Praying Through Doubt "Psalms" [5 of 5] Tim Mackie (The Bible Project) 7/21/2013

surely god is good to israel to those who are pure in heart but as for me my feet had almost slipped i had nearly lost my foothold for i envied the arrogant when i saw the prosperity of the wicked they have no struggles their bodies are healthy and strong they are free from the burdens common to man they are not plagued by human ills therefore pride is their necklace they clothe themselves with violence from their callous hearts comes iniquity the evil conceit to their minds know no limits they scoff and speak with malice in their arrogance they threaten oppression their mouths lay claim to heaven and their tongues take possession of the earth therefore their people turn to them and drink up waters in abundance they say how can god know does the most high have knowledge this is what the wicked are like always carefree they increase in wealth surely in vain have i kept my heart pure in vain have i washed my hands in innocence all day long i have been plagued i have been punished every morning if i had said i will speak thus i would have betrayed this generation of your children when i tried to understand all this it was oppressive to me till i entered the sanctuary of god then i understood their final destiny surely you place them on slippery ground you cast them down to ruin how suddenly are they destroyed completely swept away by terrors as a dream when one awakes so when you arise o lord you will despise them as fantasies when my heart was grieved and my spirit embittered i was senseless and ignorant i was a brute beast before you yeah i am always with you you hold me by my right hand you guide me with your counsel and afterward you will take me into glory whom have i in heaven but you and being with you i desire nothing on earth my flesh in my heart may fail but god is the strength of my heart and my portion forever those who are far from you will perish but you destroy all who are unfaithful to you but as for me it is good to be near god i have made the sovereign lord my refuge i will tell all of your deeds hey guys how you doing good welcome welcome to door of hope it's good to have you here um we are continuing in our series uh called the the language of prayer i have a lot of my mind right now and i couldn't even remember the name of the series that we're in right now psalms the language the language of prayer and for three months in fact we've been in the series uh and we have been turning kind of week after week uh using different psalms that assume and that speak to different life circumstances that we're in and kind of the whole basis was for the summer calling the whole church to prayer to cultivate the practice and the discipline it's not the happiest word but it's an accurate word because prayer is very much feels like a struggle or a discipline for for most of us and how do you in different life circumstance allow yourself not to just be overtaken by your circumstances or just be overtaken by emotion how do you learn the practice of praying through your life experiences of reflecting on them processing them pouring out the whole mess in front of god and we've been highlighting also week after week the the pride of place that the psalms give to our emotions in our prayer and psalm 73 what we are focusing on tonight is how uh assaf one of uh the priestly singers and choir singers in israel's ancient temple uh this poem is connected with him and he prayed through in a crisis and not just an emotional crisis but both an emotional and an intellectual crisis in his life he's he has extreme he's having a crisis of doubt doubt which i'm sure none of us have ever been there before so so here again the psalms speak to these universal human experiences and so what we have here this psalm 73 to me is so amazing because you just heard it read i want to just draw attention to the fact for all of us that we are reading the bible when we read psalm 73 somehow people's words doubting god have become god's words to doubting people and yes i did make that up and i'm quite proud of it but i just i again so we just kind of read oh yeah it's the bible whatever no dude think about that the bible contains within itself resources for doubting and processing through your doubts about everything that the bible says do you understand the significance of that this is very profound in other words the scriptures themselves recognize that this is all actually quite difficult to believe in the first place and so we include the experiences of people struggling to believe the same things that god's people have been trying to believe through the millennia and it's in the first line of this prayer surely god is good he begins with a statement of faith and then he goes on to talk about how he's not sure he can buy it anymore and then he talks about how he prayed through that experience and so you know i'm not sure i need to do a lot of work to convince us that this psalm is relevant because i'm guessing most of us have been here before and for different reasons as we're going to see the sources of his doubt are complex and usually the sources of our crisis of doubt are complex too but this is it's a profound it's a beautiful prayer that has huge huge resources to offer any of us who are in a crisis of doubt find ourselves there regularly or or have been in one or you haven't yet just be patient because it's coming right it's coming that's just part part and parcel of the deal and so let's uh let's dive in what we're going to do is we're going to see uh the the very profound way about how assaf unpacks the source of his doubt has a lot to teach us about what our doubts are and where they come from and then i think even more importantly he he explores with us about what to do with them how to process through them and address address our doubts so we've got ground to cover you guys ready for action all right sweet so he begins uh he begins with this statement that you know you could put it in quote marks you could maybe you wonder if he's saying a little sarcastically we're not sure he just begins and he says surely surely god is good surely god is good to israel to his