My husband reads ravenously! He’s got this routine every night at around 9:30 or 10:00 in the evening – after we do our devotions together and have a time of prayer, and after he helps me into bed and pulls my covers up, he puts on his sweatshirt that has a hood, he gets out his little reading lamp, and he loves to sit outside – yes, even when it’s cold out like it is now – he sits outside with his feet up and reads. He is a big, big fan of military books or mystery novels. I think he must go through three or four books a month. And he so looks forward to reading those mysteries every night – even when we travel, it’s the same routine. Mystery novels or military novels are his thing.
And you know, I don’t know what it is why Ken is so drawn to mysteries. Maybe it’s because they have a way of enticing us at the same time as they frustrate us. Take the paradoxes you find, let’s say, just flipping through the mysteries you find in Scripture: We have a free will, yet we're predestined. We're perfect in our position before God, but we are imperfect, experientially, down here on earth. We have to work out our own salvation, yet it is God who works His will within us – boy, that’s a mystery, isn’t it? Even Jesus – boy, what an incredible enigma – one hundred percent God yet one hundred percent man.
Something in us has to make mysteries understandable or puzzling things comprehensible. It’s just in us to want to solve a mystery… to get to the bottom of it all. Well, there are many things in Scripture we will never be able to get to the bottom of; we just have to accept some things by faith. But what makes it really interesting is how it is in God's nature to keep those things a mystery. It says in Proverbs 25:2, "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter." Now, I find that so fascinating! It tells us that God delights in concealing secret treasures, secret things, so that we might be drawn into this mystery, we might be drawn to search it all out and enjoy the discovery of finding treasures. And, of course, the greatest treasure we could ever search for… the most mysterious enigma we could ever hope to grasp is Jesus Christ Himself. I tell you, when you bear down on your brain and try to really understand who Jesus is… and all that He has done… what the mystery of suffering or even the mystery of iniquity, is all about … when you look deeper into the mystery of His unfathomable love for sinners, what a delight, what a joy, what satisfaction it is to begin to truly understand, to truly grasp, to know the Savior on that level.
And I’m convicted every time my husband goes outside with another mystery novel and I see him read so ravenously he just can’t wait to get outside and enjoy those books. Oh, that I would enjoy the book, God’s book, the Bible and only if I would search as diligently and be as excited about that wonderful commitment to read as Ken reads his mystery novels. Oh, that I should read God’s Word like that. I think that’s all it would take to really unravel the mystery of God’s love for you and for me.
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