In his sermon 'Hide and Seek,' Peter Allison explores the idea that it is the glory of God to conceal a matter, while it is the glory of kings to search it out. He emphasizes the sovereignty of God, who is not obliged to reveal His purposes, and the responsibility of kings to diligently search out matters as God's servants. The sermon underscores the notion that God's glory is both in what He reveals and what He conceals, highlighting His self-sufficiency and omnipotence. Allison references biblical examples, such as David's reliance on God for guidance and Habakkuk's struggle with understanding God's judgment, to illustrate how believers are called to trust in God's wisdom and live by faith, even when His purposes are hidden. The sermon concludes with a call for perseverance and trust in God's hidden purposes, affirming that His word is a sufficient guide for living righteously.

Proverbs chapter 25. I'd like to read the first three verses. These also are Proverbs of Solomon which the men of Hezekiah, king of Judah, copied. It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter. As the heavens for height and the earth for depth, so the heart of kings is unsearchable.

This law of His mouth is better than thousands of coins of gold and silver. Almighty Heavenly Father, may we see this morning the riches of your word, its beauty, its truth, may it be impressed upon us. May you sanctify us this morning and sanctify these sinful lips that From a vessel of clay your riches in your gospel and your glory might be proclaimed. Father, may your word be heard with faith this morning. In Jesus' name, amen.

Often the games that we play as children are mirrors of the work that we do as mature adults. And good games are games that prepare us for that work. One of those childhood games that I'm sure all of you and all of us have played is hide and seek. The next time you play that, if you play that, You can remember that it is the glory of God to hide things. It's the glory of God to hide things, but the glory of kings to search out things.

Glory, in this case, refers to honor. Honor, honor of one's character. It's the honor of God's character to conceal things. To conceal something from others is the prerogative of a sovereign authority. To conceal something from other people is the prerogative of sovereign authority.

If we conceal something from other people, we are saying that we have rights, absolute rights, to whatever we conceal. When we conceal our checkbook balance from other people, we are saying, We are rightly saying that no one else has a right to that knowledge, that it's ours alone. And there are things that we have a right, we alone have a right, and those things we do conceal. If we conceal our sin on the other hand, then we're saying we're not accountable to God for what we do. We're saying that we're only accountable to ourselves.

That we're the master, the Lord and master of our body. We're the Lord and master of our life and we're not accountable to anybody else. That it's our right what we do. That our lips are ours, whose Lord over us, the psalmist says. So for God to conceal things is to say that God is sovereign.

For God to conceal things is to say that God is sovereign. For God to conceal things is to say that God is sovereign. God is under no obligation to tell us anything. He doesn't owe us anything. He doesn't have to reveal his purposes.

He doesn't have to reveal why he's doing anything. He doesn't have to reveal anything to us. You see, concealing is the work of someone who knows something. You can't conceal unless you know something, unless you have something. Searching something out is the work of people who don't know something.

And so God knows all things. God knows all things. And it is His honor, it is His glory to conceal things. And what He conceals is according to His sovereign purpose. God's concealing things also demonstrates His self-sufficiency.

He never needs anything from any of us. If we need something, then we go to people and we have to reveal we have this need. May I have something that somebody else can do for us. So if God can conceal things, anything, then it's a statement to His absolute self-sufficiency. He never needs anything from anyone.

God says in Psalm 50, if I were hungry, I wouldn't tell you. I don't need to tell you. I don't need to ask you for food because the world and its fullness are mine. There isn't anything that you have, God says, that I need. In fact, it's just the opposite.

Everything that we have, He's given us. It also, God's concealing things demonstrates his omnipotence. He's all powerful. He never needs our help. He never needs anyone else's help to do anything.

So he never has to reveal anything about his situation to get help. If we need help, if we need to borrow money, we have to go to somebody and ask for the money. And what are they going to ask before they give us their money. Well, why do you want it? What are you going to do with it?

And so we have to tell them we have to reveal to them our Purposes we have to reveal to them what we're going to do with their money We have to reveal to them what our goals are what our desires are What our dreams might be? We have to we have to reveal all this to them for them to decide whether they're going to give us what we need. God doesn't need anything from anybody. God doesn't need any help from anybody. He's all powerful.

So He never has to reveal anything at all to anyone. It's His undeserved favor that He has revealed anything to us. It's a sign of His friendship with us, that He shares His plans with us. It's a sign of His love for us that He's given to us His Word. He didn't have to.

