The Cover-up
Truly, You are a God who hides Himself, O God of Israel, Savior! Isaiah 45:15 NASB
Hides Himself – Have you experienced the desert of purposelessness? Have you cried out to God when your spirit is empty and abandoned? Have you felt the despair when your pleas return vacuous? Then perhaps Isaiah’s statement reflects your emotional distress . . . and makes you wonder who this God really is. You and I can count on the Lord when the days of distress find us.
“As in the days of Noah,” says Yeshua. One taken, one left. God’s protection of the righteous. The theme comes up over and over again.
Keep me as the apple of the eye; Hide me in the shadow of Your wings (Psalm 17:8)
For in the day of trouble He will conceal me in His tabernacle; in the secret place of His tent He will hide me; He will lift me up on a rock. (Psalm 27:5)
You hide them in the secret place of Your presence from the conspiracies of man;
You keep them secretly in a shelter from the strife of tongues. (Psalm 31:20)
Hide me from the secret counsel of evildoers, from the tumult of those who do iniquity, (Psalm 64:2)
Seek the Lord, all you humble of the earth who have carried out His ordinances; seek righteousness, seek humility. Perhaps you will be hidden in the day of the Lord’s anger. (Zephaniah 2:3)
But what do we do with Isaiah? Patterson suggests a theologically affected answer:
“In the Hithpael, the reflexive takes on the added idea of ‘hiding oneself carefully.’ The difficult Isa 45:15 probably means no more than that the Lord reserves the right to veil some of his purposes.”[1]
But I’m inclined to see more in Isaiah’s “difficult” verse. If you think non-theologically, isn’t it quite evident that God hides Himself? His invisible hand might operate in the world of men, but at least on the surface, He shows Himself only intermittently and unexpectedly in our lives. Yes, we have the stories of the Exodus, and yes, we have the miracles of the prophets, but by and large, life for Israel went on day after day without these interjections of the divine. So it is with us. We can choose to interpret our experiences as signs of God’s presence, but there aren’t any smoking mountains and thick darkness days for us. Furthermore, men have explained God out of the world and He has apparently accommodated to their obdurate intransigence. If we want to see God in this world, we have to look under the covers. Perhaps He is hiding because we need to look under the covers.
So, no, I don’t think Isaiah has limited his statement to the theologically proper veiling of divine purposes. I think Isaiah reflects what we all experience—the absence of God in everyday life, the almost deliberate cloaking of who He is and where He is so that our deepest desire for Him will become the cry of our hearts. And then, maybe, we will get a glimpse.
Topical Index: hide, Isaiah 45:15
[1] Patterson, R. D. (1999). 1551 סָתַר. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 636). Chicago: Moody Press.
