I grew up much too prideful to ask those questions of doubt, those legitimate and sweet to the lips questions of existential importance…"God...why?” I had been trained from such a young age that these questions only lead to further confusion and misunderstanding, that we ask these out of ignorance and foolishness. That if we were wise enough, patient enough and sinless enough we wouldn’t doubt God. We would not feel compelled to ask these questions, instead we would have the all surpassing peace of the Holy Spirit to abide. For to ask such a question of why God does something or if God even exists, is to admit that your faith is weak. Which we all know from Bible lessons of young, a weak faith means a weak mind and an even weaker knowledge of God. Even scripture affirms the pursuit of God is the beginning of knowledge and blessed is he who finds it. So how can I ask these foolish questions twenty-one years into my faith? The answer is simple…you don’t. Instead you conjecture, debate, discuss, diffuse, reconcile, acknowledge and deflect….but never, never doubt. To doubt is to confuse your own understanding with God’s, to presume you have any ability to even begin to surmise the nature of what it is you believe, no you can not doubt, you can not question, you can not deconstruct. If you do, you will only humiliate yourself, we all know that the only answers which lie down that road of questioning is self-degradation, disgrace and shame. If you want to cure your curiosity while saving face the solution then is simple, “take it on faith”. You must accept what you do not fully believe and put it on “faith”, which is wonderful! Considering that the more you doubt, the more you put on faith and the more you put on faith the stronger you are in the eyes of your Christian community. Thus, faith becomes the receptacle for all your fears, concerns, doubts and confusion, it does not reconcile them, answers them or resolve them, no rather it puts them in an air tight, easy to hide away container, accessible at anytime and common to every believer. This receptacle holds all of my weakness and my shame, I hide away the contents, by boasting about the container, I even let fellow believers peak in once in awhile, but just to share my pride of how strong I am to carry such things around, “on faith.”
I must thank doubts and faith for two essential things in my life, for without it neither could have ever occurred. The first being my reputable position in the community of believers, what an honor indeed, and with such little exertion of my own to attain it, after all I merely carry the receptacle of faith I didn’t create it, just it’s contents, which without such a device to contain them may have actually effected my life. The second is my ability to emotionally disconnect from every significant event that threatened my fragile world. Every event I encountered which contradicted the desired path of my existence was whisked away in a cloud of ignorance, by a simple phrase which I can thank for getting me to twenty-one in spite of numerous mental struggles, countless family struggles and the death of the closest friends I ever knew. These simple words which hold such vivacious impetus to empower and guide my life, “all things work together for those who love the Lord.” Now to the lay person this might mean, through an ignorant hermeneutic, that if you love God good things will happen to you. But we are not mere pedestrian theologians here at Moody, no we are students of the word, students of exegesis we do not make the fatal flaws of ignorance with which mere pew sitters afflict themselves. No, rather through my learned ability of scriptural interpretation, I have concluded that the power held within the words of this scripture is hidden in a much deeper complexity than is first seen. You see if we interpret this verse critically it ascribes to the reader a very different promise, this being that if you love God, and I mean truly LOVE God, then you will decipher every event through this infatuation with Him and see that it is all part of His elaborate plan to bless those who love Him. It is through your love sick lenses that you will interpret the world with clarity and objectivity, then and only then once you are under or rather freed from disillusionment can you see the truth, God loves you, He has “ultimate” good in mind for you, and everything between now and then is just a necessary measure to achieve this goal of utmost importance.
So it can be seen, if I doubt God, question His plan, or confuse my interpretation of events with His own, I fail to not only see His blessing, but experience it as well. Thus, to doubt is to take off the lenses, break free from the romance and see through my human eyes the reality that has stricken my life. I must admit, I am truly entranced, enthralled with His love, freed from my inhibitions by His charm. So the real questions, the ONLY questions which remain are: Is He good and does He love me?