Things Revealed and Things Kept Secret

“The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deuteronomy 29:29).

Near the end of his last address to Israel, Moses described a scene that had not yet happened. Travelers from a far country stand over the land of Israel and look at it and see “that the whole land thereof is brimstone, and salt, and burning, that it is not sown, nor beareth, nor any grass groweth therein, like the overthrow of Sodom, and Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboim” (Deuteronomy 29:23). This was the land of which the spies had brought back a cluster of grapes so large that “they bare it between two upon a staff” (Numbers 13:23). The travelers ask the obvious question: “Wherefore hath the LORD done thus unto this land? what meaneth the heat of this great anger?” (Deuteronomy 29:24). And Moses gives the answer they will receive: “Because they have forsaken the covenant of the LORD God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them forth out of the land of Egypt: For they went and served other gods, and worshipped them” (Deuteronomy 29:25-26).

Moses had just finished reading the terms of that covenant. Deuteronomy 28 is sixty-eight verses long. The first fourteen promise blessing for obedience. The other fifty-four, from verse 15 to the end, describe what will come on Israel if she will not hear. In the chapter before that, the Levites had read twelve curses aloud, and after every one of them “all the people shall answer and say, Amen” (Deuteronomy 27:15). Israel heard every word of it, said Amen to it, and went on to forsake it, and Moses, standing before them on the plains of Moab, already knew how the story would end. It is at the close of that sober forecast, with the burned land before his mind’s eye, that he speaks of the secret things and the revealed things.

Here is a rule for every man who opens his Bible to learn what is coming, and we keep it on Sunday afternoons at Victory Baptist Church in Coden, Alabama, as we work through the prophetic word. God has not told us everything He knows. What He has told us, He has given to us and to our children, and He gave it to be done. A man who reads prophecy without the first truth will claim to know what God has kept to Himself, and a man who reads it without the second will treat what God has plainly given as though it were out of reach.

The Secret Things Belong unto the LORD

Moses divides all that God knows into two portions and tells us who owns each one. The secret things belong to the LORD our God, and no man has a claim on them. The revealed things belong to us, and no man has an excuse for neglecting them. The little word but stands between the two and keeps them apart.

The phrase secret things is found in only one other place in the Bible, and it is in Daniel. Nebuchadnezzar had dreamed a dream and demanded that his wise men tell him both the dream and its meaning, and they could not. Daniel and his companions prayed, and God showed Daniel the dream in a night vision. Daniel blessed God for it: “He revealeth the deep and secret things: he knoweth what is in the darkness, and the light dwelleth with him. I thank thee, and praise thee, O thou God of my fathers, who hast given me wisdom and might, and hast made known unto me now what we desired of thee: for thou hast now made known unto us the king’s matter” (Daniel 2:22-23). When Arioch brought him to the king, Arioch said, “I have found a man of the captives of Judah, that will make known unto the king the interpretation” (Daniel 2:25). Daniel took no credit for it: “The secret which the king hath demanded cannot the wise men, the astrologers, the magicians, the soothsayers, shew unto the king; But there is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets” (Daniel 2:27-28), and “But as for me, this secret is not revealed to me for any wisdom that I have more than any living” (Daniel 2:30). Moses said the secret things belong to the LORD, and Daniel, kneeling in Babylon, thanked God for opening one of them. The secret things are God’s, and they are His to open when and to whom He pleases; the wisest men of the greatest empire on earth could not pry one of them loose.

That should settle how a Bible reader treats what God has not said. If the Bible does not say it, a man should leave it alone, or at least tell the people he teaches that he is offering his own judgment and not God’s word. One of the troubles with prophecy teaching is that God gave a great deal of information, and some teachers are not content with the amount He gave. Where the Bible says less than they would like, they supply the rest themselves.

There are places in prophecy where the Bible is hard to follow. I have read the last chapters of Daniel again and again. The first six chapters are plain and practical, but the battles of the king of the north and the king of the south in Daniel 11, which run on into chapter 12, are very hard to follow. Where a passage is that difficult, a teacher should give his people the best judgment he can and then tell them plainly that God did not give us enough to be certain. It may be that those things are not for us. Daniel himself was told, “Go thy way, Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end” (Daniel 12:9).

The plainest example is the day of the Lord’s coming. The Lord said, “But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father” (Mark 13:32). Moses did not list the secret things, but here the Lord Jesus Himself names one of them, and He places it with the Father. On what ground, then, does a man who believes the Bible write a book naming the date of the Lord’s return? Where would he have found it? He did not find it in the Bible, because the Lord said it is not there to be found.

