Answers, or Questions, in Genesis

There is a group out called Answers In Genesis that seeks to help Christians develop a Biblical worldview by helping people to find answers in Genesis through showing how the Bible is true in all that it says regarding science and that God created the world and universe in 6 literal days.  I love the spirit behind getting people to look into the Bible to find answers, but I want to propose something a little different.  Instead of providing answers for our children and even for ourselves, could we not instead provide questions so that they themselves could seek to answer them.  Actually let me take it one step further.  I believe that I do not have the answers to God, and yet I have many questions, and so maybe we come up with questions without worrying if we can answer them or not. 

Analogy time:  If you decided to walk the Appalachian Trail and did so with a know it all, and this person always knew the right gear to use and always knew which trees should be in bloom and which animals like coke zero and which ones didn’t, and of course they always always knew where you were, would it not take the joy in discovery away, and indeed the joy of wonder.  Things that fascinate me do so often because of how much I do not know about them.  So I want to look out on the AT and not hear someone tell me the scientific reason why the leaves on the trees change color, but I want to hear someone say, “Wow!”

So it is with God.  I believe that God is not a question to find the answer to, or an arithmetic problem to solve, but a mystery to be explored – without having the trip planned out.  There is so much about God that is so unlike we humans.  The Bible, being God-breathed as it is, often resists our pinning it down and getting all our questions answered, rather it calls us to ask more questions without knowing all the answers, without solving every exegetical problem or theological dispute.  But as we follow Jesus Christ we know that He is the only Answer we need, and that there is much of Him we do not yet know, and so we press on to take hold of Him, yearning for that day when we will be completely held by Him. 

Jesus, the toddler survivor

Christmas is different this year in America because of the children who will not be able to open their gifts.  Gifts are such fun to give and receive, but everything changes when a horrid tragedy like what happened in Connecticut happened.  One of the most horrible parts of this story is that this is not the first time something like this happened.  Many Christmases ago in Bethlehem a little boy received gifts that his whole family wondered at (Matthew 2:9-12) and those who gave the gifts were overjoyed.  And yet everything changed when an evil man named Herod was hunting the little boy to kill him (Matthew 2:13).  Jesus survived this hunt and fled to Egypt (Matthew 2:14-15), but there were many of his playmates and age mates who did not survive the evil man’s rage (Matthew 2:16-18).  Jesus grew up with the horrible start of surviving a man killing his friends when he was less than two years old.  He grew up in a similar way that the children who survived the shooting in Connecticut will.  Jesus was the toddler survivor.  Jesus started his life in the midst of grief, and he came to be known as the “man of sorrows” (Isaiah 53).  Both Jesus and the kids in Connecticut had and will have questions that few can answer:  “Why did this happen?”  “Where was God?”  “Why did God let this happen?” and many other such questions.   But God sent his son not only for more questions to be asked, but to provide an answer, and that answer was not an answer with words, but and answer with a person, the person of Jesus Christ, who was God and who was man, and who died and rose from the dead and so defeated death and offers an invitation to us.  He asks us not to bring our gifts only to his feet, as the wise men did, but also to bring our grief, our hatred, our death, because Jesus can take our grief and turn it into joy, and he can take our hatred and turn it into love, and he can take our death and turn it into life, because he himself is joy, and love, and life.  Jesus Christ invites us to himself.