Why Isn't God Answering Me?

Proverbs 30 is one of the strangest chapters in the book of Proverbs. Agur — whose name means gatherer or collector — is the son of a faithful man who spent his life gathering wisdom. And the very first thing he says is: I am too stupid to be human. I have not learned wisdom. I do not have knowledge of the Holy One. God considered these words worth including in His Word because the beginning of real wisdom is knowing how much you do not know. Most of us spend our lives trying to figure everything out — our situation, our relationships, our future. Agur looks at his whole life of gathering wisdom and says: I am weary. I am worn out. I do not have what I was looking for. I cannot figure God out on my own. The reason most of us do not find peace in hard seasons is not because we lack enough information — it is because we are trying to find certainty before we find trust.

Agur writes five questions that sound like God's questions to Job: Who but God goes up to heaven and comes back down? Who holds the wind in His fists? Who wraps up the oceans in His cloak? Then he asks something that goes further than any Old Testament question: What is His name — and what is the name of His Son? A man nobody knows asks the question the entire Old Testament had been building toward without knowing it. Hundreds of years later, Jesus answers Nicodemus in John 3:13 — referencing Proverbs 30:4 directly — saying 'No one has ever gone to heaven and returned. But the Son of Man has come down from heaven.' Jesus is not just answering Nicodemus. He is answering a question that has been sitting in Proverbs for centuries. Wisdom is not knowing all the answers. Wisdom is knowing who holds them.

Two disciples walk to Emmaus, seven miles, heads down, talking through the wreckage of everything they thought they understood. Their world just collapsed. Jesus had been crucified and they say 'We had hoped He was the one to redeem Israel.' Past tense. Hope is gone. And Jesus walks up and joins them. He does not announce Himself. He does not say 'hey, it is Me, everything is fine.' He walks alongside them in their grief. He lets them tell the whole story to His face without knowing who He is. He was there the whole time — the whole seven miles — walking right beside them in the worst moment of their lives. And they did not recognize Him. Not because He was hiding, but because grief has a way of keeping our eyes down. They recognized Jesus during communion but not in their ordinary lives in the middle of grief. Most people see Jesus at church but fail to see Him at work, in their families, in their pain.