Some of our questions by their very nature cannot be answered by God. As C.S. Lewis once posed, “All nonsense questions are unanswerable…. Probably half the questions we ask – half our great theological and metaphysical questions – are like that.”
Other questions must remain unanswered because there are things we are not ready to comprehend. Theologically we are in many ways still children, and we need the protection accorded to children.
To expect mystery may be difficult to accept, particularly as we often seem to wish the very idea of childhood away. We use words like childish and immature as insults. Yet childhood is a time when a person is appropriately sheltered from certain experiences and knowledge. Only as children grow into adulthood are such “adult secrets” revealed in ways that they can be assimilated psychologically and spiritually. Children should be naïve. That is what childhood is for.
But preserving childhood for a child can mean keeping adult secrets shrouded in mystery.
Corrie ten Boom tells of an event that took place when she was no more than 10 or 11 as she traveled with her father on the train from Amsterdam to Haarlem. She had stumbled upon a poem that had the word sexsin among its lines.
And so, seated next to Father in the train compartment, I suddenly asked, “Father, what is sexsin?”
He turned to look at me, as he always did when answering a question, but to my surprise he said nothing. At last he stood up, lifted his traveling case from the rack over our heads, and set it on the floor.
“Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?” he said.
I stood up and tugged at it. It was crammed with the watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning.
“It’s too heavy,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “And it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It’s the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger you can bear it. For now, you must trust me to carry it for you.”
And I was satisfied. More than satisfied—wonderfully at peace. There were answers to this and all my hard questions—for now I was content to leave them in my father’s keeping.
God is mysterious not simply because He is God, but because we are children, and in His love our childhood is protected, so we should expect mystery.
We should view both our childhood and God’s mysteries as a source of wonder and even comfort: there is a Creator, and we are among the created; there are answers to all things safely in our Father’s keeping.
Expect mystery. As we accept God’s mysteries as little children, they become not so much frustrating as alluring.
This article urging us to expect mystery is axcerpt from James Emery White, Wrestling with God, get the eBook at Church & Culture.
