Reviewed
Is it wrong to ask God why?
Complaint is not a lapse at the edge of Scripture; it is a genre inside it, with its own psalms, a whole book, and the last recorded words of Jesus in two of the four Gospels. What that does and does not settle.
Why does God allow it · Reviewed
Also asked as Can you question God? · Is it a sin to be angry at God? · Is it wrong to ask God why he let this happen?
The question
Not the polite version — not “I have some questions”. The other one. The one at three in the morning that is closer to an accusation than a prayer.
Is that allowed? Or is sustained questioning itself the failure?
02 The objection — as its best advocate would put it
The comforting answer to this question has a standard form, and it deserves to be taken apart before it is used.
The standard form is: even Jesus asked why, from the cross, so you may too. There are three problems with it.
The first is that it flattens the hardest verse in the New Testament into a permission slip. Whatever “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is, it is not primarily a demonstration that questioning is acceptable, and using it that way is a strange thing to do with it.
The second is worse. The usual follow-up is that Jesus was quoting Psalm 22, and Psalm 22 ends in praise, so the cry is really an act of faith pointing at a good ending. But if the ending is the real content, the cry was not real. It becomes a citation, a gesture at a footnote — the theological equivalent of quoting a song lyric. Either the words mean what they say or they are a device. You cannot have the emotional weight of the sentence and also defuse it with the psalm’s last stanza.
The third objection does not care about any of this. Whatever the texts say, sustained questioning does in practice get treated as a symptom. People are told they are in a season, or that they need to guard their heart, or that the question itself is the problem. Producing a verse does not undo that experience.
The answer
Begin with the thing that is easiest to check and hardest to argue with: how much of Scripture is complaint.
Psalm 13 opens, “How long, Yahweh? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” Habakkuk opens his prophecy with, “Yahweh, how long will I cry, and you will not hear? I cry out to you ‘Violence!’ and will you not save?” Lamentations 3 says of God, “He has led me and caused me to walk in darkness, and not in light… Yes, when I cry, and call for help, he shuts out my prayer.” Job opens his mouth in chapter 3 and curses the day he was born.
These are not marginal texts smuggled past an editor. They are in the hymn book, in the prophets, and in a book named after grief. Whoever assembled these collections was not embarrassed by them.
And they are not all resolved. Psalm 88 runs: “Yahweh, why do you reject my soul? Why do you hide your face from me? I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up… You have put lover and friend far from me, and my friends into darkness.” And then it stops. No turn, no resolution, no closing note of trust. A psalm with no upswing is in the collection, and it was sung.
That is the background against which Matthew 27 has to be read. The cry from the cross is not an anomaly in an otherwise serene book. It is the loudest instance of something the book does constantly.
Now the cry itself, and the Psalm 22 point, because this is where most treatments go soft.
Matthew 27:46: “About the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eli, Eli, lima sabachthani?’ That is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” Matthew records it first in Aramaic and then translates it — he is preserving the sound of the words, not just their sense.
Psalm 22:1: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, and from the words of my groaning?”
That the first is the opening line of the second is not an interpretation. It is a fact about the text, available to anyone with two Bibles open.
But the objection is right that “he was quoting a psalm with a happy ending” is a bad answer, and it should be refused rather than softened.
Psalm 22 is not a serene poem with an unfortunate opening. Read the first eight verses. “My God, I cry in the daytime, but you don’t answer; in the night season, and am not silent.” “But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised by the people.” “All those who see me mock me. They insult me with their lips. They shake their heads.” Unanswered prayer is inside the psalm. So is the mockery. Reaching for this text is not reaching for reassurance; it is reaching for the only language that fits.
What the quotation shows is not that the cry was softened. It is that the cry was already written down. The worst sentence a human being has ever said had, at that moment, a form provided for it in the community’s own hymn book. That is a different and much smaller claim than “it ends well”, and it is the one the text supports.
Now the limit, which this page will state rather than step over.
Psalm 22 does turn later. Verse 24 reads: “For he has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, Neither has he hidden his face from him; but when he cried to him, he heard.”
You will find that verse applied confidently to the cross in both directions. Some Christians use it to argue that the Father did not in fact turn away, and that the cry expresses the experience of abandonment rather than its reality. Others hold that something real happened at that moment between Father and Son that the psalm’s later verses do not describe. Both readings are held by serious, orthodox Christians in every major tradition, and the disagreement is not a minor one.
This page will not settle it, and will not settle it by phrasing either. Matthew reports the words and does not explain them. Anyone who tells you a sixty-second answer resolves what the cry means about the relationship between Father and Son at that moment is telling you something the New Testament does not say. What can be said is textual: the sentence is the opening line of Psalm 22, quoted.
Two smaller details.
The bystanders misheard it. Matthew 27:47: “Some of them who stood there, when they heard it, said, ‘This man is calling Elijah.’” The most significant sentence in the passage is recorded alongside the fact that the people present got it wrong.
And the four accounts do not preserve the same last words. Matthew and Mark record the cry of dereliction. Luke 23:46 records “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” John 19:30 records “It is finished.” Christians have traditionally harmonised these as several sayings across the hours of the crucifixion. However you take it, no single Gospel gives you the whole of what was said.
