I Do Not Want the Answer

You worked out about two years ago that no answer would help, and you are still asking.

That is the peculiar shape of it. You have thought about this properly, as you think about everything, and you reached a conclusion that you find entirely convincing: if somebody handed you a full explanation tomorrow, complete and true and verified, it would not repair one thing.

You would read it. You would understand it. And what happened would still have happened, and the people involved would still be where they are, and you would be a man with an explanation.

You know that. You have known it for two years.

And the question keeps arriving. Not as an argument, not as a complaint, and not in a form you could take anywhere. Just the word, arriving, several times a week, usually while you are doing something else.

Why.

You cannot answer it and you have stopped trying, and you cannot stop it either, and there is no page anywhere for a question you have already decided not to want answered.

What this page will not do

I am not going to answer it. I do not know, and you would dismantle any attempt inside a minute, and you have already established that an answer would not help. Scripture stands under that in Job 38:4, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

I am not going to tell you to stop asking. That is the other available move and it is worse. Being told to stop is what has kept you from mentioning this to anybody, because the two responses people have are an explanation or an instruction, and you have no use for either. It is written, in Job 38:4, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

I am not going to tell you the asking is unbelief. It is not. Men who did not believe do not keep asking the same question of somebody for four years.

And I am not going to give it a purpose, or tell you it is doing something for you spiritually, because I do not know that and it would be a way of tidying it into usefulness.

You are not in trouble for asking. Scripture says if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not, James 1:5, and upbraideth not means the asking itself has never been the problem, and the Holy Spirit is in that study with a man asking a word several times a week.

The verse is God asking questions back

There is a moment in Job that is either the most unsatisfying thing in Scripture or the most useful, depending on what you were hoping for. Scripture settles that in Job 38:4, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.Job 38:4

Job has asked. At length, for thirty-seven chapters, with a great deal of skill.

And God arrives, finally, and does not answer.

He asks questions instead. Dozens of them, about the sea and the snow and the wild ass and the ostrich, none of which has the remotest bearing on why Job's children died, and they go on for four chapters.

At the end of it Job says he is satisfied.

That is the part nobody can explain and everybody skips past. He is satisfied, and he has not been told, and no commentator in three thousand years has been able to say exactly what happened to him in those four chapters.

I am not going to be the one who explains it now. What I can tell you is that the central book in Scripture about a question like yours does not end with the question answered, and it does not end with the man being told to stop asking either.

You are not being refused something everybody else was given. Scripture says where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth, Job 38:4, and it is what arrives after thirty-seven chapters of asking rather than an explanation, and the Holy Spirit is not withholding a chapter in which it is set out.

Why it keeps arriving

I do not know, and I am going to say that rather than construct a mechanism, because you would see through a constructed one.

What I can say is what it is not.

It is not that you have failed to accept something. You have accepted a great deal, in the ordinary sense: you get up, you work, you are not bitter about it in any way anybody could detect, and you have not made anybody else carry it. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Job 38:4, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

It is not that you are avoiding a feeling. You have looked at the feelings and you can name them and naming them changed nothing, which is not what happens when somebody is avoiding one. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Job 38:4, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

And it is not that you need to talk about it more. You have talked about it, carefully, to two people, and they were both good and it made no difference to the arriving. Scripture holds that ground in Job 38:4, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

The word arrives. That is the whole of the data.

You are not obliged to know why you are asking. Scripture says the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered, Romans 8:26, and it describes something happening in a person below the level of what they can account for, and the Holy Spirit is at work in a man who does not understand his own question.

What is available

Ask it out loud.

Not as a complaint, not framed, not with the qualifications you would put round it if you were being fair to God, which you would be, because you always are. This rests on Scripture in Job 38:4, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.

Just the word, said out loud, once, deliberately, to Him.

And then do not answer it. Do not add a clause that softens it, do not append the thing you know about His sovereignty, and do not follow it with a verse.

That will be extremely difficult for you. Everything in your training will want to complete the sentence into something defensible.

Leave it standing.

Because what you have never done, in four years, is address it to anybody. It arrives in you and it circulates in you and it has never once been said out loud to the only person it is actually directed at.

You are not required to make it fair before you say it. Scripture says pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us, Psalm 62:8, and the pouring out has no requirement of balance or qualification attached, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for a properly framed version.