Awhile ago I was reading through 1 Timothy and ran into a word that I felt was out of place. Let me give you the verse and see if you can catch the word that caught me off guard. "They must hold the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience" (1 Timothy 3:9). The word is mystery. Did it catch you a little mid stride like it did me? If you are like me you have kind of feel like you "know" what the Christian faith is. Like it was something tangible--it was concreate. Like I can prove it with "evidence." So I did what I thought was smart and jumped up from the couch and scrambled around our house for every translation of the Bible we owned. I snatched up a KJV from the bookshelf behind our couch, a NKJV from our other bookshelf in our living room, and a purple ESV from my sister's school work drawers. You know what I found? In every single translation the word was still mystery. Go look for yourself. But, there was one translation that was different: the NIV. The NIV reads "They must keep hold of the deep truths of the faith with a clear conscience." While the wording is the different the concept is the same. Deep truths and mystery, the first means something not easily (or quickly) found and not quite concreate. (think about it: truth is not an "idea" but an "ideal."--in essence anyway.*) The second is something that is difficult or "impossible" to understand: a mystery. Now I hate to admit this, but I thought Paul was wrong for calling the faith a mystery. I thought to myself that "it has to make since. Hasen't Christianity always made since? Maybe Paul was trying to say something different" but no matter how hard I tried I came up with nothing else that made since. Zilch. Nada. A big fat zero that was eating me up. At the same time that 1 Timothy 3:9 was having lunch on my mind, I was reading through C.S. Lewis' book A Grief Observed. And it just hit me. It all made since. I was out wandering in my backyard and thinking and meditating (Meditating on something is like chewing on food: you are tasting it and making it ready to be digested) on how much pain Lewis was expressing in his hurt-filled words. And it smacked me full in the face. Our faith is not physical, that is, it is not something that you can grasp in your hands and observe with a quizzical eye. It's like poetry. "Wait, what?" you might ask. Well let me use an example: poetry. Awhile ago I watched this movie called The Dead Poets Society. It is a movie about students that are attending an ivy-league collage somewhere in England. The whole story is centered around their poetry teacher and poetry. Well, near the beginning of the movie one of the students is reading the preface to their poetry textbook (which is talking about how if you take different elements of a poem and graph--yes graph--them that is how you should judge a poem) and the teacher interrupts the student mid-sentence and telles all of them to rip out the preface to their textbook and throw it away. Our faith is like poetry: you cannot just simple read a textbook about systematic theology and "graph" it and stick it in your little box labeled "faith" and just keep going on with life as if nothing has changed. You have to memorize it and think about it from different angles. You have to realize that it cannot be completely grasped at any time: you are always finding out a new asset of your faith that you never considered. You must realize that it is called a faith for a reason--you cannot use reason to explain it into something simple. You have to have faith in a mystery. You just have to believe.
~TDH
*Note on truth: Truth is not just black and white. Truth is a person--God. So yes there is a right and wrong--God is right and anything against Him is wrong. There is a such thing as truth and truth will always exist. But no mere man can indefinitely know truth, simply, because he is flawed to the core. God has to show us to truth, then we can know it.
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