When we experience God, we experience the uncaused, uncreated, absolute and eternal being. God is His innate traits and His innate traits are Him. That is to say, God does not seem to tell the truth rather He is truth; God is goodness rather than ‘God has goodness in Him’. When we consider the attributes of God, we get to worship Him not only for what is clear to us about him but also the mystery in Him. Reconciling with what is unclear about God can lead us to worship or to unbelief. In the walk of faith, doubt can be a chronic annoyance, boring into the brain while demanding certainty. It is through thinking that one starts believing. Therefore, in our philosophical and spiritual endeavours, doubt can be whelped and groomed. Doubt is double-mindedness – it is considering all sides of the story and then sitting on the fence. The thorn that is doubt can take different forms and prick different susceptibilities. These susceptibilities can be sourced from pressing questions facing us today:
Paul charges us in 1 Peter 3:15 to be prepared to give reasons for the hope we have in Christ. We ought to consider these intellectual prods and engage them to the best of our ability. Like Abraham to the inheritance of Canaan (Genesis 15.8), John the Baptist to the legitimacy of Jesus as the Messiah (Matthew 28:17) and Thomas to the resurrection of Jesus (John 20:25), we are all susceptible to doubt. Instead of sitting on the fence accompanying our doubts, we can choose a side of the fence. We can choose faith, while keeping in mind that faith is not an avoidance of our social plights or an enemy of reason. In fact, our faith should not be an avoidance of social plights or the enemy of reason. Faith with some doubt can be resourceful and productive to a believer. As Tim Keller suggested that a faith with a dose of doubt is like a body with antibodies. Faith does not make us intellectual-invalids. Faith chooses to believe what God says about what and who He is in scriptures, with the hope that he can reveal Himself to us. We can hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering because the one who called us is faithful. By being honest about our doubts to God, we can call on Him and he can tell us great and unsearchable things we do not know.
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Rea Zwane"I am just trying to live it up with a big God" Archives
April 2022
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