Hiding

“Can anyone hide himself in secret places, So I shall not see him?” says the Lord; “Do I not fill heaven and earth?” says the Lord.

—Jeremiah 23:24

There are many LGBTQ+ people who never come out of the closet for any number of reasons. Often that reason is religious. LGBTQ+ Christians often are made to feel great shame over their sexuality, and they fear losing their family, friends, and sometimes even their jobs. Others who live countries where being LGBTQ+ is a crime remain in the closet because they fear for their lives because the punishment for being LGBTQ+ is either imprisonment or death. There are other reasons as well, most arguments against the LGBTQ+ community is or originally was based on religious beliefs. It is so sad that we live in a world that does not fully accept all people regardless of their sexuality, race, gender, religion, ancestry, etc. For others, they do not even come out to themselves let alone others. Jeremiah 23:24 that God proclaims, “Can anyone hide himself in secret places, So I shall not see him?” In other words, we do not have to come out to God, who is omnipotent, omniscient omnipresent, and omnibenevolent.

I have always believed that God created me as gay. Many people argue that it is a choice, I do not believe that it is. We are born this way. We are created by God, who does not make mistakes. Jeremiah 29:11-12 says, “For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you.” If I ever got a tattoo of a Bible verse, this would be it. It is my core philosophy that God has a plan for me, and I pray that He will guide me on the path to fulfill his plan. When God created us, our sexuality was part of that creation, and we should be proud to be part of God’s plan. Whether someone comes out or not, God created us in a way for a purpose and we should not hide form ourselves because we cannot hide from God. Proverbs 16:3 says, “Commit your works to the Lord, and your thoughts will be established.”

God knows that many struggle with their sexuality. We may recognize an attraction to men early in our lives. We may find we are attracted to both men and women. We may realize that we are born with the wrong gender. We may not even know what these feelings means, but God does. Whether we feel supported or not by the outside world, what we can be sure of is that we are accepted by God for how he created us. God will give us the strength we need to carry out His plan for us. Philippians 4:13 says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” The closet can be a lonely place, and coming out can help end that loneliness, but we are never truly alone. God is omnipotent and all-powerful. God is omniscient and all-knowing. God is omnipresent and is always with us. God is omnibenevolent and will always love us. He is the personification of goodness, so we should not fear coming out to God because he already knows and already loves us.

In the “Parable of the Talents,” (Matthew 25:14–30), Jesus tells of a master who was leaving his house to travel, and, before leaving, entrusted his property to his servants. According to the abilities of each man, one servant received five talents, the second had received two, and the third received only one. The property entrusted to the three servants was worth eight talents. Upon returning home, after a long absence, the master asks his three servants for an account of the talents he entrusted to them. The first and the second servants explain that they each put their talents to work and have doubled the value of the property with which they were entrusted. The third servant, however, had merely hidden his talent, burying it in the ground. The third servant is punished and banished from the master. Thought his story is about a sum of money, there is a double meaning here. The use of the word “talent” to mean “gift or skill” in English and other languages originated from an interpretation of this parable sometime late in the 13th century. God gives us many talents, one of those is that He created all of being, including our sexuality.

Whether you remain in the closet only long enough to realize that you are in the closet, or you never emerge from the closet, you are still the person God created and the person God wants you to be. We have to be ourselves. We literally can’t be anyone else. If we hide who we are, we are hiding a gift given by God. It may not be safe for you to come out, but know that God sees you, He knows you, and He loves you. So, the least you can do is know yourself and love yourself. The Bible tells us to embrace Jesus and His sacrifice and live our lives based on that model. Part of being a healthy individual is figuring out who God wants us to be and learning to grow into and love­ that person. Paul tells us in Romans 12:2, “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” First John 4:19 tells us, “We love Him because He first loved us.” I will end with this verse from Ephesians 2:10, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.”

A note on the context of Jeremiah 23:24:

Jeremiah 23:24 is a short passage from a series of prophesies in which the Jeremiah is supposedly in conflict with other prophets in his society. Jeremiah, one of the major prophets in the Bible, lived during the late 7th and early 6th centuries BC. He prophesied that Jerusalem would be handed over to the Babylonian army, which it did in 587 BC. Biblical scholars have argued that this verse and the one before it first had an independent existence before it became part of the collection of prophesies in Jeremiah 23:9-40. I usually do not take verses out of context, but this is one time that I will, especially since some scholars believe that it was part of an independent prophesy. As a stand-alone verse, Jeremiah proclaims that his God is not just a localized god like many of the gods of the polytheistic people around Judah, but an omnipresent God from whom no person can hide. When read as part of Jeremiah 23:9-40, it should be regarded as a passionate argument against a view held by some prophets that God’s nearness guarantees peace and security.