“Who has
believed what we have heard?
And to
whom has the arm of the Lord been
revealed?”
~Isaiah 53:1 (NRSV)
Comprehensively the most important
revelation of life is that of God—of the Divine Being making himself known, in
and through the Holy Spirit through salvation by Jesus of Nazareth—the path to
the Father.
The difference between those that
God makes himself known to, by their openness to truth and Spirituality, and
those whom he doesn’t is a great mystery. Certainly those who expect something
miraculously magnificent in God, as an everyday experience, are looking for the
wrong things. God works miracles all the time, but the Lord’s not revealed that
way, mostly. But the matter of revelation does appear miraculous as we’re
personally concerned—once it’s happened; because it transforms us.
This is why Isaiah’s suffering
servant takes much of the world by surprise. Even those who would later believe
did not expect such a humble Saviour. Can saviours be humble? Well, God’s Saviour
of the world was, and is.
Belief Relies On Revelation
We could not believe unless
something had previously been revealed to us.
Even if we were to take our
curiosity and invest it upon some search, a line of intrigued ethereal enquiry,
regarding the Divine Being, we’d have to have had something insert that
curiosity into us. Beyond any notions of predestination, belief does rely on
Revelation. We do need some reason, something rational to us, to believe.
In many ways this makes the
subject of God rather academic. If a hunger for God’s truth hasn’t filled us,
we might ask why. If someone’s been hounding us about the Gospel for months or
years and there’s been no additional reason to believe installed within our
inner values and reflections then, chances are, God’s left himself as a secret
for us to be discovered—but only if we pursue it. And most don’t. Perhaps it’s apathy. Maybe
there’s no felt reason.
Scrutinising A Secret
Almost nobody perceptibly opens
themselves to belief in a ‘strange’ thing—and the Gospel is strange to a
non-believer—without having some cogent logic leading them to follow.
As believers, we take the facts of
our belief too much for granted, thinking that it’s a simple thing to believe
in everything Gospel-related. We forget the incredible human urge of
independence; to not be dependent on anything or anyone. We forget how
different the Gospel way of living is from normal life; our jargon changes, as
do our practices, speech, and living arrangements. We change. What we think was
easy only became easy upon the heights of Revelation.
We forget that none of us
scrutinises anything without reason. This explains why we marvel at the things
others do, as if, ‘How could he or she do something so boring, nonsensical,
unprovable, or submissive?’
For someone to scrutinise a
secret, which in this case is the Gospel message, requires some semblance of
interest. Sometimes the interest may result from a longer-term investment of curiosity,
but mostly it occurs beyond personal explanation—the revelation of God.
***
The Revelation of God in image
form—a humble Saviour—Isaiah’s suffering servant—is far from what we initially expect.
God is revealed in surprising ways and we can only respond to what is made
known to us. Pray that the Lord will be revealed today.
© 2012 S. J. Wickham.
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