He wasn't under no obligation to give to us this Word of Life. It is a Word of Life. It's the truth. He wasn't under any obligation to reveal any of that to us because He's sovereign. What He does, He's accountable to no one.

It's His grace, undeserved favor that He tells us what He's going to do. And He has. His Word tells us what He's going to do. He's going to put every enemy under His feet. He's going to subdue every enemy underneath His feet.

He's going to bring His wrath on everyone who does not obey the Gospel. But He's also saved a great multitude, an innumerable multitude of people, of sinners. He's made them His own people, His own special people. He died for these sinners. He is sanctifying these.

He has told us what his purpose for his church is. So that through these sinners that he is redeemed for whom he has died, whom he is sanctifying, whom he is bringing to glory as the captain of our salvation, he is going to display his manifold wisdom to the host of heaven. He's told us that in His purpose because He is treating us as His friends. He's having fellowship with us. So in saying that it is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings to search it out, it's saying that God is sovereign over kings.

It's His glory He conceals. They search out. That's asserting God's sovereignty over them. The King is a minister of God. The King is God's servant, who bears God's authority.

And so he, as God's servant, is called to search out matters so that he can either bring God's wrath on those who do evil, or God's praise on those who do well. And he needs to use diligence in searching out a matter. That is what God has called him to do as his servant. And of course, what God, if God is the one who is hiding these things, then God is the only one who reveals these things. And so you can see that one of the absolute requirements for anybody who would be a king is that they must be a Christ follower.

How can they pray to the Lord and ask for God to reveal the things that they have to search out if they are not? God doesn't hear the prayer of the wicked. He hears the prayer of the righteous, those whom He has made righteous by His righteousness. We're not righteous by our own works. So if the king is to search out a matter and God is the one who conceals matters and God is the only one who can reveal anything, you can see that a king is not qualified to be a king.

He is not qualified to search out a matter because he doesn't know the Lord. He can't pray to the Lord as David did on many occasions. Lord, should I go up and attack this enemy? Should I take this city? Is this city going to turn me over to Saul?

What should I do? David prayed continually to the Lord in every circumstance to ask the Lord's guidance, to ask the Lord to reveal to him those things that he needed to know. And God did. God heard his prayers. You remember Saul, he tried to search matters out, he tried to come to the Lord and the Lord wouldn't hear him.

And it resulted in him going to the witch at Endor, trying to find out from God a matter that God had concealed from him. And in so doing he brought just further Further wickedness and judgment upon himself and his and the nation So God is sovereign over kings but it also says in the from the fact that God conceals a matter, King search it out, but it also says that the heart of a king is unsearchable. As the heavens for height and the earth for depth. So the heart of the king is unsearchable. The heavens, God, Jeremiah says, are we cannot measure the extent of the heavens.

And Jeremiah also says that we cannot discern or search out the foundation of the earth. And if you think about it, those are two things that we just can never figure out. We really end up going in a circle. We take matter, and we can break it down more and more into smaller and smaller particles until we end up with energy that has no mass. So what have we found out?

You said the earth is made up of matter. We can divide it into smaller and smaller components, molecules, atoms, and so on. We can break atoms into particles, subparticles, subatomic particles. But ultimately, what is it? Well, if we just keep breaking it down, ultimately it becomes energy that has no mass, light.

It's a bit of a circle, isn't it? You see what the papal means when it says we cannot search out the foundation of the earth. We cannot measure the extent of the heavens. And so the heart of the king then is unsearchable because as a minister of God, the king exercises God's authority and thus in a limited way, he imitates God. He imitates God.

He brings judgments, right? He justifies the righteous and condemns the wicked. And so one of the ways then that the king is an imitation or a Servant a minister of God is that his heart too is unsearchable So the sovereign God then is the one who both conceals and reveals everything we know. We know it only because God has revealed it to us. That's true.

Think about that. Everything that we know, we know only because God has revealed it to us. David said that it was God that taught his fingers to make war. Now, we think of war, making wars, maybe the farthest thing from what's holy, and God, and church, and so on. David brings these two things together, and he says, no, Lord, The Lord is the one who taught me how to fight, taught my fingers how to kill people in battle.

David was a great warrior. He acknowledged that God taught him that. Isaiah speaks about the farmer. That's another very earthy, practical skill. And yet Isaiah attributes the knowledge of the farmer in knowing how to plow, how to prepare the soil, when to stop preparing the soil and how to plant, how to raise different types of grains and crops, how to harvest different types of grains.

