Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 317 · November 13
The Secret Things
“The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.”
What has God kept from you? Never denied, never explained, simply never said: the reason for the phone call, the reason the treatment worked for her and not for him, the reason a good man got twelve years and a bad one walked.
Read where the verse sits and it arrives in the middle of people asking. The paragraph before it is a scene of ruin, the whole land brimstone, and salt, and burning, with travellers stopping to say the obvious thing. Even all nations shall say, Wherefore hath the LORD done thus unto this land? what meaneth the heat of this great anger? Somebody answers them. That question gets a reason, and the reason runs for four verses.
So the boundary is drawn after an answer has already been given, and it is drawn in a particular place. The secret things belong unto the LORD our God, and belong is the word doing the work. It is used twice. Those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law. The revealed things are not on loan. They are property, willed to children, with a purpose clause fastened on the end, and the purpose is doing rather than knowing.
Nothing here says the secret things are small, or that they will be released later, or that you were wrong to want them. It says whose they are. The half that is yours has been signed over permanently, and there is no reply to make to the other half.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 317 is God Waits to Be Gracious (Isaiah 30:18).