Mystery Solved (Friday Devotional)

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth…No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

- John 1:14, 18

Nobody likes an unsolved mystery. Imagine if you were to get to the end of an Agatha Christie novel or a Law & Order episode and the detectives simply shrugged their shoulders and said, “I guess we’ll never know who did it.” You’d be furious! After all the clues and all the investigating, you want answers, a resolution to all the questions swirling about.

Accepting mystery is something we struggle to do, but it is a necessary reality when it comes to our relationship with our Father in heaven. God is divine and transcendent, omnipotent and omniscient and omnipresent. Since the Fall and humanity’s subsequent exile from the Garden, we are unable to see his face without perishing, unable to know him fully. His thoughts, Isaiah 55:8 reminds us, are not our thoughts, and his ways are not our ways. Though the Lord entered into a covenant relationship with Israel in the Old Testament, he remained to some extent at arm’s length.

But when God sent his Son to this world, something changed forever—where there had once been mystery, we now have answers. If you want to know what God is like, you no longer have to guess or assume—you just have to look to Jesus. His teachings, his miracles, and especially his heart, all these display for us who God is and what matters to him.

The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus make God known to us in a way that the Law and the Prophets could only hint at. And by faith in Jesus, you are given the promise of an eternity where you will see God face to face, knowing him not just by faith but by sight.

So long as we remain sinners in a fallen world, there will always be times when you must interpret for yourself what God wants from you in a given situation. But as you pray, study Scripture, and discern the Spirit’s leading, be sure you do so with your eyes fixed on Jesus, that he is the criterion by which you interpret God’s will. For God is no longer the enigma he once was—in Jesus, he has made himself known.