Ask the BIG Question

"My God, why

have you forsaken me? (Matthew 27:46).

Standing with the end of his rope in his hand, a young Christian saw no way out of his dilemma. In his desperation and finality, he knelt to pray: “I can’t go on, Lord,” he mumbled, “my cross is just too heavy to bear.”

Responding graciously, the Lord graciously replied, “My son, if you can’t bear its weight, put it inside this room and pick out another one; anyone you wish.”

Visibly relieved, the young man whispered, “Thank you, Lord,” and did as he had been instructed. Upon entering the other room; he saw many crosses. Some were so large he could not see their tops. There were all sizes. Just then, he spotted a small cross leaning against the opposite wall.

"I’d like that one,” he announced, and the Lord whispered back, “My son, that is the cross you just brought in.”

Crosses come in multiple sizes, and varieties. They introduce a variety of experiences as two Northern California teens discovered this when they found they were at the mercy of an out-of-control vehicle. The gas pedal of their moving vehicle stuck at sixty-five miles an hour while crossing Martinez Strait south of Vallejo, CA.

Already mid-way across; they made it through the tollgate and onto Fairfield highway, both brakes burned up. The driver steered the car off the road at seventy-five mph, ascended a thirty degree incline before plowing through trees and brush, finally slowing to between thirty and forty before both girls jumped.

The driver landed on her feet without even falling; the driverless car accelerated across the highway, crashed through the divider and back onto the southbound lane going the opposite direction. The driverless vehicle now rolled up the steep embankment, broke through the wire fence, and traveled an additional 1,056 feet before crashing into the dirt levee with a severed gas line.

When asked why they did not turn off the ignition switch, the girls admitted, “We were just too scared to think that far.”

Without someone in control, life sometimes proves terribly frightening. When life careens onward like the driverless-vehicle, it tests the faith of the strongest among us. It may leave us skeptical or it can cause us to doubt, but it will test our metal and determine the consistency of our character.

Should life find us faithless, we could share the fate of the two Irishmen, Pat and Mike. Pat, being an atheist, didn’t believe in God. Aware of this as he arrived at Pat’s funeral; Mike looked down at Pat and softly whispered, “Poor Pat, all dressed up and no place to go.”

Jesus spent thirty-three years unraveling the mysteries of human existence. Everywhere he went, he found need for exchanging whole loaves of truth for slender slices of personal human experience. Thirty-one times Matthew quoted Jesus, saying “I tell you the truth. . .” as he stretched someone’s insight and understanding and exchanged their narrow slice of experience for a full loaf of truth.

Mark, Luke, and John picked up additional threads from this gospel of Jesus. The individual threads of experienced truth proved as different as four witnesses filing their police reports on the same accident. “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples,” John heard Jesus say, “then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32, italics mine).

It was John who took note of Nicodemus trying to trade off the half-finished garment of truth he carried in his suitcase of Pharisaic traditions. John also reported Jesus conversing with Pilate. He saw Pilate as a man interested only in self-serving politics, a man whose real concern was, “What kind of authority does Jesus have?

Since Jesus was a Jewish king, was he really a king? If so; did he represent any threat to Pilate‘s provincial rule? Unsure as to why Jesus stood before him, this Roman Governor candidly inquired, “What is it you have done?” Now is the time to confess.”

Jesus spoke only of kingdoms and authorities not of Pilate’s political world of power struggles, but Pilate failed to understand, “You are a king, then! He insisted.

Jesus agreed that he was a king, but insisted that his real reason for getting involved in the world of human affairs--his Raison d'être, was to “testify to the truth.” He remained indifferent to the concerns ruffling Pilate and further interrupting his peace of mind.

Pilate’s reputation as a crusty career soldier made him insensitive about all things Jewish. He had offended everyone by needlessly bringing Rome’s hated eagles and Standards into the area overlooking the Temple. He had already used force to crush demonstrations against the Empire, and throughout his provincial rule he remained unnecessarily violent.

