Originally published on the Electric Gospel on October 25, 2018.
Answering questions
by David Sellnow
Once, in a religion class I was teaching, a student started the day by asking a question. He said no one had ever been able to give him a good answer before, and he really was hoping I could. He asked: “In heaven, if everyone is perfect, how does that work? If you’re playing basketball in heaven, and the offense is perfect at scoring and the defense is perfect at shutting down offenses, what happens?”
I rolled my eyes. I didn’t take the young man seriously. I thought he was joking. I later realized he was serious. He was struggling with a concept. He honestly wanted an answer. I owed him an apology for the way I had laughed off his question initially.
When people have religious questions, no matter how odd the questions might seem to us, we do well to listen carefully and answer thoughtfully. Their questions and curiosity — even their objections and counterarguments — provide us with opportunities to speak gospel words that bring attention to Christ.
There is a Christian author named Alicia Britt Chole, who was not always a Christian. Her book Finding an Unseen God tells her story, of how she did not believe in God as a child and was very much an atheist during her high school years. She didn’t fit in at all in her Texas high school where most folks were pretty religious. But two girls whom she refers to as the “Bowheads” (because they always wore bows in their hair) decided to be her friends even if she didn’t share their beliefs. Their patience and genuine friendship made an impact on her. In college, she began pursuing religious questions with more seriousness. And she writes this about her questioning:
What a relief it was for me to discover that [my] continual questioning did not make God nervous. Interrogatives do not irritate God. Emotionally charged query does not shut God down. … God is, after all, rather secure.
The problem is not that we have questions. … Personally, I have found that God takes pleasure in an inquiring mind. God delights in sincere questions.
– Finding an Unseen God (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2009), 142
During Jesus’ ministry, a group known as the Sadducees had a question for Jesus. It was an insincere, eye-roller sort of question. Still, Jesus took up the question seriously and answered in a meaningful, educative fashion.
Here’s the account of that event (Luke 20:27-38 WEB):
Some of the Sadducees came to him, those who deny that there is a resurrection. They asked him, “Teacher, Moses wrote to us that if a man’s brother dies having a wife, and he is childless, his brother should take the wife and raise up children for his brother. There were therefore seven brothers. The first took a wife, and died childless. The second took her as wife, and he died childless. The third took her, and likewise the seven all left no children, and died. Afterward the woman also died. Therefore in the resurrection whose wife of them will she be? For the seven had her as a wife.”
Jesus said to them, “The children of this age marry, and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. For they can’t die any more, for they are like the angels, and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed at the bush, when he called the Lord ‘The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ Now he is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for all are alive to him.”
Notice the manner in which Jesus responded to the Sadducees’ question, even though the Sadducees were opponents of Jesus and were attempting to refute the idea of a life after death. They had decided there is no resurrection, no afterlife — that the meaning of religion is to give morality to this life. So their question was just a doozy dreamed up to test Rabbi Jesus and see if they could stump him. But even with their not-so-sincere question, Jesus answered as a true teacher. He looked his questioners squarely in the eye and taught them something of what heaven really is like. He pointed to the Scriptures, showing how Moses expressed faith in the God who is “not the God of the dead, but of the living.” The Scriptures point us to God, to our salvation in God, to a resurrection to life with God. This was the message of good news that Jesus consistently proclaimed — good news that he was fulfilling in his own person.
How do we answer the questions that come to us? Let me tell you a story of another woman whose perspective on religion changed when she was a teenager. This woman, Elaine, was raised in the church and took the pastor’s class for the teens at her church. She had lots of questions, such as how on earth did Noah manage to get dinosaurs on the ark, and other curious wonderings like that. The pastor was always irritated by her questions, pushed aside her questions, didn’t want to answer her questions. He had his agenda that he wanted to get through in class, and she was interrupting. After a while, he wouldn’t let her ask any more questions. And after a while further, Elaine decided the church wasn’t for her. She stayed away from the church throughout her adult life. She only came back into a church class years later (that’s when I met her) — when she was working as a caregiver for a disabled woman who wanted to attend the classes. Elaine came along with Nadine as caregiver … and thank goodness I didn’t roll my eyes at questions Elaine started asking again, decades after she had previously given up on the church and its ministers.
The Lord Jesus wasn’t afraid of questions. When given the chance to speak to a question, Jesus answered in an evangelical, gospel-centered fashion. God grant us the attitude of Jesus as we deal with others, that we don’t dodge questions or reject their questions, but point every struggling or wondering soul to Jesus and his Word for the answer. And even when the questioners are Sadducee types who may think they already know more than we do, let’s still be serious and solid in our answers, saying what the Word of God says, calling attention to the Lord our God. “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for all are alive to him.” And our testimony in Jesus’ name is to point others to the life that is in him.
