Has God ever surprised you by the things you hear should be true of Him but aren’t? Or don’t seem to be?
If you are breathing and old enough to think, you have had these questions or similar ones cross your mind at some point in your life. Even Billy Graham questioned whether He could trust the Bible at an early time in his ministry. Job cried out for answers to his suffering. After all, he had done everything he knew to do to please the God he loved and God took everything He had given Job away from him.
Naomi lost her husband and two sons and while the Bible doesn’t record her questions, it does record her bitter broken heart. While we can speculate why in her case and blame it on their disobedient move to Moab, Job had done nothing to deserve his fate. It was all a test, but he didn’t know that.
And so he asked why. He wanted an audience with His Maker. He wanted to defend himself. Have you ever wanted to defend yourself to God? I have.
But let’s back up to these things that make us question God on every level. We may question God’s existence because we can’t see Him. We weren’t living when Jesus walked the earth, so we can’t point to miracles that might at least help us believe. We aren’t Thomas who got to see Jesus’ crucified scars in His resurrected body and be told to “stop doubting and believe.” And we didn’t hear God’s answers to Job when he begged God to meet with him.
We can read about these things in Scripture. But when we are in question mode, we might even wonder whether we can trust the Bible. After all, it’s such an ancient book. And yet isn’t it interesting that we can read other ancient documents and not scrutinize them quite so skeptically. Even so, as I mentioned in my last post, the Bible was written over a 1500 to 2000 year period by forty distinct and very different authors and still makes sense. Prophecies have come true even though they were separated by many generations between their writing and their fulfillment.
But let’s assume we believe the Bible is God’s letter to us. That He inspired it. We still struggle, don’t we? We don’t understand suffering. We don’t understand the Old Testament – and trust me, I spend a lot of time there and still don’t grasp it as well as I’d like to. We might like the gospels because they tell us of Jesus and they are easier to understand.
I wonder, though, if we really ponder the gospels as we read them. Because they are a great place to start with those questions that eat at us. Can I encourage you to go back and read them – really read them?
I’m reading Luke right now, and I’m finding many reasons to pause. For instance, Jesus was invited to dine with some top level religious leaders one Sabbath. They also invited a man who needed healing to this meal. The reason? To test Jesus. They weren’t honestly seeking truth. They were trying to prove Jesus wrong.
You see they had an interpretation of God’s law based on what they read in the Torah but they also had their traditions, passed down for generations. And the Sabbath law had a lot of accumulated traditions attached to it. It’s kind of like they were trying to control how the Sabbath should be upheld. Much like legalism still does with other added “rules” today. Work on the Sabbath was one of those things they took beyond the original wording to define exactly how to apply the meaning. Resting began to include how far you could walk, how much you could carry, and much more. Apparently they believed that if Jesus healed a person on the Sabbath, he was working, so He was breaking their rules.
You can read the whole story in Luke 14, but I paused a moment to ponder the reason the leaders would not answer Jesus when He asked them, ““Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?” Did they truly not have an answer or were they purposely quiet to see if Jesus would incriminate Himself?
Unlike Job’s silence when God finally came and spoke to him, the religious leaders of Jesus’ day were silent because they were focused on what Jesus would do, not what He might teach them. They weren’t awed by Him. They despised Him.
Job, on the other hand, could barely stand in God’s presence. If you read the last few chapters of Job, you realize that when God answered, He didn’t explain Himself to Job. He didn’t explain why. He showed Job His great power over everything. He showed Job that His decisions and reasons for doing things were His to make, not Job’s. And Job chose to trust God even though he didn’t understand it all.
Sometimes we question to test God. We want to find flaws in His teaching. We want to prove Him wrong. And sometimes we question Him out of personal pain. We want to find why answers. We want to know He hasn’t forsaken us. Very different motives receive very different answers.
The answers Job received made him repent in dust and ashes, even though he had done everything “right”. Even God commended him. But in comparison to God’s power and glory, Job realized that He didn’t have a clue. He didn’t understand because God was so far beyond his understanding. So like Thomas, he stopped questioning and believed.
The answers the religious leaders received from Jesus caused them to despise Him more because Jesus didn’t obey their traditions. Jesus had given that Sabbath law to Moses generations before they existed, and He wasn’t bound by human additions to His Word. Their traditions negated why He had created the Sabbath rest in the first place. They received His frustration and righteous anger and in some cases He even stopped doing miracles because of their unbelief.
There are myriad more examples I could give from Scripture where Jesus answered honest questions or refused to do so based on the motives of the one asking. Too often people didn’t get the answer they wanted because God’s ways are not our ways. His answers might tell us to leave everything to follow Him. Give up our pride, our dreams, our self-sufficiency and admit our need of Him.
We want answers to our questions? Then we need to ask them with a truly seeking heart. We need to be willing to obey Him if we want to truly understand. If we do not have that mindset, we will be disappointed with His answers.
Are we afraid to ask the questions for fear of the answers? If so, we need to start with our understanding that God isn’t afraid of our questions. He has never forsaken those who truly seek Him. He wants to be found by us.
~Selah
#seektruth #believe #toughquestions #Godcanhandlethis
