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How Can I Believe When I Have So Many Doubts?
Copyright © 2011 by Michael A. Babcock
Published by Harvest House Publishers
Eugene, Oregon 97402
www.harvesthousepublishers.com

Babcock, Michael A.
How can I believe when I have so many doubts? / Michael A. Babcock.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-7369-3073-4 (pbk.)
1. Faith. 2. Christian life. I. Title.
BV4637.B23 2011
234'.23—dc22

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

For my students—
that you may “grow in the grace and knowledge
of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18)

We’ll never stop asking questions because doubt is a normal part of our lives.

Doubt is necessary and even useful as we ask questions about ourselves, others, and the world.

Doubt is a lot like temptation and should be faced by following Jesus’ example.

We can stop stumbling over doubt and plant our feet again in a stronger, more settled faith.

There are good reasons to believe even when our minds can’t fully understand.

When we see God’s hand in the world around us, we’re already halfway to faith.

Faith responds to the smallest hints of God’s goodness in the world and in the Word.

Genuine faith rests on a foundation of first principles—the belief that God is real and good.

Faith is always nurtured and expressed within the community of believers, the church.

Faith cuts through the clutter of failure to simplify our lives before God and others.

We are spurred on to faith by the examples of believers who have gone before us.

Acknowledgments

Many friends have come alongside me over the years to encourage, challenge, and gently correct my shallow understanding of faith by their examples. I’ll mention one friend, Steve Briggs, whose life has been a chalkboard for faith. Whether teaching pastors in a house church in Bhutan or lying in a hospital bed in Virginia, Steve has modeled a consistent, persevering faith. This book is richer because of his friendship.

My wife, Janel, and our children, Wesley and Mary, have endured “another book,” and they have done so with patience and understanding. They deserve more than my thanks. Perhaps a vacation without draft copies of my next book stuffed into the luggage would be a good place to start.

Finally, I want to thank the publishing team at Harvest House for believing in a project I sometimes had many doubts about. It’s been a blessing to work with them.

Introduction

I wish someone had told me that when I was a young Christian. It might have spared me years of wandering in a wilderness where signposts had turned into question marks. I wish someone had told me that doubt can be a good thing—at least when it drives me back to God. It’s good when doubt exposes the thin tissue of reason I’m standing on. I need to be reminded of my insufficiency. I need to remember how few answers I ever really hold in my hand.

I also wish someone had told me that doubt is not the same as unbelief—and that a faith that asks questions is stronger than a faith that never thinks. But that’s just it. Nobody ever told me.

And that’s why I’ve written this book. My goal, trust me, is not to sweep away your doubt with better arguments. My goal is not to build an unassailable fortress of logic—call it a “Faith Fortress”—that will leave all questions bouncing like rubber darts off the walls. My goal, in part, is to ask whether such a fortress could ever be built. To be sure, other books out there offer highly detailed blueprints, and even come with all the bricks and mortar you’ll need if you want to tackle that kind of building project.

But consider this. If we could build that citadel, would we really want to flee there for refuge? There’s always an underground canal that can be dammed up or diverted. There’s always a sentry who’s asleep on the night watch. There’s always a bodyguard just looking for a bribe. Any fortress we make can be compromised, which is why the psalmist prays: “Lead me to the rock that is higher than I” (Psalm 61:2).

There’s another problem with our Faith Fortress. Wouldn’t we be giving up a part of who we are, a part of who God designed us to be, if we could ever build a fortress like this? And if we could shelter our faith behind some impregnable wall of logic, then what purpose would faith even serve? Instead of rendering doubt obsolete, we would manage only to make faith irrelevant—“and without faith it is impossible to please God” (Hebrews 11:6). The blunt and unavoidable theology of the matter is that doubt is necessary to faith, since our questioning is what drives us to God in the first place. “Anyone who comes to him,” Hebrews tells us, “must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him” (11:6).

You see, doubt is dealt with conclusively only by an encounter with the living God. That’s why faith in a Person is the only answer to doubt. Not arguments. Not logic. Doubt, like suffering, is one of the tools God uses to whittle us down to size.

