Meditation and the "Why" Question

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As we go about our meditation in Scripture from day to day (or night to night), there are some potholes to avoid.

God willing, in future posts, we will continue looking at other fun and powerful ways to meditate in the Word of God, but for now there are some dangers to recognise. Those dangers have to do with the ‘Why?’ question.

Why is ‘Why?’ dangerous? Put simply, you can be asking a ‘Why?’ question at a passage or verse which was never designed to answer that question.

Have you ever looked through Scripture and wondered why God seems cruel or even appears to act contrary to His own laws? Or have you ever wondered why Jesus seems unkind or easily irritated? Like when He seems to be calling a woman (in need) a “dog” in one story, or apparently rude to his mother?

I hasten to add here that it is not wrong to ask ‘Why?’ in Scripture! Go ahead and use that question, but if you find that the answer is not readily found in the passage, hold the question lightly and move on. Sometimes, though, your answers are not found in the passage because Scripture may be silent about the answer to your question.

My rule of thumb with the ‘Why?’ question is to ask it directly to the LORD in prayer rather than asking it at a passage, where it is not clearly explained.

There is a beautiful proverb, to which I have frequently returned, that says this: “Evil men do not understand justice, but those who seek the LORD understand all things” (Prov. xxviii 5 NASB). Time and again, when I have not understood something in Scripture, or about God’s ways, if my heart has been one of genuine searching, I have found that the LORD will meet me with revelation on His character and Word in a way that is amazing and transformative. And this works for those ‘Why?’ questions in my meditation. Often, when turning my ‘Why?’ over in my mind in prayer to the LORD at night I will fall asleep, and, in the morning when I awake, He speaks to me in response to my ‘Why?’.

There is another pothole concerning asking ‘Why?’ at a passage. If the answer is not obvious in the passage then, naturally, we start to think outside the Scripture where are meditating in search of answers. And we often ask in a limiting way, looking for a black and white answer that works within the small box of our ‘Why?’ question! Often too, we start bouncing all around Scripture and coming up with all sorts of answers and ideas. This will inevitably cause us to not go deeply into the passage where we were meditating, and we will miss some “treasures” the LORD has for us there.

To avoid being propelled out of the passage to other parts of Scripture (and our meditation time now becomes a Bible study), it might be good to have a notebook nearby to mark down ‘Why?’ questions for those times when you have time to do an in-depth ‘word study’ or later Bible study. Remember we are talking about meditation here with just you, the Word and God in focus.

Before we look at other methods for chewing on Scripture, I want us to think a little bit about the many words the Bible uses that we translate into English as ‘meditate’ or ‘meditation’. Some fun coming up soon!