I Can’t Handle the Truth

Manoah, on the whole, asked good questions.

His failure to recognize God on the scene wasn’t for a lack of trying.

He knew the guy who spoke to his wife was a man of God, and he went to God and asked to send him back. He wanted to make sure he had it right. “Let the man of God you sent to us come again to teach us.”

We’ve already considered how that’s a prayer God loves to answer.

But Manoah’s inquiry continued while the answers became a wee bit more elusive.

When he asked the man of God his name, the angel shut him down. And I can’t help feeling a little like Col. Jessep just handed Lt. Kaffee his backside when he shouted, “You can’t handle the truth!”

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Granted, Col. Jessep was no man of God. Certainly not an angel, and not very awesome. And I’ll concede, the angel didn’t get all shrieky and contorted like Jack Nicholson when he schooled Tom Cruise in the courtroom.

But the angel did say to Manoah, “You can’t handle the truth.”

Manoah said to the angel of the LORD, “What is your name, so that when your words come to pass, we may honor you?”

But the angel of the LORD said to him, “Why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful?” (Judges 13:17-18, NASB, emphasis added)

When you tell me there is something that I just can’t know, I don’t hear it the way you say it. I hear it like Col. Jessep screaming.

The angel, he didn’t have Jessep’s heart. He didn’t seek to hide or deny knowledge that Manoah should have been privy to. He had no desire to shame or belittle Samson’s dad.

He just spoke the truth. And that Manoah couldn’t handle it.

For it was simply too wonderful.

This word he uses, wonderful, is the same Hebrew word the Psalmist wrote in 139.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
It is too high, I cannot attain to it. (Psalm 139:6, emphasis added)

He’s not withholding. It’s simply too much.

Incomprehensible. (A word I do not like.)

That is to say, you can’t handle the truth.

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You’ve been here long enough to know that’s hard for me to hear. I want to know.

I don’t swing around passages that don’t make sense to me. I dig them out.

I have this idealistic notion that the angel just shattered to bits. This idea that if I study hard, read it once more, research deep, ask God, and put my brain in a vise, I’ll get it. I’ll figure it out.

It is not too high, not too lofty, not impossible to attain to.

That’s what I think.

That’s what the angel says just ain’t so.

God knows. Sometimes . . . sometimes I can’t handle the truth.

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It’s not because there’s something wrong with me (though perhaps there is). And it’s not because of what I am.

It’s because of what the truth is. It’s too wonderful. Too high.

Some truth is so wonderful it’s just a little bit out of reach.

Here, the angel tells Manoah his name is wonderful, don’t ask about it. You won’t get it.

And over in 139, the knowledge that is wonderful, so far beyond comprehension, is the depth of God’s knowledge of us. That He knows our sitting down, our standing up, all our ways, our thoughts from afar.

I don’t think I get how deep that is. Do you?

We can only get so much of it.

The rest is beyond us. It’s wonderful.

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That word, wonderful, it comes up again.

For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us;
And the government will rest on His shoulders;
And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. (Isaiah 9:6, emphasis added)

Here too, flipping back to the Hebrew, the word has a sense of something hard to understand. Something beyond our comprehension.

Truth we can’t quite handle.

And yet. And yet.

That Wonderful Counselor, that Mighty God, that Eternal Father, that Prince of Peace — that would be One that would be born to us. Who would be given to us.

That same One would teach eager followers that the Kingdom was within their reach (Luke 17).

Not too lofty. Not too high. Not for everybody but me.

Not too far off, but within my reach.

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By way of her “Mystery File,” Jennifer over at Getting Down with Jesus famously reminds us that though there is much left unanswered “this side of the Fall,” there is “hope on this side of the Cross.”

This cloak of mystery conceals what I cannot yet know, the truth I cannot handle. Yet now and again it billows in the wind, and the curtain lifts just a smidgen.

And with the fingers and toes that peek out there at the hem, I see that hope of knowing, and knowing fully.

For I see the hope that something wonderful edges within my reach.

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More posts in the Samson series:
Samson and Me
Rhythm
The Wasteland
Meet the Parents