A Twelve Year Old Sat in the Temple Asking Questions

He learned it around eight and he has never unlearned it.

He asked something at a table and the room went a specific kind of quiet, and an adult answered him with a sentence that was technically an answer and was actually a door closing. Then somebody changed the subject and everybody was relieved.

He asked once more, maybe a year later, and got the same weather.

So he stopped. And stopping worked, and it kept working, and by fifteen he was not even generating the questions any more, which is a different and more thorough thing than choosing not to ask them.

He is thirty two and he still nods. He nods at things he does not follow and things he actively doubts, and the nod is completely automatic, and he could not tell you the last time he asked anybody anything he genuinely wanted to know.

The boy in the temple was doing two things

There is a story about Jesus at twelve that people remember for the losing and not for what He was actually doing.

His family leaves Jerusalem and He is not with them, and they go back and search for three days.

And it came to pass, that after three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. (Luke 2:46, King James Version)

Both hearing them, and asking them questions.

Two activities, given equal weight in one sentence.

He is not lecturing them. He is not being difficult. He is sitting in the middle of the teachers doing the thing a person does when they want to find out: listening and asking, in turn, for three days.

And nobody in the passage tells Him to stop.

You are permitted to do both halves of what that boy was doing. Luke 2 names the hearing and the asking together, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old scene land on somebody who has been nodding since he was eight.

God offers to argue it out

There is a line in Isaiah that is an invitation rather than a warning, and it is easy to miss because of what comes around it.

Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD. (Isaiah 1:18)

Let us reason together.

That is a courtroom phrase. It means to have it out, to lay the case down, to argue toward a conclusion.

God is the one offering it. He is not being asked to. He opens with it.

Whatever else the Bible is, it is not a book where the party with all the authority requires silence from the other side.

You are invited into the argument rather than kept out of it. Isaiah 1 has God making the offer, and it is His Spirit who makes an old legal phrase feel like a door rather than a trap.

Two people asked how, and only one got corrected

There is an instructive pair in Luke's first chapter, and it is worth seeing both.

An old priest is told his wife will have a son and says how shall I know this. He is silenced for nine months.

A young girl is told she will have a son and says this:

Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? (Luke 1:34)

Almost the same words. Completely different outcome. She is answered, at length, and then told a further thing about her cousin.

The difference is not the question. Both asked how.

Zacharias was a priest standing in the temple asking for evidence. Mary was a teenager asking a mechanical question about something impossible. The record treats those differently, and it does not treat the asking itself as the offense.

You are not in trouble for wanting to know how. Luke 1 has the same question asked twice with two outcomes, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old pair of scenes take the fear out of a sentence.

A senior man asked a question that sounds ridiculous

There is a night conversation in John where an important teacher asks something that reads, on the page, as slightly stupid.

Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born? (John 3:4)

That is a genuinely awkward question, asked by a man with a reputation to protect, at night, so nobody would see him.

And Jesus answers it. At length. He does not laugh at him and does not use it against him.

And John, who kept the story, kept the awkward question in rather than smoothing it out, and Nicodemus turns up twice more in that Gospel, including at the burial.

You are able to ask the version that sounds foolish. John 3 keeps the clumsy question in the record and the answer with it, and it is His Spirit who makes an old late-night conversation feel like permission.

And the honest sentence got the answer

There is one more, said by a father in the middle of a bad situation, and it is the most useful sentence in the Gospels for anybody in this position.

And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. (Mark 9:24)

He says both halves. He does not resolve them.

He is not pretending to a level of certainty he does not have, and he is not walking away either. He puts the contradiction in front of Jesus in one sentence.

And that is the man whose son gets helped.

You are not required to have it sorted before you speak. Mark 9 has the contradiction said out loud and answered, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an honest half-sentence carry further than a tidy whole one.