So: is it wrong to ask why?
The texts do not treat it as wrong. They contain it, preserve it, set it to music and put it in the mouth of Jesus. What they do not do is promise that the question gets answered. Habakkuk gets a reply he did not want. Job gets a whirlwind of counter-questions rather than an explanation. Psalm 88 gets nothing. The permission is real, and it is not a guarantee.
If your experience has been that questions were treated as a symptom, nothing on a website can undo that. What the texts can do is show you that they are not the source of it.
The scripture in full
World English Bible · Public domain
Matthew 27:45–47
Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. About the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lima sabachthani?” That is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Some of them who stood there, when they heard it, said, “This man is calling Elijah.”
Psalm 22:1–2
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, and from the words of my groaning? My God, I cry in the daytime, but you don’t answer; in the night season, and am not silent.
Psalm 22:6–8
But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised by the people. All those who see me mock me. They insult me with their lips. They shake their heads, saying, “He trusts in Yahweh. Let him deliver him. Let him rescue him, since he delights in him.”
Psalm 22:22–24
I will declare your name to my brothers. Among the assembly, I will praise you. You who fear Yahweh, praise him! All you descendants of Jacob, glorify him! Stand in awe of him, all you descendants of Israel! For he has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, Neither has he hidden his face from him; but when he cried to him, he heard.
Psalm 13:1–2
How long, Yahweh? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart every day? How long shall my enemy triumph over me?
Psalm 88:13–18
But to you, Yahweh, I have cried. In the morning, my prayer comes before you. Yahweh, why do you reject my soul? Why do you hide your face from me? I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up. While I suffer your terrors, I am distracted. Your fierce wrath has gone over me. Your terrors have cut me off. They came around me like water all day long. They completely engulfed me. You have put lover and friend far from me, and my friends into darkness.
Habakkuk 1:2–4
Yahweh, how long will I cry, and you will not hear? I cry out to you “Violence!” and will you not save? Why do you show me iniquity, and look at perversity? For destruction and violence are before me. There is strife, and contention rises up. Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice never prevails; for the wicked surround the righteous; therefore justice comes out perverted.
Lamentations 3:1–8
I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of his wrath. He has led me and caused me to walk in darkness, and not in light. Surely he turns his hand against me again and again all day long. He has made my flesh and my skin old. He has broken my bones. He has built against me, and surrounded me with bitterness and hardship. He has made me dwell in dark places, as those who have been long dead. He has walled me about, so that I can’t go out. He has made my chain heavy. Yes, when I cry, and call for help, he shuts out my prayer.
The World English Bible renders the divine name as “Yahweh” where most English versions print “the LORD”. That is a translation decision by this version, not a difference in the underlying text.
Where Christians disagree
What the cry from the cross means
This is one of the deepest disagreements in Christian theology and it does not run along denominational lines. Some hold that a real separation or turning-away occurred. Some hold that “forsaken” describes the experience of dereliction rather than a rupture in the relationship. Some hold that the quotation invokes the whole of Psalm 22 and should be read in its light; others hold that the words mean what they say and that reading the psalm’s ending back into them softens the text. Every one of those positions is held by orthodox Christians in good standing, and this page adjudicates none of them.
Whether Jesus is quoting one line or the whole psalm
Some argue that quoting an opening line was a conventional way of invoking an entire text. Others argue that the convention is asserted more often than it is demonstrated, and that Matthew gives us one sentence. The evidence is genuinely disputed.
How to relate the different last words
Matthew and Mark, Luke, and John each preserve different final sayings. The traditional harmonisation is that several things were said over several hours. Others read the differences as each writer selecting what mattered for his account. That difference of approach has consequences well beyond this passage.
What the text does not tell us
- i.Matthew does not explain the cry. He records it, translates it, and moves on. No Gospel writer offers an interpretation.
- ii.We are not told whether Jesus said any more of Psalm 22, or whether the quotation was recognised by anyone present. The bystanders who are quoted thought he was calling for Elijah.
- iii.We are not told what the darkness from the sixth to the ninth hour was.
- iv.The complaint texts do not tell us why. Habakkuk’s answer is not an explanation. Job’s is a series of questions. Psalm 88 has no answer at all.
- v.Nothing here tells you that your particular question will be answered. The texts establish that it may be asked. That is a smaller thing, and it is what they establish.
In one paragraph
Complaint is not a lapse at the edge of Scripture; it is one of its genres. Psalm 13 asks how long. Habakkuk opens his book with an accusation. Lamentations says God “shuts out my prayer”. Psalm 88 asks why God hides his face and then simply ends, with no resolution at all. Against that background, the cry from the cross — “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — is the loudest instance of something the collection does constantly, and it is the opening line of Psalm 22, quoted. What that quotation shows is not that the cry was softened by a happy ending; Psalm 22 contains unanswered prayer and mockery in its own opening verses. It shows that the words already existed, in the community’s own hymn book, waiting. What the cry means about the relationship between Father and Son at that moment is a question Christians answer differently, and Matthew does not answer it. The texts permit the question. They do not promise an answer to it.
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thefairquestion.com/questions/is-it-wrong-to-ask-god-why/ · Reviewed 2026-07-30 · Scripture: World English Bible, public domain