DOUBT

“If I am guilty—woe to me! Even if I am innocent, I cannot lift my head,  for I am full of shame and drowned in  my affliction.” (10:15)

The relationship between faith and doubt is often misconstrued. We tend to think of doubt as an intellectual problem, when really it has more to do with the emotions and the will. Many people who have no intellectual doubts about their creed are nevertheless wracked by a different kind of doubt, by something that is closer to shame. This sort of doubt does not question the basic truth of such doctrines as the virgin birth, the authority of Scripture, the deity of Christ, or the physical resurrection. Where such questions are persistently present, they usually have less to do with doubt than with plain unbelief. To stand apart from these great and glorious realities and to try to evaluate them with the human mind is not doubt but a kind of trust: trust in oneself.

With real doubt it is different. Real doubt begins with such a profound distrust of self that one is driven into the arms of God, because there is literally nowhere else to go. To be cast upon God in such a way that it is like being adrift on the wide open ocean in a tiny raft without rudder or sail or oars—this is doubt.

The person who doubts, in other words, is not the agnostic, not the person who questions whether or not God exists. That is just unbelief. No, the person who doubts is the one who has already come under the profound conviction of the Holy Spirit and is therefore convinced of the absolute truth of all the basic tenets of the Christian faith. Intellectually there may still be many questions about the various doctrines and their exact nature and application. But such questions are not the real focus of doubt. For the heart of this doubter knows full well that what it is up against is the Truth, and so the real question is no longer whether Christianity is believable but rather, What am I going to do about it? Knowing already that the Kingdom of Heaven is real, what the doubter actually struggles with is how to respond to this staggering reality.

So the problem of doubt is less a cognitive one than a personal one. Even the sort of doubter who, like the disciple Thomas, seems to be mulling over the case for and against the resurrection may not really be asking, “Did Christ literally rise from the dead?” but rather, “If my good friend Jesus did conquer the grave, why am I still so afraid of death?” The issue is not, “Is the gospel true?” but, “Since the gospel is true, why hasn’t the world been more obviously turned upside-down by it? And why do I myself, having wholeheartedly embraced Christ, still experience boredom and fatigue in my life? Why can I not conquer certain sins? Or why am I not working miracles? Am I doing something wrong? Despite all my praying and churchgoing and Bible reading and good works, is my faith, in the final analysis, phony?”

These are the real questions of doubt. Real doubt is not doubt of God but of self. In self-doubt there is no longer any serious doubt of God. If anything, God is too real. He is far more immense than our puny little selves can cope with. Sometimes we would like to turn Him off, like the television set, but we cannot. Instead we are wholly alive to God; He is more present to us than we are to ourselves. It is not God’s reality we doubt, but our own. We look at the life of Jesus and it petrifies us. We doubt very much whether we can follow Him or obey Him or in any way please Him, let alone glorify Him and be like Him.

This is the struggle of doubt, and it is the fundamental struggle in the book of Job. Between the lines of every verse we hear Job asking, “With my life in such a terrible mess, is it possible to believe that even now I might be pleasing to God?” What the Christian sufferer so often forgets, of course, is that it is precisely this deep personal insecurity that is directly addressed by the gospel. This same overwhelming self-doubt is finally and gloriously resolved by the very God whose holiness so overwhelms us. For so simple is His gospel that it asks nothing else of us but this: having believed in His Son, we take hold of the hope that, however messed up our lives may be, we are in fact more pleasing to the Father than we can possibly comprehend.

Mason, M. (2002). The Gospel According to Job: An Honest Look at Pain and Doubt from the Life of One Who Lost Everything. Crossway.