To be human is to believe, holding in your consciousness a whole galaxy of realities that include the visible and the invisible. Not to believe, or being unwilling to believe, or thinking that believing is far too much to ask, is to tear out the heart of who we were made to be. It is to limit life to a kind of closet where facts are sorted on hangers and racks, instead of living that life in wide-open spaces that connect to unseen reality.
Some people think that one of the great debates in life is whether you are going to live your life by reason or by faith.
The reason-only way of life says, I can only base my life on the tangible, visible, measurable facts of life–as my reason sorts them out. My belief is in data; empirical conclusions are my creed. There is no truth apart from physical facts, so I don’t need to worry about the taboos and codes of people across the river from me, and I will certainly never impose any morality on them. To live is to be a realist, so I will not believe in what I cannot see, and I will not chase a God who obviously cannot be known.
This is, for its proponents, the sensible way to live. Sensible because it is based on senses.
The faith-only way of life can be equally risky. It says I choose to be skeptical of all evidence. I will assume that most good beliefs are beyond rationality and will almost always seem irrational. Faith is inherently subjective, as it should be. Therefore, I experience faith, I believe what I choose to believe, and I don’t believe faith has any accountability to anyone or anything else–least of all to a body of supposed “facts.” It doesn’t matter if “my faith” contradicts the faith of the guy next door, because we all have a right to our own faith. Faith is more like dreams than data.
But there is a third option.
Most people realize that everything we know of life, and everything that God points us to, assumes that life is a matter of faith and reason. Sometimes I come to believe something that I have come to understand. And oftentimes I come to understand something that I have come to believe first. But there is one reality, and in the end the facts will line up with faith.
What about the question of doubt? You cannot talk about believing without talking about doubt any more than you can talk about day without implying night. Some people think that faith is an all-or-nothing proposition. You had better believe in God, those people maintain, and everything that God says, because if you show any hesitation, any gap, any questioning, then he will look at you with a scowl and snatch away from you the whole blessing.
No. God is not a troll beneath a bridge expecting all the right answers to riddles he poses before we can cross. God is not the examiner at the Department of Motor Vehicles, mindlessly administering the same test a million times, looking for a 90% to pass.
What we see in the Bible time and again are people of great faith who live on the border of where faith stops and where hesitation begins.
Unbelief is the enemy of faith, not doubt.