Are You Asking the Right Questions?

In his daily devotional book entitled Everyday Gospel, author Paul David Tripp  writes the following, “The questions you ask and the answers you accept influence the content, character, and direction of your life. Insightful, wise people are not those who have the right answers. They are people who have the wisdom to ask the right questions.  You can’t get the right answers if you spend your life asking the wrong questions.” ¹

My reflections on Paul Tripp’s statement have led me to several observations.  First, the kind of questions Paul Tripp is speaking about are obviously not run of the mill questions about which clothes to wear, which restaurant to eat in, or which radio station to listen to on the way to work. The kind of person I become, where I go in life, and what I accomplish will be influenced most by the deeper life questions I choose or don’t choose to ask, as well as the answers to those questions I choose or don’t choose to accept and implement into my life and worldview.  Asking deeper life questions like why I am here, does my life have meaning, does my life have value, and how can my life get fixed when it gets broken, once answered, become life defining and life altering.

Second, a general axiom in life is that choices have consequences.  We make our choices and then our choices make us.  The choices we make regarding which questions we ask and which answers we accept are not exempt from that axiom. Even the choice of deciding whether to even ask a deeper life question has consequences.  Other consequences await based on whether we choose to implement the answer(s) we discover.

Third, regarding these deeper life questions, is there such a thing as a right and wrong question and/or a right or wrong answer?  That’s a very important question because to say that there is implies that there are absolutes in life – for instance, absolute truth which will color decisions regarding rightness and wrongness. Further, to say there are absolutes carries with it the implication that there is someone greater than us who has established that truth and who has revealed it to mankind for him to discover. For those of us who believe in Creator God, the thought of there being such a thing as absolute truth is not threatening but reinforcing.  It is reinforcing because it is within the boundaries erected by that absolute truth that we identify what makes life truly purposeful, meaningful, and of value.

However, to many in our postmodern culture, to even hint at the idea that there are right and wrong answers to deeper life questions, in their minds is to commit a flagrant foul against humanity’s inherent freedom to decide for him or herself what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is not.  To them, right and wrong, true and false are in the eye of the beholder. To them, truth is not revealed for mankind to discover but is a project of self-creation carried out in their own hearts and minds. Thus, regarding truth, the creature has become the creator. 

Last, are we wasting valuable time even by asking about the meaning of life?  According to Dr. Tim Keller in his book Making Sense of God, there are many contemporary thinkers who consider asking that question to be a “bogus query”.²  Keller adds that whereas most people around the world “want a reason to believe that our lives ‘matter from the outside’ and “want their lives to be connected to something beyond their mere pleasures and comforts, to be significant of something higher,” there are many thinkers today who have concluded that we are foolish to even ask.2  Based on the writings of some postmoderns, they understand “any claim that there is a Meaning to all life to be a form of bondage.” For example, Stephen Jay Gould once said “that a purposeless cosmos means that we are liberated to construct our own individual meanings for our lives.”³ How does a person come to the point where they are willing to buck the innate drive within mankind to find meaning and purpose in life beyond themselves?  For those who believe there is no God who created the world, reaching such a conclusion is less than a short jump.

Is there one ultimate deeper life question we can ask, such that if we get the right answer, it will influence the content, character, and direction of our lives to the greatest good? I think so and it is this. Is there a God who created not only the universe as we know it, but also created man in His own image? Get that answer right and you’ll be positioned to get a lot of others right as well.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…Then God said, ’Let Us make man in Our image, after our likeness…So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Genesis 1:1,26-27 ESV

 

¹ Paul David Tripp, Everyday Gospel: A Daily Devotional Connecting Scripture to All of Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2024), p.245.
² Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God (New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2016), p. 57.
³ Ibid, p. 63.