We cannot afford, as Christians discussing our faith, to put forward an absurdity and call it mystery. Frequently this happens when someone is raising legitimate questions about the character and actions of God. For instance, the person might say, “if God knows everything, is completely loving, and has all power, then why is evil so prevalent?”
To respond that this is the mystery of God’s working, and that somehow this is a loving God running things according to his plan, is insufficient and unworthy of the seriousness of the question. Mystery is being illegitimately pressed into service as an excuse for what is absurd.
Let’s be honest: to call the presence of violence, injustice, and cruelty in the world, in light of how many claim all is ordered in God’s perfect love and infinite ability, a “mystery” is to retreat from the question and accept the nonsensical. The love of God is not being expressed through the power of God if he makes every awful event happen according to a divine plan.
If he is, we are required to view each horror as actually God’s love for us. All murder, rape, war, genocide, death, and destruction is evidence of the love of God. It is no mystery that such a notion is absurd!
If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! Matthew 7:11
Jesus presupposes that we have, even in our imperfect and fallible condition, a reasonable idea of what is good and loving. We can rely on our own sense of how to be loving to discern how to act, and to extrapolate that same understanding to apply to God. The golden rule, treating others as we want to be treated, or loving our neighbors as ourselves, are irresponsible teachings if we have no idea at all of the good or loving thing to do.
If all that transpires in our world is truly an expression of the love of God, then we know nothing of what is good or loving. It is not that we have imperfect knowledge, but that we have none at all. Our questioning of God’s reputed love, power, and goodness arises from the reality that we do know enough to be suspicious that either God is not good, or everything is not going according to some divine plan in every detail. Saying there is “mystery” acknowledges our inability to fully know, not that we are incapable of any knowledge.
He [God] made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth. Ephesians 1:9-10
When we say, with Paul, that there is mystery, we are claiming that there is more than what we currently know. However, if this mystery were to be revealed, it would be as sensible as what we do know. Paul calls the salvation of the Gentiles a mystery (Ephesians 3:4-6), part of what it means for all things to be summed up in Christ.
The inclusion of the Gentiles was not previously known, but now that reality has been revealed, and the truth of it is reasonable and expands our understanding of God’s love and goodness. The mystery does not turn out to be the repudiation of all we thought was good, unless we despise Gentiles, and like Jonah, don’t want mercy to be shown to certain others.
We ought not to invoke “mystery” to defend the indefensible, the absurd, and ridiculous. What is still a mystery may involve how we cannot conceive of how goodness and love will ultimately triumph, but we know that God’s will is the very end of all things being untied in Christ. The end is good, though the way there may be hidden from us.
Traveler's Journal 