I remember an old Swiss missionary I knew as a child. He had spent years in Central Africa serving God and serving others. The one thing I remember most about him, apart from the warmth of his smile, was a little saying he often repeated—a play on words in the original French: Ça dépend à ce qu’il pend (“It depends on what it’s hanging from.”). The idiom means something like this: “Everything depends on the hook where it’s hanging.”

Our faith is like that. What hook does it hang from? The hook of logic and argumentation? Does my faith depend on Aristotle’s law of noncontradiction or Anselm’s ontological proof? Or does my faith hang on the character of God?

Maybe you’re a skeptic. You’ve given up on faith altogether; you’ve resolved to depend upon yourself. If so, then I invite you to become reacquainted with the God who is faithful, who cannot lie, and who is worthy of our trust.

Or maybe you do believe, but questions continue to dog you. You’re a closet doubter, and you sometimes wish you could seal off that little room, that closet inside your mind, where you manufacture questions that have no answers. Others seem to have no problem with their faith—and that’s what bothers you most. God and the world clicks for them; but for you, the pieces always seem to be forced together. You imagine that you’re the only one who thinks and feels this way, who asks these questions, who wonders why. Perhaps you even feel guilty for “just not having enough faith.”

If that’s you, then hang with me for a while. Start with one bit of good news: the pieces don’t always snap into place. Doubt is an unavoidable part of who you are as a human being. You were made to doubt the easy answer, to wonder why things look the way they do, to speculate about alternative stories, and to entertain parallel universes in your mind. Your instinct to doubt is natural, even God-given.

Of course, it’s hard sometimes to see doubt in such a positive and constructive way. All our experience with doubt tells us that it’s a destructive force, one that unsettles and destabilizes our faith. Doubt seems to gnaw away at our spiritual vitality. How could anything good possibly come from it? We’ll come to an answer for that. But until then, I’m asking you at the outset of this book to trust me—all irony aside—as we explore together the very human experience of doubting and believing.

In the following chapters I’ll be pursuing three main goals. First, I want to show how ordinary a thing doubt is—how it emerges from our everyday circumstances. It isn’t worthy of the stigma that Christians often attach to it or the mystique that skeptics sometimes dress it up in. It’s just plain ordinary.

Second—and related to this —our tendency to doubt, even as we yearn to believe, grows out of our dual nature as material and spiritual beings. We doubt because we’re made from the dust of the earth. We believe because God breathed into us the breath of life.

Third, our questioning can actually promote the maturing of our faith. But this happens only when our doubts turn us away from ourselves and drive us instead into the presence of an infinite God. Yes, doubt can turn to unbelief, just as temptation can turn to sin. But it doesn’t have to. They’re not the same thing.

And so to the question: How can I believe when I have so many doubts? I want you to see that when you doubt, you’re in the best possible position to believe—the one God created for you, full of the richness of human experience with all its doubts and all its hopes. That’s what we bring to God. That’s all we ever bring to the One on whom all things depend.

PART 1

Why We Doubt

CHAPTER 1

Plain Ordinary

Key Idea: We’ll never stop asking questions because doubt is a normal part of our lives.

Tekla was pointing an arthritic finger at some sort of prickly blowfish with bulging eyes that was swimming, at that very moment, across her TV screen. It seemed she was always waiting up when I came home late from the university library. I wanted to slip in quietly—through the kitchen door and up to the single room I rented in the loft. I just wanted to go to bed. But she was lonely—a widow, an 80-year-old Swedish grandmother in an old working-class neighborhood in downtown Minneapolis.

She turned around in her La-Z-Boy just far enough to catch my eye as I entered through the dining room. “Do you really think God made all these strange creatures?” she said. And then her voice trailed off. “Sometimes I just wonder.”

The ordinariness of her comment, the almost childlike candor, is what struck me most. Tekla came from that hardy Scandinavian stock that settled the Upper Midwest—hardworking, uncomplicated, Bible-believing Protestants. I’m pretty sure she would never have described her question as an expression of doubt. After all, she wasn’t undergoing a crisis of faith. She hadn’t reached the end of some philosophical argument driving her inexorably toward skepticism. Tekla was just watching a documentary on TV—nothing more—and she was puzzled by the wonders of creation. She had caught a glimpse of strange creatures lurking in the depths, and she asked the only question that made sense to her: Why?

