Is God Enough?—Recognizing Doubt and What to Do About It
“The biblical story of faith I was spoon-fed as a kid and have done my best to somehow hold on to as an adult is not enough for the complexity of the world I actually live in. It’s not enough. I’m not enough, and I’m never gonna be. And I know I’m not supposed to say this, but God’s not enough either, and I’m beginning to wonder if he’s ever gonna be.”
Tyler Staton is the lead pastor of Bridgetown Church in Portland and author of Searching for Enough: The High-Wire Walk between Doubt and Faith. The quote above came from his pastoral counseling conversation with a man named (pseudonym) Andrew. It lays the foundation for the entire premise of the book: Is God enough?
Friedrich, Northern Sea in the Moonlight, 1823
The problem of doubt
Many of us in a postmodern world experience the difficulty of believing in what many perceive to be a fairy tale origin story for humanity, that works fine as long as it brings you comfort and doesn’t disrupt my lifestyle.
Some of us may be surrounded by people who are asking, “Is God enough?” or maybe even declaring, “God isn’t enough.”
Some of us may have grown up in a context where those around us perceived faith to be a weakness, a lack of reason and an out-of-touch view of reality. So, we felt the need to make our faith look and sound a little less delusional.
Some of us may have grown up in a context where everyone around us identified as Christian, and thus, we were unable to question and wonder and wrestle with our own doubts. So, we made sure to do and say all the right things to appear spiritually mature, all the while hoping the world outside wouldn't poke holes in that facade.
So, what do we, as people of faith, do with doubt? As much as we don’t like to admit it, everyone doubts. Even seasoned followers of Jesus. How do we explain how the world works, our place in it, and what it all means? How do we answer, “Is God enough?”
Those aren’t new questions, and there have been countless attempts at answers—both old and new.
How we’ve handled doubt so far
One example is Deism, a religious philosophy that sought to answer those questions in the 17th and 18th centuries. It claimed that the involvement of God in the affairs of humanity stopped after creation.
In the minds of many, God became reduced to a “watchmaker” analogy—where he was understood to have set the world in motion on certain reliable mechanisms or “natural laws,” before leaving it to fend for itself.
As one might imagine, this way of thinking saw Jesus as entirely problematic. That God would be a community of three loving, distinct persons is challenging enough for Deism. But that one of those distinct persons would relinquish all divine privileges and become a member of the creation in order to save it? Well, that would be absurd.
Deism is one path in recent history toward a kind of compromise between reason and religion, an explanation—as Staton puts it—for “the complexity of the world [we] actually live in.”
But let’s go back even further than that.
Doubt doesn’t just live in the hearts and minds of today’s deconstructing Christians or of the Enlightenment era’s Deists who saw reason and natural law as the alternative to the orthodox Christian view of God…
Doubt once lived among the neighborhood of nations surrounding ancient Israel.
Israel was led by the LORD-Yahweh’s instruction to live in vastly different ways than those other nations around them. The people of Israel worshiped one God and in worshiping him, they were forbidden from building idols or images to depict him in physical matter.
And this meant that the people of Israel faced a similar scenario as the one we’re discussing right now: what would they say about their God to the nations around them? Was the LORD enough?
The Israelites worshiped just one God who happened to be invisible or seemingly elsewhere, which was quite different from standard worship practices trending at the time (many gods, embodied by gold and silver). Psalm 115 records the people of other nations asking the people of Israel, “Where is your God?”
In other words… Is your God really enough?
So…Is God really enough?
The answer is found in Psalm 115 and in the whole of Scripture. God, who may seem at first glance to be absent—either by the view of Deism or of the neighborhood of nations—was actually continually involved in the affairs of humanity. Invisible, yet ever-present and active.
The same cannot not be said of the gods of other nations or of human philosophies that serve similar purposes as those ancient gods did.
Psalm 115 states that these idols “made by human hands…
have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see.
They have ears, but cannot hear,
noses, but cannot smell.
They have hands, but cannot feel,
feet, but cannot walk,
…nor can they utter a sound with their throats. Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them” (Ps 115:4-8).
Those who worshiped idols felt that their form of worship appropriately corresponded to the “complexity of the world [they] actually live[d] in.”
But the irony of idolatry was that while they could see and feel and speak to their idols, their idols couldn’t do the same.
