DOUBT

Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.¹

—KHALIL GIBRAN

I once taught a class called the History and Philosophy of Atheism, which I could easily have called the History of Doubt. Atheism is essentially the story of what we don’t know about God or what we’re unsure about.

There are two types of doubt in our culture: honest doubt and stupid doubt. Stupid doubt is trendy, stylish doubt. It’s the kind of doubt that is more about feeling smart, feeling powerful, or giving yourself license to do what you want.

In Western culture, it’s trendy to doubt and be skeptical. In fact, people who claim certainty or truth are viewed as extremists. Dallas Willard said it this way: “For centuries now our culture has cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt.”²

Stupid doubt is the kind of doubt celebrities like to flaunt on late-night talk shows. It’s the same kind a friend of mine has when she chuckles at any mention of spiritual things. It’s the doubt that uses the actions of violent extremists and political powers as evidence against the validity of ancient texts and religions. It’s the kind that manifests in stupid questions like “If God is all-powerful, could He create a rock so heavy He couldn’t move it?” It’s the doubt that thrives on social media.

But honest doubt is different. Honest doubt is true, authentic uncertainty about what you believe or what you want to believe.

For example, Elie Wiesel is a holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and author who was instrumental in the creation of the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. He penned The Trial of God and many others, which are full of honest doubt—the kind of doubt many holocaust survivors faced and continue to face. Doubt experienced when God seems distant—or worse, nonexistent.

Far from being proud of our honest doubts, we’re often a little embarrassed by them. They eat away at our confidence in things about which we long for certainty.

We begin to have honest doubts when we:

• encounter the complexity of the universe

• confront evil in the world

• discover evil in ourselves

• feel lost or broken

• can’t find God

• are overcome by guilt

IN DESPAIR

When it comes to Christianity, we tend to struggle with doubt in two different ways. I see it as two slopes on either side of a tall peak. The peak is our experience of God, where we find certainty of both His presence and love.

However, leading up to the peak there is a slope of skepticism or intellectual doubt known by some of us when we first wrestle with the idea that God exists. For someone who was raised in a loving Christian home, this slope might be less steep or nonexistent. For someone who was raised in an atheistic home, has long lived in an atheistic environment, or has grown up in a difficult or abusive Christian home, this peak can be very steep.

The other kind of doubt is the descending slope. It tends to sneak up on us and surprise us. After we’ve had an experience of God and felt a degree of certainty that He is real and loves us, something or someone happens to us, and our certainty begins to erode away. We wake up one morning, and there is doubt.

Doubt on the descending slope tends to come from three places: injustice, pain, and distance.

WHERE IS GOD? THE WORLD IS DYING!

One of the loudest—and most emotionally compelling—claims against Christianity is this: How can a loving and powerful God allow so much hatred, evil, and suffering to go on in the world? Why do good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people? Why do oppressors prosper and victims suffer?

This complaint is nothing new. The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus taught that we should only believe things we can directly experience or measure, and that morality should be as simple as maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain for oneself and others.³ He summed up the claim against God’s justice thousands of years ago: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”⁴

These are powerful questions.

If you go to the Bible to find answers to those questions, you may walk away disappointed. What you will find is a whole lot of other people asking the same questions. For example, look at Jeremiah 12:1:

You are always righteous, LORD,
when I bring a case before you.

Yet I would speak with you about your justice:
Why does the way of the wicked prosper?
Why do all the faithless live at ease?

And Psalm 73 from Asaph:

For I was envious of the arrogant

As I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

For there are no pains in their death,

And their body is fat.

They are not in trouble as other men,

Nor are they plagued like mankind. . . .

They mock and wickedly speak of oppression . . .

Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure

And washed my hands in innocence;

For I have been stricken all day long

And chastened every morning. (vv. 3–5, 8, 13–14 NASB)

Jesus even leaned into this idea in Matthew 5:45: “For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (ESV).