You know, one is harvested by threshing it, another is harvested in a different way. All these very practical elements of knowledge about the preparation of food, Isaiah says, God teaches us all that. So God is the one who reveals and God is the one who conceals and we have to respect what God has concealed and not given us to know. Deuteronomy 29, 29, you probably have it memorized right the The secret things belong to God But what he's revealed? Belong to us and to our children.

And so we are only to search into what He allows us to search into. He calls us to search out the things that He has revealed in His Word. We can search the scriptures. That is the truth. And we can use the truth that God has given to us in His scriptures and search out His works in this world.

All those who take pleasure in God's works. The psalmist says search out those works and study those works because in studying them we are simply looking into the glory of God and what He has concealed and hidden in this earth for us, in this case for us to discover. He's hidden many things in the physical world, as we talked about a minute ago, the foundation of the earth, the extent of the universe. These things, God has concealed. And according to Jeremiah 31, 37, it says, Thus says the Lord, if the heavens above can be measured, if they can be measured, and the foundations of the earth below can be explored, then I will cast off all the offspring of Israel for all that they have done, declares the Lord.

The implication there being, God is saying, I'm not going to cast off my seed, but He's saying, if these things could be uncovered and discovered, then I would cast them off, meaning they can't be discovered. God has hidden them. He's also hidden things that we can discover, like the many things that we have learned, and in some cases forgotten. God enabled the ancient Egyptians to build the pyramids. How they did that is a mystery to us today.

They had the skill and they did it. God revealed that to them. But He's hidden it again from us. There are many aspects in the... And so don't think today that we know more than all those ancient people did.

I'm not so sure about that. Maybe we know more about some things, but there are a number of artifacts that have been preserved that indicate they knew a whole lot more than we give them credit for knowing. Things that God had revealed to them that they had searched out, but because they have turned away from the Lord, because they have abandoned His Word and engaged in all manner of wickedness, God judged those nations and they went into oblivion and all of their learning was forgotten. Even to this day, there are designs, for example, down in Chile that only when you look at them from the air do you see the design in them? And you wonder, well how could people have done this over this vast area unless they were somehow up in the air to be able to see it?

It's probably a bigger miracle that they could put this big design on the earth without being able to be up in the air and see it. And many other things. But there's also aspects of the spiritual world that God has concealed from us. And we're not to search some of those things out. What are His purposes?

What is God going to do in the future? Where He has concealed that from us, we are not to search that out like Saul did or tried to do. If God has not revealed it to us in His Word, then about what He is planning to do, it's off limits for us to go to other means to try and search that out. Why some things maybe are not fully revealed in the Scriptures, or at least we're not able to fully understand. Why God ordained evil to exist in the world.

We might have some answers, some sort of answer, but ultimately that is one of the things that is a mystery to us. It's something that God has concealed. What we can say is that God has a purpose for all that he has ordained, including the evil. But he's concealed that matter. God conceals his purposes for some of the things that he does.

Why do children stray from the faith? Sometimes he's concealed that from them. Why do certain calamities happen? We have to say with Isaiah, for my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than your ways, so My ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

We simply often cannot understand what God has concealed. It's beyond our ability. God conceals His works. How does the Holy Spirit bring faith in anyone? How does the Holy Spirit...

We think we can understand because an adult, irrational person can hear God's word being spoken and we see this response of faith as they repent and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. But other people can hear the exact same message and nothing happens. We really don't understand that. How does God bring faith in an unborn infant who maybe doesn't have a fully developed mind or body yet? These are works that God conceals.

And we simply have to say, Lord, your works are marvelous. They're wonderful. They are high. I cannot attain to that knowledge. As Paul said in Romans 11, Oh, the depth of the riches and the wisdom and the knowledge of God, how unsearchable are His judgments and unscrutable His ways.

For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been His counselor, or who has given a gift to Him that He might be repaid for from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be glory forever. Amen. See, we need to remember that God is glorified by what he conceals as well as by what he reveals to us. We can easily see that he is glorified in what he reveals to us.

When we see his works and we understand something about how the human body works, when we recognize that it is God who is the author that fills us with praise and awe, and we praise God. When we see, when we can read the book of Job and we see God revealing to us His purpose in that. And we see it and we praise God. When we see God working and He shows to us His purpose, we can praise the Lord. But we also need to remember that God is glorified in what He conceals as well.