He believed in the superiority of Caesar’s armies, and in Roman law, and was probably even more puzzled than curious as to what Jesus was really talking about when he demanded that Jesus define “What is truth” (John: 18:33-38). John had heard Jesus explain to his disciples earlier that “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6). Pilate neither believed this nor understood it; and, John understood it only partially.

Interestingly enough, Luke didn’t use the word truth when he reported on Jesus. He scrupulously researched Jesus before reporting on him, and only when convinced of the authenticity of Jesus and the accuracy of his own reporting did Luke release his detailed report of the alleged life story, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

In his second volume, Luke revealed the disciples and the Jerusalem church gathering around them as God’s confirmation of the birth, life, and death of Jesus through the resurrection.

Jesus was the cornerstone of this new building not made with hands, which Peter declared the Jewish builders had rejected. When Peter frankly confessed the Jews had no salvation other than through Jesus, he also agreed that Jesus was [is] the truth that clarified all of our human half-truths and transforms them into sensible reality.           

Edward McDonald read these birth stories of Jesus and concluded that when God wants to do something truly important--like righting a wrong--he goes about it in a uniquely singular way. Rather than release divine thunderbolts or stir up earthquakes, he simply initiates the live birth of a tiny human baby.

The birthplace may be in the humblest of human homes; the mother may be of the humblest of peasants; but this mother’s heart holds the idea—God’s purpose, and she plants it in the mind of her baby. God then patiently waits for the seed he planted to take root, grow, and mature.

The cross did not confront Jesus by accident. Unlike the chance purchase of a one in eighty million lottery ticket, the selection of Joseph and Mary reflected a long and deliberate historical process, as well as a faithful walk of obedience to the will of God according to the best they knew. John did not miss the truth that the parents of John the Baptist lived their lives “upright in the sight of God,” and observed “all the Lord’s commandments and regulations blamelessly” (John 1:6).

Elizabeth and Mary each awaited the coming of God’s promised one. Both dared believe she could be “the one” whom God would choose to honor. Matthew and Luke both show their awareness of this God-consciousness in the leading characters of redemption’s unfolding drama that we call Christmas.

Parents like Mary and Joseph could achieve what they did in birthing and parenting Jesus only by being prepared and spiritually in tune with that internal radar system initiated by God’s eternal Spirit. Luke describes their parenting days as a process of growing stronger, a time filled with wisdom and grace: “When Joseph and Mary had done everything required by the Law of the Lord” (Luke 2:39-40).

The great events of human history are not always the battles of war, the political elections, or even the holocausts; the genocidal wars, the ethnic cleansings. The birth of a baby can and did become a human event of epic proportions. The events surrounding the birth of Jesus remind us that every child brought to the fullness of birth offers the potential for being a heavenly messenger. Every newborn baby is another reminder that God is not discouraged with humanity. God promised only one Messiah, but every new birth reaffirms God’s desire to become incarnate in each human life.

When history’s gate opened wide enough to swing on the hinges of Jesus’ life and death, it allowed more light into the room of enduring truth than any light bulb produced since time’s beginning. We respond, each in our own way. Some of us wear a replica of his cross on our lapel or around our neck--a mere ornament for some--a deep conviction for others.

The architect finds the cross a fitting symbol for designing the worship center. The cross serves as the goad driving the scholar to further intellectual pursuits, whereas the preacher who yearns to make a difference in people’s lives soon learns the cross fills the need of the human heart at any hour of any day, like no other.

The skeptic uses the cross to cloud men’s minds, whereas others find no more than a cloudy superstition. It provided an instrument of execution for the Roman soldiers crucifying Jesus; obnoxious to most, hated by many, revered by others. The cross pointed Emperor Constantine toward heaven, providing a banner by which he mistakenly thought he could convert others in his political and military conquests.

