Explanation, exhortation and experience do not always fall neatly into place. The priests of ancient Israel were perhaps the most affected by the hiding of the Messianic kingdom. The prophets were in a different predicament; they wrote about the Messianic Kingdom without knowing how or when its details would play. We can forgive those who sought to know the timing of the greatest mystery, but the ridicule and catastrophe that comes from posing as experts of the prophetic panorama is deserved.

There was a wisdom beyond the powerbrokers

Yet we do speak wisdom among those who are mature; a wisdom, however, not of this age nor of the rulers of this age, who are passing away; but we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory; the wisdom which none of the rulers of this age has understood; for if they had understood it they would not have crucified the Lord of glory;

1 Corinthians 2:6-8, NASB

No second or third thoughts

The rulers of the age in which Paul lived did not know God’s mystery. Neither the Roman authorities nor the Jewish administrators of religious life seems to have had second or third thoughts about trying to respond to Yeshua of Nazareth with homicide. They thought nothing of killing him. He was just another troublesome Galilean. The Romans thought that by sacking the temple they would remove any Jewish resistance to Roman rule. The Jewish people on the other hand thought that by killing Yeshua they could remove the revolutionary uprising that Yeshua’s followers presented. Both the Romans and the Jewish people were doomed to lose against two permanent unchangeables: the son of David and the city Jerusalem.

“‘But to his son I will give one tribe, that My servant David may have a lamp always before Me in Jerusalem, the city where I have chosen for Myself to put My name.”

1 Kings 11:36, NASB

“then there will come in through the gates of this city kings and princes sitting on the throne of David, riding in chariots and on horses, they and their princes, the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and this city will be inhabited forever.”

Jeremiah 17:25, NASB

Faith’s mystery comes down to the matter of residence, first the residence of God among humans, God being one of us, and, second, the residents of God’s people in Jerusalem as a permanent feature. Neither mosque nor Solomonic temple are divine priorities. Faith in the prophets does not ideally end with a prophet, but with God himself intimately connected with individual human beings.