Why, indeed, would God create such things? What purpose do they serve? I’m not sure there’s a theologian anywhere who has a good answer to that.

Whether she realized it or not, Tekla was wrestling with the inscrutable mind of her Creator. Why would God make such monstrously beautiful creatures and then consign them to the depths of the ocean where few people could even appreciate his handiwork? Why should we have to rely on National Geographic to reveal the glory of God? Perhaps it’s not a devastating question. But it’s real and spontaneous. It’s prompted by a simple observation of the world. Doubt is always like this. Doubt always springs from the soil of experience—or in Tekla’s case, it swims up from the watery depths of our everyday lives.

That’s how ordinary a thing doubt is. Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost the intuitive sense that doubt is part of the fabric of our lives. It’s not to be shunned and it’s not to be embraced with enthusiasm. It just is.

The mundane, unspectacular aspect of doubt is everywhere on display in the lives of the great faith heroes of the Bible. The earliest Christians too experienced doubt as the ordinary hand-in-glove reality of faith. How else do we explain the constant exhortations in the New Testament to maintain faith in the face of suffering? The modern Christian, however, has lost touch with the ancient understanding that we believe despite our doubts—that believing is actually the exercise of our will beyond the searchings of the mind and the frailties of the body.

Domesticating Doubt

I smiled weakly and pretended that her question was merely rhetorical. Anyway, what could I say? I certainly had no answer. I was in my early twenties, a graduate student, and I thought I was smart enough to doubt everything I once believed as a child.

Just a few years earlier, as a 17-year-old Bible school student in Los Angeles, I had preached my first sermon at an alcohol rehab center. I don’t remember my text or anything that I said. I just remember the bleary-eyed expressions on the faces of men who were not impressed by what I had to offer. Still, I preached with the confidence of one who knew what he believed.

Mine had been an unspectacular path toward skepticism. Nothing dramatic happened. There was no crisis. Just the drip, drip, drip of unanswered questions. I had never learned as a young Christian how to handle my doubts. How to classify them, label them, figure out where to file them on the shelf. And with an unhealthy, unbalanced, and unbiblical view of doubt, I did what many young Christians end up doing: I drifted away from my faith and stopped thinking about it altogether. My own experience taught me that doubt, and our refusal to talk about it candidly, plays a significant role in our failure to thrive spiritually.

Doubt comes at us in many forms. We’re familiar with the big doubts—the cosmic ones about the origin of life and the cultural ones about the truth claims of Christianity. We’re familiar too with the personal doubts that hit us suddenly with that knock at the door, the phone call late at night, or the concerned look on the doctor’s face. These questions usually top the list in any discussion of “the problem of doubt.” Most books on Christian apologetics direct their fire against these targets, as though the doubting believer needs nothing more than good arguments to face down evolution, the Gnostic gospels, and a terminal illness.

But here’s the problem. In many ways, it’s easier to deal with the really big doubts than all the nagging little ones. Big doubts are answered by a big God. But what about my trivial doubts, those nagging questions that pop up like dandelions in the yard? How do I deal with these? Dandelions have a way of spreading. Before I know it, my nicely manicured lawn is overrun with them.

I envied how Tekla was able to turn off the TV and go to bed without giving a second thought to these odd little questions. Some of us can’t do that. For us, the fish keep swimming in our brains. Questions are not so easily dismissed as idle curiosities. One set of questions leads us to another until we’re staring blankly at the very foundations of our belief.

But looking back, I see that Tekla’s question was a template for doubt. All our questions grow out of our interaction with the world. That’s why we need to domesticate doubt—to wrestle it to the ground where it belongs. We need to deny its power over us and reject its mystique. The ordinary fact is that we doubt because we’re doubters. It’s the default position of men and women who are shaped out of the dust. We feel the earth in our very being; it pulls us, like gravity, toward earthly questions. In the pages that follow we’ll be putting a basic formula to the test.

