Bertrand Russell said it wouldn’t matter to God if we believed in Him or not, because God is too big for that – if He exists. In a way he was right. The older I get the more I find myself giving the advice, “don’t take yourself too seriously”. As long as we understand the expression I believe it’s good advice. And it’s good advice because God doesn’t take Himself too seriously. Again, if we understand the expression we’ll understand that it’s not sacrilegious – it’s true. Imagine if God did take His matchless majesty and incomparable holiness too seriously then we would be no longer alive – the whole world would have been destroyed a long time ago as God took offence at man’s rebellion and disobedience. Robert Ingersoll, on his lecture tours, used to challenge God to strike him dead on stage. The fact that God didn’t rise to the bait was his proof that God did not exist. I know he didn’t understand God at all. Whether we obey or disobey God doesn’t add or detract from God Himself. God existed as God before He ever made man and He will have that same eternal existence when this old world is gone. As C.S. Lewis said, To be sovereign of the universe is no great matter to God. In Himself, in “the land of the Trinity”, He is Sovereign of a far greater realm. What He does He does for our benefit, and those who will spend eternity with Him will enjoy all that heavenly world has to offer simply because of the goodness of His heart. He won’t have an identity crisis if I’m not there.
But Russell was also wrong. God has requirements for faith (Heb. 11:6) – not for His benefit but for ours. There is a moral dimension to faith because it involves handling evidence and facts. (The old word miscreant meant a misbeliever – it is now used to speak of a scoundrel or villain without reference to the person’s faith or lack thereof, but in the middle ages it was regarded as a given that a misbeliever would be a scoundrel because of the moral aspect of believing – through the fear of the Lord men depart from iniquity). And God cannot do His work of perfecting us into willing and obedient servants unless we believe that he exists and we are willing to walk down that road He sees best and fit for our growth and perfection.
Many do not believe and various reasons have been advanced for modern unbelief. A Dr. Herberg said; The triumph of the technological spirit in less than two centuries has engendered in modern western society a monstrous sense of technological arrogance. Man, collective man, has come to see himself replacing God as Maker and Master of all………The triumph of the omnicompetant welfare state whose impersonal bureaucracy has more and more replaced the care of friends and family within the scope and function of the church. This has contributed to the secularization of society wherein the hopes and expectations of the masses of people have steadily been turning from church to state, from religion to politics………..The triumph of mass society in which the individual person is increasingly atomized and homogenized and become a number in a vast impersonal machine. To be a Christian you have to be different – but it has ever been that way.
We could add other reasons for unbelief, such as ‘chronological snobbery”, which regards anything old as old-fashioned and irrelevant, and a sizeable portion of education being anti-God, along with prosperity and materialism. But these are not legitimate – not legitimate in any age (cf. Rom. 12:2).
Garfield Curnow suggests another reason – the “undisciplined will”. Man can be broken down in several ways – eg. body, soul, and spirit; part animal, part God, part dust. Another way is to talk about man as it relates to his three-fold makeup: the cognitive, feelings, and the will operate together but they can be considered individually. Which of these is the organ of faith? Is it the intellect? – well, many intellectuals believe and many don’t. Is it the emotional side of man which creates aesthetic judgments? – all temperament types are Christians, and the same types are not Christians. All elements are involved but especially the will! John 7:17 speaks of two wills; the will of God and the will of man. Man has to WANT to make sense of what he sees and hears. This moral element is seen in those who cannot find God because there is that in God which I do not want to find, and He is saying some things I do not want to hear. If there are explanations why do I not accept them? No contradictions in God’s word have been proved, but many have no intention of resolving their doubts. But it is true that all of us are beset by influences for and against faith. I believe but help my unbelief! (Mk. 9:24).
Can these two things co-exist – faith and doubt? There is an old saying that goes faith ends where anxiety begins, but this is too dichotic, too simplistic. There are reasons to believe in God and the majority of the world finds satisfactory reasons to believe in God. But there are reasons to doubt God if we look for them. We don’t have to look too far or too hard for people throw them up all the time. Rudyard Kipling spoke to his son and said there are always reasons for giving up….and then he went on to say If you can keep your faith when all about you others are losing theirs…then you’ll be a man, my son. Many do not doubt God’s existence, but doubt His will. For example, how often do we hear “Why doesn’t God…..? (you fill in the blanks). Young people have to deal with it – Wyckoff said, Doubt is the natural intellectual hunger of the healthy-minded adolescent. It’s true that as we grow and attain independent mental awareness and perception we feel like that we are not using such powers if we just keep believing what we believed in infancy. But just to be independent and different is not in itself a valid form of argument. To play Devil’s Advocate might be fun, but that in itself is proof of nothing.
