No-Good Answers
to Bad Questions

To my mind, the following are examples of some badly put questions.

1) Our pastor recently preached on the topic, “Why we don’t experience God’s power?” One of his five points was, “We ask the wrong questions.” His example: “If you are in a sinking boat, there’s no reason to ask who the owner of the boat is or who chose the color of the carpet. The question to ask is, ‘Where’s the bucket?’ or ‘Where’s the lifeboat?’”

The former questions are bad because even when we have the answers to the questions, we don’t have the answers to the problem. Many spiritual questions that people ask and we even spend huge amounts of time trying to answer won’t answer the really important question, “How can I have eternal life?” Of course, there’s only one good answer to that question, “I am the way, the truth and the life and no one comes to the Father except through me,” said Jesus. (John 14:6)

2) One of my favorite bad questions came from Saul. When blinded by a great light on the road to Damascus, Jesus asked, “Why do you persecute me?” Saul asked, “Who are you?”

Now if I’d been Jesus, I would have been hard pressed to avoid the sarcastic answer, “Are you persecuting the followers of some other Son of God that I don’t know about?”

But love isn’t sarcastic. Jesus loved Saul, and so, he simply answered his question.

Its hard, however, to give a good answer to a question when we know the person already knows the answer. The only way we will succeed in our answers in this case is to allow love to be overwhelming, like that of Christ.

3) “Why does God send good people to hell?” is a perfect example of a question born out of blind ignorance. In this case, the question, although bad, can’t be helped because people who are in darkness must ask questions born out of darkness.

However, we don’t want to walk into the darkness to find the answer. We want to draw them to the light where the question can be exposed and the truth revealed.

For instance, in the case of this question, the person has presumed that there are good people in this world. The Bible tells us that none are good, so God doesn’t send good people to hell. (Rom. 3:12)

Even the good we have done that seems to merit the notice of God must be put into proper perspective. All of our “good deeds” are like filthy rags to a righteous God. (Is. 64:6)

More importantly, goodness is different from righteousness and it is the righteous who will spend eternity with God, not the good.

3) Joyce Meyer recently pointed out another bad question in one of her sermons. This one is right in the Bible. “What must I do to inherit the Kingdom?” She pointed out that an inheritance isn’t based upon what we “do.”

Inheritance is a gift to the children of the father. Inheritance is based upon a blood relationship. More importantly, in Biblical times, adopted children could not be disinherited. The Bible tells us that we are adopted children. Our inheritance is based upon God’s choice to adopt us. It has nothing to do with what we have or have not done.

4) The first time that I really came upon this concept of bad questions centered around the ever-dividing ‘eternal security‘ question. I was raised believing ‘once saved, always saved.’ My theology hit a wall, however, when we began attending a church which did not hold to this belief.

After sitting under a different teaching, I began to see why eternal security divides us. After all, wouldn’t God be nothing more than an enabler if He allowed us to do whatever we pleased, walk all over His grace, and never say anything other than “that’s all right. My grace is sufficient?”

By the same token, I heard a sermon involving “chairs” that effectively made salvation an act of playing musical chairs. Depending upon our actions, we could sit in the ‘bound for glory’ chair or we could sit in the ‘bound for hell’ chair or we could sit in a chair where we had no confidence either way. I knew that was NOT why Jesus came.

John wrote that we could KNOW, and I believe that. As I wrestled, however, with the idea that God might become an enabler, I finally realized we had been asking a bad question. The question isn‘t whether we are saved once for all time no matter how reprehensible our behavior. The question is “Why would anyone who loved Christ behave badly enough to give Jesus good cause to retract his grace?”

Anyone who wants to be called by the name of Christ and treats His grace with contempt should seriously consider what this says about her love, not the Lord‘s.

While I think there are many more bad questions, I’ll give you only one more.

5) If Jesus said that even he didn’t know the hour and the day of his return, why do we argue with each other about how that hour and day might come?

I, personally, trust God enough to leave such delicate timing to His capable hands. My goal is to live my life so that no matter when he calls me into eternity, either through some rapture experience or through death (possibly caused through persecution in the midst of the tribulation), I will have no fear to stand in His presence. I will already know through the confirmation of the Spirit that I have been faithful and will hear those words, “Well done.”

But what’s the big deal about bad questions anyway? Why should we worry about whether or not our questions are bad or good? Isn’t what we’ve always believed true? Isn’t it better to ask questions, even bad ones?

First of all, we can’t keep those in the darkness from asking bad questions. As pointed out, we must expect darkness to behave like darkness, but we should not be caught unaware. One of Satan’s best ploys is to keep us from the truth by focusing our attentions on trying to find “no-good answers” to bad questions.

If a person has to have the answer to a bad question to be saved, he will probably never be saved since there is no good answer. If we are going to be effective in our commanded duty of sharing the gospel, we want to avoid getting caught in arguments over no-good answers to bad questions and focus on the light, the Truth of the gospel.

Once saved, we don’t want to spend a lot of time being divided over the no-good answers to bad questions. If we’re still spending time trying to find out who chose the color of the carpeting on the lifeboat, what’s happening to all of the people still trying to get off the sinking boat?