Categories

Tags

Archives


Questioning God


Category Bible
This post was published on Friday 9 March 2012.

In Job 37 Elihu (the youngest of Job’s ‘friends’ in the conversation about his suffering) tells Job to ‘stop and consider the wondrous works of God’ (v14).  From thunder and lightning to snow and rain, animals, whirlwinds and people, God made them all, is behind, above and beyond them all, upholds and sustains them all.  His power is, quite simply, awesome.  Elihu ends like this:

God is clothed with awesome majesty.
The Almighty—we cannot find him;
he is great in power;
justice and abundant righteousness he will not violate.
Therefore men fear him;
he does not regard any who are wise in their own conceit.

Job 37.22b-24 

It is often said that one of the greatest questions facing people of faith is the question of suffering.  And it is true, that is indeed a difficult question; it cannot be answered by reason or argument, because by definition suffering is unreasonable.

However, behind an insistence that suffering is the question which must cause any reasonable person to reject faith entirely is what Elihu describes being ‘wise in [our] own conceit’. We think we are so wise, so intelligent, to have conquered nature, a feat unparalleled in the natural world.

Our mastery over all we survey leads us to treat God with the same disdain.  We consider ourselves wise with regard to God, when in fact we are proud, conceited, arrogant upstarts, daring to look the creator of the world in the eye and say, ‘I know best’.  It is only when we fail to comprehend the greatness and majesty of God, that we dare to question his justice and righteousness; it is only when in our own conceit we think ourselves wise, that we dare to challenge the one who created our clever brains in the first place.

When it comes to questions of suffering, we cannot and will not understand why, this side of heaven.  People of faith cannot answer with clever arguments but only with faith: faith in the one ‘clothed with awesome majesty’, faith in the the Almighty God who is ‘great in power’, faith that he will not ever violate his ‘justice and abundant righteousness’.

In the midst of suffering that may not seem like much of an answer, but it is the one the Bible gives time and again: bad stuff happens, we don’t and cannot understand, but we know that God is just and righteous, and that one day Jesus will return to sort out all this mess we have got ourselves in because of our sin.