Dealing with Doubts

DEALING WITH DOUBTS

I was raised in church. In fact, I seriously doubt that I missed a service for the nine months before I was born. While I consider this a wonderful privilege and appreciate my parents for the training, it can come with its own pitfalls. I do not believe things easily. My mind works somewhat mathematically and jigsaw puzzles seem to fit well in my mind. So when my teenage years came along and I began to learn things that did not fit perfectly within the strict Missionary Baptist background in which I was raised, I began having doubts.

Now these doubts were not the kind where you sit around and wonder if something is true. This was a doubt about eternity and about everything that I had been taught in my childhood. These doubts would kill my parents if they even knew they existed. The doubts grew to the extent that there were nights that I would lie in bed awake and beg, literally beg, God, if he was in fact real, to cause something to fall off of the wall. It bothered me that he did not.

Today, I sit and write these words as a 60 year old man, who spends a large portion of his spare time studying and reading the Bible and trying to learn about God. Yet, those doubts will still creep into my mind from time to time. For me, unlike many others, it doesn’t take a stressful situation to bring about doubt. It is a natural thing. The funny part is that I can listen to atheist lectures or read essays by militant agnostics, and those do not bring doubt. It is the quiet times when I am just pondering life.

I would guess that you too may have doubts about Christianity. Doubts about truth. Doubts about everything and anything. Today we are going to look at what the Bible has to say about this. It says a lot.

BELIEF, KNOWLEDGE AND TRUTH

First, we need to get a few things out of the way. You will hopefully forgive me for getting a bit into philosophy, but always remember philosophy undergirds everything in life. The phrase science does not tell us anything, but rather scientists do, is absolutely true. We may be able to repeat a process, but it is the explanation of the process that tells us what actually happened. So let’s define these three terms.

Belief is the acceptance by a person of the truth of something. All beliefs are not true, and all truth is not believed. Truth is a belief, statement or other things that correspond with reality. We do not own truth. Truth exists outside of each of us. It is true whether we believe it or not. I absolutely hate the phrase “my truth.” This is a redefining of the word truth. You can have your own convictions and you can have your own beliefs, but unless you redefine truth, you cannot have your own truth.

Now knowledge is just one step beyond belief. Knowledge is a justified belief that something is true. You do not know something in this sense just because you believe it. You know something when you believe it and you have a basis for holding that belief. I hope that as we go through this lesson, you will be helped by understanding these words better. It is my BELIEF that you will seek to KNOW things so that when you identify TRUTH, you will be able to hold onto it.

DOUBT AND EXAMPLES OF IT

Biblically doubt is understood as uncertainty or lacking a strong conviction. According to Strong’s Definitions it can be to withdraw from, oppose hesitate, stagger or waver. We have discussed in previous lessons how the Bible does not hide things from us and people who doubt are no exception. In Galatians 3, Abraham is called the father of the faith, yet when God literally told him he and his wife were going to have a son, Abraham laughed at him. When the pregnancy did not happen fast enough, his wife, Sarah, told him to sleep with their maid and give them a child that way. The father of the faith then dutifully had sex with and a child with, the maid. Then when Abraham was told to leave his father’s family behind and go to the promised land, guess what he did? He took his nephew with him.

Job was a righteous man who suffered through great heartache and loss. None of it was his fault. He then said he wanted to see God and told God all that he could come up with about how bad his justice was. Job 30. Peter, the apostle considered to be the leader of them all, began to walk on water, then took his eyes off of Jesus and quickly proceeded to sink. Matthew 14:22-33.

Maybe the most famous doubter of all is the apostle Thomas. We call him doubting Thomas because he was not present when the other ten apostles saw Jesus alive after the resurrection. Thomas said he would not believe it until he touched the nail prints in his hands and put his hand into the spear wound in his side. John 20. Now Thomas really does get a bad rap because just before the crucifixion, when Jesus was talking to his disciples about going to Jerusalem, and the others were scared, Thomas said let’s go and die with him if need be.

Now the good news is that Abraham went to the promised land and he and Sarah had a child and fathered a nation as they were told by God. Job heard from God and saw that in spite of all he had suffered, he was privileged to serve a God that was so amazing and that God was worth any amount of life’s difficulties. Peter became a leader of the early church, leading literally thousands to faith and dying a martyr’s death. Thomas, tradition holds, carried his faith all the way to India, to preach and to die in the farthest of foreign lands, where a church still bears his name to this day.

We now know that even the most celebrated of historical Biblical persons experienced difficult doubt in their lives. Let’s look at what the Bible tells us it takes to deal with it.

