Flattening the Mystery

Trying to force coherence where God has paradox.

“The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.”

—Deuteronomy 29:29, ESV

Moses speaks at the edge of promise, renewing covenant with a generation that has not yet crossed Jordan. The words come in the context of blessing and curse, faithfulness and apostasy, national destiny hanging on obedience to revelation (Deuteronomy 28-30). But here Moses establishes a boundary more fundamental than geography: God Himself determines what remains hidden and what is disclosed. The secret things—nistaroth—are His exclusive domain. The revealed things—nigloth—are given not for speculation but for obedience. To demand more clarity than He has given is to transgress the boundary between creature and Creator, to diminish the depth He intends to preserve.

This is no arbitrary withholding. The distinction is covenantal. Israel receives enough light to walk in, enough truth to obey by, enough revelation to be held accountable. What remains concealed belongs to God’s counsel, purposes known fully only within the Godhead itself. The sufficiency of Scripture does not mean the exhaustiveness of comprehension. Revelation is complete for salvation and sanctification (2 Timothy 3:16-17; 2 Peter 1:3), but it does not flatten the infinite into the finite. To treat mystery as deficiency is to misread the nature of divine disclosure.

The temptation of the human heart is to smooth what Scripture leaves rough-edged, to force coherence where God has left paradox, to exchange awe for analysis. This is what it means to flatten the mystery. We want tidy systems where God has given doxology, clear mechanisms where He has given commands to trust and obey. The impulse is ancient—Adam grasping for knowledge reserved to God (Genesis 3:5-6), Israel demanding certainty where God required faith (Exodus 16:2-3; Numbers 14:2-4), the Corinthians prizing wisdom over the scandal of the cross (1 Corinthians 1:18-25). The modern evangelical inherits this tendency, armed now with systematic categories and resolute confidence that every biblical tension must resolve into perfect logical harmony.

But Scripture itself resists this flattening. It proclaims truths that stand in irreducible tension, paradoxes that refuse domestication, depths that exceed our capacity to fathom. The Word calls us instead to a Berean posture: search the Scriptures with diligence (Acts 17:11), submit to their boundaries with humility, and worship where comprehension fails. Mystery is not a flaw in revelation but a feature of divine wisdom. It is not the gap we must close but the depth we must honor. To flatten mystery is to commit a double error: it treats God’s purposeful hiddenness as accidental obscurity, and it elevates human understanding to the throne of interpretive authority.

God hides truth from the wise and reveals it to babes (Matthew 11:25; Luke 10:21). The natural person cannot understand spiritual things (1 Corinthians 2:14). Even angels long to look into the mysteries of salvation but do not comprehend them fully (1 Peter 1:12). If angelic beings—creatures of greater intellect and unhindered by sin—stand before mysteries they cannot penetrate, how much more should we embrace the limits of our understanding? The question is not whether mystery exists, but whether we will receive it as gift or reject it as obstacle.

The Hiddenness of Divine Purpose

Before examining specific mysteries, we must confront the broader biblical pattern: God deliberately conceals truth for His own purposes. This is not pedagogical kindness, waiting until we are ready to understand. It is sovereign prerogative, the King determining what His subjects need to know and what He reserves to Himself.

Daniel receives visions but is told, “Shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end” (Daniel 12:4, 9). The revelation is given, but understanding is withheld. The prophet is commanded to preserve what he cannot fully comprehend. Isaiah is sent to a people whose ears will be made dull and whose eyes will be blinded, “lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed” (Isaiah 6:9-10). Jesus Himself quotes this passage to explain why He speaks in parables—not to illuminate but to conceal, “so that ‘they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand’” (Mark 4:11-12; Matthew 13:10-15). This is not divine cruelty but judicial hardening, the righteous response to persistent unbelief (Romans 11:7-10).

Paul marvels that “through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 3:10). The angelic hosts are taught God’s wisdom through the display of His redemptive work in the church—Christ in the Gentiles, Jew and Greek united in one body, the bride prepared for the Bridegroom. Peter writes that even the prophets who predicted this salvation “inquired and searched carefully” about the grace to come, yet “it was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you” (1 Peter 1:10-12). They penned Scripture without comprehending its full weight. They wrote better than they knew. And “into these things angels long to look” (1 Peter 1:12)—the mystery unfolds before created beings, both human and angelic, who marvel at what they see.

