Walking With Christ

Job 42:7 After the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite: “My anger burns against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.(ESV)

There was a time in my life when I was angry with God over something I believed He’d done. I had my reasons. I could explain the circumstances, describe the events leading up to it, and articulate why I believed God had acted the way He had. My understanding of what happened seemed entirely reasonable to me. And for years, God didn’t correct me in a way that I recognized.

There was no unmistakable revelation explaining where I’d gone wrong. There was no voice interrupting my thoughts to challenge the conclusions I’d drawn. There was no moment when the heavens opened and God explained Himself. So I continued believing what I’d believed.

I eventually reconciled with God, but that didn’t mean I’d completely corrected my understanding of what had happened. I’d learned to trust Him again while still carrying an explanation that influenced how I understood Him.

It wasn’t until much later that I began to recognize something particularly uncomfortable. I’d spent years wrestling with God over something I couldn’t establish He’d done. I’d attributed motives, decisions, and actions to Him based on my interpretation of circumstances. And because He hadn’t corrected that interpretation in a way I recognized, I’d allowed it to remain.

Somewhere along the way, I’d begun treating God’s silence as confirmation of my understanding.

Speaking on Behalf of God

The book of Job is a fascinating study in humanity’s attempts to explain God. Job experiences suffering that neither he nor his friends fully understands. His friends arrive, initially offering the comfort of their presence. But eventually, they begin attempting to explain what has happened.

Their explanations are remarkably confident. They speak about God’s justice, righteousness, wisdom, and judgment. They make observations about the consequences of wickedness and the blessings of righteousness. Much of what they say sounds reasonable. Some of their statements, removed from the circumstances in which they’re spoken, might even sound like something we’d hear preached from a pulpit. But there’s a problem.

They’re applying their understanding of God to a situation they don’t understand. They know Job is suffering. They believe suffering of this magnitude must have an explanation rooted in wrongdoing. Therefore, Job must’ve done something to deserve what’s happened.

The possibility that their understanding is incomplete doesn’t seem to receive nearly as much consideration as the possibility that Job is hiding something. They defend their conclusions with increasing confidence. And for much of the book, God allows them to speak.

He doesn’t interrupt every incorrect statement. He doesn’t immediately correct every misrepresentation of His character. He doesn’t provide them with the information the reader received at the beginning of the story. They continue speaking without recognizing how badly they’ve misunderstood the situation. Then God speaks. And eventually, He tells Eliphaz that he and his friends haven’t spoken rightly about Him.

Consider the implications of that moment. These men had spent considerable time defending what they believed to be God’s character. They’d spoken confidently about His justice and His dealings with humanity. Yet God Himself rejected their representation of Him.

Their confidence in their understanding of God wasn’t evidence that their understanding was correct.

And God’s willingness to let them speak wasn’t evidence that He agreed with them.

The Silence Between the Question and the Answer

One of the difficulties we encounter when reading Scripture is that we can move through years of someone’s life in a matter of minutes. We read the beginning of a story, turn a few pages, and discover how it ends. We know what God eventually says. We know which assumptions will be corrected. We know which characters have misunderstood what’s happening. But the people living those stories didn’t have that advantage.

Job didn’t have access to the opening chapters of the book that bears his name. He couldn’t turn backward and read about the conversation that preceded his suffering. His friends didn’t have that information either. They were living somewhere between the beginning of the story and the moment when God would finally speak. And that space is considerably more difficult to inhabit than it is to read about.

It’s a space filled with questions, uncertainty, incomplete information, and competing explanations.

It’s also a space in which we spend much of our own lives. We experience something we don’t understand. We pray. We search Scripture. We examine the circumstances. We ask God to help us understand. And sometimes, despite our efforts, we remain uncertain.

The danger isn’t necessarily in the uncertainty itself. The danger is in our desire to eliminate it.

We want an explanation, and when one seems reasonable enough, we’re tempted to accept it. Then, when God doesn’t immediately contradict that explanation, we may begin treating His silence as evidence that we’ve understood correctly. But silence doesn’t establish agreement.

The absence of correction doesn’t establish accuracy. And the fact that we’ve believed something about God for twenty years doesn’t mean God has spent twenty years endorsing that belief.

The Questions That Already Have Answers

John 9:2 And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”(ESV)

The disciples weren’t merely asking Jesus to explain a man’s blindness. They were asking Him to identify the person responsible for it. Their question contained an assumption about how God works.

They believed someone’s sin must explain the man’s condition. The only uncertainty seemed to be whose sin it was. Jesus rejected their proposed explanation.

