Maybe It's Time to Question Your Faith, Part 1

Have you really thought through why you're a Christian? If not, the time is now.

So, you’re a Christian. Or perhaps not yet, but you’re thinking about it. Let me ask you a simple question.

Why?

Photo by Eunice Lituañas on Unsplash

Why did you do it? Why would you? What do you expect to get out of Christianity? Did you ever really stop to think it through before you made the leap? Or did you ever really make the leap at all?

Maybe it’s time that you questioned your faith.

Wait, what?! That sounds like a bad thing. Aren’t we supposed to avoid questioning our faith? Aren’t we supposed to tell ourselves that it’s all true and just plunge forward?

I don’t think that’s true. At least you shouldn’t avoid legitimate questions. You should seek out the answers until you’re sure of them.

Further, I think God wants us to have evidence on which to ground our faith. And that’s why he’s provided us with a lot of it.

You’ll Always Struggle Until You Can Answer the Questions on Your Own

You should know what you believe and why you believe it. Are you sure, for instance, that your expectations are aligned with God’s Word and his promises? If not, your faith is brittle and weak. It won’t take much hardship or persecution to shatter it and leave you with nothing.

For example, I’ve seen many Christians over the years who have struggled because they weren’t really sure what “being a Christian” meant on a daily basis. Either they came to Christianity as children, growing up in a Christian home, or they converted at some point and were left adrift by their Christian peers to figure it out for themselves, with no strong discipleship. They might know a few Bible stories and be able to explain the basics of salvation, but beyond that, they don’t really understand the larger Christian perspective.

In fact, for many years, I didn’t know what I was doing in my faith.

I was baptized as an infant in the Presbyterian Church. I attended Sunday school weekly as a kid and “big church” as a teen. I went to Vacation Bible School in the summer and memorized Bible verses. I had my own Bible and knew all the major stories. My parents were Christian, and regularly attended church, and prayed in the middle of the week, not just on Sundays. In short, I was an above-average Christian kid when compared to my peers.

And then I went to college, and I really struggled with my faith. I’ll write out my detailed testimony sometime, but the crux of the issue was that my faith at that point in my life was largely my parents’ faith, not my own. I didn’t rebel against that faith when I was a child because I loved my parents and I was a compliant child. But when I was on my own and I had to make my own decisions, I found that Christianity wasn’t as high up on the list as it was for my folks.

Years later, I was able to work through those issues and choose Christianity again for myself. Now, I don’t have the same struggles (though I certainly have others). I know what I believe and, most importantly, why I believe it. My faith is my own, not my parents’. I chose it and I’m responsible for it.

I think my story is fairly common for children of Christian parents. I think many of them come to a fork in the road, often during college or their first years on their own, where they must choose Christianity or the world.

To have a solid faith, I think there are at least three fundamental questions you need answers to.

Question 1: Does God Exist?

So, straight up, does God exist? If you can’t answer that question, none of the others really matter.

Unfortunately, this has been one of the biggest questions man has ever asked and nobody has ever come up with a completely, 100% sure answer to the question. We can’t put God under a microscope and see him. At some point, you need to make the call yourself. But he doesn’t ask that you believe in him without evidence or argument.

There are many arguments for the existence of God that have been put forward over the centuries. Some of them are listed here.

Personally, I see the situation this way:

• Belief in some sort of god seems to be universal in human history. All cultures around the world have a religious history of some sort. In fact, the idea that God doesn’t exist is a relatively recent invention. And one might claim that even atheists have gods, but they’re called things like “environmentalism” (just another form of Gaia worship) and “humanism” (just a worship of themselves).

• Without God, there is no basis for morality. Killing your fellow man, sleeping with their spouse, and taking all their material possessions is just survival of the fittest. It’s no big deal. But we know that’s not true. In our heart, we know right from wrong. Where does that come from if God doesn’t exist?

• If there is no God, then there is no justice. There is no reason for the scales to ever balance and nobody to do the balancing. If you’ve suffered hurt in your life… tough luck.

If there is no God, then any behavior is justified. Murder? No problem. Genocide? It’s just murder on a bigger scale. Rape? No biggie, just perpetuating my dominant genes. Stealing? Hey, you didn’t watch your stuff. Child pornography? They’re just bags of flesh, and why shouldn’t I use them for my own pleasure?

Civilization is built on morality, and underpinning all that morality is God. If there is no God, then life becomes very brutish quite quickly.

Question 2: Is God the God of the Bible?