This pattern persists into the New Covenant. Jesus tells His disciples, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” (John 16:12). Paul speaks of being caught up to the third heaven and hearing “things that cannot be told, which man may not utter” (2 Corinthians 12:4). John concludes his Gospel admitting that if all Jesus did were written down, “the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25). Revelation is sufficient but not exhaustive. We know enough to trust and obey, but not enough to eliminate wonder.

The error, then, is not in acknowledging mystery but in resenting it. The flattening impulse treats hiddenness as a problem to be solved rather than a boundary to be honored. It assumes that mature faith requires comprehensive understanding, that obscurity must signal either divine failure or human deficiency. But Scripture testifies otherwise. Mystery is purposeful. God could have made all things plain; He chose instead to leave depths unsounded, questions unanswered, paradoxes unresolved. This is not weakness but wisdom, not absence but presence too glorious to be grasped.

Prayer and Sovereignty: Daniel’s Paradox

Daniel read Jeremiah’s prophecy: seventy years decreed for Jerusalem’s desolation (Jeremiah 25:11-12; 29:10). The word was settled, the timeline fixed. Human logic might conclude that prayer is superfluous. If the decree is certain, why petition? If God has spoken the end, what role remains for human plea? But Daniel did not press revelation beyond its boundary. He did not treat divine sovereignty as negating human responsibility. Instead, he “turned to the Lord God, seeking him by prayer and pleas for mercy with fasting and sackcloth and ashes” (Daniel 9:3).

Here is the paradox in its sharpest form: God’s decree does not render prayer pointless; it makes prayer purposeful. Daniel prays because God has spoken, not despite it. He confesses Israel’s sin (Daniel 9:5-11), pleads God’s covenant faithfulness (Daniel 9:15-16), appeals to the Lord’s own reputation among the nations (Daniel 9:17-19). He does not resolve the tension between divine sovereignty and human agency—he inhabits it. His prayer is not an attempt to domesticate transcendence but to trust God’s promise through petition. To demand more clarity than God had given would have been to flatten the mystery; instead, Daniel embraced it with reverent obedience.

Scripture everywhere affirms both divine decree and human prayer. Jesus teaches His disciples to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done” (Matthew 6:10)—a petition that presupposes God’s sovereign will while insisting that human prayer participates in its unfolding. Paul writes that God “works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Ephesians 1:11), yet commands believers to “continue steadfastly in prayer” (Colossians 4:2; Romans 12:12). James insists, “You do not have, because you do not ask” (James 4:2), even as he elsewhere affirms that every good gift descends from the Father of lights “with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17).

The flattening impulse here takes two forms. Some collapse prayer into determinism: if God has decreed all things, prayer is theatrical performance with no real effect. Others collapse sovereignty into contingency: if prayer truly matters, God’s plans must be flexible, responsive, open to alteration based on our petitions. Both approaches refuse the mystery. Both demand clarity that Scripture does not provide. The Word instead holds sovereignty and prayer together, side by side, refusing to subordinate one to the other. Daniel models the posture we must maintain: trust God’s decree, and pray as if the outcome depends on it.

God’s Thoughts and Our Limits

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9)

This is not divine evasion but explicit declaration: the gap between Creator and creature is ontological, not merely informational. God does not think more clearly than we do; He thinks in a categorically different mode. His wisdom is not our wisdom scaled up; it is wisdom of an entirely different order. The distance is infinite. No amount of study, no depth of sanctification, no maturity of faith closes that gap. To be human is to be limited; to be God is to be limitless. Mystery flows from the nature of things.

Ecclesiastes presses this further: “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). The human heart possesses an awareness of eternity, a capacity to sense transcendence, a hunger for the infinite. But comprehension eludes us. We are made to wonder at what we cannot fully grasp, to long for what exceeds our reach. This is design, not defect. To insist on answers where God has left questions is to exchange awe for analysis, to reduce worship to intellectual mastery.

Job receives no explanation for his suffering. God does not answer Job’s questions; He asks His own. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding” (Job 38:4). The response is not cruelty but calibration. Job has demanded clarity; God offers immensity. The Lord does not flatten the mystery of suffering into neat theodicy—efforts to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with the goodness, justice, and sovereignty of God. He does not provide the categories Job seeks. Instead, He confronts Job with His own incomprehensible majesty, and Job repents in dust and ashes (Job 42:6)—not because his questions are answered, but because he sees that his questions were too small.

