Ever wanted to question God?
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| English: Fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah Русский: Бегство Лота из Содома (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Abraham is bold enough to become the first person in the Bible to initiate a conversation with God by asking him questions, questions about the justice of his intentions regarding Sodom and Gomorrah. “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” he asks (Gen. 18:25).
Sarah’s question, locked in the reality of barrenness and muttered in bitter laughter, was addressed indirectly to God, even though ironically she did not know he was on the other side of the tent door, listening (Gen. 18:12).
Hagar may or may not have been talking to the God of the family that had just expelled her when she turned away in despair, “I cannot watch the boy die” (Gen. 21:16), but it was that God who intervened to help her, as he had done before when Hagar became the first person in the Bible to give God a name—and a remarkably perceptive and comforting one at that (Gen. 16:13).
Moses, more than once, questions God, sometimes about his intentions regarding the Israelites and sometimes about his own exclusion from the promised land—something that Moses seems never to have understood, nor have those who have reflected on that divine decision in all the centuries since (Deut. 3:23–28).
Naomi, in the bitter grief of having buried her husband and two childless sons (a kind of triple widowhood), is a boiling conflict of emotions, as she trusts God and prays to him, yet accuses him of treating her like an enemy (Ruth 1:13b); she lays full responsibility for all the bitterness, emptiness, and affliction in her life on the Lord himself (1:20–21).
David cannot fathom the generosity of God in relation to himself and his household and can only ask, “Who am I?” (2 Sam. 7:18).
Elijah cannot understand how God could save life only later to destroy it, and he protests (successfully) against such inconsistency (1 Kings 17:20–21). Later he laments something similar in his own case (1 Kings 19:4, 10).
Job’s whole book is a question hurled at God in the wake of his loss and suffering. God answers Job, but does he answer the question?
Jeremiah struggles to understand what God is saying through him when the words of other prophets and the external circumstances all point in the opposite direction. His anguish often takes the form of grieving and sometimes angry questions (Jer. 12:1–3; 15:15–18; 20:7–18).
Habakkuk cannot understand the sovereign justice of God in international affairs (Hab. 1:12–17). It does not stop him trusting God with teeth-gritting joy (Hab. 3:16–19).
The book of Psalms is full of anguished questions: “Why?” “When?” “How long?” It would probably be possible to tackle most of the questions in this book through careful and creative exegesis of the book of Psalms alone. Here, above all, is the book of faith, trust, love, joy, praise, and hope—coexisting with a pervasive and painful deficit of understanding.
This is why it is a word from the Psalms that formed the most profound question at the most crucial moment in history—the cry of abandonment on the lips of Jesus as he entered into the depths of his suffering on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Ps. 22:1; see Matt. 27:46). We must hear Jesus’ question, and discern the answer, in the light of the whole of the rest of the psalm, as undoubtedly Jesus did. But it still remains a question that points us to the heart of the mystery of the atonement itself. To me it is a profoundly moving thought that the word that introduces our most tormenting questions—“Why …?”—was uttered by Jesus on the very cross that was God’s answer to the question that the whole creation poses.
Psalm 73 provides a powerful biblical precedent for these questions. It is a psalm that begins by affirming the essential faith of Israel: “Surely God is good.…” But it goes on to express profound anguish over the apparent moral and spiritual inversion that the author (like us) can see all around him—namely, the constant triumph of evil over good, the success of the wicked, and the apparent futility of striving to live a godly and upright life (vv. 1–14).
Here is someone speaking about the God he doesn’t understand, insofar as God seems to leave the situation unchallenged and unredressed.
In the middle of the psalm he does two things. First, in verse 15, he cautions himself not to go too far down the road of broadcasting his own struggles on these matters, for fear of betraying God’s people. That is, he knows that the children of God have enough problems of their own without being dangerously unsettled by their worship leader flaunting his doubts and questions. There is a proper pastoral limit to the voicing of protest—as God reminded Jeremiah on one occasion (Jer. 15:19) and as Isaiah warned his listeners (Isa. 45:9–13). I have prayed constantly in working on this book that I may not transgress that limit. I want to explore questions that the Bible itself wrestles with, but I want to build up God’s people, not betray their faith.
And secondly, in Psalm 73:16–17, the psalmist goes to worship in the house of God with God’s people. There, in the context of worship, his perspective is changed and he sees things in the light of God’s ultimate will and moral government. This does not change the realities of the present. But it injects into them a transforming expectation from the future that is both sobering and comforting. Crucially, however, having reached the place of trust and contentment by the end of the psalm (“as for me, it is good to be near God”), the author does not go back and erase all that he has written in the first half. He lets us hear both his struggling lack of understanding and his restored, worshiping faith.
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