The second definition of mystery in Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition, is something not understood. It’s something not fully explained by having too little information about it.
For example, Sir Walter Raleigh’s third expedition to America established a colony at Roanoke, Virginia, under John White, in 1587. Knowing how fragile settlements in the new world were, White returned to England promising to return within a year with supplies. European events prevented his return for three years. On arrival at Roanoke White found only empty chests and the word Croatoan carved on a tree. They found nothing and no one when they searched that nearby island. A mystery never solved. In 1975 a man in upstate New York dropped his wife at a doctor’s appointment. When he returned for her, she had disappeared, no trace found, and finally given up for dead. In October, 2017, 42 years later, New York City detectives found her at an assisted living residence in Lowell, Massachusetts. They never discovered why she disappeared 42 years previously. Where she had been since. Why she had established residence in the Massachusetts home. A mystery partly solved. A Bible mystery is something different. It’s a fact, a teaching, an event, a promise Hidden in God’s Word and Will UNTIL...revealed in Christ! And no longer a mystery, but KNOWN and EXERPIENCED! It isn’t surprising then that, in Genesis 3:15, on the same day Adam and Eve sinned, and before they knew why they needed his help, God promised recovery from sin focused on the ENMITY he personalized in his Son Jesus the Christ. The word implies the kind of hatred of sin that prompted Christ’s every forceful, violent spiritual response to every satanic power or presence in humanity. Jesus didn’t come to excuse and make exceptions for sinners, but to forgive their every trespass. He didn’t come to compromise with Satan but to demolish him. (That’s been the subject of the last few Sunday messages, though stated in different ways.) With all the spiritual violence in his Perfect Love for God Jesus assaulted and destroyed every evidence of Satan he encountered. End Part I
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