The cross branded Mary’s soul with piercing agony. The Sanhedrin viewed it as their “token of victory,” short-lived and imaginary. It guaranteed the motley crowd surrounding at Calvary one more holiday filled with more carnality and cursing than character and commitment. It simultaneously revealed to one an unexpected and eternal door into a terrible perdition, while opening an unexpected gate into a wondrous paradise to another.

For Jesus, bearing it on his back, the cross became both bier and throne, a timeless paradox predestined to eternity. For multiplied millions of storm-tossed souls, Hershel Hobbs found the sign of the cross a revelation of “an anchor, offering a haven of rest”

 “The Sign of the Cross” by Hershel Hobbs,

Worship Resources For the Christian Year, ed. by Charles L. Wallis.

(New York: Harper & brothers, 1954), pp. 94-95.

This fourth word from the cross proves troublesome to even the most faithful. People that achieve great faith seldom arrive at their point of discovery without encountering troublesome questions on their journey.  Some questions offer more search than certainty; thus, the analogy of the pearl. A Pearl, like a searching question, always begins the same way--an oyster with a troublesome grain of sand.      

Jesus voiced his harshest reality from his that cross; a tormenting grain of sand that refused to disappear. Finally, his biggest of all questions exploded into words heard only by those nearest the cross of Jesus: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34).

Even if Jesus was only reciting a familiar and beloved meditation, as is often suggested, the question pestered his humanity. We do not dismiss such struggles just because Jesus was Jesus. Nor, should we quench that questioning spirit when we are assailed by questions we cannot answer. Answering these nagging questions often marks our real starting point of faith, and it can launch us to a higher level of faith and maturity.

When Opal freely admitted, “God, you didn’t answer my prayer!” she entered this familiar freeway where we modern disciples frequently find our own heretofore-unexplored areas in the realm of the spirit.

Jesus met such a person one-day, a devastated dad. This man could find absolutely no one able to help him, nor could he find anyone to help or heal his critically ill son. In that moment, this despairing man passionately grasped at any and every passing straw. His noble quest eventually brought him and his young son to certain disciples of Jesus where rumors reported healing was available. Desperate Dad asked these disciples to heal his sick son. They obviously tried, as any good disciples would, but they failed miserably.

Returning about that time from the Mount of Ascension, accompanied by Peter, James, and John, Jesus quickly understood he faced a desperately hopeless situation, and no one had a solution. The frustrated disciples remained powerless. The forlorn father passionately begged for any kind of help Jesus could offer, telling Jesus his story and concluding with quiet desperation, “. . . if you can do anything take pity on us and help him.”

"If you can,” replied Jesus, “Everything is possible for him who believes.”

"I do believe,”  shrieked the anguished man. “I do believe. Help me overcome my unbelief!” (Mark 9:23-24).

This troubled dad might have understood Abraham Lincoln very well, when Honest Abe observed, “Probably it is my lot to go on in a twilight, feeling and reasoning my way through life as questioning, doubting Thomas did. But in my poor, maimed, withered way, I bear with me as I go on, a seeking spirit of desire for a faith that was with him of the olden time, who in his need, as I in mine, exclaimed, ‘Help Thou my unbelief.’”

Most of us are no different than this struggling father! We face days of doubt and our questions leave us vulnerable to demons of discouragement, depression, and despair. Furthermore, if we are not careful, the skepticism of our present age may challenge our sore spots. Without options, we may feel like that unhealthy victim in the barnyard being picked to death by bigger, healthier chickens.

Such unbelief can overflow unprotected shoreline like the coastal fog silently passing San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge on its way into Carquinez Strait where it blankets inland valleys. Such cold, damp skepticism can get us down on what we are not up on. Nevertheless, the true strength of our faith, the real test, is not in what we challenge but in whom we believe. To deny the reality of our doubt is not only a simplistic solution for avoiding something difficult it is to deprive us of further opportunity for developing greater faith. Faith is the one sure cure for defeating doubt.

