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(Excerpt from Walking in the Dust of Rabbi Jesus: How the Jewish Words of jesus Can Change Your Life by Lois Tverberg.)
Disciples Who Don't Always Know
God doesn't answer our every doubt or explain everything to our satisfaction. How can we deal with our inability to know the answers?
The book of Job reveals some profound Hebraic wisdom. There too we encounter God’s reluctance to fully divulge himself. Grieved and in agony, Job implores God to explain why he allows the innocent to suffer. After thirty-seven chapters of arguments between Job and his friends, God finally sweeps onto the scene. But when God speaks, he never answers Job's heart-wrenching queries. Rather, he flips the tables and interrogates Job. Job humbly retracts his questions, and God never discloses the answer to the question of the ages.
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There is wisdom in the humility to be able to say 'I don't know' sometimes, and to let God alone know all things. |
But God actually does reveal something to Job through his frustrating "non-answer," when he challenges Job to explain the intricacies of nature and describe how he planted the foundations of the earth. When Job realizes that an infinite chasm separates human and divine intellect, he is utterly humbled. Einstein could explain relativity to an amoeba more easily than God could answer Job. What Job sought to know was utterly beyond his ability to grasp.
God answers Job out of the whirlwind. Image by William Blake [Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
God's answer to Job should make all the more sense in light of what we've discovered about the universe. In Isaiah 55:9, God proclaimed, "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." To the ancients, the heavens appeared to be a great canopy, perhaps five or ten miles up. But now we realize that the stars are billions of light-years away. It should be all the more apparent that if God revealed even a portion of his wisdom, its sheer magnitude would overwhelm us. We forget that God designed everything from neutrons to galaxies, and that we are just specks in comparison to his unfathomable magnitude. Whole libraries have been written to describe the workings of just one human cell. There is wisdom in the humility to be able to say "I don't know" sometimes, and to let God alone know all things...
Neither Job nor his friends knew God's thoughts, but Job at least understood God's great compassion for the hurting. Perhaps God would rather hear us voice angry doubts that show concern for others' pain than to knit ourselves a comfortable theology that shows no love.
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We honor God more by trying to love as he loves than by trying to know all that he knows. |
As Christians, we struggle with how many people suffer in the world unjustly. But we know that in Christ, God willingly suffered as an innocent person to gain forgiveness for our sins. We can always put our trust in God's empathy and goodness, even if we don't know all of his thoughts. Since we are small and finite, we honor God more by trying to love as he loves than by trying to know all that he knows.
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Learn more about Walking in the Dust of Rabbi Jesus.
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(*Images above are web-exclusive features and are not included in the text of Walking in the Dust... This post does not represent the views of Zondervan or any of its representatives. The writer's personal opinions are shared only for information purposes. To receive new Zondervan Blog posts in your reader or email inbox, subscribe to Zondervan Blog.)
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