The unfairness and injustice in the world create tension for us. We begin to demand that God defend Himself. This has been such a problem throughout history that there’s actually a philosophical term for an argument reconciling the existence of God with the existence of evil: it is called a theodicy. The word theodicy is a combination of the Greek words for God and justice and literally means “a justification of God.”

WHERE IS GOD WHEN I’M HURTING?

Objective evil is only the tip of the iceberg. The stakes become much higher when we personally experience injustice, unfairness, or suffering.

Job is always the classic biblical picture of suffering, and the Psalms are full of laments and cries from God’s people who feel alone and separated from God. But what about the nation of Israel in Egypt? We have all probably heard the story in Exodus of the children of Israel and how they cried out in their slavery: “During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help” (Exodus 2:23 ESV).

When we hear that verse, we know how the story ends. We know that God is about to deliver them through Moses. But listen to the prophecy God told Abraham many years before: “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years” (Genesis 15:13 ESV; emphasis added).

When we read the Exodus story, we imagine a group of people crying out in their suffering and then being delivered. Deliverance was the answer to their fear, suffering, and doubt. But what about all the generations that came before who were born into slavery and died in slavery? What was the answer to their pain? Did God not hear their cries?

Look at the opening of Malachi: “ ‘I have loved you,’ says the LORD. ‘But you ask, “How have you loved us?” ’ ” (1:2).

Isn’t that how suffering feels? We want to say, “You claim to love me, God, but where’s the love?”

Pain can make pessimists out of us. It clouds our ability to see goodness anywhere, especially the goodness of God. The more suffering we experience, the farther we feel from God. As we feel farther and farther from Him, we lose hope and begin to doubt.

WHERE IS GOD?

At the core, we are worried that God is not really there, or that He does not really like us or care about us. But when we look at the Psalms, we discover that the hiddenness of God is not a new problem.

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. (Psalm 63:1 ESV)

Save me, O God!
For the waters have come up to my neck.
I sink in deep mire
where there is no foothold;
I have come into deep waters,
and the flood sweeps over me.
I am weary with crying out;
my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim
with waiting for my God. (Psalm 69:1–3 ESV)

Psalm 88 is one of the most visceral, plainspoken passages in the Old Testament:

O LORD, God of my salvation;
I cry out day and night before you.
Let my prayer come before you;
incline your ear to my cry!
For my soul is full of troubles,
and my life draws near to Sheol.
I am counted among those who go down to the pit;
I am a man who has no strength,
like one set loose among the dead,
like the slain that lie in the grave,
like those whom you remember no more,
for they are cut off from your hand. . . .
Do you work wonders for the dead?
Do the departed rise up to praise you? . . .
Are your wonders known in the darkness,
or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?
But I, O LORD, cry to you;
in the morning my prayer comes before you.
O LORD, why do you cast my soul away?
Why do you hide your face from me? . . .
You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me;
my companions have become darkness. (vv. 1–5, 10, 12–14, 18 ESV)

We live in a broken world where suffering is a guarantee. We can be rent by life, stress, tragedy, sin, a persuasive argument against our beliefs, or even something disturbing we read in the Bible. We all experience moments, even seasons of doubt.

I was once in a long, serious meeting with a group of pastors, and during a break, this question came up: “What are you afraid of?” A fairly well-known pastor, to whom all the other pastors in the group looked up, said, honestly: “I hope it’s all true. I hope I don’t find out someday that this was all a fairy tale or some elaborate hoax.” Everybody was shocked. Pastors are not supposed to doubt that God exists or that Christianity is true. I couldn’t get his answer out of my mind for days. That confession of doubt is one of the most authentic things I have ever heard a pastor say.

That pastor echoes the aching of the Psalms, and both attest to this: the hiddenness of God is only an argument against Him if we do not expect God to be hidden. But all throughout Scripture, God is spoken of as a hide-and-seek God, meaning that often God is hidden, yet we are supposed to continually seek after Him. It is comforting to know that in Scripture and all throughout church history, godly men and women have struggled to sense the presence of God or to understand why He would allow certain things to occur in our lives.