On the other hand, doubt can carry us to a crucial fork in the road we travel and lead us into faithless disobedience. Going the other way usually carries us past doubt and leads to new discovery. Doubt often accompanies growth; and had Christopher Columbus not questioned the wisdom of his day and doubted that his world was flat, he would never have found his way to America. Confronting honest doubts often becomes a real growing pain of the soul. We would avoid it if at all possible, but we would take nothing for the experience!

We understand Jesus’ role better through this questioning word from the cross, for he shows us how he faced his cross experience but he also teaches us how we can overcome our obstacles. Had he taken a “so what” approach to truth by stoically accepting “What will be, will be,” that would have taught us nothing. Had he stuck his head into the sand of circumstance and refused to confront the sinfulness of human nature--thereby denying the substance of the Father’s demands--that would have hindered the whole purpose for which he came.

Had he chosen to do so, he could have yielded to his own frustration when things did not go right and give in to the cynicism natural humanity. However, he chose to live with the higher purpose of his Heavenly Father and surrendered that inclination of natural humanity. Ali Kazan faced then after cavorting about with his mistress. When he remarried, he wondered, “Is this what I wanted?”

Equally unsure of what they were doing, the Emmaus Road disciples agreed they “thought he was the one. . .” Confused with the events of Jesus’ trial, Peter finally returned to his fishing nets. In spite of his circumstances Jesus, nevertheless, held his focus on his objective, his heart tuned to his father’s will, and hammered away on his anvil of suffering until forging a faith for withstanding adversity straight from hell. In doing so; he opened the door of hope wide enough for all of us to enter in and find strength for today with assurance for tomorrow.

By going to the cross, Jesus’ life and ministry dramatized a living sermon titled “Facing Life Realistically.” My friend Robert used to tell me, “When I become good enough, I’m going to become a Christian and join the church.” Like others, he secretly feared that God was too big and too busy to bother with someone as little and bad, and as insignificant as he felt.

"Who am I,” we ask, “that HE should notice me? I could never be what he expects me to be anyway.” Or; we conclude that human nature remains incurable, since it is obvious this celestial experiment has continued for centuries without changing human nature one iota.

A few years ago I joined a large gathering of civic and religious leaders at the nearby University. Local clergy and the press listened to the widely advertised debate on the existence of God. Dr. Paul Weiss argued for the philosophical existence of God and Dr. Thomas Althizer outlined his “God is dead” theory. Had that been faith’s final word, I would have relinquished all religion, resigned my church ministry, and surrendered to the cynic’s despair.

I see no more than a hair of difference between their theoretical rationalities, one arguing God’s rational existence, the other arguing against God’s existence. Thank God, I still had “The One” who defers not to fatalism and does not fall into the abandonment of cynicism’s bottomless pit. On the cross, there is Jesus confronting the full impact of humanity’s wickedness and forthrightly challenging death’s nakedness by confessing God‘s loving grace.

“My God, my God, why…?

The words rang from the central cross. His soul was troubled. The vacuum was devastating as he viewed God’s handiwork in that hour (John 12:27).  Yet; Jesus experienced God personally enough and powerfully enough to be the God adequate for personal experience, practical justice, and saving security. Like all humanity; we need to face this challenge of the eternal “Why…?”

Are you among those wondering whether or not Jesus’ questions were answered? Since he obviously died on his cross, consider what we currently know:

(1)       Jesus paid for his “good” life, with a cross,

(2)       Jesus died in the despair of separation from God,
(3)       God allowed Jesus to suffer and die, without rescue,
(4)       When Jesus died, the very earth reverberated with the mourning of darkness and   turmoil,
(5)       God does not always answer “yes.”

"Does God ever answer no?” Nagging questions shock inquirers and non-believers alike. Both young and old challenge this truth when personally experienced. For the sake of achieving peak excellence, however, spiritual explorers must intentionally throw aside self-comfort. The pearl of great price can be yours, but only by becoming the precise jewel for which you will sacrifice everything else you have.

