Indeed, if we had all the answers, if we had all the solutions, we would be God. Or at the very least, we would have no need for faith, no need for trust, and so on. Thus having questions and concerns can be a good thing. It keeps us dependent on God. It makes us want to know him more. It helps build trust in our lives. It can improve our prayer life. The benefits are many.
As I have said so often now, getting the biblical balance right is crucial. And this applies in so many areas. Here I want to speak about the need for biblical balance in terms of the believer embracing both certainty as well as mystery. That is, there are many things that we can be quite sure about, but there are also many things that leave us wondering, that leave us with questions, that leave us with mystery.
Let me explain. We have an entire book (really, 66 books) which contains all that we need to know about God, why we are here, what our problem is, and how things can be sorted out. So who we are, why we exist, how to get right with God, is all spelled out clearly in Scripture.
But so many other things that we might wonder about are not always clearly disclosed to us. As Francis Schaeffer used to say, we have true truth, but not exhaustive truth. God has given us all the vital information that we need to have, but he has not told us everything.
So in many areas – especially in terms of our own personal lives – we are left with countless questions. We do not fully know why we did not get that job we so very much wanted, or why the person we liked so much never became our spouse, or why a loved one died early, or why a friend got cancer, or why our church let us down so greatly.
A million questions can arise, and we do not always get the answers we are looking for – at least in this life. Presumably in the next life we will either get more clarity on some of these matters, or the questions will then disappear and seem not so very important any longer.
Especially when it comes to suffering and hardships and trials and adversity, we can have so very many questions, and most of them seem never to be answered – or at least answered to our liking. So all we can do is keep walking with God, even with so many unresolved questions.
Indeed, if we had all the answers, if we had all the solutions, we would be God. Or at the very least, we would have no need for faith, no need for trust, and so on. Thus having questions and concerns can be a good thing. It keeps us dependent on God. It makes us want to know him more. It helps build trust in our lives. It can improve our prayer life. The benefits are many.
Let me tease this out a bit further, and with my own story as a part of it. Some time ago on the social media a person had a post about how they had a huge improvement in their cancer situation. It seems they really are now doing quite well. The person said something like this: ‘It is a real miracle. It is such an answer to all your prayers.’
To which any Christian would rightly shout ‘Amen!’. God is a miracle-working God, and God certainly does answer prayer. So this was terrific news indeed, and I believe I pressed the ‘like’ button on that post. Always great to hear such reports. But….
Of course at the very same time that I was reading this I had some other thoughts going through my head as well. The truth is, other people – indeed, millions of other people – including myself, had a somewhat different outcome to a similar situation. As some of you know, my wife had a quite rare and quite aggressive form of breast cancer.
I and so many others of course were praying for her. Were there many hundreds of Christians all up praying for her? Perhaps even thousands? Friends, family, church members, even those who had never met her were praying, and many of them were praying fervently.
Yet after a very tough 18-month battle, she lost out to that cancer. The cancer won. Of course, God always wins, and she is now in the arms of her loving Saviour and suffering no more. That is great news too.