The Contradictory One

We live in a world of "either or" instead of a world of "both and."  When confronted with opposites we want to choose one or the other.  Both cannot be right.  It has to be one or the other.  If God is merciful then He cannot be judgmental.  If God is loving then He cannot allow bad things to happen to those He loves.  One of the things about God that has been driven into my heart in these recent years of living outside the shadow of orthodox theolgy where there is more room to think is that God is a God of a contradictory nature.  Just when we think we have Him figured out, we discover something about which we had not figured.    

The point at which this has come home to me is in the way He is both invisible and yet visible.  In so many places in the Scripture the Word speaks about the revealing nature of God and then there is a place like Isaiah 45:15 which says, "Truly, You are a God who hides Himself..."  And, of course, the Incarnation story told from the manger of Bethlehem is brimming over with the news that the Invisble Holy One has become visible human flesh.  The Apostle Paul points us to this as well as he wrote of the one who "was in the form of God...emptied Himself...being born in human likeness..."    (Philippians 2:6-7)     

Indeed, it is true that "God is Spirit..."  (John 4:24), but it is also true that He is constantly making Himself known.  "Ever since the creation of the world His eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things He has made."  (Romans 1:20)  I have always loved the image Annie Dillard left me in "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek."  when she wrote that creation has the "now you see it, now you don't" dynamic woven into its fabric.  So, it is with God, "Now you see Him, now you don't!"