Irony and the Christian Faith

"And I will fasten him as a nail in a sure place; and he shall be for a glorious throne to his father's house. And they shall hang upon him all the glory of his father's house...In that day, saith the Lord of hosts, shall the nail that is fastened in the sure place be removed...the Lord hath spoken it." Isaiah 22:23-25

I do not think we know quite what we mean when we talk of God's "mysterious" ways. Such a title does not quite catch it. A better title would be "unexpected" or "unseen," or better yet "ironic." Just when we think we have Him mapped out pretty well, He goes and does something completely outside our expectations, and suddenly we realize that there was more in heaven and earth than our philosophy would allow.

We pray for release from the stresses that we are facing, and God instead sends from nowhere a new set of circumstances, calamitous or otherwise, that completely redirect our energies away from everything else. We long for patience in the face of a frustrating world, and suddenly everything seems to be bent on driving us insane all at once. We strive for excellence in the work(s) we do, only to have everything suddenly fall to the ground and built back up in a completely different way. God raises up a king and gives him glory, and then He tears the king down in the same breath. The thing to remember in the midst of all this irony is that no matter how or where God's ways come from, they all lead to Him, and that is where we want to be. Many times we shy away from the presence and communion of God because we are too in love with the way we want things to go.

The very foundation of Christianity itself, the Incarnation, is an irony, an unexpected twist. God coming in the flesh was the mystery of God kept secret from the world (Romans 16:25, 26). All the monotheism of Judaism could not contain the thought of a holy Yahweh mingling with the dust. All the mythology of the heathen could not comprehend that Prometheus would actually come. Even hell itself did not grasp the half of it, "for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory." (I Corinthians 2:8)

That God's ways are past finding out is the very essence of our faith. I suppose if we somehow knew all of God's ways in their entirety (without our heads exploding), then life would perhaps be more predictable, if not more boring. However, to know all the twist and turns is to have no doubt, to have no doubt leaves no need for trust, and no trust means no basis for a relationship (for relationships are built on trust). Without the presence of the mysterious in our lives, there is no room to trust God, and therefore no room for relationship, communion, or unity. Our existence would be built solely on facts about a person. Again, such a life would be easy to predict, but it would not be living. True life is found in an intimate knowing of God (John 17:3), and we were built for that intimacy and nothing more.

The ironic ways of God set up and bring down kingdoms as well as break down your car or redirect the theme of a term paper. The important thing is not the way itself, but the One Who it leads to; not the circumstance itself, but the One Who engineered it. It is what Moses learned in the wilderness: "Show me your way, that I may know thee." (Exodus 33:13, 14)