Those Things Which Are Revealed

Some people are uneasy with this verse because they have heard it used all their lives to stop questions. When a hard passage came up, someone quoted “The secret things belong unto the LORD” and closed the Bible. But Moses spent only a few words on what God keeps, and he spent the rest of the sentence on what God gives: “those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.” The God who kept back the day of His Son’s coming has given His people a whole Bible, and He did not give it to be left closed.

Moses said so himself in the next chapter of the same address: “For this commandment which I command thee this day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it? Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it? But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it” (Deuteronomy 30:11-14). A man does not have to go up to heaven or cross the sea to find what God has said. The word is very nigh. For a believer today it is sitting in his lap.

Some people treat the Bible as though its real meaning were hidden underneath the words and could be reached only by some deeper insight. A verse means what it says. There may be more truth in it than a reader sees the first time, and there are principles to be drawn out and places where the same truth is taught more fully. But the words are not a code. At the same time, understanding is God’s gift. When Peter confessed that Jesus is the Christ, the Lord told him, “Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 16:17). Pastor Ron Ralph, a Pastor I deeply respect, would labor over a passage, and when it would not come clear he would say that he believed the Lord was going to show it to him. The words of the text are plain, and a man still needs God to open his understanding of them.

Moses speaks of the revealed things as a possession that a family owns: they belong unto us and to our children for ever. When my wife set out to buy me a rifle for my birthday this fall, I called a small shop in Lucedale, Mississippi that builds them by hand, and the man who builds them talked with me on the phone for most of an hour. He said what he makes is an heirloom, the kind of thing a man can pass down to his children. A well-made rifle can be handed down, and it will still wear out. What God has revealed belongs to His people, and it belongs to their children after them, for ever. Moses had already told Israel how it was to be handed down: “And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up” (Deuteronomy 6:6-7). The charge was laid on fathers and mothers, sitting in the house and walking by the way, lying down at night and rising in the morning, so that the word God gave would pass from one generation to the next as surely as anything a family owns.

There is a kind of humility that is really neglect. A man who says the Bible is too deep for him, and so never studies what God has plainly revealed, is leaving unopened the inheritance God gave him and meant him to hand down.

Spoken Since the World Began

The New Testament never quotes Moses’ verse, but it speaks plainly of things God has published from the beginning and of a thing He kept hidden from the beginning, and it measures both with the same words, since the world began. I set those passages beside Deuteronomy 29:29 as my own comparison, and each one must be read for what it says in its own place.

Twice those words measure what God has spoken openly. Zacharias, filled with the Holy Ghost at the birth of John the Baptist, said that God had raised up a horn of salvation “As he spake by the mouth of his holy prophets, which have been since the world began” (Luke 1:70). Peter, preaching in the temple after the healing of the lame man, said of Christ, “Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began” (Acts 3:21). A priest at the birth of his son and an apostle in the temple, years apart, both said that God had spoken this by His prophets since the world began. What God promised concerning Israel, her Messiah, and the restoring of all things on the earth has stood on the public record from the very beginning, and anyone who would read the prophets could know it.

Amos describes God’s way with His prophets: “Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid? shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it? Surely the Lord GOD will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets” (Amos 3:6-7). Amos is speaking of judgment coming on a city, and he says God does not bring it without first warning His people by the prophets. It is a comfort and a warning to Israel about the way God deals with her, and it must be left in that setting. If a man stretched it to mean that God had told the prophets everything He would ever do, he would set Amos against Paul, who says plainly that one thing was kept secret from the prophets’ age altogether.

Even what the prophets wrote was not all clear to them. Peter says, “Of which salvation the prophets have inquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you: Searching what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow. Unto whom it was revealed, that not unto themselves, but unto us they did minister the things, which are now reported unto you by them that have preached the gospel unto you” (1 Peter 1:10-12). The prophets wrote of the sufferings of Christ and the glory to follow, and they searched “what, or what manner of time” the Spirit of Christ in them signified. They were told that what they wrote was for others who would come after them. The prophets searched their own writings to know the time, and the believer who reads of Christ’s sufferings now reads them as history the prophets could only see from afar.

Kept Secret Since the World Began

The same words that measure what God published also measure what He hid. Paul closes Romans with this: “Now to him that is of power to stablish you according to my gospel, and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began, But now is made manifest, and by the scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the everlasting God, made known to all nations for the obedience of faith” (Romans 16:25-26). Over the same span of ages, from the beginning of the world, God was speaking one thing by His prophets and keeping another thing in silence. Then come the words But now is made manifest. What God kept secret He has now revealed, and in the language of Moses it has passed out of the secret things that belong to the LORD and into the revealed things that belong to us and to our children. (The fourth use is the blind man’s in John 9:32, “Since the world began was it not heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was born blind,” which means only that it had never happened before.)