If doubt is an unavoidable part of the human condition, we are going to have to learn how to navigate through it if we want to live a life of faith.

ANSWERS WON’T HELP

Doubt creates a desperation for answers. We really convince ourselves that answers are our way out of doubt. If I could just understand

• the violence in the Old Testament . . .

• the doctrine of the Trinity . . .

• how salvation works . . .

• the way science and the Bible fit together . . .

• why Christians have done such horrible things in the past . . .

• why this is happening to me . . .

• why I lost my job . . .

• why my son is dying . . .

But even if God gave us a perfect, logical answer, would it take away the emotional experience? Would it really change the way we feel and answer our doubts as perfectly as we want?

When I was a college pastor, I used to put on an event called the Skeptics Ball, which eventually grew into the website AskQuestions.tv. It was an evening get-together opened up for any questions. Any topic. Any question. The goal was to make space for people to raise their doubts and critiques of Christianity or the Bible and get an answer or, at the least, honest dialogue.

One night in particular sticks in my memory. On the second floor of a brick church that had been baking in the July sun all day, forty or fifty people were crammed into a tiny room with a low ceiling. I couldn’t tell whether the hot breeze coming through the open windows was making it better or worse.

I had been answering questions for an hour, and I was melting in the heat and drained from the mental exertion of the evening. There was a small stack of anonymous, handwritten questions next to me, and when I picked one up, my heart sank. The question was: “Why would God allow rape?” It is a pretty gnarly question on its own, but I knew who had asked it. A teenage girl in the church had been raped only weeks before . . . and her parents were sitting in the back row. What was I supposed to say?

The objective answer to suffering is stark and unfeeling: “The world is broken; you are not the first, you are not the only, and you won’t be the last to suffer. But God is good.” While I honestly believe that is true, it is not going to make anyone feel better or change that person’s experience. And it is not really the point, is it?

There is a better answer: the subjective answer. The answer that dignifies the suffering person. The answer that empathizes in an effort to understand and share in the suffering.

The subjective answer changes everything: “You are not alone; you are not forgotten; you are loved. By God, by me, by your church community. And we are hurting alongside you.” It recognizes that no cute phrase, Bible verse, song, book, tract, or sermon will change what someone is going through or reverse his or her experience. It takes responsibility for the suffering of the person, caring for and bearing the pain alongside that individual.

It was in that moment, as I stood, a bit panicked, with my pulse pounding in my forehead, wondering whether it was better to make eye contact or to avoid it, that I realized: there was no cold, hard, factual answer to relieve that family’s suffering. But the girl’s family was not in need of an explanation for what happened to them. They had experienced evil and were in need of love. Love from God, their family, their friends, and their church community. A logical answer about the goodness of God or the problem of evil could not change the girl’s experience . . . but love could.

In the midst of suffering, answers don’t change the experience: love changes the experience.

THE HOUSE OF CARDS

I have always found this interesting: one of the critiques atheists level at Christians is that religion is a crutch, a placebo to make us feel better about the difficulty of life. The odd thing is that in my experience suffering and evil often cause Christians their greatest degree of doubt.

Our certainty will often come crashing down around our ears when we are under stress or hurting—no matter what we believe. Truth remains the same, whether it feels true or not. Anybody can be hammered by doubt. To think we’ll never doubt is naive. Everyone has a breaking point.

I was talking once to a friend when I pictured two soldiers side by side in a foxhole in World War II. Bullets zipping overhead, bombs exploding all around them, and they are the only two men in their company left alive.

One of the soldiers was born and raised a Christian, the other a dyed-in-the-wool atheist. I could easily see the atheist praying a desperate prayer to God, just in case He was there. I could also see the Christian suddenly overcome by doubt about the existence of heaven and life after death.

