“the revelation of the mystery” (Rom. 16:25, NKJV)
I consider the previous instalment of these teachings as the personal highlight of everything this project has built up to over the last 12 years. It literally builds, as Dan. 9:25 suggests, “until” it gets to “Messiah the Prince”! This “revelation of the mystery” (Rom. 16:25) concerns a terrifying key to unlocking what has heretofore been hidden / concealed / closed-off, and the calling that has been placed on the rhema words to try and unlock this.
To summarise the key points from the previous three teachings we will try to paraphrase them from a different perspective. This is to ensure that we have a central position from which to understand the process through which we gain our Godly identity from before time: The fundamental truth at the basis of this process is that each believer that searches for God with his whole heart, will find Him (Jer. 29:13). The process through which we find Him is often completely different than what we have traditionally understood.
By now we know that Scripture notes that there is no one who searches for God (Rom. 3:11); “nor do they seek the Lord of hosts.” (Isa. 9:13). If we thus begin to seek Him, it is because He first sought us out: “I was sought by those who did not ask for Me; I was found by those who did not seek Me. I said, ‘Here I am, here I am,’ to a nation that was not called by My name. I have stretched out My hands all day long to a rebellious people …” (Isa. 65:1-2). Note the pressing repetition of “Here I am”! that clearly renders the pressing nature of God’s desire to be found.
This immense truth encourages and overwhelms one. Before we could come to know Him when we were still embryos in our mother’s womb, He knew us. We did not choose Him; He chose us (John 15:16). Because He loved us first, we can now learn how to love Him (1John 4:19). Before we call, He already answers (Isa. 65:24).
When the psalmist calls out, in amazement, about this truth, he not only says that the Godly process of coming into being is indeed wondrous, but also we, as the beloved of the anointed, are wondrous (Ps. 139:14): “I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvellous are Your works …” These two words point to the fact that He who is Wonderful speaks to the wonderfully made, and reveals his wondrousness within us. Without this no one could live. His focused attention and care, His careful weaving together of the characteristic nature He creates within us (Ps. 139:13 & 15), unfolds the potential to be receptive for that which He is, and wants to share, in the manifestation of man. If the detail of the external or carnal man is so rich and textured, fine in detail and speaking of intelligent design, how much more precise must the detail of the inner or spiritual man be!
Creation necessarily implies purpose. Contrary to what the evolutionists would have us understand, man and the entire creation is not a coincidence, or the unfolding of what is, at basis, a mistake in natural or biological history. We are luckily not the product of a meaningless process. The Bible’s focus on the Logos-nature of God emphasizes the fact that the testimonies of man and the entire universe does not speak of mindlessness. Stephen J. Gould makes this immensely important statement in his book Ever Since Darwin: “Biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God.” (pp. 216-217). The word paragon is defined here as “a person or thing regarded as a perfect example of a particular quality, a person or thing viewed as a model of excellence.”
Because of these continued acts of creation on God’s part, the broken and unfulfilled man is made ready to search out God, with the impossible standard that Jesus sets in Matt. 5:48: “Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” David was very familiar with this uncertain reaching out to God. Look at how accurately he describes it in Ps. 27:7-8: “Hear, O Lord, when I cry with my voice! Have mercy also upon me, and answer me. When You said, ‘Seek My face,’ my heart said to You, ‘Your face, Lord, I will seek.’” In Isa. 26:9 the song of the searching man is phrased as, “With my soul I have desired You in the night, yes, by my spirit within me I will seek You early …” [read night here as ignorance, lack of insight, primitive and natural revelation.]
As life and light is lit within one, like a lamp, as the morning star arises in the heart, as wisdom and revelation in knowledge of Him (Eph. 1:17) increases, the inner fountain of spiritual and godly identity and nature is revealed, and the mouth and spiritual dimension starts calling to God: “deep calls unto deep at the voice of thy waterspouts” (Ps. 42:7, JUB).
