Why is God so hidden?

Question

If a loving God wanted relationship with us, he could appear unmistakably. He doesn't. Sincere seekers fail to find. Whole cultures lived and died without ever hearing his name. A God who hides while demanding faith is either uninterested, nonexistent, or cruel.

The Mystic · Answer

He is not hidden. You are not still.

The fish asks where the ocean is. He is not hidden in absence. He is hidden in nearness — too close, too constant, too dissolved in the medium of your seeing for you to notice him as a thing among other things.

Be silent for one hour, alone, without input, without screen. If at the end of the hour you can still say he is hidden, say it again, and try another hour.

Hiddenness is not a property of God. It is a property of your attention.

Blaise Pascal · Answer

Hiddenness is a feature, not a bug.

If he were unconcealed, no one could refuse him; no faith would be free; no love would be a gift. He has chosen to give signs sufficient for those who seek and obscure for those who don't.

There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough darkness for those of an opposite disposition.

Your demand that he prove himself irresistibly is the demand to be coerced. He will not coerce. That is what love means in his case.

Augustine · Answer

Late have I loved you. You were within, I was without.

I sought God in books and in cities and in arguments. He was the whole time inside the seeking. The hunger I called by all those other names was him.

Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! And behold, you were within me, and I outside; and there I sought you, and upon the lovely things you have made I rushed in, deformed.

Hiddenness is a name we give to our own distraction.

C.S. Lewis · Answer

We may ignore but cannot evade the presence of God.

An unhidden God would not be a God you could refuse. We do not want a God we cannot refuse — we want a God we can choose. He has paid the high price of letting us choose.

The hideout is not in the stars or in the silence. It is in the human heart, which has an extraordinary capacity to look directly at a thing and not see it.

Aslan is not a tame lion. He shows when he wills, not when summoned.

Why is God so hidden?

The objection, in full

Late have I loved you. You were within, I was without.

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