Their idols couldn’t meet their needs.
Their idols were empty and powerless, not worth the metal they were made of.
In the end, for all the people’s worship, they still lacked. They weren’t enough, and neither were their gods.
As a result, those who worshiped these lifeless idols became lifeless themselves. What was true of the idols became true of them. And at times when the people of Israel turned from the living God to worship idols, their fate took a similar turn: though they had eyes, they could not see. Though they had ears, they could not hear (Is 6:10; Jer 5:21; Ez 12:2; Matt 13:15; Acts 28:27; Rom 11:8).
The good news
The good news? The opposite is also true. Those who do worship the LORD become like him.
Though he is “in heaven” (Ps 115:3) and “invisible” (Col 1:15) and a “mystery” (Eph 1:9); though “the world cannot receive him” (John 14:17), and though he uses things perceived to be foolish by the world to confound those who claim to be wise (1 Cor 1:27)… he is still more real and living and loving and powerful and tangible than the very silver and gold that formed the structures of ancient idols, than the watches and watchmaker that provided a bleak explanation for a distant God, than the doubts that ripple through the minds of a generation looking for something more than mere religion to meet their present-day needs.
Our God can do what none of those other things can.
The list of things that idols could not do were all things that the LORD Yahweh, the God of Israel and the Father of Jesus Christ, had already done for his people.
He speaks to us…as he did when he called, blessed, and made promises to Abraham (Gen 12).
He sees us…as he saw Hagar in distress, in the wilderness, and came to her rescue. She exclaimed, “I have seen him who sees me!” (Gen 16).
He hears us and responds to us…as he heard the outcry against the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah and brought both justice and mercy at the same (Gen 18-19).
He smells the sacrifices we make…as he smelled Noah’s sacrifice after the flood and made a covenant with him (Gen 8).
He feels and his hand is with us…even as Jacob wrestled with him and was blessed (Gen 32).
He walks with us…as he walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day and as he walked between the pieces of flesh offered by Abraham to establish another covenant—extravagant and unbreakable (Gen 15).
This is our God, and it’s what just one book of the Bible, Genesis, has to say about him.
This is the God about whom Joshua called all of Israel to make a decision: choose this day whom you will serve (Josh 24:14-15).
This is the God we must decide for ourselves to believe in and serve, in the face of doubt.
What will you decide?
I’ve had my share of personal wrestlings with doubt. Sometimes doubt scares the church. But hear this: your doubts don’t scare God. He wants to hear them. He wants to hear what you think you’re not supposed to say but what’s been burning in your heart for so long.
He wants to hear what you really think of him. He already knows it, but do you?
You can’t think better of God until you know what you think of him right now. Don’t worry, he can work with it.
Doubts are normal. Make space for your doubts. But not too much space. Wrestle with them, but don’t spend all your time in that fight.
There is a refuge even in the doubt, above the doubt, and it’s this: to trust God more than you trust your doubts. Trust God more than what you can see, hear, smell, feel—more than our modern day versions of gold and silver idols. Trust God even when you feel like you’re delusional or a fraud, reciting things you’ve heard but don’t know if you actually believe.
Be honest with yourself, but hold on and don’t let go of what you know in your head to be true, even if it takes its good, sweet time to finally sink into your heart.
Trust in the God who speaks, sees, hears, smells, feels, and walks with you. Even when you don’t know how to use your own senses to find him. He will find you. All you have to do is keep showing up. Keep coming back. Keep being honest in prayer. And a moment will come when you’ll see the God who sees you.
RESOURCES
If this hit home and you’d like support on this topic, I’d recommend finding a trusted counselor, friend, someone whose journey with the Lord you trust. Someone who you can be honest with, who will make space for you to wrestle with doubt guilt-free while still pointing you to Jesus. I’d also recommend checking out this book and/or this book and/or this book and/or this book. Read what resonates.
Remember: your journey doesn’t have to look like everyone else’s. And also remember: many times, our struggle with doubt is less about believing God is real and more about believing God knows us and loves us completely (Heb 11:6). Hold closely the messages of God’s love for you (Jude 1:21). Whatever doubts you face throughout your life, it is the environment and substance of his love that will protect, heal, and carry you. Blessings to you, my friend.
—Mattanah