When We Don’t Understand

I was reading in Luke 18 earlier this week, and was struck by the following passage:

“Then He took unto Him the twelve, and said unto them,

 Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of man shall be accomplished. For He shall be delivered unto the Gentiles, and shall be mocked, and spitefully entreated, and spitted on: and they shall scourge Him, and put Him to death: and the third day He shall rise again.

And they understood none of these things: and this saying was hid from them, neither knew they which things were spoken.” (Luke 18:31-34)

It is astonishing to me that the disciples failed to understand this very plain description of what Jesus was about to do and suffer. The phrase, “it was hid from them” indicates that perhaps there was something else at work hindering them from fully comprehending what Jesus had just told them, but we are not given any details about how it was hid, or why.

In trying to understand that phrase better, I looked up the word hid in my Strong’s concordance, and found that it carries the picture of covering to conceal. It is the same Greek word used in Hebrews to describe Moses being  hidden by his parents, and also wonderfully appears in Colossians 3:3, which says,

“For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.”

The picture of being hidden, of being covered by the blood of Christ and made secure as Moses was when hidden from the Egyptians is a wonderful truth, but it gets us no closer to knowing what is meant in Luke 18.

As I read the passage again, a phrase came to mind from the post-resurrection account of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. As they walked and talked, Christ appeared to them, but they did not recognize Him, just as they failed to recognize what had just happened in Jerusalem with the death and reported resurrection of Christ. They just couldn’t make sense of it all.

The account in Luke 24 says that these two bewildered disciples did not recognize Jesus because their eyes were “holden.”  I looked up that word, too. It is not the same as is used in Luke 18, but carries instead the meaning of strength, of being firmly held.

I wonder if perhaps God wanted them to listen undistractedly to the truths of how Jesus’ death and resurrection had so perfectly fulfilled all that had been prophesied in Scripture. The wonder of seeing Jesus alive would have eclipsed His teaching had they recognized Him right away.

What came to mind in connection with Luke 18, however, was the disciples’ statement to Jesus when asked what they were discussing:

“we trusted that it had been He which should have redeemed Israel” (v.21)

They had expected Christ to reign in Jerusalem, to kick the Romans out once and for all, and to usher in a golden age where everything would be made right. The other disciples had similar expectations and perhaps those in Luke 18 had likewise been so blinded by their own ideas of the Messiah’s reign that they just couldn’t understand or accept the truth that Jesus must suffer and die, be buried, and rise again to purchase our redemption from sin.

You and I also can face this same tendency to become so wrapped up in our own idea of how God will work, or how we think He should work, that we miss the obvious truths of God’s Word.

Like the two men on the road to Emmaus, we become disappointed and bewildered, instead of recognizing the wonder of what God has already accomplished on our behalf.

Or perhaps, like the disciples in Luke 18, we fail to understand how the truths of God’s Word can really work the way God says they will. That is the time to “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.” (Proverbs 3:5)

In those moments when we don’t understand, when the truth doesn’t make sense to us, that is when we need to take God at His Word and choose to trust. After all, “we walk by faith, not by sight.” (2 Corinthians 5:7)

Our inability to understand a truth does not make it any less true. The disciples did not understand what Jesus told them was about to happen, but it happened anyway, exactly as He had described. I may not understand how, for example, God will work a particular situation out for my good, but I can trust that He will, because He has said He would. (Romans 8:28)

God is completely worthy of our trust. The question is, will you choose to trust Him with the things you don’t understand?