"I believe, help my unbelief."
"Have mercy on those who doubt."
“The one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.”
I doubt because I’m finite.
I don’t know how many times I have had someone say to me, or said to someone over the years, something along the lines of, “If you could figure out God then he wouldn’t be God, he would be something you created.” It’s not a bad statement, especially when you need to shut someone up for trying to delve into the deep mysteries of God’s ability to build an object so large that he can’t lift it, or when some militant atheist is ranting about how if God really exists and is loving and all-powerful then he must provide perfect evidence of his existence to every individual, as if God is some element to be put into a human chemistry experiment with certain immutable properties that can be predicted and manipulated.
It is good then to recognize that God is God and I am not. And every way I conceive of God is going to be wrong. That truth is good and provides a useful braking system for my out of control analysis. However I think there is a deeper truth within this statement. I am infinitely different from God. God doesn’t have a body, God can’t die, God remembers everything, God wasn’t born, God doesn’t need sleep, God doesn’t have a job he hates, God doesn’t pick his nose, God doesn’t yell at his kids, God doesn’t pay rent, God doesn’t doubt himself...
I doubt God because I doubt myself.
I was recently at a party talking with a stranger. Fairly quickly I found out he was working on a dissertation for his PhD. related to the academic success rates of student athletes at NCAA universities. I know a little about the NCAA but very little about the specific topic he was writing about. So what did I do? I immediately tried to steer the conversation back to what I knew. Doing this was safe and comfortable. It allowed me to not look like a fool. It protected my dignity. It revealed my insecurities and my pride.
I do the same thing when I try and think about God. I basically make God into my own image because he is much easier to talk about. I know myself. I don’t know God. Not long ago I wrote a paper on the father in Mark 9 who famously exclaims, “I believe, help my unbelief.” While I was working on this it occurred to me that the reason he doubted Jesus’ ability to heal was because he knew he couldn’t heal his daughter himself. He had tried everything in his power to heal her and had failed. This history of failure and inadequacy is what caused him to doubt Jesus’ ability. He was projecting himself onto Jesus. This is why I doubt God, because I don't believe in myself.
There is good news though; I don’t have to doubt. No, actually I do and I will until I die (see paragraph one for an explanation). But the good news is that I think doubt is the catalyst for receiving grace. Not in the cheesy Christian “doubt must be present for faith to exist” sort of way, but in destroying my own self-righteousness and pride. When I say to myself, “God can’t love me” I am revealing my own inability to love others. When I doubt God’s power to heal it reveals my deep understanding of my own inability to change. When I doubt God’s existence it shows my own struggle to be present in the lives of family and coworkers. Doubt has a way of revealing how I think about myself at a given time.
Doubt then is a catalyst for brokenness, the very thing that leads someone to the grace found in Jesus. If I can begin to understand the depth of my brokenness through listening to what my doubts reveal about me then maybe it will be possible for me to realize I need God to do for me what I can’t do myself. I have always been taught that salvation comes through faith in Jesus, perhaps it actually first comes through doubt.
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