Paul concludes his reflection on Israel’s unbelief and God’s redemptive purposes with doxology, not explanation: “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” (Romans 11:33-34). The apostle does not resolve the tension between Israel’s rejection and God’s faithfulness, between human unbelief and divine sovereignty. He does not flatten the mystery into system. He worships. And in worshiping, he models the posture appropriate to creatures who encounter depths they cannot fathom.

To flatten the mystery here would be to treat divine silence as deficiency, to assume that what we cannot explain must not be true. But Scripture insists instead that we bow before the depths and walk in the light we are given. Faith does not require comprehensive understanding. It requires trust in the One whose understanding is comprehensive (Psalm 147:5; Isaiah 40:28).

Incarnation: Fully God, Fully Man

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)

The Word—eternal, uncreated, coequal with the Father (John 1:1-3)—took on flesh. The infinite entered the finite without ceasing to be infinite. The Creator became creature without forfeiting deity. John does not explain the mechanics; he proclaims the event. The Prologue offers no mechanism for how divine and human natures unite in one person. It simply asserts both truths and calls us to behold His glory.

Paul writes that “in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9). Not part of deity. Not a diminished deity. The whole fullness—pan to plērōma tēs theotētos—resides in bodily form. The incarnation is not God appearing as man, nor man elevated to divinity. It is the joining of two natures in one person without mixture, confusion, separation, or division—the language of Chalcedon attempts to guard mystery, not to eliminate it. The Council fathers knew they could not explain how the hypostatic union works. They could only affirm that it is so and exclude the errors that distort it.

Hebrews confesses that Christ “had to be made like his brothers in every respect” (Hebrews 2:17), yet He “knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21). He grew in wisdom and stature (Luke 2:52), yet upholds the universe by the word of His power (Hebrews 1:3). He learned obedience through suffering (Hebrews 5:8), yet is eternally the obedient Son (John 8:29; Philippians 2:8). He was tempted in every way as we are (Hebrews 4:15), yet could not sin because He is God (James 1:13; Titus 1:2). These truths stand in irreducible tension. To flatten the mystery is to reduce incarnation into either divinity or humanity, to collapse one nature into the other for the sake of logical tidiness.

But Scripture refuses this flattening. It holds both truths together and invites worship, not explanation. When the disciples see Jesus walking on water, they worship Him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God” (Matthew 14:33). When Thomas touches the risen wounds, he confesses, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). They do not demand a metaphysical account of how deity and humanity unite. They encounter the person, and they bow. The incarnation is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be adored.

Trinity: One God, Three Persons

“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” (Deuteronomy 6:4)

The Shema is the foundation of Israel’s faith, the confession that distinguishes Yahweh from the idols of the nations. God is one—echad, a unity that permits no division. Yet Jesus commands baptism “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). Not names, plural, but name, singular—one name shared by three persons. Paul blesses the Corinthians with “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit” (2 Corinthians 13:14). Peter addresses believers as those chosen “according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:2).

The New Testament assumes Trinitarian reality without offering a philosophical explanation of how one God exists as three persons. The Father is God (John 6:27; 1 Corinthians 8:6), the Son is God (John 1:1; 20:28; Titus 2:13; Hebrews 1:8), the Spirit is God (Acts 5:3-4; 1 Corinthians 3:16; 2 Corinthians 3:17-18). Yet there are not three Gods but one (Deuteronomy 6:4; 1 Corinthians 8:4-6; James 2:19). The persons are distinct—the Father sends the Son (John 3:16; Galatians 4:4), the Son prays to the Father (John 17:1-26; Hebrews 5:7), the Spirit proceeds from the Father and is sent by the Son (John 15:26; 16:7). Yet they are not separate—the Father is in the Son, the Son in the Father (John 10:38; 14:10-11), and the Spirit is the Spirit of both Father and Son (Romans 8:9; Galatians 4:6; Philippians 1:19).

