Scriptural Ambiguity

Don: The brevity of the I Am statements belies their complexity and ambiguity. They caused confusion even among Jesus’ contemporary audience:

This figure of speech Jesus spoke to them, but they did not understand what those things were which He had been saying to them. (John 10:6)

This only goes to reinforce that God does not provide answers; rather, he provokes questions. We ought not to be surprised that this is so, given that his ways are not our ways and his thoughts are not our thoughts, and the difference between his ways and thoughts and our ways and thoughts spans orders of magnitude. (Isaiah 55).

Whenever God shows up in scripture—with Adam, Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and all the major and minor prophets—God grills them. The most powerful example is that of Job. Job plied God with questions about why he was in the plight he was in, why he was subject to suffering and injustice. God plied back with even more: He asked no fewer than 60 questions (Job 38 through 43) of the form “Who?”, “Where?”, “Have you?”, “Do you?”, and “Can you? The questions are expansive and much rooted in observations about the natural world. Long before science was known, God asked Job scientific questions about the Creation, about geography, about weather, about the animal world, in order to expand Job’s mind in a way that would be meaningful to him. The questions were designed to humiliate Job, starting with the very first:

“Who is this that darkens counsel
By words without knowledge? (Job 38:2)

Job began to capitulate in chapter 40:

Then Job answered the Lord and said,

Behold, I am insignificant; what can I reply to You?
I lay my hand on my mouth.

Once I have spoken, and I will not answer;
Even twice, and I will add nothing more.” (Job 40:3-5)

But God was not done with him yet. He challenged Job’s assumption that he (Job) knew what the moral order of the world should be (so sure was Job that he was prepared to sue God in court over it) and by chapter 42, Job was on his knees, hid capitulation complete:

Then Job answered the Lord and said,

I know that You can do all things,
And that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted.

‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’
Therefore I have declared that which I did not understand,
Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”

‘Hear, now, and I will speak;
I will ask You, and You instruct me.’

“I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear;
But now my eye sees You;

Therefore I retract,
And I repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 42:1-6)

He had come a long way from his opening statement to the court:

… Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. And Job said,

“Let the day perish on which I was to be born,
And the night which said, ‘A boy is conceived.’

“May that day be darkness;
Let not God above care for it,
Nor light shine on it.

“Let darkness and black gloom claim it;
Let a cloud settle on it;
Let the blackness of the day terrify it.

“As for that night, let darkness seize it;
Let it not rejoice among the days of the year;
Let it not come into the number of the months.

“Behold, let that night be barren;
Let no joyful shout enter it.

“Let those curse it who curse the day,
Who are prepared to rouse Leviathan.

“Let the stars of its twilight be darkened;
Let it wait for light but have none,
And let it not see the breaking dawn;

Because it did not shut the opening of my mother’s womb,
Or hide trouble from my eyes. (Job 3:1-10)

This was an attempt by Job to do nothing less than reverse the order of Creation: God had said “Let there be light” but here Job was saying “Let there be darkness.” Jesus referred to this propensity of Man to want to reverse the order of Creation when he said:

This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.(John 3:19-20)

In short, the judgment is that Mankind has always wanted to be the Creator and not the Creature. This brings us back to God’s use of questions to communicate with us. Even the “I Am” and other short, declarative statements by God need interpretation. Why doesn’t God just do what we (usually) do: Say what we mean and mean what we say? Why questions, riddles, and parables?

All these things Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables, and He did not speak to them without a parable. This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet:

“I will open My mouth in parables;
I will utter things hidden since the foundation of the world.” (Matthew 13:33-35)

Why doesn’t God just teach the way we’re used to being taught in school? Is God’s way designed to open the gaps in our understanding of him? Even if the God of the gaps theory is wrong, and God is not to be found in the gaps in our scientific knowledge but in the science itself—in the natural world as we come to know it. Paul said:

For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made,…” (Romans 1:20)

We tend to worship the mysterious. Is God using questions and obtuse statements to keep the mystery going so that we continue to worship him? Or is he trying to encourage us to continue to seek to expand our minds?

Dion: Curiosity is part of human nature. In general, people automatically search for patterns in any data presented to their minds or senses, and will even find patterns where none exist. But this tends not to be true of the spiritual plane, where we want the patterns to be given to us. But God does not want to make it that easy for us. Modern learning theory has caught up with this method. If we go to some trouble to learn new knowledge on our own initiative, we are more likely to absorb it. Such knowledge is retained at a deeper level than knowledge fed to us. This is why God wants us to discover the Truth for ourselves. Every individual may be on a different path to the Truth or at a different level, but we all benefit equally and grow spiritually from seeking the Truth.

