Last night I had a dream, maybe not a full on God-dream but one that I woke from energised. It centred around how we tend to approach life with the answers, how we are sure because of our faith, and then we try and make life fit our answers. My little task in the dream was to come to a group who were so sure about everything and tell them that their answers were irrelevant as they did not have the right questions (indeed they did not seem to have any questions; they had left that part of life behind them). As I looked around the whole group I could see they were very content, but evidently in a bubble, they had little contact (and probably little relevance) to what lay beyond themselves.
Pre-fall I guess the path was one of discovery, experimentation and surprise – sounds a great way to live? The instruction was to ‘eat of all the trees’. Try this fruit, what about that one… What a great way to learn and given that redemption brings about a restoration this should become an element in our lives. The freedom of discovery.
Post-fall it seems that questions are key. Before God says anything by way of revelation there are questions that come that penetrate right to the heart:
- “Where are you?”
- “Who told you that you were naked?”
- “Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”
- “What is this that you have done?”
Questions continue throughout Scripture. Particularly before revelation comes:
- ‘What is in your hand?’
- ‘What do you see?’
- ‘Who do you say I am?’
If we are not comfortable with questions there will be very little revelation. We have to be comfortable with not knowing… and if we are not comfortable with that we will always have a tendency to resort to eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (hint: not a good idea and one that does not have a good ending! When I first wrote this last sentence I mis-spelt good as ‘goof’, not a bad spelling?).
Putting the two elements of pre-fall and post-fall together we need to consider that discovery (with experimentation and surprise) and questions need to be the tracks either side of the path that we walk down. God is the all-knowing one, we…? Well we are maybe not the all-ignorant ones, but far from being the all-knowing ones!
Questions without answers are not comfortable… but we have to be come comfortable with that feeling. We have to hold this, and learn to live with a big old ‘I don’t know’ as part of of who we are.