Walking in His Ways: The Profound Mystery

 

This is a profound mystery – but I am talking about Christ and the church. Ephesians 5:32

 Don’t you love a good mystery? I’m thinking of the books or movies that start with a simple question that rolls into a deeper and deeper quandry, where the main character looks sure to utterly fail, where you can hardly remember the initial premise because it has changed so many times. I think we like mysteries because, at least in fiction, they typically get solved. It’s those movies that leave us on a cliff hanger, that never really answer the question, that get mixed reviews. I’ll be honest, I’m not a fan of them but other members of my family love them. I like things wrapped up in a neat package with a perfect bow on it. When I grew up, I loved reading Nancy Drew mysteries. The problems seemed so big, so unsolvable for a young woman, but inevitably she would come up with the answer before the final page.

 In real life, mystery is a much different beast. I’ve been reading a book called Prayer in the Night by Tish Harrison Warren lately – I’ll likely be writing a few posts on it in the near future. One of the things she shared struck me so deeply I want to pass it along to you:

We sometimes talk about mystery as if it’s a code to crack—as if the full sweep of knowledge is available to us, but we just haven’t sussed it out yet. But true mystery invokes things that are fundamentally beyond our grasp. Mystery is an encounter with an unsearchable reality, an acknowledgement that the world crackles with possibility because it is steeped in the shocking and unpredictable presence of God.

 Real mystery can’t be hacked by a teenaged sleuth. The way marriage mirrors Christ’s relationship with the church is one of these mysteries. Back in the garden, God told Eve, "I will sharpen the pain of your pregnancy, and in pain you will give birth. And you will desire to control your husband, but he will rule over you," [Genesis 3:16 NLT]. That was the setup, and it’s not just for women. Remember, marriage is a picture of Christ and the church. As a part of the church, men feel the same tension where they long to rule over their lives, make their own decisions, but they are ruled over by Christ.

 The rub of all this is that we are being called to submit to a human; a fallible, fault-filled person that definitely does not always make the right decisions. But consider submission as an act of love, and listen to what John has to say about love in 1 John 4:20:

Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.

 So if we do not submit to our husbands, whom we have seen, how can we submit to God, whom we have not seen? Remember, as I discussed in this post, when we submit to our husbands, we are not merely obeying them, but God. It is God that we are ultimately putting our trust in. It is Him we are looking to to guide and direct our husbands, to put everything together just as it should be according to His perfect plan. We submit to God by submitting to our husbands.

Here's the Thing: Nancy Drew can’t wrap this one up with a perfect answer and neither can I. There are angles and depth to this mystery that I am only beginning to unlock. I wonder at the mystery and the tension we hold in this life. The knowing and the not knowing. The trust and the love. It’s beautiful!