Take from Outlaw Christianity Devotional: Finding Authentic Faith
If you are anything like me, then you have grown up believing that doubting or questioning God’s presence, goodness, power, or justice is sinful and shameful.
If doubt is the terrible sin we have always been taught to believe it is, then the dictionary definition of forsake suggests that the greatest sinner in the Bible is none other than Jesus himself. But of course, Christians do not consider Jesus a sinner or a blasphemer. So how can we explain that in Matthew 27:46, Jesus accuses God of not simply abandoning him but having ditched him entirely?
Is doubt about God’s presence and love, especially in times of deep suffering and loss, sinful? Who is right, Jesus, or the faith-laws that we have been taught? I don’t know about you, but I would place my bet on Jesus every time.
Outlaw Christians ask questions because we don’t believe the world should look the way it does. We doubt the world’s justice and God’s in-controlness of a world so out of control. In such a situation of suffering, greed, and inequality, we should be curious, unafraid to ask why all the time. When Jesus gets upset and knocks over the money changers’ tables in the temple, he claims that the religious folks have turned the house of prayer into a “den of robbers” by making profits off of selling sacrifices to the poor (Matthew 21:12–16). No doubt at the root of Jesus’ action is the question: Why are we allowing the rich to exploit the poor in the name of God? Such doubt gives new life to faith, because it makes us rise up, push for change, and knock over tables of injustice.
Without doubt, our faith is shallow and rootless. We fail to go down deep. Doubt is a sign of a healthy and deep-rooted faith, though most of us are taught to believe the opposite.
The opposite of doubt is not faith but resignation and its favorite cloak, passivity. People who accept the status quo are those who do not doubt that everything in the world is just as it should be—that all is according to “God’s perfect plan.” People who doubt, on the other hand, ask tough questions of themselves and of people in power, and these questions drive their activism. Doubt helps get us up off our duffs and get doing.
