Communication scholars reserve the term immediacy for human talk at its most intimate and intense: “Here’s what you mean to me in this moment.” In such talk, if we can stand it, we are responding to an actual person, false fronts all left behind. Whether the encounter is pleasant or painful, the point is that nothing stands between us. We’ve come out of hiding. The masks are off.

Immediacy.

However, when God speaks to us, when he draws close to us out of his gracious desire to be known, we meet that familiar paradox: God hides himself in order to reveal himself. The masks don’t come off. They go on. God’s communication with us is always mediated, that is, there is always something he places in between.

God is revealed through his Son

The “hiddenness of God” is a blessing to us. He keeps his true majesty and transcendent glory carefully veiled, safely beyond our reach. This fits our situation, of course, since the likes of us, sinners through and through, could not survive the undiminished splendor of God.

Call it Theology 101: “Surely, no one can see his face and live.”

And so we come to God’s things: the Word and the water, the bread and the wine, plain things without the least bit of shimmer—matters easily dismissed because they seem like nothing at all. Yet here we are confronted by God himself, speaking his message of reconciliation. We are always being shown the crucifixion of God’s one and only Son. The words are simplicity itself. God has never been more thoroughly hidden . . . nor more profoundly cut open and set on breathtaking display. In Christ, we have seen to his very heart.

Only they can know him at all who are not offended by the lowliness of the masks behind which glory stoops down and hides. The rest will wander in deepest ignorance of him. Faith is that intimate trust in him that exists over against every natural inclination, against all reason, against all sight. God’s own Word and Spirit cause such faith. It is a perpetual miracle, a gift sustained by God along with every other thing. Only such faith in Jesus Christ has ever laid hold of God.

God hides in our lives