Life is filled with questions. When I was young I thought that questions were for young people.
But the older I get the more I realise that questioning is very much part of our humanity.
While life is simple as far as the basics are concerned it is complex in the sense that many things seem inexplicable. So it’ good for us to grapple with the complex. Not that we always get an answer.
Often we have to hold things in tension
- like a believing in a good God who allows suffering
- like holding to the truth about Jesus while living in a world where truth is taught to be relative
- like having personal standards of purity where the prevailing culture is that there is no standard, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone
But to get to that place we have to work through our questioning process. In the Bible the Bereans are held up as a positive exampleof faith (Acts 17:11). When Paul brought them the good news about Jesus, they did not just accept it at face value. They did their own research to question as to whether his teaching aligned with the Jewish Scriptures (Old Testament). They are described as having ‘noble character’.
What about us? Lazy people just accept what they are told. Active people search out truth for themselves through a process that involves questioning.