We doubt because we’re formed from the dust.
We believe because God breathed into us the breath of life.

Domesticating doubt, accepting that it’s just plain ordinary, is the first step to dealing with our questions about God, the world, and ourselves.

But what about the domestication of faith? I had to learn that faith too grows in the soil of everyday living. We do ourselves a great disservice when we cast doubt only against a great crisis, and when we cast faith only against the great tests we face. Yes, faith for Abraham was real in the extremities of his life, on the mountain when he lifted that dagger over the body of his son (Genesis 22). But faith was also real in the tents of his pilgrimage, each and every day as “he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:10).

The church culture I grew up in believed that young Christians could deal decisively with their doubts by reading Josh McDowell or Francis Schaeffer. These men had done the heavy lifting for me. They had asked and answered all the hard questions. I could rest on the authority of their arguments. So the thinking went.

But as I grew in Christ—and continued to ask questions—I learned that doubt is not conquered by better arguments or better books on apologetics. Rather, doubt is conquered by a personal encounter with the living God.

God was relentless in his pursuit of me. Nothing remarkable had driven me away from faith, and my return to faith would be just as unremarkable. I would have to rethink what doubt is and rediscover the vibrancy and recklessness of faith. I would have to throw off the slogans of well-meaning believers and sound out the depths of a personal relationship with my Creator.

Only Believe?

The Christian who confesses to doubt is often answered with slogans: “Only believe!” and “Let go and let God!” I tried that approach too when I wasn’t able to banish every doubt through arguments and evidence, through encyclopedic answers that had lots of footnotes. Perhaps I just had to flip the faith switch. Theologians call that view fideism (pronounced fee-DAY-ism), an awkward term built on the Latin word for faith, fides. Fideism, then, literally means “faith-ism,” and it expresses a belief in the supremacy of faith over reason. It sounds good. After all, isn’t faith superior to reason?

But there are many problems with this view. Fideism isn’t heretical; it’s just simplistic and misleading. It denies the full, biblical expression of who God created us to be. Fideism is alien to the kind of faith Paul described: “I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day” (2 Timothy 1:12). It’s never “only believe” for Paul. It’s “believe first—and then know and finally become convinced.” Paul always starts with someone who is worthy of trust. Reason is not rejected; rather, it is subordinated to our relationship with Christ.

The phrase “only believe” comes from Mark 5:35-36. A nobleman named Jairus approached Jesus with a desperate request. His little girl was dying. Would the Master come and heal her? As Jesus was being led to the nobleman’s house, a woman pushed through the entourage and touched his clothing. Instantly, she was healed of a chronic hemorrhage. She too was in a desperate condition. She had spent years and a small fortune seeking a cure, but nothing had worked.

In both of these stories, faith is set against fear, not doubt. The woman is described as “trembling with fear,” to which Jesus responded, “‘Your faith has healed you’” (Mark 5:33-34). Before Jesus arrived at Jarius’s house, servants came with the terrible news. The little girl had died. Jesus spoke before Jairus could even respond. “‘Do not fear, only believe’” (Mark 5:36 ESV).

“Only believe” was the appropriate message for Jairus and the woman, because they had run out of options. They were afraid. Faith is always born out of desperation; it’s not born out of an arbitrary decision, a casual choice to believe this instead of that. It’s not produced by the victory of one logical argument over another. We must be brought to the end of our resources; we must realize that we were “dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1 NKJV). We must recognize that “at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6). This kind of desperation is necessary before we can get to the point where “only believe” makes any sense at all. One of the reasons the faith of so many fails is that it was never born out of desperation in the first place.

Let me give a well-known example. The story of Charles Blondin, a tight-ropewalker, is often cited as an example of what it means to believe. In 1859 Blondin stretched a tightrope a quarter of a mile across Niagara Falls and then crossed it several times, performing different feats. He went across on stilts, on a bicycle, and even asked if a volunteer was willing to be pushed across in a wheelbarrow. The story has been embellished many times, but the record seems to show that no spectator ever took the daredevil up on his offer.

