When Faith Questions God
When difficulties arise in our life (and they will), they often bring questions along with them—big questions that we may be scared to say out loud or even admit to ourselves. “Is God there?” “Does He hear me?” “Can I trust Him?”
Maybe you’ve been told that asking these kinds of questions is sinful, or proof that you don’t have faith. Maybe this has stifled your prayers or even kept you from praying altogether. After all, how can we come to God in prayer if we keep asking these questions?
Scripture gives us a surprising answer, showing us that these types of questions are a normal part of what it means to have faith in the midst of difficulty. When it comes down to it, the real issue is what we do with our questions. In Psalm 13, David prays:
1 How long, 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 day after day have sorrow in my heart?
3 Look on me and answer, Lord my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death,
4 and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.
Psalm 13 shows how faith responds to difficulty—not by stifling pain, pretending it isn’t there, or waiting for it to pass. The faithful response to difficulty is seeing it for what it is and crying out to God in the middle of it. We do not have to pretend that our troubles are not trouble-some. God does not ask us to minimize our pain to maximize his glory.
The relationship God has brought us into with him is a real one. He’s shown us that he loves us, he’s told us that he loves us. And when we are going through it, we’re invited to call him out, in a sense, in the middle of it in confidence that he will answer.
But the questions of faith are not the destination. David concludes Psalm 13 with these words:
5 But I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart rejoices in your salvation.
6 I will sing the Lord’s praise,
for he has been good to me.
For the believer, even the darkest times of life are permeated with this greater truth; that God has set His love on us and bound Himself to our good. This is proven definitively in Jesus Christ who fulfilled the promise of God’s graciousness in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension. We need not guess at God’s will for our lives—He has proven that His will is to “show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.” (Ephesians 2:7)
Our lives not only benefit from the live of Jesus, but we see ourselves through the pattern that his life followed. Our lives will be difficult him, it’s the nature of living in a world that is not the way its supposed to be. And our lives here in this broken world will end in death—as Ben Franklin famously said, the only two sure things in this world are death and taxes.
But our lives will follow the pattern of Jesus. And death will give way—death will have to give way—to resurrection. After all of our questions are asked, after all the difficulties are experienced, what lasts is the unfailing love of God and his goodness.
Many of you hearing these words today are experiencing big difficulties and have the questions that come from that. Don’t become frozen in the difficulty. Take your cues from the encouragement of God’s Word and pray—don’t just speak your questions into the air, but speaking those questions to God.
Cry out to God in the middle of our difficulties right alongside our praises for God’s goodness and mercy. And with eyes of faith, let’s see the One who has pledged His unfailing love to us in Christ.