Why is it so hard to say : "I don't know!"?

I just came back to the baking oven formerly known as Kiev (it's superhot these days...) after a great week of teaching in a Youth With A Mission (YWAM) Discipleship Training School (DTS) in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. Eight students from Russia, Azerbaijan, Canada and the United States along with staff and myself were talking about Discipleship this week. The students had many good questions, so a lot of the teaching time was spend talking about a number of their questions.

One thing struck me: why is it apparently so hard for pastors, Bible teachers, Christian leaders, etc. to say: "I just don't know".....Might sound like a weird thing to be thinking about, but it struck me how often these people (including myself from time to time sadly) end up answering questions that God himself has decided not to give definitive answers to as of right now!

Especially regarding the topic of healing it was clear that the students had heard many well-meaning people answer a lot of questions with a certainty found nowhere in the Bible. Students had heard that all Christians will be healed from all sicknesses if they just had enough faith. That's simply not true! It's a - pardon my French - ridiculous statement. Look at the many, many Christians who are not healed in this lifetime. Look at the apostle Paul who had a "thorn in his flesh" and asked God to take it away. God chose not to take it away (and to this day we don't know what the problem was, despite many people claiming that they know...!), but God chose not to and taught Paul the important lesson: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2.Corinthians 12:9).

We just don't know why God chooses to heal some and not others. It's true that there is some link between faith and healing in the Bible, but exactly how it works is still a mystery. There is NOT a Scripture saying that if you have this and that amount of faith, and the wind is blowing from that direction and you say exactly this prayer you will for sure be healed...it doesn't exist!

We have to admit that God is God and we're not. There are many things we don't know fully. Let's not be afraid to admit that. And let's not try to explain things that God, in his infinite wisdom, has chosen not to explain! Many well-meaning Christians feel that they have to be like Job's friends, who thought that they knew exactly who God was and who thought they could explain why so many bad things were happening to Job ("Obviously you must have sinned!!"). The Bible shows us that it wasn't anything Job had done that made God curse him. And when God breaks through in the final chapters of Job, he doesn't explain "why good things happen to good people" - and quite frankly I don't think God needs our help in defending himself!

God bless!
Torben - who is glad that God has revealed the answers to many of life's questions to us, and who, with Paul, is looking forward to the day where we'll know fully - "Now we see but a poor reflection in a mirror (the mirrors back then were made out of polished metal and gave a pretty bad image of how people looked), then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known" (1. Corinthians 13:12)