people surely god is good to those who are pure in heart and so he begins with almost kind of the most generic statement you can imagine god is god is good and depending on who's saying that statement it could sound either very naive or very profound you know what i'm saying so someone who's at the very you know the last decade of their life they've been through incredible hardship and endurance they're still following jesus for that person to say god is good is very very different for you know a brand new like 18 year old convert to christianity last month reading the bible for the first time god is good same words very very different meaning and significance but this is one of the core confessions about the storyline of the bible is that god is good to to his people and it's not just that he's nice good is always defined by action and so for israel his pride god's goodness is always linked to the story of how he redeemed his people from slavery uh out of uh out of egypt and so on that foundation story of god's goodness to israel and so here's the good line here's the line that every every good believer is supposed to you know say back and we come to worship and god is good all of the time you know this kind of kind of thing and so there it is there it is that's the statement of faith that he begins with and then he says not so fast not so fast but as for me my feet had almost slipped i nearly lost my foothold for i was envious of the arrogant when i saw the prosperity of the wicked so he he cites the line that every good religious person knows and is supposed to say with a happy face and then he says okay i'm sorry i'm sorry god i gotta pull the rug on this one i i'm at a place or at least he was at a place where he just you could not say that with honesty anymore he's like i'm not sure if i've actually believed that anymore anybody been there and notice how he describes it the metaphors are really powerful he uses two metaphors here he just he says i wasn't able to say it anymore and he describes that experience as his feet almost slipping or almost losing his uh his foothold now again this is just bible and we tend to read it mindlessly or whatever not pay attention just stop and think about that image this is really really interesting so if you're walking down the side would you describe tripping on a sidewalk as slipping and losing your foothold if you're just walking down the street would you ever use those words no of course not what where what type of journey are you on if you're using this language to describe your experience it's not flat you're describing going up something like this right so this is interesting he's describing his spiritual journey as it were as like climbing extremely steep slope climbing a mountain or a rock face or something it's hard it takes effort and intentionality you don't just happen to say god is good and if you do you're not thinking about it in which case he's trying to shake you up and say and gate what do you actually understand what you're saying do you really believe what you're saying it's like climbing up a rock face to actually follow this god who we say is good and he said i came to a point where i almost slipped and i almost thought he didn't but he almost did and then the whole rest of the psalm is telling telling that story and so i think this is a provocative image to think about what doubt is he doesn't actually say the word doubt anywhere in the prayer he describes his experience and and we call it doubt but but look at what he's describing here so what if you're climbing a rock face which i've only done a few times because i had a roommate in college who would make me go rock climbing with him when none of his other friends could go with him and so and i was never very good at it and i always liked the idea until i was standing at the foot of the wall and then i'm like i want to go home right now so so you're climbing up you're climbing up a rock wall and in theory you know depending on how skilled you are you have a plan you've made a plan for what you're doing and you know where you're going you only you only you know put your your foot in your hand in a place where you've thought it through beforehand there you go and so what he's describing here is an experience where he had his route he knew what his next move was going to be and then something totally unexpected happened it didn't go well it didn't hold his balance it went a wonky way that he didn't anticipate something unexpected happened that you had no categories or preparation for and then you're like whoa and you're completely vertigo disoriented or something that's what he's saying and that's such a good image of doubt you have we all have our world views our way of seeing the world and you know jesus and god might play a significant role you might be at a place where you're like i want them to have a role but i don't know what that's supposed to look like yet i'm learning but somehow we all have our views of viewing the world and our life experience and then things happen to us that blow the categories and we're like well if jesus and god is good then how do i make sense of that because that i thought that kind of thing wasn't supposed to happen or you guys know what i'm saying here unexpected things happen to you and you have no categories for it and it disorients you it's like hanging all of a sudden on the rock wall and you can't get your balance and you didn't you didn't see it coming and that's such a powerful image of of doubt and and notice then what he says he moves right into reality from the metaphor what is what through him what did he not have categories for and he describes the experience that he had and it's in verse three there i envied the arrogant and why was he envying them what experience did he have the next word is the key it's the key he saw and what did he see and iv has he saw the prosperity of the wicked and the hebrew word he uses right here is actually the one hebrew word that everybody in the room knows anybody come on oh shalom it's shalom there you go shalom shalom it just means well well-being well-being and uh and abundance harmony wholeness prosperity so i saw people in the world