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“Here’s another puzzle for you,” my wife says, as she lays a tangled mass of necklaces down on the table before me. She knows I love puzzles and detangling her necklaces is no exception. I love the challenge and the joy of resolution! Apparently I’m not alone. Every nationally syndicated newspaper in America has featured a crossword puzzle for over a hundred years. And it’s not just crossword puzzles either; there are word searches, riddles, and Sudoku grids as well. And outside these periodicals, there’s the Rubic’s Cubes, Jigsaw puzzles and Murder Mysteries we love to solve. Why do we love puzzles so much? I’m convinced our inclination to decipher and decode is yet another inward testimony to our Creator. Allow me to explain….

The foundation of all puzzles is faith. We approach them with the firm conviction there’s an answer to be found. Not an answer we create, mind you, but one we discover. No matter how confused we are at the beginning, what drives us onward is the understanding that it will all make sense in the end. I’m convinced this is because we are made by an intelligent Creator of order and design. This is a knowledge we all innately share. Deep within the heart of every person is that inward understanding that we were fashioned by an unseen hand, that we really do have meaning, and that things will ultimately make sense, even if we can’t see clearly now just how. 

It is this same intrinsic perception we carry with us as we approach all puzzles. When we open the Jigsaw puzzle box and see the pile of familiarly odd shapes, some with featureless cardboard backing, others with random bits of color facing up, we recognize the chaos and yet are certain it will all make sense. We look at the picture on the outside of the box and are assured this jumbled mound will look like that eventually. It’s this sense that what appears so random can be reconciled with reason, that the dislocated fragments fit together in the end that motivates our quest for resolution. This is approximately what we find in the divinely inspired definition of faith: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Heb. 11:1) Though we never rest our hope on nothing, still it rests with a firm and certain rationale upon a bedrock that our eyes can’t see.

I read an article once that sought to prove that the Murder Mystery genre was largely the creation of the Christian mind. The believer’s worldview alone lays the groundwork for its fundamental parts – that truth exists even when some of its elements are unknown, and that justice demands a moral resolution. This is precisely what we find in the pages of Agatha Christie or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The crime scene is a puzzle and the evidence and the suspects are its pieces. We marvel as Poirot or Sherlock slide the pieces into place, but we also recognize that they were hidden in plain sight. We all had access to the material testimony, we only had to use our “elementary” knowledge and our “little gray cells” to fit them all together.

This tendency to look for clues is tenacious in the human psyche. Only two things numb the sleuthing soul – the guilty fear of actually finding our Creator, and all that that might mean, and the suppressing counsel of those who have long since walked that way. These all urge us to assess these indicators of deeper meaning as nothing more than pleasant coincidences, to shake off the sense of implication and distract ourselves once again. But this penchant for pursuing unseen order is itself a clue that there is an order to be found. This pleasure of puzzles is a delicious reminder we were made for greater revelation.

Apocalypse is a word we hear a lot these days, and it usually carries thoughts of hoarding armies of the undead shuffling through dystopian cities, bereft of normal life, or visions of an environmental nightmare, with filthy gray skies and acid rain. Though the literal meaning of the word carries no such concepts, its use in the original title of the final book of Scripture is, I’m sure, the reason it inspires such gloomy thoughts. Apocalypse means revelation, as in the one that John received from Jesus on the isle of Patmos. And surely there are many dark and dreadful declarations of impending doom found in those closing chapters. The prophet’s words, so cryptic, still find resonance in the human soul, for the sense of coming judgment is as universal as our love of mystery.

But the revelation of Jesus Christ to all who eagerly wait for Him will be the final piece to every puzzle. The sight of Him will untangle every riddle now unsolved. All those maddening strands of life, so confusing on the backside of the His tapestry, will then be understood in the brilliant context of His unfurled masterpiece. We will finally know the resolution that all those puzzles pointed to, and our joy will be unending!