God has never been threatened by an honest question. The heart you ask it with decides what you are able to hear when He answers.
Gideon is crouched in a winepress, beating wheat by hand. A winepress is a pit cut into rock, the last place anyone threshes grain. That is the point. For seven years the Midianites have swept through every harvest and taken everything, and Gideon is hiding what little is left.
A stranger is sitting under the oak tree nearby. He speaks. “The LORD is with you, O mighty man of valor” (Judges 6:12).
Gideon does not bow. He asks a question.
“Please, sir, if the LORD is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all his wonderful deeds that our fathers recounted to us?” (Judges 6:13)
He questions God to His face.
I have been living in Judges 6 for months now, studying Gideon for a new book, and I keep stopping on that verse. Some of us were raised to believe you never talk to God like that. Scripture does not agree.
God can take your question
David asked, “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?” (Psalm 13:1). Habakkuk asked why God made him watch injustice and seemed to do nothing about it (Habakkuk 1:2-3). Jesus, on the cross, prayed the first line of Psalm 22 out loud: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).
The Bible keeps those questions in the record. God did not edit them out of His own book. He wants us to ask.
But a question can come from two places. You can question God to understand Him, or you can question God to complain about Him. The words can come out almost identical.
Two people, one question
Luke 1 puts two people side by side who ask an angel nearly the same thing.
Gabriel appears to Zechariah, an old priest burning incense in the temple, and tells him his barren wife will have a son. Zechariah answers, “How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years” (Luke 1:18).
Six months later Gabriel appears to Mary, a young woman in Nazareth, and tells her she will carry the Son of the Most High. Mary answers, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” (Luke 1:34).
Both ask how. Both name the physical problem standing in the way. One walks out of the temple unable to speak for nine months, “because you did not believe my words” (Luke 1:20). The other gets an answer about the Holy Spirit and the power of the Most High overshadowing her.
The difference sits in what each one wanted. Zechariah wanted proof before he would believe. “How shall I know” asks for a sign. Mary already believed and wanted to know how to say yes. Her very next sentence proves it: “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).
What the complaint sounds like
Gideon’s question has an older one inside it.
Right after God brought Israel out of Egypt, the people camped at Rephidim and found no water. They turned on Moses. “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?” (Exodus 17:3). Moses named the place after what happened there.
“And he called the name of the place Massah and Meribah, because of the quarreling of the people of Israel, and because they tested the LORD by saying, ‘Is the LORD among us or not?'” (Exodus 17:7)
Massah (מַסָּה, pronounced mahs-SAH) means testing. Meribah (מְרִיבָה, pronounced meh-ree-VAH) comes from riv, the Hebrew word for a quarrel or a legal case, the kind of dispute you take to court. That is what questioning God to complain is. You are filing a case against Him. You have already decided the verdict, and the question is the evidence you are presenting.
Now listen to Gideon again. “If the LORD is with us, why then has all this happened to us?” It is the Massah question, generations later, from a man hiding in a hole. Seven years of Midian will put some complaint in a man’s voice. There is some in his.
Either way, God answers
At Massah God told Moses to strike the rock, and water came out of it for the very people who were accusing Him (Exodus 17:6). He gave the complainers a drink.
And Gideon? God does not rebuke him. He does not walk away. The text says, “And the LORD turned to him and said, ‘Go in this might of yours and save Israel from the hand of Midian; do not I send you?'” (Judges 6:14).
He turned to him. God answers both kinds of questions.
What changes is what we can receive when the answer comes. Israel got water, and a few hundred years later the psalmist was still using that day as a warning: “do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness” (Psalm 95:8). They drank and stayed hard. Zechariah got his son exactly as promised, and watched it happen unable to say a word. Mary sang.
A man asking to understand is ready to hear an assignment. A man asking to complain is still waiting to be proven right.
Ask like Habakkuk
Habakkuk is the clearest picture of the right posture I know. He asked God two hard questions in a row, and between them he wrote this:
“I will take my stand at my watchpost and station myself on the tower, and look out to see what he will say to me.” (Habakkuk 2:1)
He asked, and then he climbed up somewhere he could see and waited for the answer. He expected God to speak. He planned to listen when He did.
So ask God. Bring Him the questions you have been carrying about your marriage, your health, the prayer you have prayed for six years, the child who walked away. Say them out loud. He can take it.
Then check your heart before you open your mouth. Three questions help me:
- Am I asking so I can understand Him, or so I can accuse Him?
- If He answers, am I willing to do what He says?
- Can I add Mary’s line to the end of my question: “Let it be to me according to your word”?
If you cannot say that last line yet, tell Him that too. That is an honest question of its own, and He answers those.
Gideon asked from the bottom of a winepress. God turned toward him, called him by what he would become, and sent him. Ask, and then stand where you can hear the answer.