Blogging in Christ — Issue 24

Hear the Questions of the Age

Every age asks its questions in public. Men once asked them at the city gate, where the paths met and travelers passed. Now they ask them into a box on a screen, in phrases typed alone at night. The counsel of the age says: find what men are already searching for, and shape your piece to the search.

Scripture knows a different kind of listening, and it begins before any writer sits down. Wisdom does not wait to be searched for. She goes out to where the questions are asked.

"Doesn't wisdom cry out? Doesn't understanding raise her voice?" (Proverbs 8:1) "On the top of high places by the way, where the paths meet, she stands." (Proverbs 8:2) "Beside the gates, at the entry of the city, at the entry doors, she cries aloud:" (Proverbs 8:3)

Mark the places: not in a study, not behind a door kept for the initiated, but where men already pass and gather. And her call is not to a market segment. "I call to you men! I send my voice to the sons of mankind." (Proverbs 8:4) The questions of the age are not a niche to be captured. They are the voice of mankind, calling out from the crossroads, and wisdom was already standing there before any writer arrived to count the traffic.

This changes what it means to hear a question. The age teaches a writer to collect phrases: what words men type, how often, in what combination. The phrases are real, and they are useful the way a symptom is useful, but a symptom is not a diagnosis. Beneath every typed phrase sits a man, and beneath the man sits a question he may not have the words to ask. A man asks how to sleep, and the question beneath it is whether his guilt will let him rest. A man asks what happens when we die, and the question beneath it is whether anyone will answer for his life. The phrase is the surface. The question is the depth. A writer who answers only the phrase has answered a search and missed the searcher.

Scripture tells the writer why the depth is there at all. "He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in their hearts, yet so that man can't find out the work that God has done from the beginning even to the end." (Ecclesiastes 3:11) Eternity sits in the heart, and the work of God cannot be found out by the heart that holds it. That is the joint on which the whole matter turns. Men ask because something in them already knows there is more than the visible, and they cannot reach it by asking alone.

The same witness stands at Athens. Paul tells the philosophers that God made men "that they should seek the Lord, if perhaps they might reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us." (Acts 17:27) Seeking is real, and God appointed the times and boundaries of men's dwelling toward that end. The heavens already speak: "Day after day they pour out speech, and night after night they display knowledge." (Psalms 19:2)

Here the tension must stand whole, or the writer will go wrong in one of two directions. On one side, he may conclude that because men ask, men are ready, and that the right answer, phrased the right way, will close the gap. On the other, he may conclude that because men are blind, their questions are worthless, and listening to them is compromise. Scripture holds both truths at once. The question is real, planted by God, and the answer is not man's to reach: "Now the natural man doesn't receive the things of God's Spirit, for they are foolishness to him; and he can't know them, because they are spiritually discerned." (1 Corinthians 2:14) The question proves the ache. It does not prove the cure is in the asker's hands. The writer listens precisely because the question is real, and answers from the text precisely because the answer is not the questioner's to supply.

Therefore the first discipline of hearing is silence before speech. "He who answers before he hears, that is folly and shame to him." (Proverbs 18:13) The age rewards the fast answer: the phrase is trending, the piece must go up today, the answer must match the search. But a herald who answers before he hears has not listened; he has only reacted. Hearing takes the slower path. It sits with the question until the question beneath the question shows itself: what fear, what guilt, what hunger is driving the words. It refuses to mistake frequency for depth, as though the question asked most often were the question that mattered most. A thousand men may ask how to grow rich, and one man may ask, quietly, whether God can forgive what he has done. The count says to answer the thousand. Wisdom says to hear the one, because the one has asked the question on which eternity turns.

Philip shows the writer the pattern. He finds the Ethiopian reading Isaiah, and he does not begin with a lecture. "Philip ran to him, and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet, and said, 'Do you understand what you are reading?'" (Acts 8:30) The man answers honestly: "He said, 'How can I, unless someone explains it to me?' He begged Philip to come up and sit with him." (Acts 8:31) Mark the order. Philip hears first, and his hearing is literal: he hears the man reading aloud. Then he asks, and the question opens the door. Then he sits beside him, and only then does the text open. The explanation follows the hearing. It never precedes it.

What, then, does the herald do with the questions he has heard? He does not build his writing around them. The questions set the table; they do not write the menu. A writer who lets the questions choose his texts will soon find his canon edited by the crowd: the comforting texts kept, the hard texts shelved. The questions of the age are the place where the herald stands, not the authority by which he writes. The authority remains the text, and the text answers questions men did not ask, because it knows them better than they know themselves.

That Word has a name, and the questions of the age end there. "The true light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world." (John 1:9) The risen Lord, walking with two men who could not see what stood before them, did not begin with their questions about the events in Jerusalem. "Beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he explained to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself." (Luke 24:27) Their questions were real, and they were answered, but they were answered by being gathered into a larger story than the one they were asking about. The herald's work follows the same shape. He hears the question, he honors it, and then he sets it inside the Scriptures, where the question finds its true size and its true answer: Christ, in whom every question about guilt, death, meaning, and hope is finally met.

So the practice is plain, and it can be kept without a single instrument. Listen before you write. Hear the phrase, and then hear beneath it. Then open the text, not to the phrase but to the man, and let the text answer what the phrase could not frame. Write that answer plainly, and leave the increase to God, for the Word sent out does not return empty: "so is my word that goes out of my mouth: it will not return to me void, but it will accomplish that which I please, and it will prosper in the thing I sent it to do." (Isaiah 55:11)

The age will keep counting its phrases, and writers will keep chasing the count. The herald has a different task. Wisdom already cries at the gates. His work is to stand beside her, hear the questions of the age truly, and answer them where they were always meant to be answered: at the text, in Christ, where the seeking man finds not a better search result, but life.