You know how sometimes someone tells you to do something and you say, “Why?” and they reply, “Because I said so”?  And do you know how annoying that can be?  Oh, it used to drive me nuts when I was little!  I wanted to know why I should do the thing that I was being told to do so that I could decide whether or not to do it – whether it was worth my time or not.  (The questioning was instinctual when I was small.  The reason I asked “why” only recently occurred to me.)

We often question those who are in authority because we think we might know better than they do.  Or we do it because we think that our personal time is so valuable that it we shouldn’t waste it doing something that doesn’t seem to have a “point.”  Honestly though, I have yet to see an action without purpose or a thing without a point.  I have not seen such things because they do not exist.  The truth is that everything – every person, every word, every action, every part of creation – has a purpose and a “point.”  The real problem comes when we question orders by asking what the “point” is.  If the point isn’t satisfactory to us, we refuse to obey the directive by deeming it “pointless.”  Now there is certainly a time and a place to ask questions, and there is even a time and a place to ask “why,” both to God and to others in authority, but please understand the heart of what I am saying.  We tend to use the “why” question in an attempt to get out of doing whatever we were told to do.  In fact, when we question the commands we are given, we are often already implying that we do not think we should have to do whatever it is that we were told to do.  The saddest thing to me is that we question God in this way all the time.

Often times God will prompt me – quite ardently – to do something that I don’t want to do.  I will then ask Him, “Why, God?”  But I will tell you what God told me one time: “Because I said so.”  I was like, “Wow.  Um, okay, I guess.”  Later, after I had done it (I don’t even recall what it was), God told me more about this response.  God revealed to me, very lovingly, that He wanted me to learn how to do things not because I could see how they would “make a difference” but simply because He told me to and I trusted Him.  That was pretty serious for me.  He wanted me to obey because I knew that His plans for me and those around me, though I may not understand them, are the very best in every way.  As brothers and sisters in Christ, then, let us learn how to obey simply because God said so, resting in the fact that He knows exactly what He is doing, even when we do not.