The Deeper End
Deuteronomy 29:29
“The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.”
Before we heaved our first infantile breath in this world, that inaudible pulse of life out of which our ligaments and sinews and organs were formed plunged us into an ocean of divine mystery and divine manifestation: an ocean so vast that, at our best and most advanced, at the pinnacle of our powers, in the prime of our reason, we’ve only waded knee-deep in wisdom’s shallow tides. Hear, o wise man, Almighty God thunder to Job through a whirlwind of words in chapter 39, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for Joy?” And then read the desperate cry of the Ecclesiast, who’d yearned to set foot on the floor of Providence’s Marietta trench, but couldn’t withstand the pressure of the deep, and tossed helplessly around in the waves, eventually getting thrust breathlessly back to shore. “The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one Shepherd. My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is wearisome to the flesh” (Ecclesiastes 12:11). That’s the sort of thing a worn-out sailor writes while digging his toes into the hot, gritty sands, grateful to have survived the sea.
Now, don’t let that dishearten your desire to learn and grow, friend. Read many books. Get seminary and graduate degrees if God calls you into academic study. Study to show yourself approved. Wade deep into the tides of history, linguistics, hermeneutics, philosophy, astronomy, chemistry, biology, mathematics, literature, if God gives you the impulse. But never, in all your exploration of life’s meaning, forget the simplicity of faith. Our mission in this chapter of human existence is not to reconcile all the paradoxes of Providence but to take Providence’s hand, step by step, and go wherever He leads us.
The meaning of life has never been a secret, and it’s always been this: to practice what God has preached.