In our series looking at questions God asks us, we have seen that God does not ask questions out of ignorance as we do. Sometimes, He asks questions to challenge us, to make us question things which perhaps would otherwise have passed us by and to dig deeper into our own motivation and the motivation of others. Sometimes, He also asks rhetorical questions (‘a question asked to make a point, rather than get an answer’), and this is the kind of question asked in Jer 32:27, when God asks Jeremiah, ‘Is anything too hard for me?’
We might feel that rhetorical questions are pointless. It would have been just as easy to say, ‘Nothing is too hard for me’, but somehow, by asking questions, we are invited to reflect and reach a conclusion; we are even drawn into the conclusion. In Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice (which looks at the divide between the Jewish and Christian faiths), questions are used to highlight the fact that all humans are the same regardless of their religion: ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?’ As we reflect on the fact that people are all fundamentally the same despite differences in colour or religion, we are able to reach this conclusion without feeling that it has been forced upon us.
God uses rhetorical questions to engage us in debate and to ensure that there is no dissonance between head knowledge and heart knowledge. It’s easy to believe that God is all-powerful from a theoretical point of view, but God wants more than head knowledge. He wants this truth to permeate every area of our lives and for us to acknowledge in our lives as well as in our speech that He is the God of the impossible.
