Our Questions Don't Always Get Answered (DI3)

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

I know we usually read from the Bible, but I’ve got another book I wanted us to read for this session.

Read Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

I think we can all agree that life can be disappointing and frustrating at times, but I’d like to see just how true that it. I am going to read some statements, and I want you to stand if what I say is true and it applies to you.

You have never experienced disappointment.

You have never experienced things going badly.

You have never been rejected.

You have never lost something valuable or precious.

You have never lost out to someone else.

You have never experienced sadness.

You have always had all your prayers answered the way they wanted.

Clearly, as expected, everyone here has experienced disappointment, rejection, or unanswered prayers at some point. Here’s one more question: Stand up if You’ve ever heard (or thought) that following Jesus would make everything in your life okay? How many of you have heard this verse?

Romans 8:28 ESV

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

It’s a great verse, and for sure one of my favorites, but so many people read or hear this and they get the wrong message from it. They hear this and they interpret that it means, “If I follow Jesus, everything’s going to be all right!” But obviously we know from our own experience that this isn’t true. Even when we follow Jesus we don’t get everything we want, we still get hurt, bad things still happen to us, we still experience doubt and disappointment.

So What?

Let’s take a look at an extended version of Alexander ‘s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Before we just jump right into it though, I want to let you know that we are going to talk about the book of Job. Yes it is pronounced Job not job. This book is one of the more difficult books in Scripture to understand. The original Hebrew that it was written in was really dense and intense, and it’s hard for us to try and rationalize or reason out why God did what He did. Let’s watch:

Job Video (5 min.)

Now there are a whole bunch of interesting things that happened in this book, and I think the video did a pretty good job at summarizing a lot of it. But there’s obviously a lot of detail that we can’t cover in just a 5 minute video clip. One thing is the part about Job’s friends, oh and the video doesn’t even really mention his wife. At first, when all these things began to happen to Job, his family (wife and kids) as well as his friends all tried to comfort him. They tried to tell him that everything was going to be okay and that this would be over quickly. But then, as the video shared with us, they pretty quickly turned and changed their attitude.

They began to really ridicule Job. The things they said were really offensive and brutal. His wife even told him to kill himself more than once! They told him things like “this is your own fault, bad things don’t happen to innocent people, so you must be guilty of something.” or “your family, your kids and wife, they deserved it too.” Shortly after his wife and kids had died, literally his entire family, they even told him “be thankful, it could be worse.”

What? Are you serious?

"THIS IS YOUR FAULT. Bad things don't happen to innocent people, so you must be guilty of something."

zz"YOUR KIDS DESERVED IT TOO."

zz"GOD HAS A PLAN. You just have to wait and see what it is!" (That's not comforting or helpful when you're grieving the loss of your entire family.)

zz"BE THANKFUL.

These “friends” of Job go on lecturing him for a very long time. Each time Job has to give a response, and eventually after this constant back and forth back and forth, Job tells them “Hey! Everything you’ve said has been really hurtful and offensive, and honestly, you’re just wrong!”

Job says that he hasn’t sinned against God, but even if he had, nothing he’s done would deserve the kind of suffering he’s experiencing. Job cries out in pain, asking God to just end his suffering already because it’s just too much for him to take. It took so much but Job eventually couldn’t help but break down.

After all of that, and after Job cried out to God, He answered back. But just as the video said, God didn’t answer Job in the way he expected. Job didn’t get the answer that he was looking for, but he did get an encounter with the Creator of the universe. God was able to show Job the complexity of the world and to understand that we don’t get the full picture.

It seems like a dissatisfying end to the story of Job, and I agree. It feels dissatisfying. When horrible things happen or life goes wrong, we want answers. Not answers that don’t answer our question. But we want a direct, “this is why this happened” type of answer. And the hard truth that we have to come to terms with is that we don’t always get that answer. And that’s part of the point of Job’s story, is that it’s hard to have faith when you’re experiencing something difficult that you can’t understand or explain.

Just like we said a few sessions ago, you’re not alone in your questions. Job had a lot of questions for God too, most of which didn’t get answered. But God doesn’t shame us for our questions just like He didn’t condemn or shame Job for his. And Job had to grasp the truth that our questions don’t always get answered.

My hope is that many of you have, at some point, written down some questions that you have and dropped them here in this box. I hope you know that I wish I could answer all of these…but I can’t, and most likely, no one can or ever will.

At the end of Job’s story, God restores Job’s life by giving him double of everything that he had before. But that doesn’t take away the pain and suffering that Job had already experienced. Let’s return to the passage from Romans that we had talked about earlier. The one that people sometimes think means, “Everything will work out just fine.”

Romans 8:28 ESV

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

This verse doesn’t mean that our lives will have a happy ending, like the end of a sitcom or our favorite Disney movie. When we experience pain and heartache, the hard truth is that our questions don’t always get answered - but God can redeem what we’ve suffered and lost.

The definition of redeem is to reclaim, repurpose, restore, or regain it. Like Job, sometimes we lose a lot, and we feel like we lose even more when our questions go unanswered. But that verse means that we are called according to His purpose and that His purpose is to see all of His creation redeemed and restored. We can know that while our questions may go unanswered, our calling will not. We will be redeemed, restored, reclaimed when Christ comes again and calls us home with Him.