If you could ask God one question....

What would it be? My friend K is struggling over what to do in the future and he would certainly ask about what job to do if he bumped into God this evening.

Another friend, M, after thinking at length, reckons she’d go with the old psychologist’s trick and ask an open question. That might not work though since God is pretty smart. If you ask him something like, “Any advice?” he is probably able to make some terrifically witty response. I mean, this is God, after all. He never misses an opportunity to let you know how smart he is!

I am only kidding of course. My friend O was much more philosophical. She thought she’d ask, “Are you real?” Then she realised that if she got to ask the question, the asking would answer it. So she decided to vote for, “How come the choice of evil already existed if you are all good and all loving and you created everything and all that?” Its more of a mouthful than the other option, “Are you a feminist?” but its worth all its words.

O’s serious questions were mirrored by C. She knows God is real but that doesn’t mean she wants to let him off the hook easily. Her big question was how she could look forward to heaven and be happy there when people she loved won’t be there because they fully deny his existence. She’d get angry with God if she got the chance, I think. “Why doesn’t he make himself more real to us!” is the cry inside her.

Pretty much everyone has had a conversation about what you would say if you could ask God just one question. Some of our questions are witty, others are facetious (“did you really tell Pat Robertson that it would be ok to kill the President of Venezuela?”) and occasionally we might even achieve the profound.

Excerpt from Tom The Dancing Bug

In these panels, the comic artist Ruben Bolling shows us how sometimes our questions that are meant to outwit God really aren’t as clever as we’d like to think they are. Homer Simpson captured this best when he once asked “Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself could not eat it?”

But I have another friend B. He lived for a while earlier in his life in East Berlin. There he met the daughter of a prominent Communist party member who had a dark secret… she was a Christian. She had spent her life asking the big spiritual questions but one day, while reading through the New Testament she realised that in Jesus, there was a God who asked those questions with her. She put it this way to B;

“I became a Christian when I realised that Jesus Christ is the God who cries out alongside me; WHY!?”

What she is referring to are the final words Jesus called out on the cross, Why have you forsaken me? B’s friend had spent her life in angst over the deep questions of evil, justice, significance and identity. Then in her early 20s it became clear to her because she finally saw clearly that there was a God, that this God cared deeply for her, that this God knows what it is like to be her because he has felt her angst. He has felt the angst that C has over the people who refuse God’s grace. He has felt O’s fears about the evil in the world. He is the God who has put himself in our shoes so that he could guide us home.

I have always been struck by B’s friend and her wise insight. We sit around and play with the idea of asking God a question. But God has been busy actually asking those questions. I need never ask God why he did not forsake me because he forsook himself on that cross. The ever-living One embraced death to bring me back to him. He lived the life I should have lived. He died the death I ought to have died. And now I can actually ask God questions whenever I want. Jesus bridged the chasm between Man and God and through him I know I can now relate to ultimate reality, to God.

So what will I ask God when I meet him?
That’s easy: “Which do you prefer: Vinyl or CDs?” I’ll have the rest of eternity to sort out the other questions you see….