People tell me I think too much.
I read too deeply into things. I follow questions further than I need to, get stuck, confuse myself, and would probably be better off accepting the simple answer and moving on.
Maybe sometimes they are right.
But I don’t think my problem is that I have too many questions. I think I’ve slowly realised how many of them I may never answer.
And I find that a little disappointing.
We come into this world knowing almost nothing. Then we spend a lifetime learning—about ourselves, other people, love, suffering, sin, forgiveness, death. If we are Christians, we spend our lives learning about God.
Yet we may leave this world with more unanswered questions than when we arrived.
That troubles me because if we are made in the image of God, then understanding who we truly are must somehow be tied to understanding who He is.
But God is infinite. I am not.
His purposes unfold across generations. My life occupies a tiny part of that story. God can begin something long before I arrive, let me participate in it for a while, and continue it long after I am gone.
There may be prayers whose answers I never see. Suffering I never understand. People whose stories I leave halfway through. Things God is doing through my life whose consequences belong to people I will never meet.
I want to know what it all meant.
Apparently, Job did too.
The Answer Job Never Got
Job wanted an explanation.
After losing his children, possessions and health, he refused the easy answers offered by his friends.
Their theology explained everything neatly: good people prosper, wicked people suffer, Job is suffering—therefore Job must have done something wrong.
Job knew that wasn’t true.
So he kept asking.
He lamented. He argued. He questioned. At times his words are uncomfortable.
If Job were sitting in some of our churches today, I suspect someone would eventually take him aside and say:
You’re overthinking this.
But God doesn’t condemn Job for asking.
Eventually, God speaks.
And strangely, He never tells Job why any of it happened.
We know something Job doesn’t. We’ve read the opening chapters. We saw the heavenly scene behind his suffering.
Job never gets to read those chapters.
Instead, God asks him a question:
Scripture“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”
Job 38:4
And then the world gets bigger.
The sea. The morning. Snow. Stars. Rain. Lions. Ravens. Mountain goats. Horses. Hawks. Behemoth. Leviathan.
For chapters, God keeps widening Job’s field of vision.
At first it can sound like God is simply saying, Who are you to question Me?
But I wonder if something more is happening.
Job, you cannot see enough of reality to interpret the whole of reality.
There are things happening beyond your field of vision. Things you don’t govern. Purposes you cannot presently see.
But none of them are beyond God’s sight.
And that gives me more rest than understanding.
Something Job Never Knew
Here is the part I can’t get past.
For thousands of years, people have read Job’s story beside hospital beds and graves, through grief, confusion and nights when God seemed silent.
Job never knew that.
He lived inside a story whose significance stretched far beyond his lifetime.
Perhaps we do too.
Maybe there are things about our lives that simply cannot be understood from inside our lives.
That doesn’t mean every tragedy has a neat explanation hiding behind it. Job’s friends should have cured us of that.
It means our inability to see the whole does not mean there isn’t a whole.
After God speaks, Job says:
Scripture“I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.”
Job 42:5
Notice what he doesn’t say.
Now I understand.
He still doesn’t.
He never learns what we learned in the opening chapters. The question that drove him through most of the book has not actually been answered.
Something else has happened.
Job wanted to understand what God was doing.
Instead, he came to know more of who God is.
The unanswered question remained. But it no longer stood between Job and God.
More Rest Than Understanding
I still want to know.
I want to understand God, Scripture, suffering, providence, eternity—and myself.
And Scripture doesn’t tell me to stop wanting that.
Paul writes:
Scripture“Now I know in part; then I shall know fully.”
1 Corinthians 13:12
There is a now.
And there is a then.
Perhaps faith lives between those two words.
I don’t have to pretend I have no unanswered questions. I don’t have to force answers from Scripture that God hasn’t given. And I don’t have to stop thinking because I’ve reached the edge of what I can understand.
I can say:
I don’t know.
And still trust Him.
For a long time, I thought peace would come when I finally understood enough.
Job has made me wonder whether peace comes when I know enough of Him to rest in what I don’t understand.
I still have questions.
Probably more than ever.
And I still look forward to the day when the mirror is no longer dim.
But until then, perhaps I don’t need every answer.
For now, I have something else.
More rest than understanding.
And I’m okay with that.
