I have read this verse. A lot.
Most of the times that I have read it, my mind would 'hear' it as meaning, "Call, and the Lord will answer."
Sometimes I would read it and my mind would 'hear' it as saying, "Ask God to help you understand."
But when I read it again several months after the bride ran off in the middle of the night, the "which thou knowest not" really jumped out!
Only this time, the "thou" wasn't me. This time the "thou" was KatieLyn, as in 'KatieLyn knowest not.' The Holy Spirit was witnessing to me—He was letting me know—that KatieLyn didn't know the 'great and mighty' thing.
The question that would usually be asked at this point is, "Well, what doesn't she know?" But this time was different. This time the question was, "Why doesn't she know?"
Let's set aside the 500 year-old style of English and use a more recent literal translation of Jeremiah:
Call to Me, and I do answer you, yes, I declare to you great and fenced things — you have not known them.And the Amplified translation:
Call to Me and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things, fenced in and hidden, which you do not know (do not distinguish and recognize, have knowledge of and understand).What the King James translators called "mighty" in 1611 has changed in meaning over time. What we think of as mighty/strong today had a different shade of meaning back then. It was a "might" that came from being fortified or fenced in. The original Hebrew word (בָּצַר) can mean restrained, fenced, fortified, made inaccessible, enclosed.
Remember, the question is not what she did not know, but why she did not know it. And the answer is: because it was inaccessible, hidden behind a fence.
Okay, I realize that on one level that sounds, Duh! Of course things that are hidden are not seen! That is the definition of hidden.
But at another level, the level at which the Holy Spirit was communicating with me, I understood that God had fenced it in; He had done the hiding. And the question remained, why would He put a fence there?
And I called on the Lord and got the answer.
KatieLyn and her mom are in a co-dependent relationship. God's plan for Joe was to give him all of one wife, not a wife who is still living in a partial co-dependency. Throughout April and the first half of May, the Lord had been working on both KatieLyn and her mother, Gwen, to sever the dependency and heal the dysfunction. To do this, God placed fences between them. The proper response would have been for each woman to call on God individually. They did not. Instead, they blamed Joe for erecting the fences between them. It wasn't Joe.
In the weeks following her run into the middle of the night, the devil had a heyday claiming his victory over spoiling God's plan. Their codependency, instead of being corrected by the Lord, actually deepened until Gwen controlled all communication. Gwen began accusing Joe's friends of lying about Katie,¹ which is untrue. At one point, she even patently accused the pastor, who was to have married the couple, of lying! And she wanted me to "move on" without answers. Meanwhile, KatieLyn was moving backwards.
The Lesson
It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, But the glory of kings is to search out a matter.
~Proverbs 25:2
Obviously, I decided to search out the matter rather than to move on without answers. That is what this blog does.
If KatieLyn ever hopes to become a queen over her own life, then she will have to master this lesson. The lesson is one which the Lord has tried to lead her toward in the past, but she ran from it. It is the glory of kings, or in her case the glory of a queen, to search out a matter on her own. At nearly 30 years old, she should be taking on the responsibility of a woman. When she chose her mother's thoughts instead of God's thoughts, it put a fence-line between her and the Lord. When she depended on her mom to do (at least some of) the searching for her, that only put a double fence-line between herself and the Lord.
God hides some things so that we will have to call on and seek Him. Our codependency² should be with the Lord, not with another person. He wants part of our relationship with Him to be very personal, and he won't always give the answers to someone else to share with us, especially as we mature. Children learn a lot from teachers, but a time comes when they need to be doing the research on their own. This is the level which KatieLyn had reached, and the Lord knew that she would need to step up to that level to be successful in marriage. He wanted her to be a mature woman who would call upon Him, hear Him, and wholeheartedly step into His plan over all other voices.
As evidenced by her run into the night, she decided to act like a kid.
¹ You may notice that I always call KatieLyn by her full name. She told Joe that is what she prefers. Her mother always calls her Katie, without the Lyn. I have attempted to retain that use of the name in this blog.
² It is a codependency from the point that Christ is the Head of the Church, and as we rely on Him, He depends on us to be his body on Earth.
Photo Credit http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Inspirational-Images/
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