Paul says in Ephesians what the mystery is and where it was kept: “That the Gentiles should be fellowheirs, and of the same body, and partakers of his promise in Christ by the gospel” (Ephesians 3:6), and it “from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God” (Ephesians 3:9). It “in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men, as it is now revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit” (Ephesians 3:5). To the Colossians he wrote, “Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints” (Colossians 1:26). In the body of Christ, God has made of Jew and Gentile one: “for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace” (Ephesians 2:15). Every believer today is a member of that body, and the place he stands in Christ was a secret God kept through all the ages of the prophets.

Romans 16:26 says the mystery is now made manifest “by the scriptures of the prophets.” The verse does not say which prophets. Ephesians 3:5 names “his holy apostles and prophets,” and Romans 16:26 may mean them, or it may mean the prophets of the Old Testament, whose writings God now uses in making the mystery known. The Bible does not settle that question. What it does settle is Ephesians 3:5 and 3:9: the mystery was hid in God, and it was not made known to the sons of men in other ages. It was not sitting in the prophets’ pages waiting for someone clever enough to find it.

Nor can a man sort his Bible by the word mystery. It occurs twenty-two times in eight books, and not every use is the body of Christ. The Lord told His disciples, “Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God” (Mark 4:11), and He was speaking of the kingdom, not the church. A passage belongs to the prophetic program or to the mystery by what it says: to whom it is spoken, what it promises, and whether it was published by the prophets or kept back from men. Finding the word mystery in a verse settles none of those questions.

Paul also tells how well the secret was kept: “But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory: Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:7-8). God kept His purpose so close that the men who crucified Christ did not know what they were doing.

That We May Do

Moses closes the sentence with its purpose: “that we may do all the words of this law.” God did not reveal His word to satisfy curiosity or to furnish debates. He revealed it to be obeyed. The Lord asked, “And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?” (Luke 6:46). Knowing the Bible helps a man very little if he does not do what it says. Some people want a new insight from God when they have not yet done what God has already told them. A man who does not attend church faithfully has no reason to expect God to show him something new.

Doing begins with study. Paul told Timothy, “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). A workman is approved by his work. Many people do not study at all. Some study and never rightly divide, and what they gather is a great deal of information with nothing kept in its place. The workman God approves does both: he labors in the word, and he puts each part of it where God put it. In this series, rightly dividing will mean, among other things, keeping what God spoke by the prophets since the world began apart from what He kept secret since the world began.

Doing also means giving the revealed things away. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Awake to righteousness, and sin not; for some have not the knowledge of God: I speak this to your shame” (1 Corinthians 15:34). The some were men in that church who said “there is no resurrection of the dead” (15:12), and Paul laid the shame of their ignorance at the church’s door. The same is true outside the church. When we drive through Theodore, Bayou La Batre, Grand Bay, and Dauphin Island, there are people there who do not know God, and the believers who know Him are the ones God has given His word to carry. “How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?” (Romans 10:14). God gave us these words to give to our families, to our children, and to our neighbors, in tracts and books and conversations, even when it is awkward.

When I ask a man whether he will go to heaven when he dies, he almost always says yes. When I ask how, he tells me he is a good person, or that he belongs to a church. When I ask whether he has the gospel, he says he does. When I ask him what the gospel is, he cannot say. The Bible explains why: “But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them” (2 Corinthians 4:3-4). Some of those men have never been told the gospel plainly, and that is why we go. But the verse speaks of men “which believe not,” and the god of this world blinds the minds of men who will not believe. Hebrews says the same of Israel in the wilderness: “For unto us was the gospel preached, as well as unto them: but the word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it” (Hebrews 4:2).

The gospel is one of the revealed things. “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). It is not hidden from you, and it is not far off. If you have never trusted Christ, there is nothing secret standing between you and Him. Believe what God has said about His Son, and trust Him.

And for the believer, the things God has kept back need not trouble him. The day and hour of the Lord’s coming are with the Father, and the hard chapters of Daniel will be as clear as God means them to be. What God has given is enough to live by. “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee” (Isaiah 26:3). A believer whose mind rests on what God has said, and who does it, can leave the secret things where God has put them.

Thomas Irvin
Pastor, Victory Baptist Church, Coden, Alabama
www.VBCoden.com