QUESTIONING GOD
This is the fourth installment of responses to your questions. My hope is to have this be a piece of larger, ongoing conversations, and not to be the last word. Many responses are designed to do just this. My hope is to respond in a way that opens the questions wider, rather than narrow them.
Q: God brought my girlfriend and me together in college. We pursued Him in our dating relationship and engagement period – we felt it was all part of God’s plan. We prayed often that our relationship would not be based on each other and the other person making us happy, but that our source of life would be in Christ. After years of dating and getting engaged, she called the things off. How, after years of clearly pursuing the Lord in our relationship, is our marriage no longer in God's plan? I know I can't see the bigger picture. But that still doesn't take away my question of "Why?" But then again, who am I to ask God why? I have to trust that He has a greater purpose. Just like Job was doing, God said listen Job, can you cast stars into space? And as Isaiah 45 says, "Does the clay say to the potter, what are you making?"
R: There are many times in life when we ask God, “Why?” And I don’t believe that’s wrong. Let’s not forget the brutal honesty we find in the Psalms. Some say as many as half of the Psalms are laments. People crying out to God; saying things like:
Why, LORD, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? Ps 10.1
Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning? Ps 22.1
Why should the nations say, “Where is their God? Ps 79.10
Why? Why? Why? If we translated the words in these Psalms in a modern, literal way, many of us may have a hard time ever saying them. These Psalmists are not engaging in a task of writing nice, cozy Christian poetry. These Psalms are from deep in the gut – filled with rage, anger, sorrow, doubt and pain. They are shouting out, “God, what’s wrong are you deaf?!
The downside is we rarely hear about these Psalms. Perhaps this is due to the fact that many of us live in denial with regard to pain. In her book titled, Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman says, “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness.” And there are many ways to banish them.
We try to explain things that defy explanation. We try to find good believing there has to be some – even if it’s obvious there isn’t. We argue that this was all God’s will, and make him out to be a puppeteer controlling the world and us like marionettes. And then say things like, “Who am I to ask why?
It’s no wonder. We do not often look to these Psalms. Walter Brueggeman, in his book The Message of the Psalms, says:
It is a curious fact that the church has, by and large, continued to sing songs of orientation in a world increasingly experienced as disoriented … this action of the church is less an evangelical defiance guided by faith, and much more a frightened, numb denial and deception that does not want to acknowledge or experience the disorientation of life. The reason for such relentless affirmation of orientation seems to come, not from faith, but from the wishful optimism of our culture.
Perhaps it’s time for us to be more honest than ever – knowing all the while God can handle it. Let’s not forget, God knows firsthand what it means to feel pain. “He took up our pain and bore our suffering …” (Isaiah 53.4) He understands where we are, and that, at times when it really hurts we – in tired, exasperation cry out, “Why?” or “How could you let this happen?”
This kind of doubt, expressed honestly, may be our greatest display of faith. I say this because when we cry out; we cry out to God. We don’t cry out to our friends for an explanation, we don’t yell at family or ponder it alone.
Not at all.
We bring our grief and pain before God saying, “I don’t get it … but I believe you do. Help me out here!” This is why I believe that doubt is a good friend of faith. Frederick Buechner said, "Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving." It’s possible that the more we silence our doubt – out of fear or doubting that we can doubt – it’s possible we do more harm to our faith than if we make it known to God.
Let’s not forget this is what we see time and time again in the Psalms is doubt shouted out to God. And we never see the person who doubted later apologize for having doubted, nor is there any notion of God rebuking them for doing so. Once again, Brueggeman sheds light on this. He says,
The use of these “psalms of darkness” may be judged by the world to be acts of unfaith and failure, but for the trusting community, their use is an act of bold faith, albeit a transformed faith. It is an act of bold faith on the one hand, because it insists that the world must be experienced as it really is and not in some pretended way. On the other hand, it is bold because it insists that all experiences of disorder are a proper subject for discourse with God. There is nothing out of bounds, nothing precluded or inappropriate.
Which brings me to a question about your question. What would happen if you shouted in desperation to God? What if you dug deep, grasped your pain, confusion, sadness and disbelief and threw all it at God? After all, these are the very things he bore on that horrible instrument of torture we call a cross. Perhaps, it's worth a try.