Asking the Tough Questions
Psalm 13
August 3, 2003
Introduction
I’m going to go out on a limb this morning and assume that all of us have had questions for God that we have been afraid to really ask God.
We’re afraid that if we really voice our questions and even complaints, God will strike us down, or at least love us less.
Am I right?
Well, I want to encourage you that God is not upset when we ask questions, even questions that express honest wondering and maybe even doubt.
How can I say that? I think you’ll understand better as we go through the message today.
I think that God, far from being angry and scared of honest questioning, actually encourages it.
And my aim today is to give you the freedom to come to God with all your questions, no matter how simple or profound.
My example for this is King David.
Here’s a guy who had no problem at all getting in God’s face about things he didn’t like or understand.
That’s not to say he was prideful and arrogant. His questioning was based on an honest desire to know what God was doing.
One of the best passages that illustrate how David did this is in Psalm 13, which begins on page 387 of the Bibles in the seats.
1 How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?
2 How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?
3 Look on me and answer, O LORD my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death; 4 my enemy will say, "I have overcome him," and my foes will rejoice when I fall.
5 But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation.
6 I will sing to the LORD, for he has been good to me.
I want to encourage you to ask questions – tough questions. And in doing so, I want to give you some guidelines that will help in that effort, okay? Let’s get started.
When asking questions…
1. Know it’s okay ask the tough questions!
Look again at verses 1-2:
1 How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?
2 How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?
Obviously, David was going through something here. We don’t know what it was, but David’s history was filled with not only fame and glory, but also sorrow and anguish.
He wasn’t especially close to his father and brothers. Nothing is mentioned of his mother.
King Saul tried to hunt him down to kill him. His home life as king was no doozy, either.
Three wives and multiple concubines, and an affair that included murder of the woman’s husband.
His children were at constant war with each other, and one son murdered another, after the first son raped his half-sister.
AND THEN, his own son Absalom tried to hunt him down and take his life.
Think about all that. Here’s a guy that had plenty to complain about, even though a lot of what he experienced came about as the consequences of his own earlier decisions.
Can you imagine David out in the desert running from Absalom?
“HELLO!!!!! I’m trying to live for you, God. I’m zealous for you, I believe you made me king, so what’s going on here?”
He asked some tough questions. And that’s okay.
I think that too often ministers and the church give the impression that God is not only not interested in our cries, but that He is offended when we cry out to question Him.
I don’t think that’s a Scriptural viewpoint.
Romans 8:26-28
26 In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. 27 And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will.
28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
Have you ever had a time or situation in your life when all you could do was cry? When you didn’t even know how to pray for something or someone?
Every now and then I think about the early Christians, when it was illegal to even be a Christian, and it meant torture and even death if you were discovered. I’m guessing that many times they wondered where God was in all of that. And I’m sure they cried out to God, just like many do today in places where it is currently illegal to be a Christian.
The good news of this passage is that when we are crying in our heart, the Holy Spirit knows what’s going on, and He conveys that to the Father.
He’s heard all your questions before. You can’t ask Him something new. He’s heard it, and knows it all.
God doesn’t fall off the throne of you ask a tough question.
By the way, there are all sorts of tough questions:
Why did you allow sin into the world? Why did you allow the Church to be so cruel at times?
I don’t get this, God. Why can’t I understand what’s going on? This is a hard Bible passage, God. I don’t get it. Why can’t I understand this?
Why did you allow terrorists to kill so many innocent people here in America? Why do you still allow it in other parts of the world?
Why do you allow Christians to be butchered, and innocent children to be sold into slavery because their parents are Christians?
Why, God? Why, why, why?
Those are tough questions. And I think it’s okay to ask them.
But let me tell you something here. There’s a difference between honest questioning and cynical questioning.
Honest questioning is marked by humility. Humbly seeking answers is a good thing.
Cynical questioning, on the other hand, is marked by a haughty pride demanding that God prove Himself to the cynic. But God does not obligate Himself to answer them in their lifetime.
I think God encourages honest questioning, as you will see in our next section. Let’s go there now, shall we?
When asking questions…
2. Go to the primary source for your answers.
Notice that David’s not calling out to his soldiers or his family. He’s calling out to God.
That’s not to say that God cannot use others in our lives to help us find answers, but ultimately, we need to turn to God as the source for our answers.
Jeremiah 33:3
“Call to Me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.”
Normally, He uses His Word, the Bible. Time spent in the Bible is time well spent, because as we gain familiarity with it, we see that God sometimes offers direct answers to our questions, and sometimes you will see general principles that you can apply to your situation or circumstance.
Sometimes God uses godly people who love Jesus to guide us or give us answers, because sometimes we can’t see things very clearly, and we need people to help us see through the fog. Also, someone who has had a relationship with God for a while has wisdom that we can learn from.
But the bottom line is that the wisdom comes from the Word of God.
When we’re asking tough questions, ask God, and take the answers He gives you through the Bible or through godly people who love the Word of God.
But let me just camp here a minute. If you want to know more about God, you need to go the source in which He reveals Himself the most – the Bible.
I don’t go to an atheist to learn about God. I don’t go to an agnostic or a skeptic. I go to the primary source – the Bible.
An atheist has nothing to offer me – what can he tell me about a God he doesn’t believe exists?
An agnostic or skeptic can tell me nothing except why they’re questioning.