experiencing shalom and as i won't read the description again that stephen did he goes on to describe these are people who they're self-promoting they're self-important they they abuse they mistreat they take advantage of other people to their own advantage they treat people like dirt they seem to see no level of accountability above themselves they do whatever they want either they don't think god exists or if they think god does exist he clearly is not going to hold them accountable for their behavior and they do whatever the heck they want and they're not just getting away with it they're actually living the good life they get shalom for this kind of behavior and he said i saw this he had an experience and not just he didn't just observe it look at verses 13 and 14. i mean he's really he's being really honest here he's like okay i thought god was going to be good to the pure in heart and i'm telling you i have been keeping my heart pure and i'm now wondering if it's worth it i'm not convinced that it's worth it really because what do these people they get shalom and what do i get what i get is affliction every day and punishments every morning so i experience life as punishment and plague and people who totally neglect god and and whatever give him the bird they're like getting shalom right they get shalom and affliction plague whatever has happened he's not this isn't abstract he's not just reading the newspapers here he's clearly had a personal experience that's called into question everything he thought he thought he believed do you see this he saw he observed and then verses 13 14 he's actually personally he doesn't say what it is his boss took advantage of him you know what i mean his neighbor his dog you know like ate his cow or something we don't know we don't know but he had some level of personal experience of real loss of affliction he describes it as plague or or punishment and he's like i just what this doesn't square with my what i say i believe about god and so he's just kind of like i don't know i don't know if it's worth it why am i doing this in the first place then if what i want to shalom then i should go be like be like those people and i think this is important i just we're just going to camp out here because what what he's describing here the word doubt in english i think for many of us we think of it as something that happens in your head and that's true it is happening in your head but what he's describing is something that's happening in his head but also in his heart and in his life experience in other words his doubt doesn't come simply from him learning a new idea his doubt is generated by a life experience that he has that he does not have categories for within his existing view of of god in other words human beings we're not just brains on a stick who are constantly and only rationally putting together a view of the world and new ideas come in and so that's not how humans operate there might be a few right and so they have no friends right and they live at the library or whatever so but even they're humans they're humans they are humans right so so are you but we're not brains on a stick and so all of our all of our struggles and our doubts so in psalm 73 come from both ideas but relationships life circumstances doubt comes from a whole kind of think of doubts your experience of doubt as being like a lake that's fed from all kinds of different streams and rivers and so any experience of real crisis of doubt and struggling you always have to stop and reflect and say to like not just what idea have i come across but what are my life circumstances right now we're not we're not brains on a stick and so what doubt is you could say it this way then at least what he's experiencing is that doubt he's had some kind of experience a life experience that is causing his heart to question the reality of what his mind says is true his mind and what he has been taught to say is god is good to israel he's good to those who are pure in heart but he's now had a relational experience a life experience that is it's not just about his ideas it's about his heart and volition and he's like i'm not sure i ca i can't buy this anymore the point is just we're complex creatures we're spiritual and psychological and emotional and relational and physical and hormonal and all of these things put together and crises of doubt are never just one of these it's always a hodgepodge and it's always said in our life our life circumstances which he doesn't specify and i actually think it's really great that he doesn't say like because my neighbor's dog ate my cow because then that would kind of rob the poem of connecting to anybody and everybody who's ever had this feeling it's precisely because he doesn't describe what happened that this psalm all of a sudden can become your prayer and my prayers does that make sense and so it's he's going through this this life this life experience now obviously this is a very unpleasant experience that he's coming through does he sound like he's having a good time clearly not it's clearly not but just because this crisis of doubt is an unpleasant experience does it mean that it's a bad experience and this very important i think for us to see into here would we have psalm 73 if he had not had this experience no i'm quite thankful that he had this experience actually because i'm glad psalm 73 exists in other words crises of doubt because of a life experience they rock our world they totally throw us off and they cause us to question everything that we thought that we knew there are some christian circles where that kind of experience is suspect and if you're having one of those types of experiences you might be viewed as sub-spiritual you know and you're you're probing you're asking questions maybe you're even kind of intense about the questions that you're asking truthfulness of the bible or about the character of god or about the historical truthfulness of jesus or the scriptures and you're like you're not letting up and some of you have come been in christian circles or you've known christians you're just like dude chill out just believe you know just believe and you know i don't know what else to