The Bible is full of questions.
In the fourth of his devotional volumes, Tony Bennett takes us through 31 Scripture verses each featuring a question asked directly either by God in the Old Testament or by Jesus in the New Testament.
Some are well known: ‘Is anything too hard for the Lord?’ (asked by God of Abraham), or ‘Who do you say that I am?’ (asked by Jesus of the disciples), but others less so.
In the Old Testament, these questions were usually asked by God to named individuals – such as Cain, Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel – but some were posed through God’s prophets to his people in general.
In the New Testament, although some of Jesus’ questions were asked rhetorically during his public preaching, many were posed to specific people such as Nicodemus, Martha, Philip and Peter.
To most of these questions, Scripture records no answer.
And maybe the reason why God doesn’t give us all the answers to his questions in Scripture is because he wants us, through the teaching of his Holy Spirit, to be offering our own answers so that we might honestly search our own hearts and see in them what he already sees and knows about us.