Go to the primary source.
Before I move on, let me be quick to say that even if I don’t go for them for advice or knowledge about God, I do encourage them in their questioning, based on this passage in Jeremiah, as well as Jeremiah 29:13 –
You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.
I am convinced that if a skeptic, agnostic, or even an atheist is willing to ask God to show Himself, and is honestly wanting to find out if the God of the Bible is real and active, I think God will move.
But the key here is honesty. If they honestly want to know, I think God moves. But He makes no such promise to the cynic who is only looking for reasons to not believe.
Review: know it’s okay to ask the tough questions, and go to the primary source. Next, when asking the tough questions…
3. Trust that God knows what He’s doing.
This is easy to say, but not always easy to do.
But let’s look back at our Psalm, in verses 5 and 6:
5 But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation.
6 I will sing to the LORD, for he has been good to me.
Remember what I said about David earlier and all the stuff he went through?
The trust that David was able to develop even in the midst of all that horror and tragedy is a testimony that we can all learn from.
That trust allowed David to write Psalm 3 while running from Absalom, and Psalm 7 after being insulted and pelted by stones as he was running.
David could voice his confidence in God, even when his own son was seeking his life. Now I don’t know about you, but this would be tough for me if one of my kids was trying to kill me.
But David had a relationship with God that allowed him to have that confidence.
I need to point out here that David does not say, “when You come through for me, then I will trust in Your unfailing love.” David said this before he was delivered.
When we are in the middle of a time or circumstance when life is in an uproar, or when we are experiencing deep pain or sorrow, we can call out to Him, trusting that even if He doesn’t give us the answer we seek, we can still trust Him.
Because the fact of the matter is that God will not always answer our questions this side of heaven.
There are some things that are meant to be a mystery, and they’ll find their fulfillment when we meet the Lord face to face.
Can you handle that? If you are hurting, can you trust God even when He doesn’t seem to hear?
Please understand that I am not trying to minimize the pain that some here might be experiencing. I would never do that.
I am saying that God is present and working, even if we don’t notice or understand it during the trials, and that His unfailing love is still present and active in the midst of them.
Review: it’s okay to ask, go to the primary source for your answers, and trust God that He knows what He’s doing.
So…go for it!
Hebrew 4:16
Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
God is not far off and aloof, not caring for you. He is not a God who just watches things go, hoping we get it right.
God is intensely interested not just in the world, but in you, as an individual.
And He invites you to come to Him whenever and wherever. Because He’s everywhere all the time. You can’t get away from Him, and His care for you reaches beyond anywhere we can go or anything we can do, or anything that can happen to us or our loved ones.
The apostle Paul says that God is only as far away as we can push Him.
So go to Him. He’s waiting.
Conclusion
One of the biggest and toughest questions we can ask is this: why am I here? What’s my purpose on earth?
John Calvin says that our main purpose is to love God and enjoy all His benefits. I like that.
My purpose isn’t to bring world peace or to ensure that certain politicians make it into office. My purpose isn’t even to tell people about Jesus. My purpose is to love God and enjoy His benefits.
Colossians 1:16 in the Message Bible says that “Everything got started in Him and finds its purpose in Him.”
My job is to tell people about Jesus and how to get to heaven. But my purpose is to love Him.
If you call yourself a follower of Christ, then the ultimate questions in life need to revolve around Him.
So let me ask you: do you love God? So much that you’re willing to order your life around His priorities?
If not, why not? What’s in the way? Can you be honest with yourself about what’s keeping you from surrendering yourself totally and completely to Him? I say, “honest with yourself” because you can fool yourself, but you can never fool God. He knows what’s in the way, so you might as well fess up to yourself, and acknowledge it to God.
When we lose ourselves in Christ, we find our purpose in life. And when that’s squared away, then we can deal with all the other questions better, because we can relate more to God’s purposes for our lives.
But the prerequisite of all this is having a relationship with God that allows you to love Him in the first place.
You see, outside of Christ, the Bible says that we are enemies of God. We deserve punishment for the sins we have committed, and the Bible says our sins keep God from hearing us.
Can you imagine Billy Graham as an enemy of God? It’s true – but in giving his life to Christ, trusting in Him for forgiveness of sins and a home in heaven, he is no longer an enemy of God, but a child.
Now how’s that for a change in status?
And when you’re a child of God, you can love God as you should, and you can enjoy everything God has to offer, including the assurance that God is with you, even during the hardest trials life has to bring.
So if you have never trusted in Christ a your Savior, won’t you do that today, right now?
Here’s what I mean: first, you need to recognize the fact that you’re a sinner deserving punishment. It’s a fact of life, because the Bible says we are all sinners, whether we know it or not, whether we fully understand it or not.
So recognize the fact that you need a Savior.
Second, believe that Jesus died on the cross for you, shedding His blood for your forgiveness, and rose again from the dead.
And thirdly, call on Him to save you for heaven. The Bible says that all who call on the name of the Lord will be saved.
Admit your need, believe Jesus died and rose, and call on Him. ABC.
I am going to lead us in a prayer, and if you want to receive Christ as your Savior, trusting Him to cleanse you from all your sins and give you a home in heaven, then you can pray along with me in your heart, okay?
I am going to pray for all of us hear as it relates to asking the tough questions, and then I will pray a prayer for you to receive Christ as your savior.
Let’s pray.
