Called Into Questions Sample

Questioning God

At the crux of history, the center of all things—Christ asks a question. It is an astonishing moment, and a difficult one to understand. Jesus is fully God, and yet He asks the most terrible, most human question possible: where is God in the midst of my suffering? G.K. Chesterton once wrote that Christ’s question makes Christianity “the one religion in which God seemed himself for an instant to be an atheist.” In that moment, Christ frees us to ask God our deepest, hardest questions while at the same time giving us God’s answer to them. We may ask where God is, but we need not fear that we will meet silence. For Christ’s question on the cross has gone to God on our behalf, and the Word of God does not return void.

We can think about Christ’s question from two different perspectives. First, Christ’s death and resurrection is the form God’s faithfulness to His people takes in a world of sin. God has made a covenant with humanity and will not depart from it. In this way, Christ’s question on the cross is almost a performative contradiction: Where is God? With Christ, on the cross. Christ’s lament that God is absent becomes a strange sign of God’s presence. The same man who cries “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” invites the thief into paradise for believing in Him (Luke 23:43). Christ's death discloses the lengths to which God goes to reassure the faith of His creation. And His resurrection vindicated that faith, revealing the depths to which God affirms His creation.

Second, Christ’s death and resurrection is the form humanity’s faithfulness to God takes in a world marked by sin. As the one who ascends the holy hill of Calvary on our behalf, Christ is the man who has “clean hands and a pure heart” (Psalm 24:3-4). He fulfills the terms of the covenant on behalf of humanity, innocently undertaking God’s judgment for trespassing His commands. As the Man of God, Christ manifests humanity’s faithfulness to God. His death is the form our life takes through the power of His resurrection, which we are given in the Holy Spirit. In this way, Christ’s question is precisely what we ought to ask God amid evil, injustice, and sin: lament is the form our faith takes when we are afflicted by doubt and dismay.

In Jesus Christ, God has become the answer to His own questions, even as Jesus puts humanity’s questions to God on our behalf. On the cross, Christ offers atonement for our sins so that we need never fear God’s questions again. In asking “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Christ asks God where He is—just as God had asked Adam and Eve where they were. In the same work of grace, God liberates humanity from the judgment of God’s questions and liberates questions from their captivity to sin. It is for freedom that we are set free—and it is for the sake of questioning that God questions us and questions Himself on the cross.