In Rom. 8:26 Paul explains that the Spirit of God takes over from our spiritual dimension, there where we often do not know what to pray, to ask, or to petition. If it notes that “the Spirit helps us in our weakness”, this word has manifold meanings in Greek, but can, according to Thayer, also mean “(failing) to understand a thing”. We can thus pray with our mind (1Cor. 14:15), but the type of prayer of which we speak here is initiated WITHIN US, by GOD HIMSELF, without us – through whom this is happening – rationally understanding what is busy occurring. But what we should know is that we were designed for discovery. Please ponder this earth-shattering statement for a moment. Man is designed so that the discovery of the numinous WITHIN OURSELVES is an inevitability.
The numinous is a concept that derives from the theological writing of Rudolph Otto. In his book The Idea of the Holy, he coins this Latin phrase to explain it in more detail: Mysterium tremendum et fascinans, which in short means fearful and fascinating mystery. God designed things in such a way that you and I can discover, within ourselves, the fearful and fascinating mystery of ourselves. This transcendence is facilitated by the Spirit of God. Selah.
In his revelatory book, The Go-Between God, John V. Taylor makes the following very important statement about the Holy Spirit: “We can never be directly aware of the Spirit, since in every experience of meeting and recognition he is always the go-between who creates awareness.” (p. 43). This awareness (logos, used in the widest sense possible), is always directed by the Spirit of God as Mediator, or Go-Between. This consciousness (logos, used in the widest possible sense) is always managed and directed by the Spirit of God as Mediator. Philip Yancey, in his outstanding, thorough book: Reaching for the Invisible God, says: “The Spirit is with which we observe, rather than Whom we detect.” (p. 140). Amen.
If the Spirit intercedes for us (“maketh intercession” – KJV; “makes our petitions” – NJB), He prays the complex and precise blueprint of God for our lives. The Douay-Rheims-translation presents it beautifully: “The Spirit is said to ask, and desire for the saints, and to pray in us.” This occurs through the “groanings which cannot be uttered”. This corresponds with what Paul tries to explain in 2Cor. 12:4, about the “unspeakable words” that can be heard in Paradise, “too wonderful to tell” (CEV), “which are not possible for man to utter” (GEN), “so astounding that they cannot be told” (NLT). These words that have not yet been made manifest, are rhema words! The opening up (“entrance to disclosure”) of these words of identity brings life and light: “The entrance and unfolding of Your words give light; their unfolding gives understanding (discernment and comprehension) to the simple.” (Ps. 119:130, AMP). Your unique rhema word wondrously unfolds your Godly identity.
Rom. 8:27 then notes that God “searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God”. If we know that the “unspeakable words” are indeed rhema words, the question remains: how are these dark words understood by the mind of the Spirit WITHIN us?
If we know that the unutterable words truly are rhema words, then the question remains: how are these “dark” words translated or understood by the mind of the Spirit WITHIN us? The poet N.P. van Wyk Louw describes this holy process of transcendence as follows in his poem: ‘Borders’, the opening verse in his debut anthology Soliloquy (Alleenspraak, translated by Chantelle Gray van Heerden
My bared soul wants without qualm
in all its plainness to come to you,
as our dreams from deep slumber do,
as trees in dusk-light do
reaching for the azure moon;
will with all his opaque wishes,
and the sacred too, never-heard things
say, that which people shy away
from, and which coruscates ’round
the borders of my turbid words.
The gracious reception of your rhema word (your word in the poema of God), contains all hesitations, suspicions, dreams, wishes, the sum total of our search, and culminates in a transcendental process through which God, as with Asaph, streams your unique position in Christ from before time (Ps. 78:1). This literally becomes the synergy of the interaction between the heavens and the earth, and through this streams of living water are opened, and that water allows riddles and parables to stream from before time, so that you can acquire a deeper and deeper manifestation of this fearful and fascinating mystery.
This process of logo-centric thinking is very difficult to pin down in understandable language. From the psycholinguist Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky we have learnt that language and thought are two sides of the same coin. You can have no thought without language, and, ipso facto, no language without thought. For this reason, all thoughts or facets of the Logos are linked. But because our language fails, and murky words flicker at the borders of true consciousness, a process needs to arise that is discovered in and through the hermeneutics of the unsaid. If the Holy Spirit consistently directs this process of transcendence, we will learn to chart the things kept secret, the “never-heard things” from “the foundation of the world” (Matt. 13:35) and be able to bring them into the light. This means that we will be able to walk in the fullness of our rhema words, and to exercise the Godly-sanctioned authority that serves as standard or benchmark. Truly: “the entrance of Your words gives light …” (Ps. 119:30). As the light of your rhema identity is unravelled, or articulated, or unfolded, the more the revelation is increased, the more the light WITHIN YOU grows, too. The light that will enlighten every person is coming.