Friends called Joseph Priestly the “joyful lunatic.” One day a friend spoke to Joseph as he prepared to leave for America. “Americans are a crazy lot,” exclaimed the friend, “maybe they will let you be.” With that, he handed Priestly his coat, announcing, “There is twenty pounds of my conscience pinned in the lining of my coat.” Priestly went on to become the father of American chemists, the man we remember for discovering oxygen.           

Too many Christians have only a second hand faith they found on sale in someone’s bargain basement. They avoid asking hard questions that threaten their faith. They find it too threatening and uncomfortable to change the order of things. Their synthetic spirituality requires them to parrot the creeds of orthodoxy and attend passive entertainments that pass for worship and avoid the stigma of sins that prove toxic.

Such faith is but a cheap counterfeit, a generic capsule taken in once-a-week dosages. Such individuals remain unburied until after their prescribed three-score and ten years, although they died before reaching thirty-five having paid little or nothing. Anyone that would come after me, must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me” Jesus noted (Matthew 16:24).

The disciples had hardly understood when Jesus reminded them earlier; and some did turned away and follow him no further. There have always been those who find his way too uncomfortable, too demanding, and too disappointing. However, Jesus had faced his vision quest long before arriving at the cross. His wilderness temptation at the very beginning of his ministry determined the kind of Savior he would become.

“If you are the Son of God. . .” Satan had challenged Jesus in the wilderness. “It is written,” Jesus replied, pushing forward with his goal of ministry as the Son of Man. Although he revealed the fullness of God, Jesus served with the humility of a servant (Colossians 2:6-10; 1:15-19, 26-28).

Arriving in Gethsemane shortly before his crucifixion, Jesus experienced the ultimate intensity in his struggle. Exercised in soul, sweating bloody perspiration, he prayed in full surrender, “Not as I will, but as you will? (Matthew 26:39).

As we follow Jesus in our pursuit to know him better, we begin to understand the reality of his substitutionary death. He endured what our repeating failures and undeniable selfishness called for us to endure (Romans 1:28-32). Because we persist in flopping about like fish out of water, unable to lift ourselves out of our moral quicksand by means of our failing human resources; Jesus did it for us.

He paid our penalty, although he knew no sin. He became as sin, although it was really our sin. He offered his cross as God’s personal response to human need. His suffering qualified him uniquely as our Savior, for although he was “very man” he was so much more. He broke the very principal of sin, by living above and beyond sin. He took our sin into his own death, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.

Thus Paul concluded, “If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9-13).

Not for one moment do I doubt that Jesus suffered great anguish. He lived; he walked; and he died in the fullness of God’s love, doing it uniquely as no other. Moreover, he offered each of us a starting point for finding our own faith, beginning at his cross. There, we see him taking our place, although his word from the cross allows for the very real possibility of separating ourselves from him. Yet, he makes it abundantly clear that separation from him never expresses his will. Although he never promised an escape hatch from life’s difficult dog days, he reassures us there is a way under--over--around--through the very worst of times.

Having achieved a life more excellent than anyone ever lived before him, and having consistently pursued the truth that God sent him to reveal, Jesus yielded himself up on the cross (Mark 15:37). Admittedly, some thought he called for Elijah and took him a pacifier of drugged vinegar with which to face his death. But while the earth recoiled and the temple veil tore in half, Jesus yielded himself up to the Father, not as a sacrificial victim but as Christus Victor.

Herein is our quest. How do we find the stepping stones of faith as we put one foot ahead of the other in life’s murky waters? Outwardly, we laugh at the Little League coach who told his young team, “Here we are lads, undefeated, unscored on, and all ready for our first game.”

Inwardly, however, we yearn for the faith described by the faithful Bishop who prayed,

            Out of the shame of my coward heart,

                        Out of my night of defeat,
           Lift me, O God, to the battle again,

                        Cover my bitter retreat.

