Job 23:8-9
Where I Look, God is Not There
8 “But if I go to the east, he is not there;
if I go to the west, I do not find him.
9 When he is at work in the north, I do not see him;
when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him.
John 14:19-21
Before Long the World Will Not See Me Anymore
19 Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. 20 On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. 21 Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him.”
The answer for me to the question "Does God Hide?" is yes...Yes, I think He hides...But this is not a new question...One of the oldest books in the Bible, talks about looking for God, and not being able to catch one glimpse of Him...Job looked everywhere for His LORD, but He could not find wherever He looked...Jesus even told His disciples that the world would not see Him anymore, but they would see Him...So He would be gone, and in a sense out of our sight...This is a little mysterious, but the disciples did see Him after His resurrection, and because He rose from the dead, they would always remember that He was from the Father, and in the Father...Related to this, Jesus even when He was on earth, would walk off to lonely places to pray, and He would not be around many times after some of His great healings...He seemed content many times to hide His true identity...By Jesus telling us the world would not see Him anymore, leads me to believe that He will not be seen like He was with His disciples, until His Second Coming...
So, if God is a Personal God, and loves us, one must has to make sense out of why we think He hides...There are a few reasons that come immediately to mind...The first one, for this author, is that man is limited in the way we see Him...We see Him from our perspective, as a human would...An analogy might be how does a flea or a grasshopper views man, when he sees him walking by...Does the flea see a man or does he just see a shoe or a small part of man?...Does the flea have the capability to understand what he is seeing?...The flea is finite and man is finite, so a flea should have a better understanding of man that man to God...Man is finite, but God is Infinite...So a flea is closer to a man, than man is to God...So, if you believe in this analogy and in the infinite, then you can see how difficult it is for us to see God, or at least all of Him...So, I think we get glimpses of God throughout our lives, or slices of Him, but never God completely, because He is infinite...So, we as man are limited by what we see of anything infinite or eternal...
Related to this first argument is maybe God does not want to meet us mind to mind...Much as two who are in love are not always having meetings of the mind, or a meeting of the mind...God wants us to seek Him, and seek Him persistently...That is why I think Jesus tells us to ask, then seek, then knock -be persistent in our search of His Father...He wants us to seek God and love God with all of our hearts and our souls, and maybe this eye to eye finding God, or intellect to intellect is not always the way to see Him...Maybe it is better or more frequent to find Him after we have sought Him is heart to heart...But He does not rule out the mind to mind meeting with Him...
Another reason maybe the God, who is all knowing, and man is not has the ability not only to hide from us when He wants, but He can pick and choose the times and ways we see Him...He chooses the times and places He wants to be seen...In getting back to Jesus, He seemed to do just that...He did not look for fanfare or pomp and circumstance...He was humble in all His deeds and acts...God and His Son know the right time and the right place for everything...God has a plan...And God is in control...
To get past the question of does God hide, requires faith...Faith is not stab in the dark...It is more like a lamp for our feet, a walk into the Light...God works in our lives, and our saints and many believers feel blessed by God, being in their life...
One area where He did not hide, but came right out and showed Himself was with His Son...Jesus bluntly puts out the statement that I AM in my Father...Jesus tell us He came from above...God plainly revealed Himself through His Son...His Son was not hiding when He came to earth...So much has been written about His Son -so this is not hiding...So, when I am looking for God, when I look to the north, south, east and west (and cannot find Him) -I think of Jesus and read the gospels...There He is in the gospels -coming humbly out of His hiding to show us and teach us the things He wants us to know...