All things considered: There is a search for a breakthrough to unknown spaces; that which is there, is defined by that which is not there. One does, after all, search for what you do not yet have. And the spiritual goods that you seek, are not always clearly defined and steadfast – it hovers around consciousness, and it requires being conscious of the process. Dreaming thoughts are often the womb of the impossible asking to be born. Which is not to say that you should fixate on desired and imagined things, but this is a process of seeking without knowing what you are looking for, and to find without knowing exactly what it is that you have found.
In Prov. 30:18 Solomon notes: “There are three things which are too wonderful for me, yes, four which I do not understand.” This Wonderful that we discover within us in this search, is the unexpected appearance of the unfathomable Origin Himself, also WITHIN us and in our circumstances. In Isa. 9:6 it is prophesied over Him: “For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” In Hebrew the word for this is pele’, which means (1) “wonderful,” but also (2) “incomprehensible” (The Complete WordStudy Dictionary).
In Judg. 13 in the Old Testament we find a beautiful example that illustrates the identity of Wonderful: “Now there was a certain man from Zorah, of the family of the Danites, whose name was Manoah; and his wife was barren and had no children. And the Angel of the Lord appeared to the woman and said to her, ‘Indeed now, you are barren and have borne no children, but you shall conceive and bear a son.’ … So the woman came and told her husband, saying, ‘A Man of God came to me, and His countenance was like the countenance of the Angel of God, very awesome; but I did not ask Him where He was from, and He did not tell me His name.’ … Then Manoah prayed to the Lord, and said, ‘O my Lord, please let the Man of God whom You sent come to us again and teach us what we shall do for the child who will be born.’ And God listened to the voice of Manoah, and the Angel of God came to the woman again as she was sitting in the field; but Manoah her husband was not with her. Then the woman ran in haste and told her husband, and said to him, ‘Look, the Man who came to me the other day has just now appeared to me!’ So Manoah arose and followed his wife. When he came to the Man, he said to Him, ‘Are You the Man who spoke to this woman?’ And He said, ‘I am.’ (For Manoah did not know He was the Angel of the Lord.) Then Manoah said to the Angel of the Lord, ‘What is Your name, that when Your words come to pass we may honor You?’ And the Angel of the Lord said to him, ‘Why do you ask My name, seeing it is wonderful?’” (Here the adjective is pil’ı̂y, of which the root verb is pâlâ’. The former word can also, in the original Hebrew, mean secret! Note what then appears in verses 19 and 20: “So Manoah took the young goat with the grain offering, and offered it upon the rock to the Lord. And He did a wondrous [again, pâlâ’] thing while Manoah and his wife looked on— it happened as the flame went up toward heaven from the altar—the Angel of the Lord ascended in the flame of the altar! When Manoah and his wife saw this, they fell on their faces to the ground.”
Despite the fact that Wonderful does “extraordinary, incomprehensible” (BDB) things, He also engages in things that are secret and hidden. To render the infertile fertile, to transmutate into a flame and rise up from the altar, are all wondrous acts. But it also points to the fact that Wonderful comes to seek you out, and reveals Himself to you. Although He is hidden, His communication method is to transcend, and to incarnate.
Stick with this truth for a moment – the search for God as we’ve described it above, and also in the set of previous teachings – is led by Godly transcendence between the heavens and the earth, between the spiritual realm and the physical realm, between the visible and the invisible, between eternity and the temporary, between kairos and chronos, between God and man. That transfiguration is wondrous and the characteristic nature of Wonderful. During this visit wondrous identity and Godly nature is imparted. The deeper manifestation of this fearful and fascinating mystery is our next instalment.
• Selah: John 1:9 was originally written about Jesus, but we can now also understand it in the
light of the Christ. Examine this statement.
• Read: Judg. 15-21; Ruth 1-4
• Memorise: Judg. 15:1 (in the light of this teaching, try to understand this verse typologically)
• For a more in-depth understanding: Read any of the books mentioned above.