Hidden Is Not Gone

Eleven months in, Marta had stopped looking.

Not stopped believing. That is a different thing and people confuse them constantly. She still prayed, in the way you still breathe. She had simply stopped scanning the horizon, because eleven months of scanning an empty horizon does something to a person's neck.

Here is her four in the morning, and she has done four in the morning about three hundred times now.

The house is cold because the heating comes on at six and she will not change it, on principle, for reasons she could not explain to you. She goes down. She sorts the box, the little plastic one with the days of the week on it, and she checks it twice because she has frightened herself once before. She takes it up. She sits on the edge of the bed and waits for him to surface enough to take it, and helps, and says the same three things she says, and he says the same one thing back if it is a good night.

Then she goes down again and puts a wash on, at ten past four, because it is the only quiet hour in the house and washing has to happen.

And people keep saying it to her. They mean it kindly and it lands like a slap every time. God is really working in this. You can see His hand on your family. One woman at the church door, six months ago, with her head tilted: He must have such a purpose in it.

Marta has looked. She has looked at every angle they suggested. She has looked for the good coming out of it, for the growth, for the door opening, for the silver lining, for the meaning, and she has come up with nothing, over and over, and then felt like a bad Christian for coming up with nothing, and that second thing is nearly worse than the first.

If He is anywhere in this, He is very well hidden.

And then at ten past four this morning, standing in front of the machine watching it fill, she noticed something and could not immediately make it fit.

Her hands were doing this again. The box, the stairs, the wash. Eleven months, three hundred times, and nobody made her, and she is not a saint and she would tell you so first, and she has no idea in the world where the getting up keeps coming from.

She just knows she keeps getting up.

He is nearest where He looks least like Himself

Let me start by taking two things off you, because you have been carrying them and they were never yours.

The first: I am not going to tell you that God sent this. I am not going to hand you a God who arranges an illness to sharpen somebody up. That is not in this message and it is not in my mouth.

The second: I am not going to ask you what you were meant to learn. Nobody gets to set homework at four in the morning. If a lesson is somewhere in this, it will find you and it will not need an interrogation.

Now here is what Scripture actually says about how hard He is to see, and it is going to be more comfort than you expect, because it comes from a prophet who says it right out.

Truly, You are a God who hides Himself, O God of Israel, the Saviour.Isaiah 45:15

So hear this said over you, in the eleventh month with every place checked twice. You are not outside His care because you cannot detect Him, and the emptiness of every place you were told to look is not a report on whether He is there. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who bears witness with our spirit underneath the level at which a person can take their own reading.

Look at the shape of that sentence. It is one breath. You hide yourself, and You are the Savior. Both halves at the same time, no tension acknowledged, no apology offered. The prophet is not complaining about a God who has gone missing. He is describing the way this particular God works, and in the same breath he calls Him the one who rescues.

So the hiddenness is not evidence. Read that again. The not seeing has never been evidence of the not being there, and the whole Bible is comfortable with a hiddenness that unnerves us.

But I can do better than that for you, because there is a place where God told us exactly where to look for Him, and it is the last place on earth anybody would have chosen.

He had no form or majesty that we should look at Him, and no appearance that we should desire Him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and like one from whom people hide their faces.Isaiah 53:2 to 3

Nothing to look at. Nothing that draws the eye. A face people turn away from.

And then the cross itself, which is the middle of everything: a public execution, a failure by every visible measure, a man who could not save Himself and was told so by a crowd. If you were hunting for God with the instruments we have all been taught to use, that hill on that afternoon is the one place you would have crossed off first.

The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.1 Corinthians 1:18

So here is the thing I want to leave in your hands, and I will not go one inch further than it, because the guardrail on this message is that we claim nothing we cannot stand behind.

God attaches Himself to the place that looks least like Him.

That is not a promise about your outcome. It is not a reason for your situation. It is a statement about where He is, and the reason it matters at four in the morning is this: you have been sent looking for Him in the shine. In the good coming out of it, the door opening, the visible improvement. And when the shine did not come you concluded He was not here.

He never said He would be in the shine. He said He would be in the low place, and the low place is where you have been living for eleven months.

Which means the plastic box with the days on it is not evidence of His absence. And the getting up that you cannot account for, three hundred times, from a woman who insists she is not a saint, is not nothing. I am not going to over claim it and tell you it is a sign. I will say only this, and I believe it with my whole chest: strength that keeps arriving from somewhere you cannot identify is worth being honest about.

Hidden is not gone. Hidden is where He said He would be.