KINGDOM (WITHOUT) QUESTIONS

Have you ever been told that you shouldn’t ask, “Why” or that you should simply accept God’s Word for what it says without questions? I can’t count the number of times that I’ve been accused of asking far too many questions! It has even been suggested that I “need to learn to just believe!”

The truth is I haven’t always had so many questions. In fact, I pretty much accepted and taught what was passed along to me for many years. Oh, I studied Scripture. However, I read with lenses that had been tainted from ideas and opinions of others.

At some point, I felt prompted to begin to ask questions and to ask the Holy Spirit to guide me through the Scriptures. When the answers of others didn’t match up with what I was learning, I became very unsettled. I was beginning to realize, like Thomas Merton, that

The unanswered questions
aren't nearly as dangerous as
the unquestioned answers.

Jill Carattini shares in her article entitled, “Kingdom (Without) Questions”

"The kingdom of God is for the gullible," I read recently. "You enter by putting an end to all your questions."

It's true that Jesus moved all over Judea pronouncing the reign of God and the kingdom of heaven as if it were a notion he wanted the simplest soul to get his mind around. But simplicity was not what hearers walked away with. With great disparity, he made it clear that this kingdom was approaching, that it was here, that it was among us, that we needed to enter it, that we need to wait for it, that we desperately need the one who reigns within it....

Contrary to putting an end to one's questions,
the kingdom of God incites inquiry all the more.

What is the nature of this kingdom? Can it be all of these things? Who is this messenger? And what kind of proclamation requires the herald to pour out his very life to tell it? Whatever this kingdom is, it unmistakably introduces to a world far different from the one around us, one we cannot quite get our minds around, with tensions and dynamisms reminiscent of the promise of God to answer our cries "with great and unsearchable things you do not know" (Jeremiah 33:3). It is a kingdom that tells a story grand enough to master the metanarratives which otherwise compel us into thoughtless, gullible obedience. It is a kingdom with a king whose very authority exposes our idols as wood and reforms our numbed minds with great and surprising reversals of reality.

In this kingdom Jesus proclaims we are shown a God who opens the eyes of the blind and raises the dead, who claims the last will be the first, and the servant is the greatest. But his proclamations did not cease with mere easy words. Jesus put these claims into action, placing this kingdom before us in such a way that forbids us to see any of it as mere religion, abstraction, gullibility, or sentimentality....

The kingdom he proclaimed in life and in death continues to unravel our own....

In this world of gullibility, crafted ignorance, and much distraction sounds a clarion call for a new means of perception. Living somewhere between this foreign kingdom of God's reign and the familiar kingdom of earth, some of us never fully see or live in either. Still others somehow find themselves moved beyond the familiar borders of the world they know, to the very threshold of the kingdom of God where, longing to see in fullness and relishing here and now, they discover the one who reigns.

(excerpts from “Kingdom (Without) Questions,” by Jill Carattini, A Slice of Infinity, originally printed 02 July 2010 (www.rzim.0rg). Used by permission of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.)

God isn’t impressed with credulous acceptance of what someone else teaches us. In fact, unless we become serious students of God’s Word, we are easy prey to false teachings. Instead, we are encouraged, “If… you seek the LORD your God, you will find him if you look for him with your whole heart and with your whole soul” (Deut. 4:29). If the totality and depths of one’s being is required to find God, how can we rightly consider that His Kingdom is one without questions or that a quick “sinner’s prayer” purchases an entrance ticket?

If you find God with great ease,
perhaps it is not God that you have found.
– Thomas Merton

Whole-Heartedly,
Bonnie

DISCLAIMER:
The author of this article does not endorse everything represented on/in suggested links, books, etc. Each of us is accountable to God to weigh everything according to His Word.