Darkness, Mystery, and Worship

With a name like that, I feel this post has much to live up to.  And honestly, it repeats much of an earlier post.  Yet, it has so much to do with today's sermon, I felt it was a good time to post it anyway.

Who among you fears the Lord
and obeys the voice of His servant?
Let him who walks in darkness and has no light
trust in the name of the Lord
and rely on his God.
Behold, all you who kindle a fire,
who equip yourselves with burning torches!
walk by the light of your fire
and by the torches that you have kindled!
This you have from my hand,
you shall lie down in torment!
Isaiah 50.10-11

Survival tip: You cannot fight quicksand.  Struggling and swimming only loosens the soup around you, drawing you deeper.  Instead, you must stop, rest.  You must order your body to remain motionless even as every instinct screams panic and every limb is shaking with the desire to flail around for whatever hope might be grasped.

Isaiah speaks of our response to utter darkness.  Darkness creates discomfort and tension, because it naturally limits our control, and so, as often as we can, we quickly build our own fires, light our own torches, to mitigate the tensions of unknowing and to limit the danger of mystery.

The problem is that our faith is naturally one immersed in mystery.  Ours is a God of paradoxical statements, a God of proportions greater than our minds can comprehend.  To reject mystery is to reject relationship with Him.  When I reject tension, I reject life as He created it.

But this means that we will find ourselves in struggle, in tension, in uncertainty and doubt and anxiety and unknowing.  How are we to respond?

Isaiah calls us to trust in the name of the Lord and rely on our God.  Our tension, if offered to Him, can become worship; and mysteries, as Spurgeon wrote, become fuel for our devotion.  But only if we allow Him to be their resolution instead of seeking to make things resolve on our own.

And how do we do this?  How do we trust in the name of the Lord and rely upon our God?  We remember what He has done, and what He has spoken.  To allow mystery is not to remove truth, or even truth seeking, but to base our truth upon the Word of God, the one Truth incarnate and established.  We lean upon what we do know know, namely, our relationship with Him insofar as He has reached out to us (in moments of our lives and in scriptural promises, ultimately manifest in Jesus Christ) to find security in what He has not yet revealed.  When faced with immeasurable brokenness, we can worship, because we know He remains the same, even though we don't understand.  When faced with doubts, we can worship, because we know that His love and His spirit remain, even though we don't understand.  And it is in this darkness, if we leave our meager candles cold, that His light can become most defined, His heart most revealed, and His nature, which is so far greater than our own, most known: within mystery itself.  For there we find a love and a wrath carried for us, an unearnable grace offered to us, and God breaking in our place.  This, greatest of mysteries, is the moment of greatest revelation of our God-  why then would we try to mitigate mystery today?