The Church developed the language of substantia and persona—one essence, three persons—not to add to Scripture but to guard what Scripture reveals. The terms are tools, fences around mystery, preventing the errors that flatten Trinitarian truth into either tritheism (three Gods) or modalism (one God wearing three masks). But the tools do not eliminate mystery. Augustine confessed that we use such language “not in order to say something, but in order not to remain silent.” We speak because Scripture compels us to, yet our words cannot capture the reality they describe.

To flatten the mystery here would be to erase either unity or distinction, to force coherence where God has left paradox. Some resolve the tension by subordinating the Son and Spirit, making them less than fully God. Others collapse the persons into modes or manifestations, making them less than truly distinct. Both approaches domesticate transcendence. Both refuse the depth of revelation. Scripture holds unity and trinity together, insisting on both, explaining neither. And the Church’s confession through the ages has been to receive this mystery as gift, to worship the Triune God without pretending to comprehend the inner life of the Godhead.

Election and Human Responsibility

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.” (Ephesians 1:3-4)

Paul begins his letter to the Ephesians with doxology, not debate. He does not defend election; he celebrates it. God chose His people before creation, before time, before any human will or work could serve as grounds. The choice is unconditional, rooted in divine purpose and grace alone (Romans 9:11-16; 2 Timothy 1:9). It is particular, not universal—”us,” not all (John 15:16, 19; Acts 13:48). It is effectual, securing not only the offer of salvation but the response of faith (Acts 16:14; Philippians 1:29). This is election in its biblical form: God’s sovereign choice of specific individuals unto salvation, purposed in eternity, accomplished in time through the work of Christ and the call of the Spirit.

Yet the same Paul writes, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). Salvation is conditioned on confession and belief. The call goes out to all: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13). The offer is genuine, the invitation sincere, the command universal. “God… commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30). The gospel is not proclaimed with the caveat, “If you are elect, believe.” It is proclaimed to all, with the promise that whoever believes will be saved (John 3:16; 6:37, 40).

To flatten this mystery is to collapse one truth into the other. Some resolve the tension by denying election, insisting that human choice alone determines salvation. Others resolve it by denying genuine human responsibility, treating the call to believe as mere formality since God has already determined who will respond. But Scripture refuses both reductions. It proclaims sovereign election and human responsibility side by side, without subordinating one to the other, without offering a mechanism that reconciles them to our satisfaction.

Jesus tells the disciples, “You did not choose me, but I chose you” (John 15:16). Yet He also commands, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life” (John 3:36). Peter writes that believers are “elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father” (1 Peter 1:2), yet exhorts them to “make your calling and election sure” (2 Peter 1:10). Paul declares that God “chose us in him before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4), yet urges the Corinthians to “examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith” (2 Corinthians 13:5). The Scriptures hold election and responsibility together throughout. They do not explain how divine sovereignty and human agency coexist. They simply insist that both are true and that both must be preached.

The flattening impulse here is strong. It feels intolerable to proclaim two truths that seem to contradict. Surely one must yield to the other for the sake of logical consistency. But this is to demand more clarity than God has given, to smooth what Scripture leaves rough-edged. The Word calls us instead to embrace both truths, to preach election without fatalism and responsibility without Pelagianism. Faith flourishes not when mystery is eliminated but when it is honored, when we trust that God’s ways are higher than ours (Isaiah 55:8-9) and that His revealed truth, even in tension, is sufficient for salvation and godliness (2 Peter 1:3).

Providence and Human Action

“The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps.” (Proverbs 16:9)

Human planning is real. The heart devises, considers options, weighs outcomes, makes decisions. Yet divine sovereignty is ultimate. The Lord establishes, determines, ordains the outcome. Both statements are true. Both are affirmed without caveat. The proverb does not resolve the relationship between human intention and divine purpose; it simply places them side by side and lets the tension stand.

Joseph tells his brothers, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (Genesis 50:20). The brothers acted with malicious intent. Their guilt is real, their sin accountable. Yet God’s purpose was good. The same event bears both human evil and divine goodness without either negating the other. The crucifixion of Christ is the ultimate example: “This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23). The act is simultaneously the worst sin in human history and the center of God’s redemptive plan. Human guilt and divine sovereignty converge without collision.

