The Answers

Where are all of the answers? Are they in a search engine? Perhaps Google. Are they in a library? In a book? Are they in a think tank somewhere? Would the list of the 10 highest IQs in history reveal the one with all of the answers? What about the list of the top 500 billionaires in the world, could all of the answers be there? Maybe the definitive place to find all of the answers is someone on the list of the most powerful people in the world today?

The Answer Man

There was an advertising campaign from the people at Shell Oil Company called the Shell Answer Man. Beginning in the 1960s to around the 1990s through a series of television commercials the company provided answers to common questions related to cars, driving, maintenance, and more. Here is one of their iconic advertisements:

The Shell Answer Man became synonymous with knowing all of the answers over its multiple decade run of the commercials.

What would you do if you were the keeper of the answers to all of the questions? Because of our human nature I suspect the person with that ability today would find no room’s capacity large enough to contain their self-opinion of greatness; big-headedness. Well, maybe not you, but some other individual that loses sight of the real reason we are here, would be arrogant beyond belief.

Our Inquisitive Nature

The desire to have questions answered dates back to the dawn of man. Knowing all of the answers or being with those in the know remains highly desirable. The quest for information has often overridden patience, and integrity.

We do have an example of what happened when individuals were given the ability to have all of the answers. Remember the story of Adam and Eve? They were provided communion with God. A relationship one might call the highest level of intimacy imaginable.

When given the opportunity to choose to continue that close fellowship with their provider, their source, the obvious creator of their very breath, what did they do?

Adam was clearly instructed by God, regarding the pursuit of knowledge as recorded in Genesis 2:17: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shall surely die.” (KJV)

Because of our brother Adam’s ability to choose we were ushered into a condition where we have a proclivity to know all of the answers via the short cut, even though the cost of that knowledge may be injurious to us.

I believe that within the intimate relationship amongst God and Adam, there was an understanding that God would reveal what was necessary for Adam in God’s timing; God’s perfect timing. I believe that Adam was aware God is not a liar. While Adam may not have fully understood what it would be to die, yet he did understand God would be true to His word, as recorded in Genesis 2:17.

Adam chose to go against the word of God however, he was unable to choose the consequences of said choice. Ultimately he and Eve came to know that God is not a man that He should lie. That desire to have the answers, all knowledge, even if it is acquired in a way that dishonored God, and their relationship, is recorded as a lesson for us. Likewise the truth of Jesus coming to redeem us from the disobedience of Adam is recorded for our benefit too.

How did Adam benefit from having all the answers? How do the prestigious, the powerful, the rich, the possessors of high intelligence quotients, benefit from having answers?

They live, they experience joy, happiness, comfort and fulfillment. They similarly experience sickness, lack, despair, failure, depression and ultimately their physical bodies die. Whether your name is included or absent from those highly sought-after lists all of the answers reside with God. He is the beginning and the end.