Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

It is the glory of God to conceal a matter;
    to search out a matter is the glory of kings.
As the heavens are high and the earth is deep,
    so the hearts of kings are unsearchable.

• Proverbs 25:2-3

“He loved mysteries.  He would lock himself in his room and read detective stories for hours.  He would take notes so that he could outsmart the detective and solve the mystery first.  Any kind of puzzle fascinated him, and he threw himself into whatever mystery lay before him.
Most people are fascinated by a good mystery.  We like to be challenged and to give our minds exercise.  There is no greater mystery in this life than the mystery of God.  He is a puzzle beyond our comprehension, but His greatest desire is that we will try to know Him as best we can.  He longs for us to devote our lives to an understanding of His will and ways.  He has given us the holy scriptures to read and contemplate, and they hold both questions and answers which can occupy a lifetime.  If we will work to unlock the mysteries of God, He will help us and lead us to ever-greater understanding.  We must spend time daily with the Lord in order to know Him more.  We need not expect answers immediately, but we can live with the questions and struggle out their solutions.  No greater challenge awaits us, but its reward is finer than the purest gold if we will face it.”

• Dan & Nancy Dick, Daily Wisdom from the Bible

I deny that the authors were referring to me in the first paragraph of the devotion.  Besides, I never locked my door.  I knew everyone in the house when I was growing up would be less than enthused if I left my room to irritate them (irritation by way of breathing air in the same room), so they loved it when I went to my room to read.

And I never took notes; I kept my notes in my head.  When challenged in my early 40s, I expanded from reading one novel at a time to reading six novels at a time and a collection of short stories.  I could tell you each plot, who the major characters were, and who I thought had done the crime – if that far along – for each of the seven stories.  The short stories started running together.  It was really tough when one novel had an FBI agent named Hugh and another novel, at the same time, with a different FBI agent chasing a guy named Hugh.  The name may not have been Hugh, but that has happened, once with three novels having such similarities.  As I have gotten older, it is down to three novels at a time, and I could care less “who-dun-it.”

I started with the Hardy Boys and none of my grandsons have an interest.  I did not read every Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries until about fifteen years ago, finding a complete collection (annotated) and a few stories that were not in the major collections.  I laugh about halfway through most of the Erle Stanley Gardner Perry Mason novels, because I can remember the television show for that story.  And I read all the Nero Wolfe (Rex Stout) mysteries just for the conversations between Wolfe (pompousness and a dislike for working until his brain grasped the nuance of the mystery) and Archie (street wise toughness and a bucket load of sarcasm – often used to spur Wolfe into working, although Archie worked for Nero Wolfe).

But I have often been frustrated by the enigma that is God.  Without Jesus in your heart, most of the Bible is clouded in mystery.  Then with Jesus in your heart, you understand a great deal, but never the full picture.  You have to continue to study to learn more.

Here is the person of Jesus Christ standing before our eyes as we read the Bible, but we never get that crystal clear image.  Enough to love Him, but never a full, clear image.  When we read more, we discover more.

Jesus will be our brother that we will be with for eternity, and maybe that is why there is mystery.

If everything was blatantly obvious, we might fall on our knees in awe, but how long will it take before we think “I already know everything, so let’s move on.”  We have a short attention span.  We get bored.

But if God creates a mystery that is so convoluted that we will never grasp it all, God is seeking those who establish such a relationship with Jesus that we try to solve the mystery, the unsolvable mystery.  If we do not love Jesus enough to try with all our might and knowhow to solve the mystery, then do we love Jesus with all our heart and with all our mind and with all our soul and with all our strength?

Maybe I am all wet, or just an avid lover of mysteries, but I love Jesus enough that I want to know as much as possible before, in an instant, I will be with Him forever.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.