Thousands had seen Blondin push the wheelbarrow across the tightrope while blindfolded, so they knew he was able to do it. In the usual pulpit version of this story, the failure of a single spectator to climb into the wheelbarrow was a failure of faith. But is this so? If Blondin had asked me to climb in, I would have said no too. Any reasonable person would say no. It would be a great act of foolhardiness to get into that wheelbarrow. What reason would I have for doing so?

But now change the circumstances a little. Consider for a moment that a raging forest fire has us trapped or that headhunting savages are rushing toward us. The only way of escape is across the tightrope. Would it then be so foolish to climb into the wheelbarrow? I’ve just seen Blondin cross the rope; I know my situation is desperate. All that remains is for me to commit myself to the single reasonable alternative before me, no matter how many doubts I might still have.

That kind of desperation brings us to God by faith. We don’t come to him on a whim. We don’t decide to cross the tightrope in a wheelbarrow because we have nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon. We cross that rope because we’ve come to the end of ourselves. Only when we acknowledge the desperation of our condition can we really commit ourselves by faith to the wheelbarrow of God’s grace. This is why “only believe” doesn’t answer the skeptic’s questions. The skeptic, like everyone else, must be utterly emptied of himself and flat out of options before he can reach out to God.

The more philosophical “leap of faith” isn’t much of an improvement over these popular slogans. A leap of faith conjures the picture of lemmings plunging headlong to their deaths, for no good reason other than that the lemming in front of them is doing it. That’s the response of a dogmatism that brings little thought and reflection to its faith. And that’s not the kind of faith I want.

A Tipping Point

So what’s the answer for the doubting mind? Desperation. We’ve got to reach a point—call it a tipping point—where we’re ready and willing to exercise a choice and step toward God. The moment of doubt is one of the great tipping points of the Christian life. It’s a moment of choice when we turn either to faith or unbelief. Every question, big or small, thus becomes an opportunity to exercise our faith in a fresh way.

We’re programmed to ask questions, to seek answers, to wonder why. God didn’t make a mistake in creating us this way. It’s real. It’s human. It’s who we are. But what are we going to do with the capacity to doubt? Or better yet, what are we going to let God do with it? That’s where doubting and believing become a matter of our will.

Job reached that tipping point. And that’s why he’s one of the greatest examples of faith in the Bible. You know the story—how a rich and righteous man got caught up in a spiritual bidding war between God and Satan. “Job only loves you because you’ve been good to him,” Satan said. God then called Satan’s bluff by allowing him to afflict Job with sufferings and setbacks great enough to shake his faith. Of course, God knew all along what Job’s faith was made of—and that’s one of the encouraging subtexts of this story.

All of this is the frame of the story, given to us like a “behind the scenes” documentary. Call it “The Making of Job”—with never-before-seen footage and candid interviews with God, Satan, and the Hosts of Heaven. But we’re cheating in a sense, since we never get to peek behind the cosmic curtain when we’re going through this kind of suffering. We want a privileged view, of course. We want a front-row seat to the counsels of God. Who doesn’t? Job gives us the next best thing.

God tells Satan to “consider my servant, Job.” We too should consider his example. Job shows us how doubt, in all its ordinariness, can push us toward spiritual growth by deepening our humanity, our honesty, our humility, and our hope.

Consider My Servant

Job may well be the most anthropological book in the Bible. The book is an extended meditation on the mystery of being a human being in a world beyond our understanding. “‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb,’” Job said, “‘and naked I will depart’” (Job 1:21). Job’s friends came to comfort him, but instead they treated him like a sermon illustration. They canceled out the humanity of his condition with laws and interpretations. He was a living stigma to them, a breathing question mark about God. Sitting in sackcloth and ashes, Job troubled his friends greatly. They came to commiserate with him—Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, and Elihu—but they ended up explaining him away with theology. Not one of Job’s counselors doubted God, but they all doubted Job. He was too human and too real.

We see no honesty in their faith either. Their sermonizing was inauthentic and shrill. How different it was when Abraham lodged a complaint against God for the impending judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18:23). Or when Aaron was displeased with God over the deaths of his sons (Leviticus 10). Or when David took God to task for striking Uzzah dead (2 Samuel 6:8). They didn’t understand God, but neither did they retreat into a sanctimonious defense of God’s honor. None of these men settled for theological posturing. They struggled honestly with the Almighty—and they grew in faith.

