. And if darkness is the absence of God, then what is said about God to the blind person? It cannot be so, because the blind person is not excluded from the presence of God in their darkness. No, I think the blind have a better grasp on the hiddenness and presence of God than most seeing people.
Thus, while Scripture is the divine revelation of God to the world describing to us his character and nature, no words can do absolute justice to the God Who Cannot Be Named. The metaphors of Light and Darkness relay concepts to us to help us, created beings, understand that nothing is beyond God’s power or reach. Language is limited. The words we use to translate our Scriptures from one language to another are inadequate to fully describe these concepts.
There are the purists of Scripture, who insist that God can only be known in the original languages, but I would offer a rebuttal to that—even the original languages were accommodated to humanity’s intellect and cannot fully encapsulate all that is God. He is God, after all. If we could describe him completely, then would he be God?
Scripture offers glimpses of God, sure. So does nature—trees rustling in the wind, prairie grasses waving furiously, pronghorns leaping majestically through winnowed fields, and the rush of mighty rivers and burbling creeks filling the air with the crisp scent of fresh water. So does humanity in the crinkle of laughing eyes and booming joy, in suffering and weeping with one another as we grieve, and in the perseverance of getting up one more day and then another as we provide for our families and loved ones.
Perhaps it is our ordinary eyes that have grown dull to the extraordinary beauty of God in the everyday. The mystics, philosophers, and social scientists have it right when they say that gratitude is one of the greatest markers of human resilience and good quality of life. When we are grateful, we see the small things and realize that they are not so small; these are the things that make up the substance of the world—a laugh, a hug, a cry, a stunned silence in the face of soaring mountains and unending prairies.
The God who hides himself is present in the small and ordinary.
I wonder if this is the purpose of his hiding himself, if this invitation is to seek him in our mundane relationships, work, creativity, and errands. Brother Lawrence, a 17th century Carmelite monk, wrote The Practice of the Presence of God, which encouraged the reader to find the presence of God in every ordinary thing—in the washing of dishes, taking out the garbage, wiping babies’ bums, lovemaking to your spouse, and sharing a meal with others (granted, he didn’t identify caring for babies or sexual intimacy in his book because he was a celibate monk, but you get the point).
So, can God be fully, truly known? In glimpses, perhaps. In the waiting and the darkness. In the ordinary. Pieces here and there, gradually forming an entire picture, though never complete on this side of Christ’s return. The pieces I see are stunning, truly overwhelming in their goodness and grace. Those glimpses are the fuel that keep me persevering and enduring even while the road is dark.
