The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law. Deuteronomy 29:29
All my life, I have never been satisfied with knowing that something is the case without knowing why it is the case. Sometimes I envy those who can accept the what without concern for the why. We do not always have the necessary information to know why things are as they are. For people like me, this can produce frustration. This got the best of me in my eighth-grade math class when my teacher demanded an expanded method of showing our work when doing equations. Each equation became a half-page written assignment which made no sense to me. I should have simply done what he asked and succeeded in the class, but I was a stubborn kid. The root of my failure was my sense of having to know why he wanted it done that way.
Needing to know why a thing is what it is can likewise promote frustration when we approach our curiosities surrounding the Bible. There are so many things I would like to know but cannot know. Here I offer three principles from the Bible I believe will help us overcome the frustration of not knowing all we wish to know about God, our nature, our purpose, our destiny, etc. The first of these principles is the fact that God’s thoughts and ways differ greatly from ours (Isaiah 55:8-9). The essential take away from this passage is that much of His will and ways are beyond the reach of our carnal minds. Much of the truth we could not bear (cf. John 16:12).
This truth brings us to the second key to contentment with God’s revelation, realizing our dependence upon God to reveal His higher thoughts and ways to us. Paul speaks at length of this in 1 Corinthians 2:6-16. Not thinking as He thinks is the reason the rulers of the day put Christ on the cross (vv. 6-8). Thankfully, God has revealed His wisdom to us, through the vehicle of the apostles and prophets (vv. 9-16; Ephesians 3:1-5), thus enabling us to think as He thinks and live as He desires us to live. This revelation, however, is not exhaustive which brings us to the final piece of the puzzle of contentment with what God has shared with us.
Think how big the volume of Scripture would be if God had revealed all that we might collectively wish He had. Like John said of trying to just write everything Jesus did in His earthly life, if God satisfied all our curiosities in Scripture, “…if they were written one by one, I suppose the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25). For this cause, we must be content to live within the framework of what is written (1 Corinthians 4:6; 2 John 9-11). To do this, we need to remember two passages concerning God’s selective revelation.
First, “His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue” (2 Peter 1:3). So, while the revelation is not exhaustive of every possible question, it is absolutely all we need to please God and have eternal life (cf. 2 Timothy 3:15-17). Second, we need to internalize Deuteronomy 29:29 and accept that God has chosen, in His infinite wisdom, to withhold certain details from us, and He is well within His rights to do so. God was and is not obligated to satisfy our curiosity. Thankfully, His immense love for us prompted Him to reveal what we need to be content in His service and to enjoy a place with Him in eternity when all is said and done (John 14:1-3; 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17).