How do you react to questions? As an intrusion? As an attack or challenge to what you just said? As a ‘inquiring minds want to know’? Then again, you need to know the question-asker. Personally, I’ve never met a question I didn’t like… and, I never ask an idle question. However, that may not be your experience and/or standard. One way of furthering your understanding of the question-asker is to ask a question as your initial answer. How does the question-asker respond?
It’s interesting to note that Jesus asked 307 questions (in scripture) and answered only 3 of the 108 He was asked. I get a chuckle in reading the account in Mark 11:27-33… a ‘if you won’t answer my question then I won’t answer yours’. Then again… look at the question-ers and their motivation. His bluntness is understandable.
I grew up with questions which is why I probably enjoy them because neither of my parents ever responded with, ‘because I said so’. They also typically asked questions in order to discover what we did know and what our attitude was. That’s another purpose for questions. When you have to explain your who, what, where, when, why out loud then you also hear what you think you believe. We sometimes end up discovering that what we think we know or believe, is not what we know or believe.
I also believe that if, as a learner, you know how to ask questions then you also know how to find your answers. When I was teaching in college my primary goal was always to help students make their discoveries, to know what their questions were rather than accepting the teacher’s answers, to know how to ask questions. To their dismay, I never allowed them in ‘test’ situations to merely parrot back what they heard me say. If they believed what I said, then they needed to also explain why they did, what their discoveries and confirmations were.
My bias is that in our educational system too often new teachers are taught to teach their answers to their students rather than teaching their student to learn how to ask questions in order to be able to apply this ‘talent’ to other situations. It’s almost that education is on a quest to make copies, duplicates of the standard answer rather than the more creative approach of helping them to know how to probe and discover. Education didn’t use to be so lock-stepped based. When you look at the major advances in much of the ‘way things are done’, you see it’s the maverick, the innovator that moves the understanding along to the next ‘discovery’.
Questions. In my mind, these are the spring boards in every area of life. From the engineering mindset to the poet’s. Nothing is beyond the scope that a good question can’t impact. But what has this to do with spiritual matters? Perspective. What is your perspective when you read scripture and then attempt to teach it or grow in understanding? It’s not questioning the Lord… it’s discovering what you understand that the Lord is teaching through the parable, or the teaching, or the action. Questions not only tell us what we know but what we don’t know. Questions often birth other questions but the Lord never has problems with our questions… I think He is disappointed when we don’t know our answer to the point of applying it.