What interests me about this encounter is that the disciples were already following Jesus. They’d heard Him teach. They’d witnessed His works. They were living in close proximity to the very One who could correct their understanding. Yet they still carried assumptions that needed to be challenged.

How long had they believed that suffering could be explained in this manner?

How many other people had they encountered without ever questioning that belief?

How many conclusions had they drawn about the lives of others based on an understanding that Jesus would eventually correct?

We don’t know. But we do know that their proximity to Jesus hadn’t prevented them from carrying an incorrect assumption. That should give us reason to examine ourselves.

We can love God and misunderstand Him. We can study Scripture and misapply it. We can pray sincerely and still approach God with questions built on incorrect assumptions. And we can spend years walking with Him while carrying beliefs that haven’t yet been properly examined.

That doesn’t mean our relationship with God is fraudulent. It means our understanding of Him isn’t complete.

The God I Thought I Knew

Looking back, I can recognize that there were periods of my life when my understanding of God was influenced as much by my experiences as it was by Scripture. I’d experienced rejection, abandonment, disappointment, and loss. Those experiences influenced what I expected from people. They also influenced what I expected from God.

When something went wrong, I didn’t always begin by examining what Scripture actually revealed about His character. Sometimes I began with what life had taught me to expect.

I knew what it was like to disappoint someone. I knew what it was like to believe that acceptance could be withdrawn. I knew what it was like to expect consequences without fully understanding what I’d done to deserve them. And without always recognizing it, I carried some of those expectations into my relationship with God.

I interpreted circumstances through them. I assigned meaning to His silence through them. I sometimes understood His actions through the lens of what I’d learned to expect from others.

The result was an understanding of God that contained elements of truth alongside assumptions that had never come from Him. And because those assumptions were so deeply embedded in my understanding of life, I didn’t always recognize them as assumptions. They simply seemed true.

I wonder how often we do this.

How often do we approach our heavenly Father expecting Him to behave like an earthly father who disappointed us?

How often do we interpret a season of uncertainty as abandonment because abandonment is something we’ve experienced before?

How often do we assume that God is withholding His love because we’ve known people who made their love conditional upon our performance?

How often do we attribute something to God’s character that actually originated in our own history?

Those experiences are real. Their influence is real. But they aren’t necessarily accurate representations of God.

What life has taught us to expect from God must still be examined against what God has revealed about Himself.

When the Correction Comes

There’s a particularly interesting moment in Job’s response to God.

Job 42:3 ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.(ESV)

Job acknowledges the limitations of his understanding. But notice what God hasn’t done.

He hasn’t provided Job with a detailed account of everything that occurred before his suffering began. He hasn’t explained every decision, answered every question, or given Job the information the reader possesses. Job receives a correction without receiving a complete explanation. That distinction is important.

Sometimes we assume that understanding God requires understanding everything He’s doing. But those aren’t the same thing.

I can recognize that I’ve misunderstood God’s character without discovering exactly why a particular event occurred. I can reject the assumption that God was punishing me without claiming to know His purpose in allowing me to suffer. I can acknowledge that my explanation was wrong without immediately replacing it with another explanation. And perhaps that’s one of the more difficult forms of humility.

We want to move from an incorrect answer to a correct answer. Sometimes, however, the correction moves us from an incorrect answer to an honest acknowledgment that we don’t know. That can feel unsatisfying. But it’s considerably better than continuing to defend an explanation that isn’t true.

There are times when the most accurate thing we can say about God’s involvement in a particular circumstance is that we don’t understand it.

And there’s no shame in acknowledging the limits of our knowledge.

Why Didn’t God Tell Me Sooner?

This is a question I’ve had to consider recently. If I’d misunderstood something so profoundly, and if that misunderstanding had influenced my relationship with God for so many years, why didn’t He correct me sooner?

Why did I spend so much time carrying something that wasn’t true?

Why wasn’t the correction more obvious?

Why did it take so long for me to recognize the distinction between what had happened and what I’d believed God had done?

I could construct several explanations. Perhaps I wasn’t ready to hear the correction. Perhaps there were things I needed to learn before I could understand it. Perhaps God was preparing me for something that would eventually require this experience.

Those explanations might sound encouraging. Some of them might even be true. But I don’t know that they are. And wouldn’t it be remarkably ironic to respond to the discovery that I’d misrepresented God’s actions by immediately constructing another unverified explanation of His actions?

