“The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law - Deuteronomy 29:29
The quest for knowledge is a tricky thing: the more you know, the more you realise you know very little. We are a very long way from seeing a chap in a white coat leaning back in his chair, and say with a satisfied crinkling of the eyes: “that’s it! We now know everything”!
This verse reminds us that there are some things which will always be beyond us, that there are thoughts so deep that they reside only in the mind of God. In fact God is so entirely ‘other’ that we have to rely on him to tell us about himself. The various gods and idols of the nations surrounding Israel remind us that humans have an innate idea of ‘god’. But they also remind us that when we try and imagine what that ‘god’ might be we get it wrong.
That’s the basic issue here. We all tend to make God a bigger version of ourselves, or at least a bigger version of all that we think is good in others. The old joke goes: “God made man in his image, and he has been returning the favour ever since”!
This is why the Bible is so important. It records God as he is, not as we wish him to be.
