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INTRO:
I want to talk about an experience that I am sure everyone can relate to. It is a particularly prevalent experience in high school, but not limited to that timeframe. It is the experience of someone telling us something, parents, teachers, pastors, grandparents, etc, and hearing that thing, maybe even believing that thing, and then having a life experience that calls it into question. Some examples that came to mind: don’t swim within 20 minutes of eating, going to sleep with wet hair will cause a cold,
In this post, I want to talk about that experience of disorientation that happens when what we experience can’t fit into our grid of understanding anymore - in other words, we are talking about doubt.
When I was given some options of things to write about, I jumped at this one because this is something that is near and dear to my heart. I have had and continue to have profound experiences of real doubt about several things that I have genuinely questioned and continue to do so. I am not satisfied with easy answers, and I am unwilling to believe something just because I was raised to or my church teaches it. I want to know what Scripture actually teaches, what Jesus and the apostles meant, and how the earliest followers of Jesus understood them. That has led me to question things like the duration of hell, the timeframe of creation, end times prophecy, the historical accuracy of the Bible, how Christians should relate to violence, etc.
And as I have navigated these questions, I have been so very grateful to different guides and anchors. Most prominent among them would be the late Tim Keller. I am so indebted to him for helping to conclude that my faith is reasonable. It is not based on blind belief. Ultimately, I’ve concluded, as he puts it, “Faith is not opposed to reason because faith is not holding onto something despite the evidence but despite the appearance”. I want to have a reasonable faith, and that is not without doubts. So, as we think about this idea of Christianity and doubt, there are so many places we could go in Scripture to look at doubts and doubters, but we are going to use Psalm 73 as a launch pad for this idea.
As you read, I want you to think about this passage around these three points: What Doubt Is and Is Not, The Causes of Doubt, and The Response to Doubt.
Go ahead and read: Psalm 73
Asaph shows us in this Psalm that doubt is not the end of faith but part of the journey.
WHAT DOUBT IS & IS NOT (v. 1-5)
The superscription above this Psalm tells us that this is a Psalm of Asaph. These superscriptions are not part of the inspired scripture, but we have every indication that they are authentic. This Asaph guy is a Levite worship leader. So he is part of the priestly family. I find that really comforting that this doubt thing can and does happen to everyone, to a priest like this guy or to the disciples after spending 3 years in the 24/7 presence of God become human. If they doubt, then it seems safe to say that everyone will.
So Asaph begins with this truth claim in verse 1:
Truly God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart.
In the context of this Psalm, it becomes more clear that he is saying this less for others and more to himself. Either maybe sarcastically, certainly without conviction, maybe to try and convince himself. This truth about God that He was familiar with is not real to his heart. We begin to see why in verse 2:
But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped
He is describing his journey of faith like climbing a steep mountain. That’s when you need footholds and when stumbling is a risk. With this metaphor, he is saying he nearly lost his faith. He nearly gave it all up. Why? Something broke. He had an experience that called into question what he believed. He began experiencing doubt.
He knows about God’s goodness, but his experience is not aligning with that. This experience, which he does not give exact specifics of, but of disorientation and slipping in his faith, would not be a problem if he did not believe in a God who is good to Israel and to those who seek Him. That is the heart of doubt: faith and confusion coexisting. So let’s clarify for a second what doubt is and is not.
I would say there are two competing ideas of what doubt is: in religious circles, doubt is often viewed as dangerous and as something to be avoided. “Just believe,” on the other hand, deconstruction and wallowing in doubts is in vogue - it is popular. Scripture and specifically the Psalms offer a more balanced and nuanced approach that is neither. Our doubts are not to be avoided, but neither are they ultimate. There is positive energy in doubt, but there is also a lot of sin in doubt.
Doubt is not the opposite of Faith:
There is a prevailing sentiment that doubt is the opposite of faith. But the problem with that is that the doubts are almost arising from the foundation of faith. Doubt is the tension between what we believe and what we experience. So it cannot be the opposite of faith because it is that very faith being worked out: This was the experience of Job and his friends. They believed in something called “Retribution Theology” that God always rewards the righteous and always punishes the wicked. So, for them, they concluded Job must have sinned, but poor Job knew he had not, and yet his experience disoriented him. He was not disbelieving in God; it was his very belief in God that was driving his questions and his doubt.
Doubt is not the Opposite of Faith; Doubt is the Working Out of Faith:
You don’t grow without doubts. Nearly every doubt has a genuine objection that, once worked through, will help you understand Christianity better. Job and his friends’ understanding of God and the way the world works was too small. It needed to grow.
