All-Knowing?

How does an “all-knowing” God meet us in difficulty, even trauma or tragedy? 

 “It’s going to be okay. God knew this would happen. Besides, everything happens for a reason.”--People trying to make you feel better when you're in something difficult

307. 183. 10. (The numbers that hint at what God's "All-Knowing" looks like.)

“Who touched me?” -- Jesus

In December 2007, there was a shooting at our Youth With a Mission (YWAM) campus in Denver, Colorado.  I can remember it quite vividly but will spare you most of the details.  But when your roommate wakes you up at 12:30 in the morning to tell you there has been a shooting at the campus; four people shot and two of them dead; and one of the victims is a really, really close friend of yours, it sends you into this deep place of processing. Her name was Tiffany, and she was our son Josh’s favorite person outside of our family.  Josh had just turned two years old in October.  My wife, Sarah, and I were trying to process all of this for ourselves, and also help him process—his not-yet three-year-old heart and mind—that he's never going to see her again, on this side of life. It was a heavy, heavy thing for us to try to do.

What we mean by God being all-knowing is really important for us to unpack because who we believe God to be dramatically shapes the way we process things, especially in times of challenges, pain, trauma, tragedy, and grief. 

The year 2020 was full of these things, whether it has been a personal tragedy, an illness, a global pandemic, racial injustice, or political insanity.  

When we believe we have an “all-knowing” God, then in times of trauma and tragedy, the questions, even accusations, towards God quickly surface in our hearts and minds: 

“God, if you knew this would happen, why did you allow it?”

“Why did You let this happen?”

“Why didn't You stop this?”  

“Why didn’t you warn me?”

“Why aren’t you doing something?”  

Maybe some of us have moved past this line of questioning, but if we really let the primal, deepest thoughts and feelings surface, aren’t those the questions that long to arise? 

What do you do with all of that when you find yourself in that situation?  

And how does God respond? 

307. 183. 10?

At the beginning of this chapter, I gave you three numbers: 307, 183, and 10 with a question mark.  They’re not just random numbers. The first number, 307, is the number of questions Jesus is recorded asking in the New Testament. The second number, 183, is the number of questions Jesus is recorded as being asked. The third number, 10 with a question mark, is the number of questions Jesus is recorded responding to directly with an answer, and most people would say that even 10 is a high estimate—hence the question mark!   

So we have this Jesus who asked and even responded mostly with questions, such as:  

“Who do you say that I am?” (Matthew 16:15) 

“Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life?” (Matthew 6:27) 

“Do you want to be made well?” (John 5:6) 

“Who touched me?” (Mark 5:31) 

“What do you seek?” (John 1:38) 

Wouldn’t Jesus know the answers to all of these questions?  And yet He insisted on spending a significant amount of His mental and verbal energy asking questions.  What’s going on here?  

Have you found that you can get an answer to something, but the answer doesn't really satisfy, at least on a deep, emotional level?  We can have answers for days, but one of the things that I love about Jesus is He doesn't just give us a philosophical answer from a distance.  Rather He actually brings His living person into our very presence, as the living answer. I like how Baxter Kruger addressed this during a phone call with me when he said, “One of the reasons Jesus asks us so many questions is because he wants to know what we think and He wants us to know what we think.” 

Where did Jesus learn to ask questions?

Now another way we may look at Jesus asking questions is that He asked questions because He was human, and we might say it is different than God asking questions because God the Father isn’t human.  

But notice this: as soon as evil, chaos, and destruction enter into the world in the Garden of Eden, and the world and the cosmos start to go sideways, we find the same omniscient, all-knowing God asking, 

“Where are you?”  

“Who told you you were naked?” 

“Did you eat from the tree I told you not to eat from?” (Genesis 3:9-12).  

Later with Cain and Abel, we see God asking, “Where is your brother Abel?” (Genesis 4:9). And in the case of probably the most famous sufferer in history apart from Jesus, Job, when God finally responds, most of God’s response comes in the form of questions.  

So it wasn't just Jesus who asked questions.  God asked questions from the very beginning.  And where do we think Jesus learned how to ask questions?  From His “all-knowing” Father (John 5:19)!

There is something interesting, powerful, and instructive, when we find an “all-knowing” God who insists on asking questions instead of dispensing “answers”.  

In some situations, answers can be helpful, even necessary.  

Sometimes you just need to make a decision. Or know a fact. Or get information. 

But when it comes to matters of the heart, of the soul, of relationship, aren’t questions so much better than answers?

Healing and transformation happen inside of relationship.

Answers can shut down conversation, and can even shut down relationship. Like a sentence that ends with a period (or a full-stop). 

But what does a question do? 

Doesn’t it invite response, and open up conversation and relationship? 

And isn’t God all about relationship?

Richard Rohr, a spiritual writer and Fransiscan priest, says, “In general, we can see that Jesus’ style of communication is almost exactly the opposite of modern televangelism or even the mainline church approach of Dear Abby.  Bits of inspiring advice and workable solutions for daily living.  Jesus is too much the Jewish prophet to merely stabilize the status quo with platitudes.”  

