Are You Asking the Right Question?

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The atmosphere in the auditorium was heavy that day at the seminar I attended with about 200 women from all over the United States.

The speaker had shared with us that when difficult circumstances arise, God will reveal to us the reason He allowed that circumstance in our lives. He then sent us back to our room with an assignment to recall a difficult situation we’d encountered and then ask God to reveal the reason behind it.

He couldn’t possibly have predicted what could arise from such an assignment.

After a period of time, we returned to the auditorium where we shared our experiences. And then a girl stood up and, crying, said that God hadn’t revealed to her why He allowed a man to rape her.

Hard as he tried to explain to her what the answer could possibly be, he didn’t succeed. And the reason for that is this:

If you want the right answer, you must start asking the right question.

And this is where Job went wrong. Soon God will join in the dialogue and remind Job of his proper place, because he became angry when he didn’t get an answer to his question “why”. Why me? Why didn’t God protect me? Why is God against me? Why must I suffer like this?

And we will never receive an answer to questions such as those, because God doesn’t owe us an answer. He is Almighty God. He owes no man anything!

And this is where the speaker at that conference went wrong. He gave us the impression that God owed us an answer to why we must suffer.

If the right question isn’t “why”, what is the right question?

What. The question is what.

“God, what do you want to teach me from this situation? What do you want to do in me through this situation?”

You see, rather than the question “why” that accuses God, the question “what” opens our heart to God.

Job was righteous….but he wasn’t without sin.

We have to remember this as we read the book of Job. Did he have to go through what he went through because he sinned? No. But it doesn’t mean that he didn’t sin at times in his sorrow.

And I think that it is very, very easy at times to sin when we grieve because we want to know why, when sometimes the only answer to the question “why” is that we live in a sinful world where bad things happen to good people.

But if in these difficult circumstances we open our hearts to God, He can do something wonderful in the end so that through our lives and through the difficult situation He is glorified!

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