There is something developmentally necessary about doubt that plays out in all of our lives. When we all began learning math, grammar, and maybe a foreign language, we began by learning the rules. We learn the fundamentals. And in all of these experiences, we get to this point where we start to see things that don’t fit the pattern or rules, and we are introduced to exceptions. “I before E except after C or when sounding in Ay as in neighbor and weigh”. You know what’s “weird” about that… exceptions to the rule. In the moment you encounter the word “weird,” you realize that the rule was not large enough and robust enough to contain your experience and the reality you are living in. It requires growth and expansion. Not to rigidly repeat the rule and close your eyes. To let the doubt and questions grow your vision of reality.
Doubt is not a Sin to Hide:
When doubt is seen as a shameful thing, then of course we would hide it. But the problem with that that Elyse Fitzpatrick points out is that, “As long as we keep doubt secret, it has more power in our lives than it needs to”. Secret habits and addictions are really dangerous, and the same is true of secret and hidden doubts.
There are two really meaningful times when people brought their doubts to Jesus in the gospels:
The first is the father of a demonized child in Mark 9, who had gone to the disciples and they had been unable to help him, and he comes to Jesus and Jesus presses him and he cries out in beautiful, honest confession, “Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, ‘I believe; help my unbelief!”
Jesus did not shame or condemn him; he took his honest confession, and he healed his son. I think often Jesus can be misunderstood in the gospels as condemning small faith: “Oh, you of little faith, why did you doubt?” Instead of seeing it as an invitation to honesty and realization. “Oh, wait, my faith is small. I was doubting there. I needed to realize that and name that and bring it into the light in order to share this struggle, and that’s what doubt is.
Doubt is not a Sin to Hide; Doubt is a Struggle to Bring into the Light:
Elyse Fitzpatrick emphatically says, “You can have faith in your heart and doubts in your mind at the same time.”
One of the disciples is famously called a doubter; his name is Thomas. I think he gets a really bad rap.
According to John 20:24-29, He missed the time Jesus popped in to show everyone he was alive, and he missed it. So he says he won’t believe, and then Jesus shows up and doesn’t shame him, doesn’t rebuke him; he shows up for Thomas and meets his request. He gives him evidence to believe. He lets him touch and see. And the result was what scholars agree is the most clear and decisive articulation of faith in the gospels. “My Lord and my God”.
Thomas was not rebuked. Jesus met him in his doubts (John 20:24-29). So that’s what doubt is and is not. But what causes doubt?
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THE CAUSES OF DOUBT (v. 3-15)
Back to Psalm 73, if you look at verses 3-16, what do you see are the reasons for his doubt? It is actually really relatable; he sees the wicked prospering while the faithful suffer. Again, doubt often comes when what we see doesn’t look like what we believe.
Now, the thing about doubt is that it is often framed as a strictly intellectual thing. You just need an answer and a verse, and you can get over your doubts. But the problem with that is that it doesn’t take into account a full enough view of what it is to be human. We are not brains on a stick. We are embodied mind, body, spirit, and so our doubts cannot be neatly parsed out. If we look at Asaph’s doubts, I think we see all of these, but nonetheless, with that qualification, I still think these categories are somewhat helpful:
Intellectual: Questions about science, the Bible, morality, or evil. This is often framed as “I can’t believe this because X,”. Which is something you probably hear often, but the problem is that it is presented as faith vs fact. “I can’t believe there is only one true religion.” Implicit under that doubt or objection is not fact but rather a belief. They believe that if there is a God that God would not be so narrow. Which is their prerogative, but let’s call it what it is - not faith vs. reason but faith vs faith. Two competing beliefs.
Emotional: Disappointment, suffering, unanswered prayer. Asaph says, “All in vain have I kept my heart clean”. Sometimes pain talks louder than our theology.
Morality: Fitzpatrick says, “Sometimes our doubts come because we want to be God. We want to call the shots”. Man, isn’t that the truth? We doubt God when his truth confronts our desires.
Social: hypocrisy, decision, cultural pressure. Sometimes we confuse disillusionment with people with disbelief in God.
Any combination or fusion of these things can contribute to that disorientation or spiritual vertigo, as Tim Keller describes it. These things loom large and eclipse our certainty.
This was Peter’s experience walking on the Water (Matthew 14). He had faith. He believed that it was Jesus walking towards him. He believed that he could walk to him. You cannot tell me he didn’t have faith. And yet in the moment when he started slipping, the storm looked bigger than Jesus. The waves were more real to him than Jesus was. Not if he had been rational and reasonable, but in the moment in his experience and appearance of things.
