Tuesday, March 11

Reasons to Doubt… {and otherwise}

Tuesday, March 11

James 1: 6,7

Consider Scripture accounts of doubt. Of course, they are legion.

Maybe the easiest example to recall is Peter’s sinking faith as he is walking on the water. Jesus’ question to Peter was, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?” (Matthew 14:31) Jesus, of course, had answered His own question, “…you of little faith.”  Why was Peter’s faith little? Peter never replied. One answer seems to be obvious: typically, people do not walk on water. Probability and precedent are significant factors in doubt.

But Peter was walking on water!  He was doubting what he was doing!  Why?

Since even before the fall of the first humans, Satan has been creating, spreading doubt. Although Scripture does not reveal clearly the root of Satan’s rebellion, certainly when we look at Satan’s temptation of Christ, we see a quest for power and attention in our adversary as well as a disdain for the Lord, who holds Satan on a leash. Satan doubted that God’s Kingdom was sufficient for the serpent of old to be satisfied.  So he constantly sows dissatisfaction among both the faithful and the faithless.  (His possible tactic sounds familiar: “God must not love you if you are suffering.  So why follow an uncaring deity who placed you in these circumstances?)

Many scholars believe that James, the author of the New Testament epistle bearing that name, was the next younger half-brother of Jesus. We know from episodes in the Gospels (Mark 3, 6, John 7) that James and his brothers initially did not believe in Jesus as the Messiah. It seemed that the Passion and Resurrection of the oldest Son of Mary brought James to faith. (I Cor. 15:7)  Seeing his Brother go silently to be slaughtered, and then seeing Him alive again was enough for James.

I bet he had never witnessed anyone else he loved die innocently and willingly for others and rise again. What was the probability that his brother Jesus was the Messiah? One divided by the number of humans to ever live. Josephus tells us that James would die for his faith in the improbable Jesus.

God does the improbable.  He joins His creation and dies in the place of those who rebelled against Him. Improbable, unprecedented.  And the uniqueness of it all points to the fact that only God could be capable of such!

When we pray, we are praying to an out-of-the-brain-box God. And an element of our prayers should be a simultaneous belief in the astonishing mercy and intimacy of our God.  He knows and has carried our sins – all of them – past, present, future.  Our God does things His way, often involving pain and fantastic deliverance.

A believing James would write: “But he must ask in faith without any doubting, for the one who doubts is like the surf of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind. For that man ought not to expect that he will receive anything from the Lord…” (Jas. 1:6,7) We “must” ask in faith because, as Christians, we believe both in miracles and in cross-bearing. If we are Christians, we already believe in the improbable and unprecedented. So, of course, we pray in faith – faith that “Nothing is impossible with God” (Lk. 1:37) and faith that His “power is perfected in weakness.” (II Cor. 12:9) We have nothing to doubt when it comes to the topic of our loving Lord and Savior.