I recently organised a surprise baby shower for my daughter-in-law, and found the experience of keeping secrets from her stressful to say the least. My son knew only that they had to be in a certain place at a certain time; I dare not tell my grandchildren about the surprise in case they gave my secret away. It was only at the right time that the plan could be unveiled, and thankfully everyone invited kept the secret and it was a successful party time!
We often think of secrets and mysteries in this way: knowledge that is hidden from us. There are many things we do not fully know or understand; sometimes, at the ‘right time’, we may find answers to our questions (she found it frustrating not quite knowing where they were going, what to wear and so on; my son could not understand why I would not tell him how this event was going to affect the rest of the weekend, but that was because friends of his were travelling from the Midlands to the party and I did not know what their long-term plans were!) Sometimes, we never really understand the answers to our questions; maybe we just cannot comprehend the answers we get.
The Bible frequently talks about the mystery of Christ and of the gospel (see Romans 16:25, 1 Corinthians 2:7, Ephesians 3:4-9), but this is not a secret as such, simply a revelation of God that became clear at a certain point in history. Much of the book of Revelation seems mysterious to us, including the ‘seven thunders’ in Revelation 10, which John was told to seal up and not write down. (Why mention something if you cannot explain it?!) We may well feel frustrated about the many things we do not understand about God’s ways, and we often ask questions about why God, the God of righteousness and holiness, allows evil to go unpunished and His own people to be crushed and broken on every hand. We still do not have answers that fully satisfy us as we read the Bible, but we are reassured that “God by His Son, the Heir of all things, will wrest the government of the world from the iron grasp of Satan, confine him as a prisoner in the abyss for 1,000 years, finally casting him into the lake of fire for eternity, and then rule and reign in manifested power and glory” (J. Hampton Keathley III), as the rest of the book makes clear. Sometimes, we really do have to wait and see…