Proverbs also teaches, “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD” (Proverbs 16:33). Even chance—the roll of dice, the drawing of lots—falls under divine government. Nothing escapes His rule (Ephesians 1:11; Daniel 4:35). Yet Scripture nowhere suggests that human choices are illusory or that responsibility is a fiction. The flood comes because “the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth” (Genesis 6:5), yet Scripture also says “the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (Genesis 6:6). The language of divine regret—the ESV footnote offers “was sorry” as an alternative—does not contradict God’s immutability or sovereign decree (Malachi 3:6; Numbers 23:19). Rather, it reveals God’s genuine response to human sin within His eternal purpose.

To flatten this mystery is to erase either providence or agency. Some treat God’s sovereignty as eliminating human freedom, reducing our choices to predetermined scripts. Others treat human action as requiring God’s plans to be contingent, flexible, subject to change based on our decisions. Both approaches refuse the depth of Scripture. The Word holds providence and responsibility together, insisting that God governs all things while humans act freely, that divine decree is absolute while human choice is genuine.

Paul commands believers to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12-13). The imperative—work out—assumes real human effort. The indicative—God works in you—grounds that effort in divine enabling. Both are essential. To emphasize one at the expense of the other is to distort the gospel. Salvation is all of grace (Ephesians 2:8-9), yet it requires our response (Acts 2:38; 16:31). Sanctification is all of God (1 Thessalonians 5:23-24), yet it demands our labor (Hebrews 12:14; 2 Peter 1:5-7). The mystery is not deficiency but design.

The Comfort of the Inexhaustible

There is pastoral wisdom in mystery. To flatten revelation into exhaustive comprehension is to shrink God to the size of our understanding. It is to turn theology into mathematics, faith into formula, worship into intellectual mastery. But the God who exceeds our grasp is the God worth worshiping. The depths we cannot fathom are the depths we can trust will never run dry.

When Paul writes that we “know in part” and “see in a mirror dimly” (1 Corinthians 13:12), he is not lamenting deficiency but acknowledging reality. Our knowledge is partial, not false. Our vision is obscured, not blind. And the promise is not that mystery will be eliminated but that it will be clarified—”then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). Even in glory, creature remains creature. Even in perfection, we do not become omniscient. The gap between finite and infinite is not a temporary condition awaiting correction. It is the nature of the relationship between God and His image-bearers.

This means we can rest in what we do not know. We do not need to resolve every tension to trust God’s character. We do not need to flatten every paradox to walk in obedience. The gospel is clear: Christ died for sinners (Romans 5:8; 1 Corinthians 15:3), rose for our justification (Romans 4:25), reigns at the Father’s right hand (Hebrews 1:3; 10:12), and will return in glory (Acts 1:11; 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17). Salvation is by grace through faith, not of works (Ephesians 2:8-9). These truths are sufficient for life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3). The mysteries that remain—the mechanics of election, the mode of providence, the inner life of the Trinity—do not obscure the gospel. They deepen our awe.

“The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.”

—Deuteronomy 29:29

Moses returns us to the boundary. What is revealed is sufficient for obedience. What remains hidden belongs to God alone. To demand more clarity than He has given is to transgress that boundary, to flatten the mystery into something manageable, to exchange the infinite for the finite. But Scripture invites a different posture.

Daniel read the decree and prayed (Daniel 9:2-3). Paul proclaimed election and called men to believe (Romans 10:9-13; Ephesians 1:4). The Church confesses Trinity and bows in worship (Matthew 28:19; 2 Corinthians 13:14). We do not resolve the tensions; we inhabit them. We do not flatten the mystery; we honor it. This is not intellectual surrender but spiritual maturity, not the abandonment of truth but submission to its fullness.

The temptation will remain. We will want tidy systems, clear mechanisms, exhaustive explanations. But let us resist. Let us live as Bereans—searching the Scriptures with diligence (Acts 17:11), submitting where they end, and worshiping where they leave us in awe. In this tension, faith is not diminished but deepened, humility is sustained, and obedience becomes worship. For the depths of God are not deficiency but glory, and the mysteries He preserves are gifts, not gaps.

Paul’s doxology stands: “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” (Romans 11:33). Let the depth remain deep. Let the mystery stand. And let us worship the God whose ways are higher than ours (Isaiah 55:8-9), whose thoughts exceed our grasp, and whose revelation is sufficient for all we need to know and do (2 Timothy 3:16-17; 2 Peter 1:3).

For now, we know in part, as seeing in a mirror dimly.