I don’t want to replace one assumption about God with another simply because the new assumption is more comforting. I don’t know why the correction came when it did. I don’t know how many opportunities to recognize the truth I might have overlooked. I don’t know whether there were moments when I was so committed to my understanding that I couldn’t recognize something that challenged it.

What I do know is that I’ve been given an opportunity to examine what I believed. And I have a responsibility to respond to what I now understand.

Perhaps the more important question isn’t why I didn’t recognize the truth twenty years ago. Perhaps it’s what I’m going to do with the truth today.

The Danger of Explaining Someone Else’s Suffering

There’s another responsibility that emerges from this discussion. If we can misunderstand God’s involvement in our own circumstances, how much more careful should we be when attempting to explain His involvement in someone else’s?

Someone experiences a loss, and we tell them God has something better planned. Someone encounters a closed door, and we assure them that God is protecting them from something. Someone experiences hardship, and we explain that God is preparing them for a greater blessing. Someone’s prayers remain unanswered, and we begin examining whether they have enough faith.

We may offer these explanations with entirely honorable intentions. We want to encourage. We want to provide hope. We want to help someone make sense of something painful. But encouragement doesn’t require us to explain what God hasn’t revealed.

We can remind someone that God is faithful without claiming to know exactly how His faithfulness will manifest in their circumstances. We can remind someone that God loves them without explaining why He permitted their suffering. We can pray with someone without promising the outcome we believe they should receive. And we can sit beside someone in their uncertainty without feeling obligated to eliminate it.

Job’s friends initially spent seven days sitting with him in silence. They recognized the magnitude of his suffering and remained with him. It was when they began explaining his suffering that they started misrepresenting God. There’s a lesson in that.

Sometimes the person sitting beside us doesn’t need an explanation. Sometimes they simply need someone willing to remain beside them while they wait.

Knowing God Without Knowing Everything

1 Corinthians 13:12 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.(ESV)

Paul acknowledges the partial nature of our present knowledge. That doesn’t mean we can’t know anything with certainty. God’s revealed Himself through Scripture, and we have good reason to trust what He’s revealed. But knowing what God has revealed doesn’t give us unlimited insight into everything He hasn’t revealed.

We know that God is righteous. That doesn’t mean we can explain every circumstance in terms of a specific act of His judgment.

We know that God is loving. That doesn’t mean we can identify His purpose behind every painful experience.

We know that God is sovereign. That doesn’t mean we understand every decision He makes or everything He permits.

Faith doesn’t require us to fill every gap in our understanding. Sometimes faith requires us to leave those gaps unfilled. To acknowledge that God knows what we don’t. To trust His character without pretending to understand all His purposes. To continue walking with Him without constructing explanations simply because uncertainty makes us uncomfortable. And to remain willing to be corrected when something we’ve believed about Him doesn’t withstand examination.

What Have We Attributed to God?

I’ve spent a considerable portion of my life learning about God. I’ve also spent a considerable portion of my life discovering that things I’d believed about Him weren’t necessarily things He’d revealed about Himself.

Those discoveries haven’t diminished my faith. They’ve challenged me to distinguish between God and my understanding of God. That distinction matters. Because when I discover that something I’ve believed about God is wrong, I don’t need to defend the belief in order to defend Him.

God isn’t threatened by the correction of my theology. He isn’t diminished when I acknowledge that I’ve misunderstood Him. And His character doesn’t change simply because my understanding of His character does.

Perhaps there’s something you’ve believed about God for years that deserves another examination. Perhaps you’ve attributed a particular loss to His judgment. Perhaps you’ve interpreted His silence as rejection. Perhaps you’ve believed that a painful circumstance was His response to something you’d done. Or perhaps someone offered you an explanation of God’s actions that you’ve accepted without ever examining whether Scripture supports it.

I’m not suggesting that every conclusion you’ve reached is wrong. I’m suggesting that the length of time you’ve believed something isn’t sufficient evidence that it’s right. Neither is the sincerity with which you believe it. Neither is the confidence of the person who taught it to you. And neither is the absence of an unmistakable correction from God.

Job’s friends spoke confidently about God for much of the book before God confronted their understanding. The disciples followed Jesus while carrying assumptions He’d eventually challenge. And I’ve walked with God while believing things about Him that I’m only now beginning to reconsider.

Perhaps we should all be a little more willing to distinguish between what God’s said and what we’ve concluded. A little more careful about attributing our explanations to Him. And a little more comfortable admitting that there are things we simply don’t understand.

God’s character is perfect. Our understanding of His character isn’t.

And sometimes the next step in our relationship with Him isn’t discovering something new about God. It’s relinquishing something we believed about Him that was never true.