One of C. S. Lewis’s most famous books is The Problem of Pain, a philosophical book that defends God and attempts to explain suffering. Lewis wrote it in his forties, and it displays a powerful intellectual grasp of the reality and nature of suffering. But it wasn’t the only book he would write on the subject of pain.

He waited nearly his entire life to meet his wife—they were married the year he turned fifty-nine. But she died three short years later. He had all the answers to why people die and why bad things happen, but that didn’t prepare him for the experience of losing his best friend and spouse.

The unfairness and injustice of so quickly losing the woman he had waited sixty years to meet nearly broke Lewis. He poured out his grief and doubt in a journal that was published after his death as A Grief Observed. Read what he had to say about his faith:

God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.⁵

It’s almost as though a different Lewis wrote that paragraph. The younger Lewis wrote about pain objectively—the elder Lewis wrestled with it experientially. I had a professor once say, “Wounds are deeper than our convictions.” Lewis didn’t live the rest of his life in a state of doubt, but for me his “house of cards” has always illustrated that even the person with the most intellectual faith can be laid low by their emotions and personal experience.

In 2007, a collection of Mother Teresa’s private letters was published, called Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light.⁶ The letters, which were never intended to be read by the public, reveal that she occasionally experienced deep personal torment and periods of intense doubt. This revelation, the personal doubts and fears of someone many consider a saint, surprised many. To me, it only showed her humanity and the fact that we all—even the saints—share struggle and doubt in common.

Christianity is not a crutch. Real Christians living by faith, looking for more than a security blanket or a genie in a bottle, demand more than a spiritual crutch to make them feel good about ultimate reality. Christians actually require a level of personal engagement and love from God far beyond the intellectual proposition that He exists and loves them. Maybe that’s why Jude said, “Be merciful to those who doubt” (v. 22).

FAITH IS THE ANSWER

Faith isn’t destroyed or diminished by doubt. The opposite is true: faith is the answer to doubt.

When you are in the desert and are dying of thirst, collapsing in the sand won’t take you to water. When you are drowning in the ocean, becoming motionless won’t save your life. Why when we are doubting do we often believe that bringing our Christian walk to a halt will provide us with answers? We get hung up by our doubt, refusing to move forward until we have answers.

Sometimes we inadvertently or even deliberately hit the brakes to create distance between us and God. That’s why turning to sin in the midst of doubt is such a bad idea. The progression often goes like this: we get hurt and say something like, “I am really struggling with my faith. I need a break from church for a while.” Usually that also means a break from prayer, a break from the Bible, and a general break from our Christian community and even our moral code.

But if we were to be honest and say what’s really going on, it might sound more like, “I’m not sure God exists or loves me. So I’m going to isolate myself from Him, His Word, and all the people I know who believe in Him. Instead, I’ll turn to the things I know will give me satisfaction and pleasure until I feel happy enough to believe in God again.”

How can we expect to find God by deliberately pushing Him away? We all understand that cheating on your spouse isn’t going to solve marital problems. It may bring satisfaction for a while, but it certainly won’t fix any problems. Instead, it will most likely be catalytic in the ultimate destruction of the marriage. Our relationship with God is no different.

Throughout Scripture, God never challenges whether doubt should exist. It is the one point of unity between us and God—the recognition that we struggle with faith, belief, and trust. Where we differ from God is what we think should follow doubt. We think the burden rests on God to erase our doubt. God knows that the burden rests on us to continue to trust and wait on Him, even in our doubt.

Our programmed response to confusion is doubt, while the Psalms teach us to respond to confusion with faith. We think doubt demands an answer. God thinks doubt demands faith.

We look at doubt and think it needs an urgent resolution. God looks at doubt and thinks we need patience and endurance.

It could be said that when we think doubt is the problem between us and God, the reality is that an absence of faith or trust might be the real problem.

