The T-shirt made the point very well. It read: “Because I’m the Mum!” I thought to myself, “Okay, there goes a woman who has experienced the questioning nature of children.” You respond to their “Why” only to have the same question fired at you once more: “But why, Mum?” There comes that moment when in sheer exasperation we tell our children that this is the way things happen, because we are the parents who make the rules and the arrangements. “Get used to it…!”
I thought of this the other evening when we were reading the end of Hebrews 11 for our devotions. It talks about some wonderful ways in which people of faith had their prayers answered – but then it adds a list of terrible things that people of faith experienced when their prayers were apparently not answered. I thought of Christians under Nero’s horrible reign. They were dipped in tar, hung from poles and set alight to provide light for night-time entertainment. I found myself saying: “One day when I get to heaven I want to ask why. Why did the Lord allow these people to die such horrible deaths?”
Over the years I’ve sometimes told my Church Ed students that I don’t have questions about God’s existence. Thankfully I’m not plagued either by questions about the Trinity – why this One God whom we worship and adore exists in three Persons. I’ve been blessed with a child-like faith that simply accepts that as being true. But I do have questions about the seeming injustices of life. For example: there’s a family that lost a young-adult son to cancer less than eighteen months ago and now they have to come to terms with the fact that Mum has cancer as well. Why do some families seem to get more than their fair share of suffering and hardship? Why, dear Lord?
I don’t want to sound disrespectful or irreverent but I suspect that when I come with those questions I may meet the Lord wearing a T-shirt that reads: “Because I’m God!”
Okay, I know that the Lord God does not mind us asking, “Why?” After all, even Jesus on the cross asked that question with His dying breath. And yet it seems to me that at the end of the day we may have to content ourselves with that image of God in a T-shirt.
I say that because when I read the book of Job, I find Job and his friends asking questions too. Lots of them! Job on several occasions shoots off some very appropriate, “Why, Lord?” questions to heaven. Yet it is significant that God never answers Job’s questions. In the end – after some 35 chapters of arguing about the seeming injustices in life – God comes to Job and asks him some questions too. “Were you there when I laid the foundations of the earth? Have you ever given orders to the morning or shown the dawn its place?” My summary of those two chapters in which God questions Job would be: Because I’m God, that’s why!
There are numerous other places in the Bible where God does not explain Himself or answer our questions. That already begins at the dawn of history. God puts the man and the woman in a beautiful garden and tells them that there is this one tree from which they may not eat fruit – and that if they do, they will die. But significantly God doesn’t tell them why that tree is there. Sure, in Theology 101 we deduce some reasons: God was testing their love. However, I suspect that if Adam had asked why, the Lord might have replied, “Because I’m God!”
God never explains the Abraham and Sara why they have to become senior citizens before they are blessed with their own son. God never tells David why he had to wait all those years before he became king of Israel.
The lesson is that in this life we are simply called to trust and obey. And that’s the whole point of Hebrews 11. We are called to live by faith… the kind of faith that obediently follows God even when questions shake the very foundations of our life. He is God and He is good… even when troubles beset my pathway. That puts all my questions into perspective.
John Westendorp