Prayer and the Hidden God

Devotional Classics, John Ballie, A Dairy of Private Prayer

"Almighty and eternal God,
You are hidden from my sight,
You are beyond the understanding of my mind:
Your thoughts are not as my thoughts:
Your ways are past finding out." (p.127)

The world around me makes God plain to see. His willingness to answer prayer encourages me. His instruction moves me to greater obedience and love. Who is more present than God?

And yet, he is hidden. I have heard a good deal these days about God's scarcity. For many people he seems to have disappeared, even in the moment of their greatest need. This wilderness may change my life profoundly, but often the wilderness comes not from God's making, but my own. I isolate myself from him.

Yet the One who is "hidden from my sight," as Baillie puts it, is not usually hidden due to some "dark night of the soul" nor even because of my own sins. God's secrecy comes from his greatness and my own limitation in understanding him. God "hides" behind the smallness of my mind, and more, the smallness of my heart.

The famous passage Isaiah 55:7 "For my ways are not your ways, and my thoughts are not your thoughts" is preceded by his unfathomable pity on me: "Let him call on the Lord and he will have mercy, and to our God, for he will freely pardon." The passage culminates in a glorious promise, "You will go out with joy and be led forth with peace. The mountains and the hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands."

So God sandwiches his thoughts between mercy and promise. In this way, my thoughts are a million miles away from his. I neither easily accept these thoughts and ways as ones that he could possibly have for me, nor do I imitate these sorts of thoughts often in my own life. Hidden in this passage is God's desire: that my thoughts would be his thoughts and my ways his ways.

I believe it was the Cloud of Unknowing that says that I cannot understand God with mind, nor will I ever, but I can understand God perfectly in my heart through love. I long to understand "what wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!" Baillie continues this prayer in this way:

Yet You have breathed Your Spirit into my life:
Yet You have formed my mind to seek You:
Yet You have inclined my heart to love You:
Yet You have made me restless for the rest that is in You:
Yet You have planted within me a hunger and thirst that make me dissatisfied with all the joys of earth. (p.128)

I have many days when I wonder how God can put up with me. I can't even put up with myself. His pity and promise make my life something precious, worthy of the greatest speculation and wonder. God's hiding place may be for my growth or due to my hardness, but perhaps I am not looking high enough: "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." I look beneath him to ways and thoughts that do not befit One so loving and kind.

Lord, let me say, "I lift my eyes up to the mountains" (Ps. 121) because I seek thoughts and ways that are higher and better than my own. I do not think much of myself. I am not worth much in myself, ruined and wayward. The high price paid for me determines my worth. Today, let me lift my eyes up to that mountain, Golgotha, where my help comes from and where your thoughts and ways were revealed. Let me hear you say: "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what I have prepared for you" (1 Cor.2:9) as I cling to that cross. Amen.

On days like today, I need to find a way to have the Lord's thoughts before me. Pondering is good. Prayer is better. But often the words cannot find their way into my heart. They stay before me, but out of reach. I feel lonely. Perhaps a trip to the cross is what I need; the image may help the idea to sink in deeper.