However, as it is written: “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived”— the things God has prepared for those who love him—
1 Corinthians 2:9 (NIV)
Shown by the Spirit
A man at the counter wants to know where his line is. He has a fence and he has begun to suspect the fence is not the line. The clerk pulls the drawer and the mylar comes up with a sound like weather, and there it is: a boundary that runs eleven feet inside his hedge, from a rebar stake nobody has seen since 1974 to a creek that shifted one spring and never went back.
Nobody has ever seen that line. It was never visible and it never will be. It is not less real for that, and everything he owns is decided by it.
However, as it is written: What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived, the things God has prepared for those who love him. Paul is quoting Scripture at a church that had gotten impressed with clever talkers, and he tells them their faith rests on God’s power.
Then he says what has happened to those unseen things. These are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit, and the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God.
God prepared them and God has shown them, and he gave the Spirit for a stated reason: so that we may understand what God has freely given us. The rulers of that age never got near it, and Paul says if they had understood, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
The things God has prepared are that kind of real, and Paul says the Spirit shows them. Nobody arrives at them by walking the ground; they are not the sort of thing an eye was ever going to find.
He stands at the counter a while with the sheet. The hedge is where the hedge is, and it isn’t moving this year, and he is going to have to take somebody’s word for the rest of it. He takes it.
A Prayer to Remember
Show me what you’ve prepared, as much of it as this side of things allows, God. I’ve read that line about eyes and ears for years and gone on picturing something I invented. Send your Spirit into the middle of that. Let me understand one thing today I couldn’t have reached on my own.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
