Over the past eighteen months, we have looked at many questions – questions we ask God and questions He asks us – and have seen that asking questions is a normal (even healthy) part of a relationship. However, we have to also face the fact that sometimes God does not seem to answer our questions, and how we respond to the silence of God is very important.
1 Cor 13:8-12 reminds us that we currently live in a season of incompleteness, when we do not know everything. One day, we shall know fully, even as we are fully known, but until that day comes, we must accept that God is not obliged to answer our questions. It’s not that He is mean or secretive, but sometimes He does not answer our questions because He wants us to live by faith and not by sight (2 Cor 5:7) and because some answers are beyond our comprehension (see Deut 29:29).
We mature by learning to trust God even when we do not see or understand what He is doing. It can be hard to trust Him when we do not see how He is working or what He is doing, but we are called to praise Him in everything and to believe that He is working for our good in every situation, even those which are tragic and hard to bear. (Rom 8;28-29) Faith and trust, worship and praise, are our choices. They are markers of living by faith and not by sight. Rend Collective’s song ‘Weep With Me’ has the profound truth in it that ‘what’s true in the light is still true in the dark.’ Often, when darkness calls, when sorrow hits our lives, we find it hard to believe that God is good, that He loves us, that He is able to work for good in our situations, but we grow as we trust God in these situations.
Secondly, sometimes perhaps God does not answer our questions because He knows we would not be able to understand the answers! We live in the now; we live in a world we can see and touch. But the answers God brings belong to the spiritual realm and this realm can’t be seen or touched in the same way as the natural world. God often gives us examples and pictures of spiritual truths through the natural world – the transformation of a butterfly from a caterpillar, for example, pointing to the truth that our mortal and corruptible bodies will one day be transformed into immortal and incorruptible bodies. But spiritual questions have spiritual answers.(1 Cor 2:14) We need to have spiritual understanding if we are to grasp the answers to spiritual questions and must learn to accept that we can’t understand everything now.
Andrew Peterson says, ‘So when the questions dissolve into the silence of God,/The aching may remain, but the breaking does not.’ (‘The SIlence of God’, Andrew Peterson) We don’t have to be broken by unanswered questions but can learn to trust God even when He doesn’t give us all the answers we would like.