Tag: belief

Parables

This is why I speak to them in parables:

“Though seeing, they do not see;
    though hearing, they do not hear or understand.

In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:

“‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
    you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
For this people’s heart has become calloused;
    they hardly hear with their ears,
    and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
    hear with their ears,
    understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.’ [Isaiah 6:9-10]

Matthew 13:13-15

Doubt and unbelief are never an intellectual issue. Some of the most intelligent people on the planet, even some of the most well-respected scientists, have been followers of Jesus (for modern examples see John Polkinghorne and Francis Collins). Jesus makes clear, right after he tells the Parable of the Sower, that lack of understanding and lack of belief happen in the heart.

Notice the progression mentioned in Jesus’s quote from Isaiah. First, the heart becomes calloused. While the heart is not yet completely hardened, it is on its way. Usually this happens not because of an intellectual question about God but because of a wound of the heart. Someone hurts us or God doesn’t meet an expectation we had. A person stops trusting God because they had the wrong definition of trust in the first place.

Too often our hearts become calloused because we think trust is built by “someone doing what I expect they will do.” Meaning, to build trust we want a person to be predictable. We want the person to do what we would have done in particular situations. In other words, the more you are like me, the more you respond the way I would have responded, the more I trust you. This faulty understanding of trust means that any time another person does something I can’t anticipate, mistrust starts to grow.

You can see how destructive this understanding of trust would be to our relationship with God. When we expect Him to be just like us, and then He isn’t, we begin to lose trust in Him. When He doesn’t respond in a predictable way, a way that we wanted Him to, we begin to live in mistrust. God is completely perfect and good. He is worthy of absolute trust. But we’ve already started with the wrong understanding of trust.

Healthy trust is built on someone consistently telling us the truth not on someone being and acting predictably like us. God is wholly other than us. He will act in ways that surprise us and maybe even confuse us. But this is no reason not to trust God. Jesus is the Truth. He cannot be other than truthful with us. He is worthy of our trust.

Our wound of the heart, our mistrust, then leads to the next progression. We stop hearing. This is a more passive reality. Hearing God (and people for that matter) depends on listening and trust. When we have a wound in our heart, we stop trusting and we stop listening. Hearing God’s voice gets more and more difficult. Weeds of doubt and confusion start forming in our hearts. We are not actively plugging our ears, but hearing gets difficult until we repent of our distrust and get healing for the wound in our heart.

Eventually, after struggling to hear from God for a while, we shift into rebellion. That’s the next step in this progression of doubt and unbelief. While our struggle to hear was not intentional, the next step is intentional. We close our eyes. Closing our eyes is something we actively do. It’s not just that we struggle to see, it’s that we are now actively closing our eyes to the truth of God. We resist. We reject. We live in cynicism and skepticism. We choose unbelief. We close our eyes and proclaim that the room is dark.

This whole progression started with the heart, not the head. This is why Jesus spoke in parables. Parables aren’t meant to confuse the mind; they are meant to expose the condition of the heart. Those who have soft hearts, open hearts, are willing to trust the Lord. They will receive the seed of Kingdom truth planted in them. They will either understand the parable or it will lead to a curiosity that invites them into exploration. Lack of understanding for a person with a softened heart is an invitation into deeper intimacy as curiosity leads them to seek the Lord even more.

Calloused hearts, hardened hearts, will not understand the parables. Instead, they will likely be offended by them. It will not provoke curiosity but suspicion, mocking, and accusation. Lack of understanding for a person with a hard heart becomes mounting evidence that they were right to doubt. Lack of understanding exacerbates mistrust in the Lord. Cynicism abounds.

Jesus spoke in parables because they expose what is underneath our intellectual prowess and our religious actions. They expose the condition of our heart.

The One Who Doubts

If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. Such a person is double-minded and unstable in all they do.

James 1:5-8

It has become popular to celebrate “doubt” in Christian circles as something that should be embraced and welcomed. It is a cliche at this point to say, “Doubt is not the opposite of faith.” Believers are encouraged to embrace their doubts and live with them as a sort of conversation partner with faith.

That all sounds great, and I am sure it is comforting to those who have doubts. The only problem with it is that it is the complete opposite of what scripture says and how Jesus lived and taught His own disciples.

This verse in James does not have nice things to say about doubt. It is not something we embrace. It is something we fight against. It is not something that acts as a conversation partner to faith. It is something that erodes faith. I have cast out a spirit of doubt in more than enough deliverance sessions to know that doubt is a demonic tool of the enemy.

We need to clarify what we mean when we are talking about doubt. Doubt in this James passage is the opposite of belief. When we ask the Lord for something like wisdom, we are commanded to believe and not doubt. This Greek word translated as “doubt” is the same word translated as “waver” when describing Abraham’s faith in Romans 4:20, “he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God.” So we see that when scripture talks about doubt, it is talking about unbelief.

Yet, there has been a bit of a slight of hand in the language used today in the church. Many people who celebrate “doubt” are meaning to say “uncertainty.” They want to create room for the Christian not to be certain about everything. And I whole-heartedly agree with that intention. In the life of faith there are many uncertainties that will never fully be resolved until we are in eternity. The apostle Paul affirms this reality to the Corinthians when he says, “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known”(1 Corinthians 13:12).

Uncertainty is a lack of knowledge that, when addressed humbly, leads to intellectual curiosity, pursuit of God, and a kind of soul rest in the presence of mystery. However, doubt is a lack of trust that often leads to distance from God, a skeptical attitude, and a cynical outlook. Doubt demands knowledge before trust while uncertainty acknowledges trust as the gateway to greater knowing. Doubt comes with accusations while uncertainty comes with an admission of our own limitations.

So while we can and should admit uncertainties, we should reject doubt as described in the Bible. Doubt in the Bible is unbelief and is toxic to our life of faith. The one who doubts is “like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind“(James 1:6). James does not celebrate the Christian who doubts as “normal” and “natural.” Instead, he makes it clear that a person who lives in doubt “is double-minded and unstable in all they do“(James 1:7). These are the words of scripture, not my words.

But we really shouldn’t be surprised by James’s words. Jesus was no less combative toward doubt. After causing the fig tree to shrivel up, Jesus said:

“Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done. If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”

Matthew 21:21-22

His words to Thomas were even stronger:

Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”

John 20:27

So if we struggle with doubts, we should not embrace them. We should not celebrate them. Doubts are also not an opportunity for us to feel shame, self-condemnation, or self-pity. They are, instead, an opportunity for repentance. Doubts need to be acknowledged not so that they can be conversation partners with faith but so that they can be surrendered and removed. Cancer cells are not partners with healthy cells. They are toxic invaders that need to be found and removed.

Most of the time, underneath a particular doubt or area of unbelief, is a wound of the heart. Until that doubt is acknowledged as both real and unwanted, the wound underneath can never be exposed and healed. Doubt is not a problem of convincing the mind but of healing the heart. This is why we need to ask God for wisdom. We need His wisdom in eradicating doubt from our lives.