Tim Keller updates this example from C.S. Lewis and tells this story of a woman who meets a guy and is excited to go on a date with him. All three of her closest female friends, who don’t know each other independently, come to her to tell her that she shouldn’t get attached to this guy. He has a bad track record. He will date her until she gets attached, and then he will break up with her. But she goes on a few dates with him, and she begins to doubt what her friends are saying. It’s not that she doesn’t trust her friends, but he seems so nice, and maybe she’ll be different than all the rest. The problem at that moment is that her friends are on audio, and this guy is on video. He is more real to her than what she knows from her friends, and that is the experience of doubt, whatever its origin might be.
Doubt is the tension between what we believe and what we experience.
THE RESPONSE TO DOUBT (16-28)
You will notice I did not title this section “the answer to doubt” or “the solution to doubt”. Doubt is not this simple formula to solve and answer. Like I said before, we are complex creatures with brains, feelings, and experiences.Keller points out: “You won’t get into your doubts only by thinking, and you won’t get out of them only by thinking.”
But we do have hope and wisdom from this Psalm and the Saints. Namely
Doubt Your Doubts: Back in verse 3, Asaph was honest about his doubts. He realized that his doubt had come from envy. They have what I want. That ability to discern where the doubt is coming from is so important.
You have to distill and deconstruct your doubt to find the dishonesty.
Enter the Sanctuary: Down in verse 17, he has described how hopeless he was,
Until I went into the sanctuary of God.
So often, doubts come from embodied experiences in a classroom with a hostile teacher, the death of a loved one, etc. These are not just mental things but experiences, and so you need to answer those with the experiences of the community of faith: worship, prayer, biblical teaching, reading of scripture, community, and embodied practices of faith.
Jude 1:22 says, “And you must show mercy to those whose faith is wavering. That faith community needs to be a place that can hold people who are doubting. We need to be a place where people can sit with doubt and ask honest questions and not be shunned, embarrassed, or condemned.
Compare Footholds: Verse 18 Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin.
You never have to choose between belief and unbelief. You always believe in something. For Asaph and for us, he realized that even if your faith might feel shaky, their faith is impossible.
Sheldon Vanauken in his book, A Severe Mercy:
“When it came to believing in Christ, there was a gap between what was possible and what could be proved. It was possible that Jesus is God; it was possible that this is all true. But can it be proved? No. So there was this gap — and I asked, ‘How am I supposed to cross it?’If I’m going to stake my whole life on the risen Christ, I wanted certainty. I wanted letters of fire across the sky. But I got none of these.Then came my second breakthrough: The position was not, as I had been thinking, that there was only a gap before me. My God, there was a gap behind me now, too! There might not be certainty that Christ was God, and so that would require a leap — but I had no certainty anymore that He was not God. To go back now would require its own leap of faith. Once I saw that, I flung myself across the gap toward Jesus.”
Feel for His Hand: In verse 23 forward, as Asaph ends this Psalm, it is suddenly overflowing with relational language as if somehow this experience of doubt has actually brought him closer to God. We look for God’s presence in His absence.
This is where we will end: I want us to turn our eyes to Jesus, our teacher, our older brother who has gone before us in the Garden of Gethsemane. Tim Mackie puts it this way:
“He is on his knees in agony. He quotes a number of Psalms, he says, I’m so grieved I could die right now. He says twice, Father, I don’t want to do this. He’s experiencing a deep absence of God’s presence, and human evil is about to rain in on him and crush him physically, literally. But it’s precisely right in that moment where Jesus experiences God’s forsakenness, that is the moment where God is meeting all of us in our moment of need. It’s in the hours that followed that Jesus’s experience of God’s forsakenness - became God becoming God forsaken with us in order to redeem and to conquer our God-forsakenness by his Love. And so for me, the Garden of Gethsemane has become this place where I have to go and kneel beside Jesus when I have crises of doubt and recognize…I was not here first. Jesus was kneeling here before me. And then all of a sudden you realize Jesus is right there holding your hand, kneeling alongside you, grieving over the state of the world with you.”
This is what we do with our doubts, as they come, and come they will, may we encounter Jesus.
Recommended Resources:
Podcasts:
205. The Mess of Doubt (w/ Elyse Fitzpatrick)
Questioning Christianity with Tim Keller - YouTube
Books:
Tim Keller – The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism
C.S. Lewis – Mere Christianity
Sheldon Vanauken – A Severe Mercy
John Mark Comer – Live No Lies