say other than i just think that's total hogwash that's just total hot lodge right so there does come a point where there's a leap and he's gonna he's gonna talk about that and we'll talk about that in just a few minutes but faith does not come at the expense of our reason faith is not the opposite of reason in the scriptures what does paul say we walk by faith not by he doesn't say reason he doesn't say check your brain at the door he says we walk by faith not by the seeming appearance of things and dude if if the last hundred years in just like science discovery has taught us anything it's that the most basic things about reality that you and i take for granted every single day are not at all how things actually are you know i'm saying i've talked about this before this podium is more not here than it is here that's the scientific explanation of the molecules in this podium it's more not here there's more empty space here than there is matter you do know that most of our experience of physical reality is completely opposite of how it appears to us that's just the science of living in a material world and so this is this should not surprise us that faith is not opposite of reason it's actually built on reasonable claims namely the eyewitness claims that jesus rose from the dead that's the only reason any of us are here in the first place is because there were eyewitnesses to this claim that jesus rose from the dead but there comes a leap when all of a sudden i i can't prove that personally because i have to rely on eyewitness testimony and now i have to stake my life on something that i'm believing the truthfulness of somebody else there's a leap but it's an informed leap it's an informed leap and so faith is not the opposite of reason and so what what this forces us to do as christians is it forces us to move towards experiences of doubt not as sub-spirituality and not as like i'm not a good christian or something these are precisely moments of growth how many of you watch growing pains exactly right so so actually what i meant to say that was like the ultimate freudian slip because that was what what i want to say is how many of you remember growing pains right not the show not the show kurt cameron aside right so so i remember vividly in like my my early teens uh pre-adolescent years waking up in the middle of the night and you know like my legs are seizing you know and like my bones are not like keeping pace with the growth of my ligaments and so on in the middle of the night just ah it's like there's a knife stabbing how many i don't know boys do you remember this growing pains i know girls did girls have it too i don't i have a sister i never asked her though so i think it's kind of a human thing it's it's actually unpleasant to grow isn't it it's not pleasant it involves actually quite a lot of pain and so it could be that you're at a point in your journey of following jesus where the explanations and the ways of reading the bible that made sense to you like three years ago they're not going to work anymore and that's not a sign of you losing faith that's not a sign of you being sub-spiritual it's because you're growing and actually your faith needs to catch up with your growth as a human being it means you need to learn some new ideas you actually maybe learn need to learn to read the bible in a more informed or learn some new skills in reading the scriptures you need you see what i'm saying here it's a part of growing if faith means anything it's faith in changing and not saying the same and so i think this is incredibly important for we wouldn't have psalm 73 if he hadn't had this experience it was clearly very unpleasant but thank god that he had this experience you know what i'm saying and so what if you could process the crisis of doubt that you're in one day as actually thanking god for it because of how you this is how you grew you saw it as an opportunity to to grow and there's a uh there's a poet um i don't read poetry avidly but uh you guys know uh reiner maria rielke yeah letters to a young poet anybody there josh knows it so it's one of the most famous quotes from this book but i i think he really gets at the heart of the issue here he says he's writing to a young man who had written him who aspires to write poetry and he's like the senior poet writing to a young man he says i would like to beg you dear sir as well as i can to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language don't search for the answers and i don't quite agree with that but i like everything else he's saying don't search for the answers which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them and i do agree with that the point is to live everything so live your questions now and perhaps then someday far in the future you will gradually without even noticing it live your way into the answer it's coming from a poet and you can tell right and it's poet and he knows it so so in other words so i think we should look for answers but what we should reckon is that i'm gonna i'm growing and changing and so it might be that struggling with this question and realizing like resolution might be a decade out from me that might be the best thing for you actually is to sit with that question and to lean into your faith as we're going to see lean into your community of faith to lean into jesus in a new and more personal way and all of a sudden 10 years later you may realize yeah it's not really that big of an issue for me anymore but look at the growth in your life as you wrestled with it like that's what that's what assaf is getting at here we can see this process and so how does he how does he move towards his his doubts doubts are complex they're multifaceted they happen when life experiences make us doubt make our hearts doubt what our minds say we believe so he's dangling from the rock he's dizzy how does he move towards it and there's at least four moves that he makes there's actually some more but i think these four are really profound and we're going to move towards them it's kind of four moves he makes towards his doubt how we make some progress look at verse three and this is this is really quite quite amazing cue the motorcycle