The Revelation of a Mystery

Our culture does not like mystery.  We want to have everything figured out, analyzed, and quantified.  If something can't be figured out, analyzed, and quantified, then it must not be real. 

This works well when it comes to airplanes, vacuum cleaners, and global temperatures, but not when it comes to God.  We will never be able to figure out, analyze, and quantify God in the same way that we can categorize the natural world.  God is, and always will be, mysterious to us.  The tragic mistake that is made both in and out of the Church is that if God cannot be figured out with the same methodology that we use to figure out the natural world, that God must not be real.  Those who do not believe in God state as their justification that they cannot see or perceive God in the way that we see or perceive natural objects.  Some Christian voices try to prove God's existence by literal interpretation of biblical stories and then attempt to align those stories with the findings of paleontologists, geologists, and biologists.

Paul said that in Christ, God revealed a holy mystery that was hidden from the foundation of the world.  Notice that Paul did not say that Christ took away the mysterious nature of God or made God comprehensible.  Rather, Christ revealed the nature of God as mysterious to us.  As the Church, this is where we theologically live and stay.  We know that God has been revealed in Jesus, that God has redeemed us in Jesus, and that the world remains lost in darkness despite the light of God that lives inside the hearts of every person in this world.  This is a holy mystery.