The Most Glorious Game of Hide and Seek
[18]For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens (He is God!), who formed the earth and made it (He established it; He did not create it empty, He formed it to be inhabited!): “I am the Lord, and there is no other. [19]I did not speak in secret, in a land of darkness; I did not say to the offspring of Jacob, ‘Seek me in vain.’ I the Lord speak the truth; I declare what is right.
[20] “Assemble yourselves and come; draw near together, you survivors of the nations! They have no knowledge who carry about their wooden idols, and keep on praying to a god that cannot save. [21] Declare and present your case; let them take counsel together! Who told this long ago? Who declared it of old? Was it not I, the Lord? And there is no other god besides me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is none besides me.
Isaiah 45:18–20
God made the whole world to be a place for us to live. Like a Van Gogh painting is easy to recognize as a Van Gogh, the Lord left His impression on the entire creation. Psalm 19 says that the skies proclaim the work of His hands. Every inch of the cosmos bears His mark and shows His presence.
But He didn’t just write Himself all over His creation for fun. He wrote Himself all over creation so that when He would put us into it, as part of it, we would have hints of evidence about Him. Every time we note the faithful predictability of the seasons, the consistent taste of tomatoes and strawberries, we get a hint that something made this stuff and is keeping it the way it is.
God earnestly wants us to seek Him. That concept and theme of ‘seeking the Lord’ comes up over and over again in the scriptures. This passage gives the reassurance to Israel in a time of great trouble. It isn’t in vain that they seek Him. The problem is, like a game of hide and seek when the ice cream truck pulls up, the seekers have forgotten who they were seeking. They exchange the quest for the creator for a false rest with the created things.
Not only does God hide Himself all over, but He gives His creation the freedom to not look for Him. It is all too easy to say “This thing that I found, that wasn’t hidden very well, this is what I was really seeking.” And then we quit seeking the Lord and rest with a weaker satisfaction for a created thing just like ourselves. That’s not what we or the creation were created for. We were created to be in and part of the creation, but looking to and seeking after God.
There is only one God, and there is no other. He has written Himself all over creation like a middle school girl writes a boy’s name all over her notebook, acting like it’s hidden, but hoping to be discovered. Seek Him today. Watch for Him. The Lord is present in conversations, events, nature, and you. He is waiting to be caught.