Help My Unbelief: Why doubt is not the enemy of faith

by Barnabas Piper

I don’t take many things at face value; I question nearly everything. The upside of this is that I’m curious and love to learn. The downside is that I am a cynic who trusts my own impressions and opinions instead of trusting others’.

Questions are the conversational currency of a child. Every question is asked to learn, out of a desire to understand, from a stance of trust. Children ask not to challenge but in order to believe. That’s a big part of what “faith like a child” means.

But the Bible isn’t clear all the time. It isn’t a simplistic, comprehensive rule book (thank God!), and it doesn’t address every problem explicitly. Instead, it depicts the

And aren’t we all like that? Don’t we all question God, then turn our backs on him when we don’t like his response?

to believing and obeying. Questioning isn’t just about the intellectual understanding of who God is; it is about the willingness to follow what God commands.

Faith is what differentiates a Christian from a demon. Faith is belief that transforms into action, into new actions.

The enlightened, progressive world, if they believe in God at all, sees him as subservient to their understanding and to human rules of logic, justice, fairness, and morality. They don’t think too much about where standards of logic, justice, fairness, and morality come from. In short, they submit God to their wills and whims. If he does not abide by their framework of understanding, he either is not good or does not exist. So Christians are burdened to answer questions about God’s infinite existence and his perfect and good nature.

Rather than looking at his holiness as a mark of perfect trustworthiness, we think so highly of ourselves as to say “Well, I don’t get it, so it can’t be good” whenever he does something we can’t fathom.

Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.[32] —Paul Tillich

If belief in action is faith leading to obedience, then unbelief in action leads to disobedience whether or not the unbelief is verbally expressed or intellectually acknowledged.

But trust in God stems from understanding his character, not his reasons.

We cannot originate belief in ourselves. We cannot have relationship with God. We cannot understand truth. No transformation can happen. Not without the Holy Spirit.

God confronts Job with his own finitude, his inability to understand God’s counsels and purposes even if they were revealed, and his status as a sinner in no position to demand a comfortable life.

not knowing is okay. Do your searching. Ask your questions. Then find peace in the knowledge of a good and sovereign God to whom we can go through a present and personal Jesus.