            Out of despising my weakness and route,

                        Out of the love of my soul,
            Purge me, oh purge, with the hyssop, dear Christ,
                        Give me my spirit made whole!

            Beaten, but still undefeated, I pray,

                        Thou of unconquerable hand,
            Reach me my poor broken saber again,
                        I pledge thee to die or to stand.

            By the wonder of Heaven’s forgiveness,

                        By the lovely lure of thy light,
            By the spirit of victory eternal,
                        God fling me again to the fight!

“Undefeated” by Ralph S. Cushman, Spiritual Hilltops.

New York/Nashville: Abingdon Cokesbury Press, 1932), p. 47.

                 
In this word from the cross, the doubter finds light at the end of life’s darkened tunnel. Jesus’ followers soon learned they too would suffer the agonies of life as well as the ecstasies. Their discoveries along that path Jesus walked, somehow transformed their doubts from despair to delight.

Years in a Chinese prison shaped the character of Watchman Nee in such a way that the quality of life influenced more people than he could reach personally as an evangelist-teacher-author. Like first-century Paul, Watchman Nee’s twentieth-century life in a Chinese prison provided platform for powerfully proclaiming God’s gospel.

Like Paul, Watchman Nee’s ambition took on the theme of overcoming with Christ by participating in his triumph over death. Like Jesus before him, it took a trial and an execution to call from Watchman’s “judges, from a fellow prisoner, from his executioner, and from the common people the admission that he was a faultless man.”

“We are hard pressed … perplexed … (and) struck down,” Nee could truthfully join Paul in adding “but not destroyed.” And like Paul before him, Nee could admit in deep humility “We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body” (2 Corinthians 4:8-10, italics mine).

Chou En-lai had met all night with the founders of the Chinese Christian Three Self Movement and had personally laid down the gauntlet, clarifying official Party position on freedom of Christian witness. "We are going to let you go on trying to convert people, provided you also continue your social services,” agreed Chou. “after all, we both believe that truth will prevail.

Convinced Communism was true and that Watchman’s Christianity was false, Chou concluded, “…therefore, if we are right, the people will reject them and your church will decay. If you are right, then the people will believe you; but as we are sure that you are wrong, we are prepared for that risk." The presentation was both gracious and ruthless, but Watchman was prepared to take that risk. His detention oversubscribed his published sentence of fifteen years. He wrote his final letter ten days after completing twenty years of prison life on April 12, 1972.

"The summer sunshine can give a little colour to the skin, but it cannot affect the illness,” he admitted when writing to the beloved sister-in-law he addressed as Elder Sister. In the message he left for us to savor, Nee assured her that in spite of his illness, “…I maintain my own joy, so please do not worry. And I hope you also take care of yourself, and that joy fills your heart. Wishing you well, Shu-tsu.”

Signing the name he used when the two played together as children, Watchman wished that her “heart within be filled with joy,” and he used the “four characters: hsi-loh, (joy), and man-tsu, (full).”

“Can we perhaps detect here a twinkle in his eyes? Wonders Watchman’s biographer. The four characters, he notes, are those “used in translating the words of Jesus to his disciples: ’Ask and you shall receive, that your joy may be full.’”

What the sixty-nine year old prisoner could not write without being censored, he expressed cryptically for his reader to interpret privately. Since God is always present, concluded his biographer, there is no situation on earth in which we are powerless to do anything, based on the indisputable life of detention Nee lived for twenty years.

Angus I. Kinnear, Against the Tide, The Story of Watchman Nee.

Fort Washington, Pennsylvania 19304: Christian Literature Crusade,

1973), pp. 175-180.

I remember when Watchman Nee was a rallying point for prayer on behalf of Chinese Christians during the 1960’s. Every generation since has also found itself facing situations asking “Why?” Every "Why?” offers a potential double-play that threatens to throw us out. This is walkingwithwarner.blogspot.com

inviting you to explore your big “Why?”

It holds a potential grand-slam guaranteed to win your biggest ballgame.