Questions Worth Asking

Today's readings: Psalms 36; 147:12-20, Isaiah 45:5-17, Ephesians 5:15-33, Mark 4:21-34

Human beings like answers. It was true thousands of years ago in the time of the prophet Isaiah, it's true today, and it will be true thousands of years from now. Uncertainty vexes us. Sometimes we are more content to grasp at false answers than to have no answers at all. Yet sometimes the answer is simply ... there is no answer.

When the exiled nation of Israel cried out against God's seeming abandonment of them, Isaiah challenged their right to take God to task. He compared them to clay questioning the choices of the potter. The God of Israel declared he "made weal and created woe" (Is 45:7) as he saw fit, and human beings should not strive to comprehend why.

Like the ancient Israelites, we often want to know why God has allowed things

(more often bad than good) to happen to us. Some people's faith evaporates when something bad happens and the world stops making sense to them. "How can a loving God let bad things happen?" they wonder. That question can feel threatening to people of faith. An entire industry of apologetics, creationist "proofs," and theological musings has evolved to address that question. In the end, most of them are overly pat and largely unsatisfying.

Questioning is healthy, but some questions will remain unanswerable. Isaiah, Job, Proverbs: these scriptures and others advise us energy spent on unanswerable questions could be put to better use. If we can accept that God is good and bad things still happen, we can move on to address questions of a faith lived in the world as it really is: Whom shall we serve? How shall we love? Where is God leading us? Questions worth asking are worth living through.

Evening readings: Psalms 80; 27