Friends: Christianity’s great challenge to secular intellect is the truth and reality embodied in the mystery of God. Man wants evidence, Jesus insists on faith. Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #979

August 19, 2025

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Embracing the Mystery

By Bob Walters

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. … what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.” – Hebrews 11:1,3 ESV

Hebrews 11 is the great New Testament catalog of the Old Testament prophets and faithful whose trust in God exemplified and to this day remain object lessons commending the promises of God. Jesus is all the proof we need.

“Proof,” however, looms across the non-theological firmament as that which must be provided in understandable, tangible, empirical, human terms – i.e. evidence – to validate God’s reality. Faith, the non-faithful loudly proclaim, is not proof enough. 

I blame the ancient Greeks for re-casting reality out of the realm of Godly faith and instead funneling God’s presence and purpose as things to be tucked away from true intellect. Not to pick on Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle – great Greek thinkers and educators who sensed the necessity and logic of the existence of One True God – but their final reality was governed only by that which could be seen, defined, and explained by humans to humans. Divine mystery, evidently, could not be part of reality.

The problem here is so simple that great minds can’t grasp it; God’s mind is different from ours. He says so himself in Isaiah 55:8-9, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as heavens are higher than earth, so are my ways higher than yours, and my thoughts than yours.”

Humanity’s greatest minds, if they be slaves to physical evidence, haven’t thought through that the one who created our minds – granted, in His own image – has a perpetual leg up on what and how a human mind might conceive.  The highest, most logical and legitimate reality a human should expect – should depend on – is that our Creator knows more than we do.  That insults many self-congratulating human minds.

But I believe there is more.  It is not just that God is smarter, eternal, more righteous, more creative, more loving, and more everything than humans.  “Higher,” I submit, truly means “different.” We think how we limitedly think; God is unconstrained.

Humans are stuck in the closed crosshairs of time, space, matter, probability, and aspiration, with only an occasional peak behind the divine curtain of God’s intentions and the mind of Christ. God, on the other hand, is not “stuck.”

As humans our only mental ability to get “unstuck” resides in a mystery that Paul refers to as “the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16), and to “have the same mind in you that was in Christ.” (1 Timothy 2:5). The first suggests the illuminating indwelling of the Holy Spirit that shifts our perspective to think like Christ, and the second to model His humility, selflessness, obedience … and His trust in God.

These are among the free – and underappreciated – gifts we receive with faith in Christ. If we lack wisdom, James 1:5 invites us to “to ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault.” We are never shy about asking in prayer, in Christ’s name, to fix our problems, heal our wounds, or cleanse our sins, both for ourselves and others.

So why won’t we deeply accept God’s offer of wisdom unlocked by our faith? Because we are thinking in worldly terms of needing an explanation rather than, in faith, accepting the mystery of not being able to entirely explain the gift. It is still real and true.

Western culture loves a good mystery as entertainment, but the very best mystery is when our faith leads us to relationship with God through truth in Christ.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is relieved he doesn’t have to explain everything. Btw, the Greeks mentioned lived during the period between the Bible’s Testaments.