FINDING TRUTH

For many years I heard that we live in a post-modern society. I accepted that even though I had absolutely no idea what was meant. Finally, I looked it up. Post-modernism is based on the idea that truth is relative. In other words, there is no such thing as absolute truth. The problem with this statement is that it defeats itself. The statement claims there is no absolute truth, yet it is a statement claiming to be absolutely true. The same becomes apparent with the statement that if absolute truth exists, but we cannot know it. This is a self-defeating statement because it makes a claim of absolute truth but says we cannot know absolute truth. Apologist Frank Turek calls this a Road Runner statement. Remember the old Road Runner cartoon in which Wile E. Coyote would chase the Road Runner to the edge of the cliff? The Road Runner would stop and good ole Wile E. would keep running and then realize he had gone over the cliff and fall. These statements have already fallen off the cliff even though the person making the statement doesn’t yet realize it.

Now that we know that absolute truth must exist and that it is findable, it is up to us to find it. Jesus made the claim, “I am the truth.” John 14:6. I may believe that Jesus is the truth, but in order for that belief to become knowledge, I must have justification for it. What is meant by justification is that if something is true, there will be sufficient evidence. Let’s look briefly at the encounter between Jesus and Thomas in John 20:26 and following, but let’s add a little more context by going on and reading verses 30 and 31, which may not seem to go with the story.

A week later his disciples were indoors again, and Thomas was with them. Even though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and look at my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Don’t be faithless, but believe.” Thomas responded to him, “My Lord and my God!!” Jesus said, “Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

Now we might think from reading this that Jesus was rebuking Thomas for not having blind faith and commending those in the future that would have it. But let’s read on:

Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

If Jesus was putting Thomas down for not just having faith and saying his faith would be better blind, then the following verses completely contradict what he just said. John says his entire book is written to give evidence so that you and I can believe that Jesus is the Messiah.

We see the same type of discussion in Luke 7:22, when John the Baptist, the biological cousin of Jesus, sends two of his disciples to Jesus to ask him if he really is the Messiah. John, at this time, was being held in prison and about to die. He was in a very dark period of life. Jesus did not tell his disciples to go back to John and tell him that he just needed more faith. He said, “Go and report to John what you have seen and heard. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, those with leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor are told the good news.”

Jesus and the writers of the New Testament are telling us that the proof has been given. He is saying to Thomas that it is not good to shake your fist at God and say that he has not provided enough proof for you. He is simply telling us that he has made certain to show us that he really did live up to the statement, “I am the truth.” Sometimes this is a hard truth to accept because what it means is that I am giving up control of my life to the one who is bigger than I can imagine.

In Romans ch. 20, Paul writes that God has also made himself evident in creation. Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist, says in his book The Blind Watchmaker, that, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” Richard Lewontin, famed Harvard geneticist and atheist, says that atheists agree to accept absurd (his word) explanations for life because they have agreed up front to not allow a “divine foot in the door” of science. Yet, as scientists become more knowledgeable about the universe and life, they have learned that there was an absolute beginning of time, space, matter and energy, and that life really could not just pop up in a primordial soup. Now physics is on the edge of almost admitting a great supernatural being. This is shown by more and more scientists coming to believe in at least some type of intelligence behind the universe and also a growing percentage of physicists. See multiple recent surveys.

APPLICATION TO OUR LIVES

So, what is the application:

1. Never be afraid of doubting. It is normal. Many great historical Christians experienced it.

2. Never be afraid to ask questions. Always be afraid of those who claim to have all the answers. Only Jesus actually has the answers. The rest of it just get to have fun looking for them.

3. Like Abraham, never stop trying to follow God, even when you don’t get it right. He really is worth it.

4. Like Job, God loves you so much, he can handle your frustrations. You just have to learn to live with his answers.

5. Like Peter, even when you have taken your eyes off of God in the past, make a choice to return your eyes to him. He can take you to places that you cannot imagine. The last of those being in his presence.

6. Unlike Thomas, do not think that you should have some type of special proof that just fits you. God is speaking to you from his word, from creation, and from the people around you that are truly following him. His evidence is loud and clear. One of his greatest promises is that if you seek him with all your heart, you will find him.

7. Finally, don’t let circumstances define what you know to be true. No matter what life may throw at you, he is capable of making good come from it. Paul wrote that all of life’s troubles are nothing compared to what God has in store for us if we believe him.

Biblical faith should never be equated with blind faith. God literally calls us to him. In all the ways described above. Not too long ago, after studying Biblical faith for quite awhile, I decided my own definition for it. Biblical faith is belief to the extent of causing action. Notice that nowhere in this definition does it say that you cannot have doubt. In fact, doubt can grow faith. It is like courage is to fear. Not too many years ago there was a Benton Panther shirt that said something like, courage is not the absence of fear, but the willingness to confront fear and keep moving. So too, faith is not the absence of doubt, but the willingness to move ahead in spite of doubt.

I still have doubts at times just like when I was a teenager. What I have learned now though is that when those doubts arise, I simply go back to his word and all the other ways throughout creation that I have seen him reveal himself. When confronted with absolute truth, doubts wilt pretty quickly. That is a God thing.