Proverbs 25:2: “ [It is] the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings [is] to search out a matter.”
A friend of mine asked about this verse. People think that if you are a Hebrew teacher you have all these answer right at my finger tips. They expect me to go to a museum and look at clay pot and just read the cuneiform inscription. Well, there are those out there who have that ability as well as people like Indiana Jones or Dr. Jackson on Stargate, but I am afraid that is not my story. I have to secure a photo of that clay tablet and then hopefully find where some scholar has transcribed onto paper so I can actually make out the lines and triangles, I have to see how other translated it and well, it is a process. I am sorry if you find that disappointing but to just translate one sentence from the Akkadian can be hours of hard work with a lot of dependence and respect upon those how have previously translated the passage. I am making a trip to the Oriental Institute in a couple weeks to get a photo of Phoenician vase that has an inscription which about a chariot and horse that may give me some insight into the Hebrew word for chariot and horse.
A lot of work to figure out a chariot and horse but believe me, I have my reasons.
All that to explain why I did not have a ready answer for my friend on Proverbs 25:2. So what does this mean that the glory of God is to conceal a thing? Every translation seems to walk lock step with each other, it is the glory of God to conceal a thing or matter. One explanation is one my sister law mentioned the other night. There are so many intelligent people out like a physicist or mathematician. They can start talking their theories and leave your head spinning wondering what the blazes they are talking about. Yet there are many many things that they openly admit they cannot explain. Over time many of their theories change. God gave them a part of His knowledge but the entire knowledge is kept hidden. I can spend years studying the words for chariots and horse but ultimately God has the real knowledge and for whatever reason He is keeping it from me.
Another more common explanation is that there are things that we just can’t understand. I was talking with a widow who could not understand why God took her husband, a good man, a good husband and father who died at an early age. Then there are men who are alcoholics and drugs addicts who beat and abuse their wives and children and they just keep on living. I can only point to Proverbs 25:2 that there are things that are concealed and hidden by God. Ok, we can kind of accept that but to say it is the glory of God to conceal to a grieving widow why her husband died, that sounds a bit heartless to me.
The word conceal or hidden in Hebrew is hasatar. Sounds familiar? It should that was the Hebrew name for Esther who hid her Jewish identity to her husband the Persian king until he was hopelessly in love with her or infatuated with her, either way she had him wrapped around her little finger. I traced the root word satar to its Semitic origins and found that this word was used in the Canaanite language for the closing of the door or tent flap where a couple will go to be intimate. It was understood that the couple desired intimacy and respectable people left them alone. You see in ancient times privacy was very difficult to come by. You just could not discreetly sneak away with your spouse to a motel and lock yourselves in the room to share uninterrupted intimacy. Intimacy is really hard to come by when you are jumping at every footstep wondering if someone is going to walk in on you. So there were agreements made and understood that when a couple wanted to be alone to share their most private expressions of love and caring, that they were satar, guaranteed privacy to share intimacy. It is even more telling that the word satar has a Hei in front of it indicating a Hiphal form. This is also in the form of an infinitive absolute. It is expressing continuity. In other words God is caused to continually keep things hidden from us. One example is dreams. The Talmud teaches that when we sleep the body and soul are out for the count and this frees up our spirit that never sleeps to be intimate satar with God. Why do you think God created us to spend 1/3 of our lives in an unconscious state? It gives God a chance to minister to be satar, alone and intimate with our spirits. Our spirits when it is joined in that satar private intimacy with God in our sleep will know everything God knows just as a wife and husband share their intimate things only among themselves, even their children (body and soul) are kept out of these secrets. Hence your spirit knows your past, present and future. However, our bodies and souls cannot handle this knowledge so God causes us to forget it or He wraps it up in symbolism he kabad’s hides it so the knowledge does not give us heart failure.
It is the glory of God to do this. The word glory is kabad. Kabad in its Semitic origins has the idea of weightiness or a heavy burden. I believe in the context here we should not render glory as honor but as a heavy burden. It is a heavy burden to God that the things revealed to our spirit must remain hidden. I am not about to tell this grieving young widow that God is honored by her not understanding why her husband died. But rather that God bears a heavy burden in not giving her this knowledge. He longs to tell her but for her own good He cannot, not until the right time or until she gets to heaven. In the meantime her lack of knowledge is a burden to her, but it is an equally heavy burden on her Savior as well who could tell her why but right now it would do more harm than good.
There are things I do not understand in my life. I cry out to God why, why, just explain to me why. But I look at Proverbs and realize, God is crying out; “I want to tell you why, I really do, but not now, you will misuse that knowledge, it will bring your greater pain, just trust me you will one day understand why.” This grieving young widow said it best: “I just have to keep trusting God.” If you can’t understand why God brought something into your life, do what this young widow has done, just trust God.”
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