The Complete Rob Bell: His Seven Bestselling Books, All in One Place. Rob Bell
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seem that mean people get the most money?”
“Why does the killer go free and the honest man die of cancer?”
“Sometimes I doubt God’s presence in starving Africa.”
“If we can ask God for forgiveness at our last breath, why strive for a godly life in the present?”
“Either God is in control of everything and so all the crap we see today is part of his plan (which I don’t want to accept), or it’s all out of control (which sucks too). What’s up?”
This is just a random sampling. I have page after page of questions on my desk. Heaven and hell and suicide and the devil and God and love and rape—some very personal, some angry, some desperate, some very deep and philosophical.
Most of my responses were about how we need others to carry our burdens and how our real needs in life are not for more information but for loving community with other people on the journey. But what was so powerful for those I spoke with was that they were free to voice what was deepest in their hearts and minds. Questions, doubts, struggles. It wasn’t the information that helped them—it was simply being in an environment in which they were free to voice what was inside.
And this is why questions are so central to faith. A question by its very nature acknowledges that the person asking the question does not have all of the answers. And because the person does not have all of the answers, they are looking outside of themselves for guidance.
Questions, no matter how shocking or blasphemous or arrogant or ignorant or raw, are rooted in humility. A humility that understands that I am not God. And there is more to know.
Questions bring freedom. Freedom that I don’t have to be God and I don’t have to pretend that I have it all figured out. I can let God be God.14
In the book of Genesis, God tells Abraham what he is going to do with Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham fires back, “Will not the Ruler of the earth do right?”
Abraham thinks God is in the wrong and the proposed action is not in line with who God is, and Abraham questions him about it. Actually, they get into a sort of bargaining discussion in which Abraham doesn’t let up. He keeps questioning God. And God not only doesn’t get angry, but he seems to engage with Abraham all the more.15
Maybe that is who God is looking for—people who don’t just sit there and mindlessly accept whatever comes their way.
Moses tries for two chapters to convince God that he has picked the wrong man, and God seems all the more convinced with each question that he has picked the right man.16
David says this to God in Psalm 13: “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? Look on me and answer.”
What’s the first thing Mary says to the angel who brings her the news that she’s going to be the mother of the Messiah?
“But how can this be? I’m a virgin!”
Questions. Questions. Questions.
What are some of Jesus’s final words? “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Jesus. On the cross. Questioning God.
Central to the Christian experience is the art of questioning God. Not belligerent, arrogant questions that have no respect for our maker, but naked, honest, vulnerable, raw questions, arising out of the awe that comes from engaging the living God.
This type of questioning frees us. Frees us from having to have it all figured out. Frees us from having answers to everything. Frees us from always having to be right. It allows us to have moments when we come to the end of our ability to comprehend. Moments when the silence is enough.
The great Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, “I did not ask for success, I asked for wonder.”17
The Christian faith is mysterious to the core. It is about things and beings that ultimately can’t be put into words. Language fails. And if we do definitively put God into words, we have at that very moment made God something God is not.
Most of us are conditioned to think of mystery in terms of a television show or a novel or a film in which the mystery is solved at the end.18 Often right before the credits we find out who did it, or who is actually the long-lost son of whom, or that she is actually a he. Or that Bruce Willis was dead for most of the movie and we just now figured it out.19
Mystery is created when key facts are hidden from the viewer. What the writer/director/creator does at the end is pull back the curtain and show us the things that had previously been hidden.
So the mystery gets solved and our questions get answered.
But the Bible has an entirely different understanding of mystery. True mystery, the kind of mystery rooted in the infinite nature of God, gives us answers that actually plunge us into even more . . . questions.
Take this example from John 3:16. The first part of the verse reads: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.”
So why did God give his son?
Because God loves the world.
But what does it mean for God to love the world?
Does God love evil people? Mean people? People who don’t think that God exists? People who think that God loves only them? If you do enough evil, can you exhaust God’s love?
Because God loves the world is an answer to the question, why did God give his son? It’s a real answer; it’s an answer you can trust; it’s an answer you can base your life on. It’s an answer you can know. But it also raises a new set of questions.
Why does God love the world?
What motivates God to love like this? What does God get out of it?
The writers of the Bible, especially one named John, would answer this way: “Because God is love.”20
Which is an answer, of course, but as you probably have figured out by now, it raises even deeper questions: How can God be love? Is every experience of love an experience of God? Is every experience of God an experience of love?
So God is love is an answer to the question, why does God love the world? But as an answer, it raises even more questions. And we could go on and on and on.
Truth always leads to more . . . truth. Because truth is insight into God and God is infinite and God has no boundaries or edges. So truth always has layers and depth and texture.
It’s like a pool that you dive into, and you start swimming toward the bottom, and soon you discover that no matter how hard and fast you swim downward, the pool keeps getting . . . deeper. The bottom will always be out of reach.
One of the great “theologians” of our time, Sean Penn, put it this way: “When everything gets answered, it’s fake. The mystery is the truth.”21
The mystery is the truth.
Or take the Trinity, for example. Even the best definitions end up sounding like a small child trying to play Mozart on pots and pans in the middle of the kitchen floor. The more you study the Trinity and what has been said about it over the years, the more you are left in wonder and awe about the nature of God.
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