If you speak to your secular neighbor, they might tell you, “Okay, sure, but even if we believe in god in the abstract, why should we believe in the God of the Bible? Maybe god exists, but he’s one of the Hindu gods, or maybe all the Hindu gods exist. Or maybe the Native Americans got it right with the Great Spirit. Maybe he’s the Allah of Islam. Perhaps, god is just another word for a vague cosmic consciousness and we just need to meditate our way to Nirvana, as Buddha did. Maybe there is more than one way to heaven. Maybe they’re all sort of wrong and sort of right. Who’s to say?”

Well, Christianity is different than every other religion in several ways.

• There is no god but God (Yahweh). God claims exclusivity. There are no other Gods. Thus, Hinduism, naturalism, animism, and other theologies cannot simultaneously be true. Further, even religions that claim to worship the same God, notably Islam and Mormonism, portray him in non-Biblical ways and cannot also be true. Judaism is true as far as it goes, and in fact points the way to Jesus. Many Jews are also Christians and those two things are not in conflict.

  • “This is what the Lord says—Israel’s King and Redeemer, the Lord of Heaven’s Armies: ‘I am the First and the Last; there is no other God.’” Isaiah 44:6 (NLT)

• Jesus claimed to be the exclusive way to heaven. This cuts off the arguments that “All religions lead to the same place” and “Maybe there is more than one way to heaven” that your neighbor might say. They can’t all be right because Jesus stands in contradiction.

  • “Jesus told him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.’” John 14:6 (NLT)

  • “There is salvation in no one else! God has given no other name under heaven by which we must be saved.” Acts 4:12 (NLT)

• Jesus claimed to be God. Mohammad and Buddha didn’t. While Mohammad considers Jesus an earlier prophet than himself, the Quran says that Jesus performed miracles while Mohammad never did. Again, we can’t square these claims. They conflict.

  • “Jesus answered, ‘I tell you the truth, before Abraham was even born, I am!’” John 8:58 (NLT)

• Jesus was a true historical figure. We know that Jesus actually lived. We have extra-Biblical (outside of the Bible) histories written in the first hundred years after Jesus’s crucifixion that talk about Jesus and the early Christians. Both Josephus, a Jewish historian, and Tacitus, a Roman historian, mention Pilate and Jesus’s crucifixion. The earliest accounts of Mohammad come from the Quran. The sira and hadith were written hundreds of years after Mohammad died. Even the Quran was not standardized until hundreds of years after Mohammad’s death. These are all Islamic works, not independent. Similarly, with Buddha, the texts which mention him are hundreds of years after he died. To be clear, this does not mean that neither Mohammad or Buddha existed, but rather that there is more contemporaneous evidence confirming Jesus and the Biblical account of his death and the fact that his followers claimed he had been raised from the death than anything claimed by anybody else.

• Jesus’s claims are backed by Biblical prophesy. It’s one thing for somebody to come along and simply claim, “I’m god,” or even, “I’m a great prophet who talks to god.” The claims being made have a lot more weight when they’re backed by prophesies that come true. In the case of Jesus, scholars say he fulfilled between 300 and 570 different prophesies that were made hundreds of years, some more than a thousand years, before his birth. No other religious figure can claim this level of prophetic confirmation.

• We have extra-Biblical archaeological confirmation about things in the Bible. I wrote a post about the Moabite Stone a few weeks ago. This monument, created by one of Israel’s many ancient enemies, mentions King David, Israel, and Yahweh.

• Christianity is based on grace. Sometimes we tell ourselves that “people are basically good.” But in the next breath, we ask, “Why does God allow so much evil to persist in the world?” One of my favorite movies is Moneyball, and there is one scene where Brad Pitt, playing Billy Bean, asks his baseball scouts, “If he’s a good hitter, why doesn’t he hit good?” The same might be asked about people: If people are basically good, why isn’t the world basically good? Christianity speaks to the reality that people are fallen and corrupted. Therefore, they can’t find their way to God or Nirvana, themselves. God must do what we’re unable to do for ourselves.

So, I submit to you that if there is a god, he’s left a huge trail of evidence supporting the idea that he’s the God of the Bible. Surely, no other religion has such a trail of evidence.

Question 3: Do You Understand the Christian Bargain?

Many Christians struggle with worry and fear because they don’t fundamentally understand God’s promises to them. We don’t have time to unpack this today, so we’ll take a deeper look at this question in my next post.

A Prayer for Today

Holy Father, thank you that you’re not a God who is angry with us when we wrestle with our faith, that you want us to find answers and grow in confidence. Thank you that you have provided prophesy and evidence that helps us ground our faith on facts and reason. Help us to come alongside our brothers and sisters and encourage them to understand their faith more deeply. Help us to be bold in proclaiming your absolute truth to the nations and our neighbors. Finally, thank you for the sacrifice of your son that paid the penalty for our sins and provided a way back to you. Amen.

You can find Part 2 here.

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