What Do You Do With All the Unanswered Questions About God?
Question: Today I received a letter from a young woman who said she is feeling overwhelmed because of all the unanswered questions she has about God. She is convinced of the basics of salvation and the Christian life, but she is wondering what to do with all the things that she does not understand. It was not a letter that was questioning the foundational truths, but a letter about feeling overwhelmed because there is so much about God and our walk that she does not understand. I thought some of you in the church might benefit from the answer because if you are like me, you have felt the same way.
Answer: I think I would call what you are going through growing pains. I have been through seasons like that in my Christian life as well. God sort of keeps showing us, as we go on, that He is really big and awesome, yet at the same time, the things that are really foundational to our Christian life are clear and solid and grow stronger. There are times when we feel like we have it all figured out-- almost-- and then He sort of opens up whole new vistas for us and we are left in awe and wonder and feel like a little child before Him, just starting out. Jesus says that it is good for us to be like this.
In false religions, God is often reduced to what the worshippers can fully understand. And then there is the opposite error of other false religion (neo-orthodoxy for example) in which God is seen to be so great that we cannot understand anything about Him and might as well not even try. In either scenario, those who fall into these errors are avoiding Him because they are uncomfortable with Him. The ones who reduce Him to something they can understand feel like they can control Him. They suppose they have Him all figured out and sing shallow praise songs to Him. The ones who exalt Him beyond ability to know Him find security in sort of removing Him from their lives-- they exalt Him out of their lives and talk about mystery a lot. Instead of facing His clear revelation, they remove His authority from themselves by saying that He is "too great" to speak to us in a way we can understand.
What we need to do instead of either of these approaches is seek Him in Jesus Christ through the Scriptures which is God's way of revealing Christ to us. Christ is the Word (the logos) who reveals the Father to us, so that if we have seen Christ, we have seem the Father. Therefore, we can know God-- we can know Him very well-- through Christ; but at the same time, we cannot comprehend God (know all that there is to know)-- we can't even come close to comprehending Him.
We are familiar with many other things like this. Think about how well we know food. We know the difference between bread and fish, we know a lot about how to prepare it. We know that some food tastes good to us and we know what different foods taste like, and we know that some food makes us sick. We know that it nourishes us and we know that if we eat too much of it we get fat and sluggish, but that if we don't eat enough we get weak and faint. There are all sorts of things we know about it. But at the same time, there is so much we don't know! Even the experts have tons that they don't know. When students of nutrition get a masters degree, they sometimes feel that they know quite a lot, but when they go on to get a PhD, they spend several years studying some narrow area and realise that there is so much more to learn that they are humbled. They are only looking at one tiny area of a field that is so vast they realise that they are only scratching the surface. But all this does not discourage them from eating. They continue to eat and they know quite enough about food to be able to use it and to enjoy it.
You have listed off the essential things that you know about the Lord and our life with Him, yet you also recognise that there is so much more. There is a great statement in the Westminster Confession about this. In chapter 1, section 4, it says:
"All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them."
The right posture for a Christian is humility before the glory and majesty of God because He is incomprehensible, coupled with a confident, sure, and joyful reception of His revelation to us in Jesus Christ. Some Christians go wrong because they set aside the clear revelation of God's Word in a quest to figure out thing things that are not revealed-- and they call into question what God has faithfully revealed because of their questions about that which He has not revealed. Augustine once said that Hell was made for those who ask such questions. What he meant is not that we ought to keep searching out what God has revealed, but that if we ever start to question what is revealed because of questions we have about what is not revealed, we lose our way with God.
Two scriptures that come to mind are:
“and consider that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation—as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, has written to you, as also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures.” (2 Pe 3:15 -16 NKJV)
"The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.” (De 29:29 NKJV)
These two scriptures are different because the first one talks about things that are revealed that are hard to understand and that some people make use of to twist and distort and call into question the things that are clear; and the second one talks about things that God has not revealed to us at all that some people will start to ask questions about when they ought to just stick to the Word.
In saying all this, please don't think I am suggesting that you are doing this. I just want to encourage you to realize how much you do know through the clear teachings of God's word and to build on that. I don't know if you have ever noticed this about me from my preaching, but I have become fixated on the cross of Jesus Christ because this is the supreme revelation of God. I can't get away from it, and I am glad for that, because there are lot of theologies and practices in the Christian church that set aside the cross. And to whatever extent they do, they cease to be Christian. I had a lot to say about a couple of my favourite verses in that message I preached recently from Ephesians. And those favourite verses are the ones that speak about how much we have to learn and experience about God's work in our lives and about His love to us through Jesus Christ. They are:
“Therefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, do not cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers: that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality and power and might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come. And He put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.” (Eph 1:15-23 NKJV)
and
“For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height— to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.” (Eph 3:14-21 NKJV)
Paul is saying, "there is so much more for you to grasp about what God is doing in your life through the resurrection of Christ and about His great love for you through Christ. There is so much more and I yearn for you to get to know it." I find that just meditating on the simple cross of Christ and what He did for is a treasure that is so vast, I can never finish exploring it. I can never get to the bottom of it, but I can keep on understanding and appreciation it more and more. It is so simple, and yet so profound!
There is a great chapter Doug Wilson and Doug Jones have about this subject in their book called "Angels in the Architecture." It is a strange title, but it is an excellent book about this kind of thing-- I mean, about the greatness and incomprehensibility of God. The authors talk about how we have lost a sense of the very divinity of God as modern Christians-- that we have less of a sense of holiness and divinity than even the ancients had in their false religions. Here is a quote from the book. You can borrow the book if you like.
"We have lost any understanding of the numinous. We do not know what it would be like to walk through a grove of ancient trees sacred to the holy and terrible gods, and then be converted to the worship of One holier, and stranger, and mightier than these. We reject the shining of the ancient and numinous gods, not because they are creatures, but because they remind us of the divine. This is not the holiness of Christianity, but rather the crass materialism of the great loser, modernity, and its ugly little sister, postmodernity."
A page or so later, it says:
"We have no room for the wyrd, for the idea that ineffable wisdom governs us in the most inscrutable ways. We, trapped in our thicket of time and chance, imagine there is nothing above or outside it. Because we do not know, because we do not see, it must not be there to be known or seen." See Eccl. 8:17.
I think what you are describing is an awareness of the holiness of God. Stand in awe and sin not. He is incomprehensible, yet He is revealed for us to know in Christ. Hallowed be His name!