But how do we live with doubt? Perhaps we should ask the agnostics who sit on the fence with doubts both ways. Life involves learning to live with the less-than-ideal:- eg. disagreeable people, poor health, lack of money etc. But life is still life and life goes on. And faith is still faith though we may want it to be stronger than a mustard seed. The pressure of doubts doesn’t deny the legitimacy of faith. What separates people is what each person chooses to stress – sow a thought and reap an action; sow an action and reap a habit; sow a habit and reap a character; sow a character and reap a destiny. In a similar manner we are in a position to choose what we want to stress – belief or unbelief; what side of the fence we want to stand; the selection of thoughts we want to cultivate (as in a garden with vegies and weeds). Emphasise what one does believe. Jesus wants all to be honest. What if you honestly unbelieve? – no better or worse than dishonestly believing? Is it possible to dishonestly believe? It may be possible to believe something without adequate evidence, but faith comes easy to children in whom there is no baggage. The development of faith is simplistic, not complicated. Note the Psalmist’s appeal to the universe as evidence of God (Ps. 19:1ff), and note Paul’s conclusion in Rom. 1:20,28 that it is sin that is the cause of unbelief, not lack of evidence.
Allow faith to rule: obey as far as one believes in Him: but don’t allow doubt to rule! Which is better, faith or doubt? Look at their fruits. The song, God Moves In A Mysterious Way has a line blind unbelief is sure to err…. Name a hospital, a welfare organization, a political system, or anything of value to the world that has been accomplished by the fruits of doubt and unbelief! SO many people are troubled by the presence of evil – why does it exist? Why do bad things happen to good people? We may well ask why good things happen to bad people?! But all of this tells us there is a God for if there is no God then we are just accidents and everything is just accidental and there would be no way we could have any sort of objective measurement of good and evil except our own pleasures and perspectives and how subjective that would be. But there’s something about this question of good and evil that will not let us go. As Edward John Carnell said, As we reflect upon the problem of evil, one important observation must be made. When it comes to it, the convictions of the heart ask no more than a final triumph of goodness….Those of you who are parents have noted the way that children engage the dynamics of good and evil in a fairy tale. Children get quite disturbed when a fairy tale ends with the triumph of evil. I believe it is because such a take would imply the child’s own defeat – if good and evil are our own inventions and do not matter then the child does not matter, but a child’s heart will have none of that. Neither will yours.
What you feed is what grows. What reigns in life? Sin or Christ? Good or Evil? Faith or Doubt? People allow what difficulties they perceive in the story of Jonah (why this one I do not understand, especially when compared with creation or any other number of miracles) to loom so large as to blot out everything else – or Balaam’s ass, so that they do not believe God spoke through His Son. You cannot disbelieve the truth of Christ without it having some effect upon you. Goethe said to someone who came to him with doubts; Tell me of your beliefs – I have enough doubts of my own. Peter walked on water till doubts came (Matt.14:22-31).
You do not get rid of difficulties by turning from Christ – the difficulties of atheism are far greater:- eg. all has come from nothing; life has come from dead matter; consciousness has come from unconsciousness; effects without a cause; design without a Designer and so on. Difficulties demand study, not doubt.
There are always mysteries: we got up the other morning and there was the back door wide open – been that way all night. No thieves had entered and yet the media says they are active. They just missed us. But one of the great mysteries of life is why water doesn’t miss a hole in the bottom of the boat or why oil never misses a crack in the gasket! More seriously, no man can explain why grass, when eaten and digested, grows feathers on a goose and hair on a cow or how a black cow can eat green grass and give white milk and yellow butter. Does one reject the reality of the H2 bomb because it seems incomprehensible how one small bomb can do so much damage? T. Arthur Thomson well said, We understand the how of a few things and the why of nothing.
Can you doubt a doubt? Yes. It is interesting to note that one doubt can win over many reasons to believe – why not allow one reason to believe win over many reasons to doubt. I believe, help my unbelief.