Psalms 104:2

Psalms 104:2

I. There are two kinds of mystery: a mystery of darkness and a mystery of light. With the mystery of darkness we are familiar. Of the mystery of light we have not thought, perhaps, so much. With all deep things the deeper light brings new mysteriousness. The mystery of light is the privilege and prerogative of the profoundest things. The shallow things are capable only of the mystery of darkness. Of that all things are capable. Nothing is so thin, so light, so small, that if you cover it with clouds or hide it in half-lights, it will not seem mysterious. But the most genuine and profound things you may bring forth into the fullest light and let the sunshine bathe them through and through, and in them there will open ever-new wonders of mysteriousness. Surely of God it must be supremely true that the more we know of Him, the more He shows Himself to us, the more mysterious He must for ever be. The mystery of light must be complete in Him. Revelation is not the unveiling of God, but a changing of the veil that covers Him, not the dissipation of mystery, but the transformation of the mystery of darkness into the mystery of light. To the pagan God is mysterious because He is hidden in clouds, mysterious like the storm. To the Christian God is mysterious because He is radiant with infinite truth, mysterious like the sun.

II. The doctrine of the Trinity is not an easy, ready-made, satisfactory explanation of God, in which the inmost chambers of His life are unlocked and thrown wide open, that whoso will may walk there and understand Him through and through. There is a mystery concerning God to him who sees the richness of the Divine life in the threefold unity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost which no man feels to whom God does not seem to stand forth from the pages of his Testament in that completeness. Not as the answer to a riddle which leaves all things clear, but as the deeper sight of God, prolific with a thousand novel questions which were never known before, clothed in a wonder which only in that larger light displayed itself, offering new worlds for faith and reverence to wander in, so must the New Testament revelation, the truth of Father, Son, and Spirit, one perfect God, offer itself to man.

Phillips Brooks, The Candle of the Lord,p. 305.

Reference: Psalms 104:3. J. Irons, Thursday Penny Pulpit,vol. viii., p. 8.