Elisabeth Elliot - On Asking God Why: And Other Reflections on Trusting God in a Twisted World

Also by Elisabeth Elliot

A Lamp Unto My Feet

Be Still My Soul

Guided by Gods Promises

Journals of Jim Elliot

Joyful Surrender

Keep a Quiet Heart

Made for the Journey

The Mark of a Man

Passion and Purity

Quest for Love

Path of Loneliness

Path Through Suffering

On Asking God Why

Secure in the Everlasting Arms

Seeking Gods Guidance

Shaping of a Christian Family

A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael

1989 by Elisabeth Elliot

Published by Revell

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Ebook edition created 2021

Ebook corrections 01.06.2022

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ISBN 978-1-4934-3449-7

Scripture marked KJV is taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture marked NEB is taken from The New English Bible. Copyright 1961, 1970, 1989 by The Delegates of Oxford University Press and The Syndics of the Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission.

Scripture marked NIV is taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. www.zondervan.com

Scripture marked Phillips is taken from The New Testament in Modern English, revised editionJ. B. Phillips, translator. J. B. Phillips 1958, 1960, 1972. Used by permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.

Scripture marked RSV is taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Tenderness is from The Mark of a Man by Elisabeth Elliot. Copyright 1981 by Elisabeth Elliot. Published by Revell. Used by permission.

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Do you find it difficult to approach God with the questions that are tugging at your heart?

When speaking of God, Elisabeth Elliot writes, He is not only the Almighty. He is also our Father, and what a father does is not by any means always understood by the child.

On Asking God Why reminds us that as children of God we can bring our questions to him with all the trust of a child in his earthly parent. We are encouraged to search the Scriptures for Gods answers. Among the issues Elliot contemplates are singleness, risk taking, and being judgmental of others. When we overcome our fears and decide to ask God why, he will surely give us all the answers we need.

To my husband

Lars Gren

who builds the

fences around me

and stands on all sides

G od does many things that we do not understand. Of course he doeshe is God, perfect in wisdom, love, and power. We are only children, very far from perfect in anything. A true faith must rest solidly on his character and his Word, not on our particular conceptions of what he ought to do. The word ought presupposes an idea of justice. When Gods actions do not seem to conform to our idea of justice, we are tempted at least to ask why, if not actually to charge him with injustice.

Thousands of years ago one of Gods faithful servants, having lost practically everything, sat on an ash heap surrounded by weeping friends who were tearing up their clothes and tossing dust into the air for grief. For seven days and seven nights they were speechless in the face of Jobs suffering. It was Job who broke the silencewith a long and eloquent curse. He asked the question men have asked ever since: Why?

Why was I not still-born?

Why did I not die when I came out of the womb?

Why was I ever laid on my mothers knees?

Why should the sufferer be born to see the light?

Why is life given to men who find it so bitter?

Why should a man be born to wander blindly, hedged in by God on every side?

See Job 3:11, 12, 20, 23 NEB

Written centuries later, the Psalms express similar agonized cries:

I will say to God my Rock, Why hast thou forgotten me?

Why hast thou cast us off, O God? Is it for ever?

Psalm 74:1 NEB

There would be no sense in asking why if one did not believe in anything. The word itself presupposes purpose. Purpose presupposes a purposeful intelligence. Somebody has to have been responsible. It is because we believe in God that we address questions to him. We believe that he is just and that he is love, but that belief is put to severe strain as we wrestle with our pains and perplexities, with our very position in his ordered universe.

Whence knowest thou that this thing is unjust, unless thou know what is just? wrote St. Augustine. Hast thou that which is just from thyself, and canst thou give justice to thyself? Therefore when thou art unjust, thou canst not be just except by turning thee to a certain abiding justice, wherefrom if thou withdrawest, thou art unjust, and if thou drawest near to it, thou art just.... Look back therefore, rise to the heights, go to that place where once God hath spoken, and there thou wilt find the fountain of justice where is the fountain of life. For with thee is the fountain of life [Psalm 36:9].

The pieces in this book make up a somewhat mongrel collection. Essays? Sketches? Cautionary tales? Those, perhaps, and some less classifiable. They touch lightly on matters of considerable weightthe mystery of suffering (losses, cancer, despair, death), the mystery of evil (abortion, divorce, euthanasia, the cult of rock music), and the mystery of our ordinary human condition (loneliness, hopelessness, tenderness, confusion, aging, the need for forgiveness). All but one are the expression of a single writer who owes a special debt to the author of the second chapter, On Brazen Heavens. He is my brother, eight years my junior, to whom for the first decade or so of his life I taught everything I knew. He has been teaching me ever since. He wrote the above mentioned chapter while my husband Addison Leitch was dying. I think we share the same vision, seeking always to see things in the light of a certain abiding justice. It is my hope that this collection will help some to rise to the heights, go to that place where once God hath spoken, and find that Fountain of Life.

O ne of the things I am no longer as good at as I used to be is sleeping through the night. Im rather glad about that, for there is something pleasant about waking in the small hours and realizing that one is, in fact, in bed and need not get up. One can luxuriate.

Between two and three oclock yesterday morning I luxuriated. I lay listening to the night sounds in a small house on the stern and rockbound coast of Massachusetts. The wind whistled and roared, wrapping itself around the house and shaking it. On the quarter hour the clock in the living room softly gave out Whittingtons chime. I could hear the tiny click as the electric blanket cut off and on, the cracking of the cold in the walls, the expensive rumble of the oil burner beneath me, and the reassuring rumble of a snoring husband beside me. Underneath it all was the deep, drumming rhythm of the surf, synchronized with the distant bellow of Mother Anns Cow, the name given the sounding buoy that guards the entrance to Gloucester Harbor.