Hidden in the Unseen
I have joined myself to an Ocean, and I cleave to a world unseen. It is not only a joining that we embrace but a free-falling. In our descent, a drawn out cry comes forth as our last request, “Have Your way!”
I freefall with arms spread wide, holding nothing for myself and keeping not the slightest grip of ownership upon my life. My life is not my own. I have been bought with a price. And I have willingly surrendered to my position of hiddenness in Him—hidden with Christ in God. When He appears, I too will appear with Him (Col 3:4).
When we leave the places of living before men and begin to live before the Eyes-of-fire alone, we cross over into unknown territory. As we looked at in the process of His awakening, He has brought us to a certain wilderness of transformation. And here in this place we are no longer able to measure our worth by the tangible reality of our success before men. We leave the old measuring sticks at the door, for they are not suited for the ways of God. We depart from the false identity that was based on how respected, known, gifted and influential we were in the eyes of men and leap into the vast unknown realm, the hidden reality, of who we are eternally in God. In this hurdle, we take great risk for we leave every familiar comfort behind us.
To abandon the realm of the seen that we might freefall into the unseen is a daring endeavor and only faith anchors our souls. We voluntarily jump off the cliff of our old identity without an absolute clarity of our new one. Though we know who we are in the corporate sense of the redeemed-body-of-Christ, the mysteries that He formed in us individually and the details of who we are personally in the hidden places, are nearly entirely hidden from our understandings.
We are trading in what we have always known and what others have always told us of ourselves for a book of blank pages. We leave all the old voices, however true or false, for the One voice who is temporarily very silent in our experience. He shows us so little of who we are in Him in the beginning because He wants us to experience the “drop off” from the old ways and be willing to plunge into the unseen realm with eyes of faith. We face the pain of the barrenness of our souls. We face the reality of all that we do not yet know of Him when we once thought we knew so much. We spend a season in this dangling-in-between place—no longer identified as we once were, yet still so foreign and distant from who we truly are in Him and our eternal identity.
As we dangle, we pray, “Let me be weighed on honest scales, that God may know my integrity” (Job 31:6). In this season of “dangling,” we slowly and nearly imperceptibly experience a transfer of all of our wealth. Our “gold” and all that we are are moved from what is seen into the hidden realm of the unseen. “Then you will lay your gold in the dust….Yes, the Almighty will be your gold and your precious silver; for then you will have your delight in the Almighty…” (Job 22:24-25).
What we cling to is no longer of the essence of what is temporal but what is eternal. We are hidden with Christ until He is revealed and us with Him. We leave the realm of what can be communicated and stake our territory in the temporary silence of eternal reality. In this place, the cost is the silence. The price is the hiddenness. No one, except those rare few with eyes into eternity can perceive who we are anymore. We cannot communicate except by such feeble words that never do justice to the beauty or the wonder of what He Himself calls us in Him. The pain is the namelessness. Though we are far from nameless in truth, we simply have not heard the very real name He has given to us and that we will possess for all eternity. This is the cost and, oh, how worth it is the sacrifice.
It is this struggle that brings forth strength within us in time. We place all of our riches and all of our inheritance in the realm beyond. We wish we could reach it, but we cannot. It is hidden. It is behind a veil. Yet it is there. And we begin to know by the testimony of the Spirit within us that we own a very real and genuine reality in that place outside of the seen.