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6. REMEMBER GOD'S WISDOM IS BEHIND ALL APPEARANCES OF SEVERITY AND OUR BETRAYAL IN THIS WORLD

God often hides His wisdom from you and others. God's wisdom was hidden from Job.  He didn't exactly know what God was up to. In our previous message in this series we looked at Job 16:9 and here is what Job says in reference to God: "He has torn me in his wrath and hated me; he has gnashed his teeth at me; my adversary sharpens his eyes against me." 

I don't think we read Job 17:6-8 but it is similar. Again speaking about God, Job says,

So, Job was asking here, "What is God up to? I don't see it. I don't understand it." But of course, Job again is written to reveal some of this mystery to us and there is still much more that we do not know!

Proverbs 25:2 says, "It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out." God doesn't reveal everything to us.

We read in Deuteronomy 29:29 that, "The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law." The secret things belong to God; the revealed things belong to us. Our responsibility is in regard to the revealed things, not the secret things. 

In Romans 11:33-36, the bible tells us this:

And so, we don't know everything. God reveals somethings to us, but there are still things He keeps as His secrets. And so we must never judge God to be capricious or arbitrary or hostile or cruel or out of control. The word capricious means "inclined to change abruptly and without reason, erratic, unpredictable, inconsistent".  The word "arbitrary" means "acting according to one's own preference without reason, dictatorial". God is not that.

Faith says, because scripture says, even though I can't see what God is doing, even though it looks chaotic, even though it may look arbitrary, even though it may look capricious at times from my limited perspective, I know that everything God does is in accord with his perfect character and His perfect will and therefore I will rest in Him.

Have you ever seen a tapestry? A tapestry is a picture that has been painted with thread.  The detail of a good tapestry is amazing! Somebody had to put amazing work into a tapestry. If you look closely at a hanging tapestry, you can see beautiful colours and many tapestries that have been weaved together with little tiny threads. Thousands and thousands of these tiny threads go into the making of a beautiful tapestry.  

But have you ever looked at the backside of a tapestry? It looks like a mess! How can anything but chaos come out of this? Because as you look at the backside, you see not the threads woven together in their orderly fashion but in their disorderly fashion and you say, "how can that be anything of beauty?" And then you go and look on the other side again and you say, "Wow!" The artist took what looked like chaos and made it into beauty. And this is what your God is doing.

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