The very fact of Job’s suffering led his friends to deliver windy sermons on the godly life. They presumed to explain the mind of God, while denying the whole time that they were doing any such thing. There was no humility in their faith—only the arrogance of dogmatism.

There wasn’t any hope either in what they said to Job. But Job’s faith, by contrast, reached beyond his miserable circumstances to a glorious, if unseen, future. “‘I know that my Redeemer lives,’” he said, “‘and that in the end he will stand upon the earth’” (Job 19:25). Job’s friends could summon nothing to match the scale of Job’s hope. Theirs was a bleak legalism disguised as faith.

After 37 chapters, God grew weary of hearing theology thrown back at him. “‘Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge?’” (38:2). Then God challenged Job to face his questions like a man (38:3). Job had brought his personal dilemma before the Almighty. A righteous man suddenly loses everything he has and is given no explanation. Why?

But God takes Job’s question and rolls it up with every other question that has ever been asked. God responds to Job not by explaining to him why his children died or why the skin was falling off his bones. Instead, God starts speaking to him as though he’s my old Swedish landlady. Do you understand all the creatures I’ve made? And God, like Tekla, has a point. If you Google “strange underwater creatures,” you’ll find all kinds of monsters you never knew existed. There’s one called a viperfish—a really nasty thing that looks like it escaped from Steven Spielberg’s art studio. Why on earth would God make such a creature?

God must still defeat leviathan in the hearts of men and women today, and his main weapon for doing this is faith.

Of course, Job isn’t asking God about blowfish or viperfish. Job is asking, Why am I suffering? But God doesn’t answer that question. Instead, he confronts Job with some strange, water-dwelling creatures such as behemoth, which is traditionally identified as a hippopotamus though all we can say for certain is that it is a powerful aquatic animal that eats grass.

I can imagine what Tekla would say: “Can you believe it? It looks like a cow, it chews on grass, but it lives in the water! What a strange creature!”

God also mentions leviathan (in Job 41:1), but we don’t have any idea what this is. The term may be more symbolic than anything else, as the great sea creature that leviathan represents is found widely in the myths of ancient Semitic cultures. In the creation myths of Mesopotamia, El must defeat leviathan before order is established in creation. What a powerful image this is, especially since the spirit of leviathan is alive in our world—the spirit of chaos and disorder. This is the spirit that denies any higher Intelligence that rises above our own. God must still defeat leviathan in the hearts of men and women today, and his main weapon for doing this is faith.

Thomas Hobbes adopted the term leviathan as the title of his massive book, a dreary work of seventeenth-century philosophy that famously described human life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes was one of the fathers of modern materialism—the belief that there is no reality beyond the physical, material world. He took this ancient mythic creature as his emblem, his representation of natural, humanistic, materialistic power. This leviathan too will be destroyed by God, along with every philosophy of man that challenges (as the Tower of Babel once did) God’s sovereign reign. Every creature is subject to God’s might and power—every strange creature exposed by National Geographic, but also our mythic creatures, our scientific fables, our secular nightmares, everything that swings its scaly tail against our faith each day.

The question of why God would create a blowfish might not keep us awake at night. But the suffering of a child, the inexplicable loss of a loved one, a sudden reversal of goodwill, cruelties that seem to go unpunished—these are the really tough questions. And God seems to take a pass on them all. He seems to answer the question of Job’s life only with an endless interrogation of his own, as if to say, “You think you have questions? Man, you haven’t even scratched the surface!”

But God is doing no such thing. Out of his majestic whirlwind, the Almighty gathers up every doubt, every objection, and drops them all into one little box that’s been labeled by the finger of God. Open up the box called Why? and you’ll find that God does not maintain a filing system for our doubts. There is no hierarchy of skepticism with God. Tekla’s questions about blowfish are neither more trivial nor less personal than Job’s questions about human suffering. And to that one generic question Why? God offers but a single answer: “‘Everything under heaven belongs to me’” (Job 41:11).

