We have to consider the truth that God's hiding of Himself is in order that He may be better known, and that His great end in all is that all the ends of the earth may look to Him and be saved.
I. This is true of the material universe. Matter in its dullness and insensibility hides God. Its crassness and opacity keeps the thought of God out of our minds. We lose God in the multitudinousness of the forms He presents to us. We are delighted with the picture, and never rise beyond. In the vastness of nature we often seem to lose ourselves rather than to find God. And yet this matter, so often felt as a concealing of God, is truly a revealing, a manifestation, of qualities in God which otherwise would have been hidden from us. How could God's almighty power have been made plain to us except through matter? Space and bulk and force illustrate power, and illustrate it the more clearly in proportion to the denseness, dullness, crassness of the material acted upon. The variety which may seem to hide God reveals the inexhaustibleness of His resources. Minuteness reveals the greatness of His care.
II. It is true of law, which is found everywhere in the material universe, that while it seems to hide God, it yet manifests Him in a higher way. The existence of law does not really hide God. On the contrary, it reveals Him in a grand and elevating way. What lessons it teaches of the Divine love for order, of the unity of God's mind, and His unchangeableness! What an impression it gives of the entire absence of caprice in His nature, and His absolute reliableness! How grandly it shows the subordination of all things, even the minutest, to one vast purpose! What a glory this universal supremacy of law casts over the moral law! And how gloriously it illustrates and harmonises with the Cross of Christ, which is the great vindication and triumph of law!
III. It is true of the means and agents employed by God that in them He hides Himself, yet reveals Himself in a higher way. God hides Himself behind truth and behind man. Yet what a revealing there is of God in this hiding of Himself, in thus keeping Himself out of sight, that truth may have free play, that souls may be trained and disciplined to the utmost, that men may be put to the highest possible use, and may be great and hallowed to each other!
IV. God hides Himself behind delay and disaster, and yet reveals Himself through these in a higher way.
J. Leckie, Sermons Preached at Ibrox,p. 94.
References: Isaiah 45:15. S. Baring-Gould, One Hundred Sermon Sketches,p. 75.Isaiah 45:18-25. C. Short, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xv., p. 120. Isaiah 45:19. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. ix., No. 508; Ibid., Evening by Evening,p. 236.