Jay: Truth must be timeless. Anything that holds only for a finite moment in time and space cannot be True. Knowledge taught in schools today is vastly different from what it was before. 18th century textbooks make us smile at the outdated and incorrect “truths” they present about the world. Things have changed so much since then. And they will continue to change, so that our textbooks will soon enough seem outdated and irrelevant. The non-specificity of God and Jesus reflects Truth that transcends time.

Kiran: In Daniel or Revelation (I forget which) it says that in the last days, knowledge will increase. That implies that before then, we do not have all the knowledge God wants us to have. As we increase human knowledge, everything changes, because it is a dynamic process. It makes sense that knowledge would accumulate after the Fall and not remain the same for all generations. Asking questions, at any and all points in history, is what keeps the dynamic process of knowledge acquisition moving forward. It’s the reason why knowledge accumulates.

Jay: The abstractness of Christ’s ministry is because he wanted not to emphasize knowledge or “the right thing” or “the right way”. His parabolic non-specificity was often obtuse even to his disciples. Rather, his emphasis was on abstract yet perceptible quantities such as grace, love, faith, and forgiveness. Not that “right things”, correct knowledge, and “right ways” are not important—to our human nature and curiosity they are important, but Jesus spoke of things of greater importance.

Dion: We look to God for Truth, and he responds with an ambiguous question. We expect Truth to be absolute, but to our limited perception in time and space it cannot be. Grace seems to us to be doled out differentially, but it must not seem that way to God. We have to trust in God. We have to accept the ambiguity and learn what we can from it.

Michael: God is not the only one who asks questions i order to teach. Socrates used it too, so as to get people to reveal knowledge they never knew they possessed. He compared himself to a midwife, but instead of delivering pre-conceived babies he delivered pre-conceived knowledge.

Psychotherapy is another way of extracting subconscious truth through questions. Jung’s notion of a collective unconsciousness came from his study of his patients’ dreams, which explained mystical truths.

David: At the local level—the individual level, in the here and now—I am not sure that asking questions will lead us to God. The only thing we can be sure—from scripture, or perhaps from our inner light—will lead us to God is his grace. But in an ultimate, universal, collective sense, asking questions—including scientific curiosity—does bring us closer to God. Paul was quoted earlier as saying that God is manifested in Nature; therefore, the more we understand Nature, the closer we are to understanding God.

Robin: Scripture has very simple statements, such as that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son for it, and that we are to love God and love our neighbor as we love ourselves, but God has to communicate through scripture with people of differing levels of intellect, so there has to be some simplicity. But many people can handle more than that. They want mystery to puzzle over. If scripture were crystal clear would it become rote and less meaningful? Would we bother to pray about it? Would we seek enlightenment from the holy spirit?

Dion: We see the world in three dimensions, but we acknowledge the possibility of worlds with N dimensions. The only way to find out if they exist is to explore. When God speaks, he is in a sense speaking to the entire Universe, not just to us,about the battle between Good and Evil. We can’t see this bigger picture, and there has to be much more—many more dimensions—than we can perceive in the here and now. Asking questions helps us to search for these hidden dimensions. Perhaps we won’t get there—perhaps it’s the journey, the process, that matters.

Chris: In school, we are asked questions in order to direct us toward finding the answers. My math teacher would ask questions but in so doing would take me down a very specific path in a very specific way to reach the conclusion. Now I look at the math my kids are learning and it looks like a foreign language to me, because they are being asked totally different questions that lead them down totally different paths—but to the same answer. This still raises a conflict between paths: Whose is right? Maybe all are right. Maybe we all interpret God’s questions differently and go down separate paths, but we will all arrive at the Truth. The question is, how can we know that?

Michael: Perhaps God asks questions because the Truth is not absolute but dynamic in some way?

David: If God is manifested in Nature than it is no wonder that he encourages us to ask questions. The more we ask questions—the more we pose and test scientific hypotheses about Nature—the more we come to know God… whether we realize it or not. It doesn’t matter that atheists use the closing gaps in knowledge to proclaim God’s non-existence, because by closing the gaps we are in fact revealing God whether we acknowledge that in so many words or not.

Don: This may have some bearing on the next “I Am” statement we will study: “I am the way, the truth, and the light.”

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