I’ve been blogging around Matthew Lee Anderson’s Called into Questions over the last few months. It’s a great book, though difficult, that Pastors should give some extended reflection to.
We turn at the end to God’s questions. Anderson comments:
“Hearing God’s questions is the cost of our freedom to question God.”
Called into Questions, 23.
There’s a cost to a questioning life, and it’s that God will question you back. The Bible’s questions for God “How long…?” “Who shall…?” are also questions for us. Anderson produces a fearful symmetry by adapting the Golden Rule:
“we should question God only as we would have him question us.”
Ouch. Think perhaps of when Yahweh comes to answer Job’s questions, with a torrent of questions. Yahweh’s questions do answer Job’s, we see with wisdom and reflection, but they also cut to the quick. He is exposed—as are we as we read it—his soul displayed and found wanting. Question the Almighty and you will get answers; and you will be questioned in turn. Question the mystery and we will not penetrate all of its confusion, but conversely it’s the mystery that makes us free to question.
God loves our questions, but any encounter with God is one in which the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Anderson summarises the encounter with Job as Yahweh saying ‘Come and see,’ (32) much as Jesus so often does. It’s in Jesus that God becomes the answer to his own questions. Anderson points to Jesus’ questioning of God on the Cross with his quotation of the opening to Psalm 22, ‘My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?’ In the garden, God asked where man was. Now the man asks where God is. He turns his own question back on himself—like the upward facing bow of rain—liberating us from the judgement of God’s questions.
As an aside, Anderson’s section on the questions in the garden is the highlight of the book, and I won’t summarise that for you—you should buy it and read it!
God’s questioning of us is to lead us into truth. First about ourselves and then about the world. His questions are to help us take hold of and love the truth. Our confidence in faith only comes to the degree that we have faced God’s questions about us.
You will be found wanting. Then solace comes only in Christ’s sacrifice for us.
Questions are good. And curiosity is an intellectual vice. God’s questions will reveal this to us: why do you want to know?
There are things we should not know. This sounds controversial but every parent knows that the child should not know that the freshly made cake is in the cupboard. There are things we should not know yet.
We can debate which category Adam & Eve not being allowed to eat from the tree of wisdom falls into, but the first sin is one of taking knowledge.
When we seek good things—like knowledge—in the wrong way, at the wrong time, or for the wrong reasons, we turn them into bad things.
Curiosity is a desperate need to know. We love to be curious; I use the word positively like most of our culture does—I’m sure I’ve extolled its virtues at some point in my writing—but Anderson points out the long history of regarding curiosity as a sin.
Augustine put it this way:
It is more accurate to say that [the curious] hate the unknown because they want everything to become known, and thus nothing to remain unknown.
De Trinitate 10.1.13
Inquiry is good, questions are good, as long as they are pointed towards Christ and knowing him and what he would have us know. We will not know everything. We should not know everything. The scientific urge to do something ‘because we can’ is the birth of breakthrough, yes, but also many horrors.
To return to where we began, as we question, God will question us. We will be found wanting. We will be asked why we want to know. You’ve probably never had an unmixed motive so those too will be shown for what they are.
We may discover our answers and we should ask our questions. But, be warned, this is not playtime. You will learn more than you bargained for, like the depths of your own sin. If you are going to question God, be ready to throw yourself on the mercy of Christ, who waits open-armed to gather up weary travellers and give them rest.
Photo by Nick de Partee on Unsplash
To subscribe and receive email notifications for future posts, scroll all the way to the bottom of the page.
Would you like to support my work? The best thing you can do is share this post with your friends. Why not consider also joining my Patreon to keep my writing free for everyone. You can see other ways to support me here.
nuakh 