What About Doubt?

SBCVoices recently posted the article “What do we do about doubt?” The author, Mike Bergman, made the following comments. “Let’s face it—most if not all Christians, whether we want to admit it or not, experience moments where we identify very much with Thomas and you might as well dub us as ‘Doubting’ Mike or Suzanne or Ichabod! But what do we do with our doubt?” Doubt is common to all believers. None of us ever get beyond this purely human response to our situations and circumstances in life. So, we must ask with Mike Bergman, what do we do about doubt?

Doubt is not a sin. Like many of our other emotional and intellectual responses to life’s challenges, doubt arises all by itself. We do not summon fear, or doubt, or revulsion; these things simply are responses to our circumstances and situations. What we do about these reactions to life is a different matter altogether. We might not choose to have doubts enter our minds, but we surely can choose what to do about the uncertainties.

Thomas, infamously called the “Doubter,” does not stand alone in Christian tradition. Peter doubted, and so did John. Just because their doubts stemmed from situations different than Thomas’s does not get them off the hook. Was not Peter the man who walked on water, but, after surveying his situation, started to sink? Further, the very appearance of the word doubt in the NT suggests doubting was a common phenomenon among early followers of Jesus.

James encouraged those to whom he wrote to view their difficult circumstances, their trials, in a particular way: their faith was being tested. For those who were undergoing a variety of trials, doubt was a component of their experiences. For one thing, they probably doubted whether or not the challenging situations they were encountering had any purpose at all. So, James told them if they lacked wisdom, the ability to perceive God’s purposes, they were to ask the Lord and he would give them the insight they needed.

But, he warned them, when one seeks God’s wisdom, “he must ask in faith without any doubting.” Obviously, doubt was a factor in those believers’ lives, or James would not have raised the issue. But, what did he mean about asking in faith without doubting? James was addressing a topic Jesus himself had spoken to. “Truly I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what was done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ it will happen.” (Matt. 21.21)”

So, what about doubt? Both the Lord and James were not saying believers do not doubt, both were declaring how believers should deal with doubt. Simply put, we should not allow our doubts to determine our response to the Lord or to our situations. Doubt, even when it lurks in our unconscious mind, is always present. We have the freedom, though, to choose how we will deal with our doubt.

Eve doubted, and from the moment of her fateful choice in the Garden of Eden till today, the big question for human beings is does God have credibility? Is he believable? How we respond to our doubts is based on our relationship and response to the Lord himself. If God is believable, if he is a credible witness to himself, we will trust him. If we allow our doubts to determine our response to God, if we doubt him and his witness to himself, we will then be, as James said, waves of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind. We will live a life without substance or stability. Further, because we allow our doubts to determine our response to the Lord, we should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. (Jam. 1.7)

Ultimately, God wants us to trust him and him alone. What he would have us do is rely wholly upon him without any evidence to do so apart from who he is. We of course look to the biblical record and our own experiences of God’s faithfulness to his people. Yet, in the final analysis, God wants to be trusted for who he is. Eve had no record of God’s faithful acts of deliverance. All she had was God’s command. All the Lord wanted from Adam and Eve was for them to trust him. Eve was consumed by her doubt, and, so, she was deceived. She, nor any of us, if we put our doubts aside, cannot and will not be deceived.

We all doubt; at some point in our walk with the Lord, questions arise in our minds about whether the Lord will deliver us or not. We can, though, choose to trust him. We can choose to lay our doubts aside and not let them be the determining factor in our response to the Lord. We can trust God. At some point, we must ignore all the competing voices, all the questions arising in our minds and the fear doubt engenders. We must, in spite of all these things, trust God. That is what we do about doubt.