Disguise and recognition

There's an interesting and neglected parallel between theodicy and certain kinds of Bible stories. The basic idea of theodicy is that God has good reasons for not preventing certain kinds of evils, but his reasons may not be evident. They don't lie on the face of events. Rather, it takes imagination, a long-range view, or retrospective view, to appreciate the instrumental value of evil. 

By analogy, the Bible contains stories about characters in disguise as well as recognition scenes. They go together.

In the OT, some theophanies or angelophanies are God or angels in disguise. They have a human appearance (e.g. Gen 18-19; Josh 5:13-15). Their true identity might initially be revealed to the reader (e.g. Gen 18:1), but concealed to characters in the narrative until they say or do something that discloses their supernatural identity (divine or angelic), like when the angels blind the Sodomites (Gen 19:11).

So initial disguise leads to a recognition scene, when it dawns on characters that these apparently human visitors are supernatural beings. There's more to it than meets the eye.

We see the same pattern in the NT. For instance, both Mark and John introduce Jesus to the reader as the coming of Yahweh or Yahweh Incarnate. But outwardly, Jesus just seems to be a man. It's only as he begins to say and do certain things that a dawning awareness occurs that there's more to Jesus than meets the eye. They discover things about him that don't lie on the surface. 

Recognition can operate at two levels. At one level they learn what he claims to be, but some of them reject it.

At a deeper level, some of them realize that what he claims to be is in fact his true identity. They have an epiphany. 

This is a general pattern in the Gospels, although there are some dramatic disguise/recognition scenes (e.g. Lk 24:13-34; Jn 20:11-18).

This is analogous to the problem of evil, where there's a sense in which evil is disguised good. It's genuinely evil, but with the benefit of hindsight or a long-range view, the instrumental value of evil becomes increasingly recognizable. So initial appearances are misleading. There's more to it than meets the eye. You can't properly assess it at the time it happens. Rather, it has a larger significance that's initially obscure, confounding, or hidden.