Translation: Jesus doesn’t buy into our clichés. And we have many of them. This book is born partly as a response to those cliches, because they require further contemplation, and even to be challenged.

For example, when we say things like “God is in control,” we need to have an honest conversation about what we think we mean when we say that, because that stuff really matters. Especially if we’re saying it in an attempt to comfort someone in the midst of a difficult circumstance, which is what a friend of mine did on the phone after he had heard about another one of my wife Sarah’s miscarriages. God’s response to me, however, was quite different...

“Son, where are you going?”

My wife and I have a lot of kids, but we only know three of them in this life.  I remember after one of the doctor's appointments when we had heard about another one of our miscarriages, I did what somebody with my personality does: run as far away as I can from the pain.  (On the Enneagram, I lead with Type 7, which means I'm allergic to heavy, non-positive emotions.)  Generally, I can't sit still, and especially if there's something painful going on.  So I find myself constantly on the move, because who wants to sit and feel that pain?  I remember after this heavy news, disappointment, and brokenness, I had all these questions for God, but I didn't even want to sit down and ask. I would just keep moving and keep going.  Specifically, one of the things I would do to keep moving and keep me from having to feel the pain was to play ping pong.  We had a ping pong table in our garage, set up Forrest Gump style where one half of the table was upright, so I could just knock the ping pong ball back and forth.  

I remember this one particular moment very clearly. I was walking out to the garage and I could almost physically feel this hand on my shoulder, even though I was the only one in the house.  This question came softly but clearly to me: “Son, where are you going?”  

The questioning voice knew the answer.  

The answer wasn't, “Oh, I'm going out to play ping pong,” and then God was like, “Oh, okay. Cool.  Okay, go ahead.  Thank you for clarifying.  I wasn’t sure.”  

The question was rhetorical, implying an invitation.  And in that moment, I knew I had to listen.  So I turned around, and I went in the living room, and I sat down on the couch. As soon as I stopped, I began to feel this physical embrace of a being that wasn't physically present.  I began to bawl and to let out this emotion that I didn't even know was there. It hit me like a tidal wave.  But the thing was--the emotion didn't break me.  

It didn't crush me.  

It didn't devastate me, because I went there within the space of Somebody whose shoulders are much broader than mine.  

There were no verbal answers given, but there was a pure, present embrace.  And it was worth more than a million answers.  

Our youngest son, Nathan, had to go under anesthesia for about two and a half hours for a dental procedure.  It was incredibly tough for my wife, Sarah, to have to be there while they held the mask over Nathan to sedate him.  So for the next few days, whenever Nathan would start to fall asleep, he would just freak out and start to panic.  He was still trying to work the trauma out of his body to be able to relax and fall asleep.  Sarah and I would take turns lying next to him as he would go between trying to sleep and doing these twitch things, and we were trying to figure out what was going on.  I realized that there could be this temptation and it could even be healthy to talk him through it: “Buddy, this is what's going on and you don't need to be afraid.”  But do you think that would really help in the space where he was in that moment?  The thing that really helped him was when we would just simply reach over and put our hand on his chest or just pull him tight. 

My friend Michael Regier, who is a therapist, recently told me, “We can’t meet emotions with logic. To get through to emotion, we have to use emotion.” 

Our son, Josh, was telling Sarah and me about a boy at the local middle school.  One day something happened that triggered this boy into a mental break--he was screaming, throwing bicycles, and even slapped a teacher in the face.  All these kids were on the bus watching this young boy go through this.  The kids had to get off the bus while the teachers figured out how to get control of the situation.  

Can you imagine? In middle school, our insecurities are already through the roof on a normal day, and for this young man, something just snapped in him.  So he's throwing bikes around, slaps the teacher, is screaming and yelling.  Then, he goes into the parking lot and pulls his pants down.  As I heard this story, I wanted to cry for this boy. What would bring someone to the point where they would do all these things?  Obviously, there was something going on that he could not contain, could not handle within himself.  I thought about different ways of handling and responding to this, and imagined the teachers trying to talk him off the ledge, so to speak.  They're trying to calm him down and trying to intervene in whatever way they can.  But when you're that far in, how open are you to somebody giving you a logical explanation about why this is going to destroy your social life?  You're not necessarily listening for logic or a rational argument about why this isn't a good thing to be doing, are you?  What do you really need in that moment? 

Transferring Hope

One day, my friend Baxter saw this little girl getting off the school bus.  He could just tell that she had had the most horrific day.  As soon as she stepped off the bus, she started bawling and just kind of crumbled in this pile of tears.  She walked up to her front yard and her grandma was out on the porch.  When her grandma saw her, she immediately went to her, knelt beside her, and just pulled her tight.  

The little girl just sobbed in her grandma's arms.  

Do you think that meant anything to this little girl?  

Do you think that that meant much more than, “Here's why you had a bad day.  Here's why your friends are being mean to you.  Here's the logic behind what's going on, and here's the answer to all of your problems”?  

