I Love a Good Mystery!

We all love a good suspense, mystery story where we don’t know what’s going on until the very end. I was hooked on Hardy Boys as a kid, then Agatha Christie. I progressed on to spy novels and those sorts of things. I was hooked. They had me from the beginning when there was a mysterious happening or something went wrong. I found something interesting yesterday that I thought I would post about the mysteries of God. Enjoy.

In his new book Stewards of the Story (Westminster John Knox), James Earl Massey observes, "Mystery is something whose utter strangeness and stubbornness forever resist all attempts on our part to domesticate it, dominate it, define it or dismiss it. Life is a mystery! Death is a mystery! The incarnation -- the coming of God in Jesus Christ -- is a mystery! The resurrection of Jesus from death is a mystery! Our life on this planet involves us in mystery. The Story of God's gracious dealings with us through grace involves us in mystery! We can experience the mystery, but, try as we might, we cannot explain it. We can try but it is more wonderful -- filled with what arouses wonder and awe -- than we can fully explain.

"Dr. Gardner Taylor has told about an experience he and Mrs. Laura Taylor had near the end of his first preaching mission in Australia years ago. They were treated by their host with a visit to the studio of an outstanding Australian landscape artist, a man whose work had earned him a British knighthood. As Dr. Taylor looked about in the studio, his eyes caught sight of a massive canvas on which the artwork was only half finished. He asked the artist about it. The artist shook his head, a little sadly Taylor thought, and explained that the unfinished picture was to have been a scene he had experienced during a visit to Australia's northern territory, but after much trying he had been unable to depict the real beauty of the scene that had captured him.

"Taylor saw, in the felt limitation that artist confessed to, a parable of the glory and pain of the Christian: while there is so much that can be seen and known and said about Jesus Christ, he is still a subject too vast to fully capture in our work, because his sacrificial life and work are rooted in 'the mysteries of God.'"