Deut. 29:29; Psalm 131:1-3
This verse in Deuteronomy is one of the most profound, meaningful and underrated verses in all the Bible, and most people either skim over it or miss it altogether. If we understand this verse and take it to heart, we'll avoid a lot of heartache, headaches, and wasted time. I need to give R.C. Sproul credit for pointing it out to me and for his interpretation of it.
As someone who teaches the Bible, over the years I've gotten a lot of people who throw out the “stumper” questions. Sometimes they’re honest seekers, but most of the time they’re just trying to “stump the teacher” or (even worse) discredit God’s word by coming up with some smarty-pants question like “Who was Cain’s wife?” or “Did Adam have a belly button?” or “What about the dinosaurs?” This verse is the perfect answer to a lot of those types of questions.
This verse helps by focusing our attention on the difference between secret things versus revealed things. Under the first category I would include things like the question of life on other planets, or what happened to the dinosaurs, or how exactly God’s sovereignty works with man’s free will. The second category would be a lot more limited. They're what God has revealed to us through his word, and there is a specific purpose for these revelations, stated at the end of this verse. They're not there to satisfy our idle curiosity about whatever tickles our fancy. The revealed truth in the Bible was given to us to tell us everything we need to know about God and ourselves, and how to behave. It's not there to tell us everything we'd like to know about heaven, just how to get there. It doesn’t tell us whether or not there’s life on other planets—it was addressed to humans here on earth. It tells us how our first parents sinned and how that one bad decision put us in the predicament we’re in, but it doesn’t tell us how dinosaurs fit into the picture. I promise you, if you really needed to know those things in order to know God and act right, he would've put them in there. The passage from the Psalms presents the perfect perspective we need to take concerning a lot of questions which the Lord has chosen not to answer in this life.
What does this mean to us? Well, for a naturally curious person like me, it means that I need to sometimes fight that natural tendency, and I'd be better off focusing on what I do know instead of getting distracted by the “secret things.” My problem is not lack of knowledge; it’s acting on what I do know and understand fairly well. How about I let him handle the rest?
Father, your ways are so far above my ways, and your thoughts are so far above my thoughts. I trust you.
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