What this grandma was doing in that moment was inviting the pain, the sorrow, and the anxiety of this little girl into her own being.  

The grandma knew something that the little girl didn’t. The grandma knew that these events of the day are not the end of the world.  But she didn’t share that knowledge with words, platitudes, or cliches. She shared it with presence. 

The grandma was able to swallow up the girl’s angst into herself and share in it.  

And in doing that, she also spilled her knowing, her hope, back into the girl's heart.  

There was a beautiful exchange of the girl's anxiety and the grandma's hope—both influence one another, but one of them wins out in the end, doesn’t it? 

This is a picture of an omniscient, all-knowing God. A picture of Jesus.

Imagine if somebody would have been able to do this for the little boy at the middle school.  Imagine that his parents or an uncle or somebody that's close to his family had shown up.  This is why community is so important.  Sometimes we don't need answers.  Sometimes we just need a hug.  Sometimes we just need somebody to come alongside and say, “Are you okay?”  

“I'm with you.” 

“I'm for you.” 

“I’ve got you.”  

Occasionally we express this with words. But from my experience, it means the most when expressed by our presence. 

Perhaps these are the stories we need to hold onto when we find ourselves feeling like we don't know which way is up. 

When we think that God is far away, that we don't have answers, and the questions are too big.  

Sometimes maybe the most important answer that God gives us is silence with arms wide open saying, “I think you just need a hug.”  

As Paul Young once said, Jesus knows that “sometimes a good question is worth more than a thousand great answers.”  

And Jesus also knows that oftentimes silence with a peaceful presence is so much more significant than our speech.   

“What is Truth?”

In John 18, we find Jesus in His own difficult situation.  

He's been betrayed by Judas, and deserted by His friends. 

He's about to be whipped and beaten.  

Pilate, the governor, is looking Jesus in the face and he asks this question, “What is truth?” 

How does Jesus respond in that moment?  

Does Jesus give Pilate all these answers?  

Does Jesus just shrug His shoulders?  

Does Jesus even say a single word in response?  

Pilate is sitting there, looking Truth, in human form, square in the face...and has no idea.  

Jesus knows that the real answer is not to tell Pilate all about “truth”, to preach a sermon, to give a logical answer, but actually to go fully in and enter into the darkness of our human existence on the cross. The answer to Pilate’s question wasn’t to be found in a philosophical response, but in Jesus’ own laying down of his life. 

And now, when we bring our questions of suffering, of injustice, of pain, of rejection, of loss, of heaviness to Jesus, He doesn't just tell us from a distance, “Well this is why that happened. Here’s what I want you to learn.”  

Rather He says, “I know how that feels, because I experienced that, too.” And every once in a while he actually conveys that with words.

The Most Important Question?

The Gospel of Matthew tells us a story:

“And when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples, ‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’  The disciples respond, ‘Some say John the Baptist; others, Elijah; and others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’”  In other words, Jesus asks His disciples a which surfaces many misunderstandings people had about who He was.  There are all these people who don't really know. 

“And then He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’  

Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Coming King, the Son of the living God.’  

And Jesus said, ‘Blessed are you Simon, son of Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father in heaven.’”  

What is Jesus saying? It’s as if He wants Peter to know:  “Look, you would never have come to this answer from a book, from a distance.  This answer that you gave can only come to you out of a living, personal experience with Me. Otherwise you're going to be filled with so much misunderstanding."

It can be incredibly frustrating when Jesus comes back to our questions with more questions, or worse, when He comes back to our questions with silence. 

Especially in times of feeling like we don't know which end is up and when there are things just too big in the world for us to make sense of, something often starts to rise up.  

At the core of it, we can begin to question: is God really good?  

Does God really care?  

We can try to talk ourselves into thinking that God is good, present, and caring. 

But when we're in the thick of the thing, we don't often know.  

In your life, right now, in the midst of your thing, can you hear Jesus asking: Who do you say that I am?

Can you trust me, in the midst of your confusion and pain?  

Do you need Me to just sit with you for a moment and absorb any of that turmoil that you’re feeling into My being, so I can share My hope with you?

(Prayer) Jesus, thank You that You care too much to just throw answers at us from a distance, but You bring us Your living person and You enter into our brain, our struggle, our confusion, our joy, our chaos, our disappointment. You enter into it and it begins to take on different meaning.  We experience it differently.  So we invite You in and we thank You that You've already invited us first.  So Holy Spirit, come.  

Questions for Reflection:

• When was the last time you took the time to just sit, check-in with yourself, and ask, “How do I even feel?  How am I even doing?  What do I do with all this?  Why do I feel so up-ended?” 

• In this moment, would you be willing to take just a few minutes to check in with yourself?  How's your heart?  How's your soul?  How are you doing? 

• What is your default response to others when they are going through something difficult?

• Can you think of a time when you thought you wanted an answer from God and what you really wanted was connection or presence? 

• How might God be meeting you in what you’re processing, right now in this season?