I find more and more that I am very much a facts-based person.
I love to daydream, I love to think and dream big, I love to dwell in possibility; but at the end of each day, my question always boils down to practicality. Based on what I have, what can I do? Based on my current supplies, what can I fix? Based on my current emotions, what am I feeling? Based on my current situation, what can I do to help?
I like to know the questions in order to get the answers. I am solution-based. Thus, there have been innumerable moments in my life that I have looked skyward and asked, "Why, God?"
How perfectly presumptuous of me.
Today I had the privilege of sitting in on a class at G42 Leadership Academy and hearing Andrew Shearman, a co-founder of the Race, speak on a few things. Some of the newly arrived students gave brief testimonies and during one a girl mentioned this same question.
"Why, God?"
Andrew spoke for a few minutes after each testimony and after this particular girl, he offered an answer, or at least as much of an answer that there can be to such a question that only the most audacious allow to escape their lips. He presented this idea of two trees:
There are two trees we can go to in life. There is the tree of life, and there is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. When we ask God why, we choose to go to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We are seeking an answer to the often unanswerable, we are seeking logic and knowledge. We are seeking things that we were never intended to know. We were never intended to eat of the fruit of that tree yet continually ask God permission to eat more, thinking of ourselves so loftily that we even become angry when we don't get answers.
Maybe sometimes there is no answer to what you're asking. Some people might tell you that "it's God's Will" and that "God is Sovereign." That's fine. God does have a will and is indeed sovereign.
I don't think that's why your newborn passed away.
I don't think that's why you're unemployed in a terrible economy.
I don't think that's why you're depressed and feel so alone.
I don't think that's why your husband or wife had an affair.
I don't think that's why your loved one has a terminal illness.
I don't think that's why your boyfriend or girlfriend broke up with you after you gave them everything.
I don't think that's why your mom or dad was never around when you grew up.
I don't think that's why bad things happen.
I don't think bad things happen because God wants them to.
I think bad things happen because we continue to visit the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I think that's Biblically supported. God warned us not to eat that tree's fruit from the first moment we saw it, and when we ask God why, we presume that we are entitled to information that was never ours to know. Asking why presupposes that we are somehow privy to the same information as God.
….No.
Loving us as He does, God never wanted us to have to deal with this question (cf. Genesis 3.2-3). God saw that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would lead to one thing – death. He tried to save us from it from the beginning, but humanity chose otherwise. Now we have such a God-complex as to assume that we may continue to eat from the tree and then become indignant and stamp our feet when we're banished from the garden.
God is responsible for everything good in your life. God is Good and cannot produce anything evil.
The bad things that happen to us are a result of sin, of brokenness, of evil and its prevalence among humanity and its hold on the human race.
Granted, I think it could be equally audacious to equate our ideas of what is good and what is bad with God's idea of what is good and what is bad. That's another conversation for another day.
We need to understand something, though.
God is NOT our enemy.
When we ask God why, we inadvertently reveal our own ignorance about God Himself – that He is big, bad, and out to get us.
That is simply not true. God is the only one who is always for us. God is the only one that is always faithful. God is the only one who takes everything that happens to you – good, bad, and everything in-between – and makes good of it. God takes our sin and molds it into something good. That is who God is. That's what God does.
Thus, asking Him why He is doing all these horrible things to you is most assuredly an affront to the only one who is always fighting for you.
Andrew said that when we're tempted to ask why, the only answer to kneel at the base of the tree of life and give thanks. Kneel at the base of the tree of life with hot tears on our face and give thanks that He is all we'll ever truly need, that He IS the answer, and that no one can ever take Him away from us. Give thanks that He can take the ugliest of situations and turn it into something breathtaking.
This is the same God, after all, that made caterpillars knowing that they'd turn into butterflies.
The same God that took twelve brothers' jealousy-driven sale of their father's favorite child and made it into the situation that would keep a nation from starving during a seven-year famine and that would eventually make it possible for His people to be rescued from 430 years of slavery.
The same God that took the most brutal and torturous of Roman execution methods and used it to save the entire world.
With a God like that, I think I'm fine not knowing the answers.
I'll be happy kneeling and giving thanks for the beauty that is to come instead.
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