CHOOSING REALITY

We need to learn to discipline ourselves to keep moving when we begin to be hung up by our doubts. Seeking healthy community is one way we do that. Another habit that can be helpful is the discipline of remembrance. We see an example of this in the story of Joshua. After the Israelites crossed the Jordan River, God instructed them to raise a memorial to remind them that He had delivered them: “ ‘Let this be a sign among you, so that when your children ask later, saying, “What do these stones mean to you?” then you shall say to them, “Because the waters of the Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD; when it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off” ’ ” (Joshua 4:6–7 NASB).

Remembering the goodness of God can be difficult in the midst of challenging circumstances. Think back to the last time you were sick for longer than five days. When you’ve been sick for a week or more, it becomes difficult to remember what it feels like to be well. Sickness becomes your reality.

In a similar way doubt, pain, and frustration can easily become our reality. In the midst of losing a house, it can be difficult to remember all the cherished memories you have been blessed with there. In fact, your cherished memories might even contribute to your pain, because you realize that part of your life is ending.

The old phrase “count your blessings” might be trite, but it’s apt. The discipline of remembrance is synonymous with the discipline of praise. I’m not saying we should praise God inauthentically by praying prayers we don’t mean or singing songs we can’t feel. But there is something powerful about disciplining ourselves to remember God’s blessings and reminding ourselves of times when we’ve felt His presence and goodness.

Seven different times in the book of Deuteronomy God commands the Israelites to remember what He has done for them. The last time is in Deuteronomy 32:7: “Remember the days of old; consider the years of many generations; ask your father, and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you” (ESV).

This verse also demonstrates that one of the ways to find our way back to faith during a season of doubt is to seek encouragement from our community.

When doubt becomes our reality, we completely lose sight of the big picture.

THE VANISHING BEES

In graduate school, a professor teaching philosophy of mind discussed a study with bees. This certain kind of bee would go and fetch pollen, bring it back, set it down, go and look inside the hive, where it was to take the pollen, and only then would it come back out, grab the pollen, and take it into the hive. The study was conducted to learn what would happen if someone moved the pollen while the bee was checking things out inside.

What happened was surprising. The bee would come back out and rearrange the pollen—and then go through the script again: look inside the hive, come back out, fetch the pollen, and take it into the hive. If the pollen was continually moved, the bee would be stuck in its programming and forever run through the motions of putting the pollen back in its place, going inside to look, coming out, finding the pollen moved, and then cycling back through the steps all over again.

The study was interesting from a philosophy of mind standpoint, as it spoke to the difference between a purely mechanistic animal and one with free will and consciousness: the bee couldn’t transcend the change in its routine or the deviation from its expectations.

Often, when we are consumed by our doubt, we become like the bee that can’t break out of the programmed pattern. We become hyper-focused on the single issue of which we can’t let go, and cycle back to our mental tapes, our arguments of why something is not fair, why it is wrong, and how we cannot move on till things are put back aright.

What God is telling the Israelites in the Old Testament “remember” passages is to zoom out and consider the bigger picture. To see the whole context and be able to engage human consciousness and free will to move forward despite whatever the current circumstances might be.

The reality is that there are times of intense trauma or loss when we will be consumed by grief: the death of a child, natural disasters, school shootings, addiction, and so forth. It’s not that we should slap a smile on our faces and pretend that nothing is wrong, but there is a powerful distinction between forgetting sorrow and remembering blessing.

We can embrace both.

Faith means holding these two things in tension: the goodness of God and our circumstances that scream out to the contrary. We can be honest with our doubts while leaning with trust into the arms of the God who holds us through our grief. That is the paradox of faith. It does not seem possible that a good God can allow bad things to happen to us. But if we can lean into His goodness and keep moving forward, we’ll find Him on the other side of our doubts.

The story of our faith does not end when we doubt. Faith is not the absence of doubt; it is the remedy to doubt.

Doubt is only the beginning. It is in our doubt that we begin to truly find faith.

Only a faith that has been doubted can be confirmed.

Only a life that has been risked can be redeemed.

Only a God who has been trusted can prove Himself trustworthy.

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

—ROMANS 8:38–39