My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6). The manner in which western religion teaches the Bible, says to me that we have mistaken cerebral knowledge for mystical knowing. Our western mindset defines the word mystery as something that can’t be fully understood but that’s not the biblical meaning of mystery. Biblical mystery is not something you cannot understand, but it is something that is endlessly understandable. It is multilayered and pregnant with meaning and never admits to closure or resolution. Paul refers to it as the “hidden wisdom of God that we teach in our mysteries…things beyond the mind of humanity that God has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Cor. 2:6-9). It’s “knowing spiritual things spiritually” (1 Cor. 2:13). In other words, it could not be communicated to people who didn’t have at least some level of inner experience. It is that necessity of personal experience that gives life and wisdom to all things divine. The death burial and resurrection of Jesus is a doctrine that all Christians would intellectually assent to, but is obvious by their life that it’s an intellectual belief system and not living faith. We move from one to the other only through encounter, surrender, trust, and the inner experience of presence and power. Biblical mystery does not recognize this self-made autonomous “getting it right” agenda that you see in western fundamentalism.
~Stan Tyra