Sometimes God hides His face from us. Nine times in the Psalms, maybe more, but at least nine times, the psalmist speaks about God hiding His face. And he cries out, Lord, why are you hiding your face? Why do you stand afar off? Why do you hide your face from me?

Sometimes God does hide his face from us, or it seems that he hides his face from us. There are trials that We don't understand. We may not understand why He is bringing something to us. Maybe He does reveal His purpose to us. Maybe by His Spirit He does testify to us and show us why He is doing it, especially if it's chasing us for our failings and sins and weaknesses.

But sometimes He doesn't and in those times We need to remember that God is glorified by what He conceals. When God chooses to conceal His purposes from us, He is teaching us to trust Him and to live by faith. Habbakkuk had a question for God. And God had come to him and told him about the judgment that would come under Babylon. Sorry, I lost my train of thought, and I was trying to find Habakkuk, and I forgot for a second where it was.

God came to Habakkuk and told him that he was raising up the Chaldeans, a great and terrible nation, to come and bring judgment on Israel. And so Habakkuk has a question. He says, well, aren't you from everlasting, aren't you the Holy God? He says, you are of pure eyes than to behold evil and you cannot look on wickedness. Why do you look on those who deal treacherously referring to Babylon and hold your tongue when the wicked devours a person more righteous than he.

Why do you make men like fish of the sea, like creeping things that have no ruler over them? God had said he was going to send the Babylonians. They were a very terrifying nation, far worse than anything China has done to anybody. In the worst of their persecutions and torture of people, Babylon was far worse. The cruelties that they inflicted on their captives were far worse than probably anything we have seen in the world today.

They are violent people, more fierce than evening wolves. They are terrible and dreadful. And so, Habakkuk is asking, Lord, how can you allow this very wicked nation to devour somebody that's more righteous than they are? Yes, Israel was bad, but They weren't that bad, Habakkuk thought. And he said, they take up all of them with a hook.

They catch them with a net. They gather them in the dragnet. They rejoice and are glad. Therefore they sacrifice to their net and burn incense to their dragnet because by them their share is sumptuous and their food is plentiful. Shall they continue to empty their net and slay the nations without pity?" Habakkuk is asking God, how can you do this?

And you know what God's answer was? It wasn't to reveal his reasons or his purpose. It was simply to tell Habakkuk, the just shall live by faith. The just live by faith when God reveals His purpose, or when God conceals His purpose. We continue to trust in the goodness of God.

We continue to trust in the rightness of God. We continue to trust that we are His children and that He is the good shepherd. He is the wise overseer, what the Bible calls the bishop of our soul the overseer of our soul and that in his wisdom he has brought this to pass because he is all wise and all powerful and Knows everything And that in whatever he is bringing to pass is he has concealed his purpose from us that he is still our Father. That he is still with us, that he will never leave us nor forsake us. And that we continue by faith to believe with a sure and a certain hope Not an uncertain hope but a sure and certain hope That He is accomplishing His purpose for good, not only for His own glory in what He is doing, and He is glorified in the death of the wicked, but He is accomplishing His purpose in us for our good as well as His glory.

As well as his glory. And so when God conceals his purpose, the just live by their faith. We are content that whatever reason God has, it is sufficient. His word is a sufficient guide to reveal to us all that we need to know to live holy and rightly, righteously before Him, to be thoroughly equipped for every good work. And that if He hasn't revealed something to us, it is truly because we do not We do not need to know it And we have to be content with that We do need to be content And Not to doubt and not to fear what the Lord is doing.

For He has said, I will never leave you and I will never forsake you. That's true even when He conceals His purposes from us. Let's pray. Almighty Heavenly Father, we praise you this morning for your wisdom, your power, your majesty. You are clothed in great majesty.

The sun is your chariot. You dwell in unapproachable light. And there are many things that you have concealed from us that we do not know. That we do not know. Help us Lord to by faith put our trust in you, to hope in you.

Hope that is, we don't hope for the things that we see, but we hope for the things that we do not see. And when we do hope for them, we eagerly wait for them with perseverance. So Lord we ask for that perseverance. It comes only by your grace through faith to continue to hope for the things that we do not yet see, for your purposes that you have concealed from us. And Lord, where you have called us and revealed to us, we ask for diligence to search those things out.

That we may look, that we might praise you and glorify you both in what you have revealed and what you have concealed. In Jesus' name, Amen.