The same God who was “reconciling the world to himself in Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:19) fashioned that little box out of the wood of the cross. And it was on that cross that the Son of Man and the Savior of mankind asked the deepest human question of all: “‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Matthew 27:46). The stigma of my doubt, no less than the stigma of my sin, is closed away forever in the great Why of what Christ did.

Job has reached the tipping point—and he chooses faith. Consider the simple formula once again. It’s important enough to repeat.

Job doubted because he sat in sackcloth and ashes. He believed because he knew that his Redeemer lives. Right there in that moment, Job looks up from the ashes of life, his body wracked by affliction, and he finds himself hurtling back toward his Maker. That’s us—all of us—at the tipping point between doubt and faith.

My doubts too should always sling me back toward the infinite—and the infinitely good—heart of God. Only there, in the wide expanse of his Being, can my doubting heart find rest. Only there, in the intense fire of his presence, can my question marks be hammered and beaten and reforged into exclamation points of praise.

Summing-Up:

There’s nothing mysterious or alien about doubt. It’s woven into the fabric of our lives. The example of Job shows us that we doubt because we’re made of the dust of the earth. Whether our questions are big or small, they’re motivated by the simple, ordinary desire to make sense of the world we live in.

For Further Reflection

1. What are some of the ordinary things in life that prompt questions in your mind?

2. Have you ever felt stigmatized by doubt? Do you feel free to talk about your doubts with other Christians?

3. Would you have volunteered to get in Blondin’s wheelbarrow in 1859? Why or why not?

4. What times in your life would you describe as tipping points between faith and unbelief?

CHAPTER 2

The River of Doubt

Key Idea: Doubt is necessary and even useful as we ask questions about ourselves, others, and the world.

IT HAD BEEN A DIFFICULT YEAR, the kind that could shake the confidence of even the most supremely self-confident man. Teddy Roosevelt had spent 1912 on the campaign trail, pursuing a futile effort to take back the White House as a third-party candidate. Nothing was easy—nothing went right. After a campaign rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a mentally imbalanced man named John Schrank stepped out of the crowd and shot Teddy at close range. The bullet was slowed down by a notebook in his front pocket, but it still lodged permanently in his chest.

So Teddy returned to what he called the “strenuous life” in the months following his defeat. He was incurably restless. He laid his speeches and his policy papers aside. Taking little more than his pride and John Schrank’s bullet in his chest, he steamed toward the Southern Hemisphere. He was heading for South America, for adventure—and, in some respects, for personal redemption.

Roosevelt faced one of the greatest challenges of his life in Brazil—navigating a perilous, uncharted river known as the Rio da Dúvida, the “River of Doubt.” He would later say that the adventure had taken ten years off his life. In fact, he died only five years after returning from the Amazon jungle. When he wrote his account of the expedition, Roosevelt explained why the river had such an ominous name.

On February 27, 1914, shortly after midday, we started down the River of Doubt into the unknown. We were quite uncertain whether after a week we should find ourselves in the Gy-Parana, or after six weeks in the Madeira, or after three months we knew not where. That was why the river was rightly christened the Dúvida.

“We were quite uncertain,” Roosevelt wrote—and that has all the makings of a great adventure.

There was nothing uncertain about the origin of the river. That’s where the journey began. Roosevelt was standing at the headwaters, deep in the jungle. And it was no mystery that the river had to empty somewhere into the Amazon—which it did, a thousand miles later, as an anonymous tributary.

So what was in doubt? Nobody knew how the beginning and the end fit together, because nobody knew what lay in between. All the uncharted rapids and unknown twists and turns were yet to be discovered. The middle was a mystery, a huge blank space on the map.

As long as we’re held by time and space, we’ll have questions we can’t answer.

As Roosevelt placed his dugout into the water, he didn’t know what would happen tomorrow or the next day. He didn’t know, for example, that Julio would turn out to be a murderer. He had no idea that he, the former president of the United States, would stare down his own mortality and even contemplate taking an overdose of morphine to put himself out of his misery. “Anything could happen,” Roosevelt wrote. “We were about to go into the unknown, and no one could say what it held.”

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