When You Want to Know Why
I
don’t just want to know that something works; I want to know how it works. I want to understand it. When I was a young adult and installed my first ceiling fan, my father was there and showed me what to do. Step 1: connect the two white wires together. Step 2: connect the two black wires together. Done. But that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to know the purpose and the differences between the two wires. Then I wanted to understand wattage and ohms and voltage. My wife was just content to flip the switch and watch the fan blades go around.
I use the Internet constantly—I mean, who doesn’t?—but that wasn’t enough for me. So, two years ago, I read a book about how the Internet works. I want to fully comprehend.
We do things all the time that we don’t fully understand. Most of us drive our cars while remaining clueless on the intricacies of an internal combustion engine. Most of us listen to music without fully appreciating the intricacies of a D7b9th chord, but that lack of understanding doesn’t keep us from enjoying it.
Let me take this one step further. We don’t simply do these things; we trust them. We go through our lives trusting things we don’t understand. We take medications we can’t pronounce simply because a doctor prescribes them for us.
So why is it so hard to trust God?
- We want to know the why behind what we’re going through.
- We want to know the why behind what He’s calling us to do.
- We want to know the why behind the way God works in general.
Job was a man with a lot of why questions. His story is a sad one. It is a hard one. And through it all, Job desired to plead his case before God. When God finally spoke in Job 38, He never answered Job’s question. Instead, God turned the tables and asked Him a series of questions, questions like:
“Can you fasten the chains of the Pleiades or loosen the belt of Orion? Can you bring out the constellations in their season and lead the Bear and her cubs? Do you know the laws of heaven? Can you impose its authority on earth? Can you command the clouds so that a flood of water covers you? Can you send out lightning bolts, and they go? Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’?” (Job 38:31-35).
God was making a point. “Job, you don’t know these things, and there’s no way you can fathom the ways and “why” behind what I do. Just trust me.”
We may think we’re smarter today with all our scientific, medical, and technological know-how, but we’re still like Job. God is God, and we can’t fathom the “why” behind what He does.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways.” This is the Lord’s declaration. “For as heaven is higher than earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isa. 55:8-9)
But we can trust Him. We can trust that, in His infinite love for us, God works for our benefit. We may not understand it at the moment, but we can still trust Him.
I’ll still work on trying to understand the way my wife thinks, but I’ll let God be God. And I will trust Him.
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