every week i'm not telling him just it's amazing it's amazing look at verse three verse three in many ways it's actually something of a confession isn't it he says i envied the arrogant when i saw the prosperity of the wicked here the first step that he takes at least the way i would put it is that he deconstructs his own doubt he becomes skeptical about his own skepticism in other words what he does in verse 3 is he he really probes honestly his motive for this that moment of doubt that he had what's his real motive here is this purely just an issue of justice for him and that god's character is called into question and that the innocents suffer is that really the issue for him according to what he says in verse three look at verse three what does he say is that really the core of the issue it's not it's not he'd like to say it is and maybe in a debate he'd like to say it is but it's not what's the real issue according to verse three he's jealous he's jealous in other words he he actually has a real raw personal character issue that's motivating this crisis of doubt for him and and so so envy it's it's this is a boring description of it would be it's something that's negative emotional energy that gets aroused when i feel like i don't not getting what i deserve in life i feel like i'm entitled to something it's not happening that's envy and specifically there's usually a target there's someone who's experiencing what it is that i think i deserve now is is that primarily an intellectual crisis of doubt no that's that's a heart and character issue and so i think what assaf he's almost confessing here is even the origins of his own doubt while it might be about god's character and god's goodness he really is admitting he's deconstructing his own doubt he's being skeptical about his skepticism is this really an honest issue that i'm wrestling with well actually if i am honest there's a lot of streams feeding into the lake that is this complex world that is my doubt and one of the major streams flowing into that is that i'm i'm just straight up jealous i'm jealous there's a whole bunch of people living in the world the way that i think i ought to live because after all i've been keeping my nose clean right i've been doing the religion thing right he's the priest for goodness sakes you know i've been keeping my heart pure washing my hands in innocence god can i get a little payoff here and there's like the mafia dawn down the street and he lives on this you know palatial estate and he's you know got pools and this and what's you know what's the deal i'm a levite i don't get anything right he doesn't even have any inheritance in the land and so he's really honest with that and so i think this isn't this is very difficult and i'm not i'm not even sure i can tell you to do this to yourself but we have to somehow do some some raw heart searching to say what it what's my vested interest here i say i can't believe this particular thing about the bible or about jesus is it possible in any way there's some other issue and this is just the smoke screen absolutely for me when i sat and skated church for three years listening to the message every single week it was not like intellectual objections that was keeping me from from becoming a christian absolutely not it was like i wanted to do what i want with my time there was my friends were having a blast every single weekend with all kinds of different substances didn't want to miss out on that you know what i'm saying i had all these things and i knew that following jesus would require all kinds of life transformation in me that i was not interested in but i used the smoke screen of the questions that i just wasn't sure about not ready to commit yet and so it might be other people that need to see that in you but if they point it out to you might actually get ticked at them anyway because it's a smoke screen so but there you go you have to always if you're honest honestly wrestling through your doubt you have to be skeptical of your skepticism you have to deconstruct your own doubt which is precisely what what he does let's keep going isn't it isn't psalm 73 awesome this is so raw i think it's awesome i hope that's rubbing off look at verse verse 15 he has this is kind of the key turning moment in the prayer he says if i had spoken out about all this he's a leader in in the religious community he says if i had spoken out and just said i'm done done with this ditch the whole thing none of this is true he said if i'd spoken out like this i would have betrayed a whole generation of your children he recognizes that his own faith is actually connected to the well-being of other people's faith and he said i tried to understand this it troubled me deeply until i entered the sanctuary of god then i understood there that is the wicked's their final destiny now again this is so interesting he went to church i said what does he say he went to church kind of but not really so what he's talking about is you know the the sanctuary the temple in jerusalem which would have been was perpetually full of pilgrims people going there it wasn't just where sacrifices were taking place so that's true if you look at descriptions of what's going on in the temple in any given day i mean there's there's singing there's choirs there's whole like rooms and parts of the temple that are full of classes and people learning torah and teaching and debating and dialoguing there's people just spending there's people spending time up there there's people worshiping courts for prayer there's hundreds hundreds of people all around constantly all day all night and so what he's saying is that he immersed himself in a community of faith of worship of prayer of learning and somehow immersing himself in that brought the key turning moment and again he doesn't say what that is and i'm kind of thankful for it because he leaves it open he leaves it open and i think a way to summarize what he's saying here is that he immersed himself in a community of faith experience remember doubts aren't just ideas they come from a life experience if you want to address a real doubt in your life and move towards it and engage it you're not going to think your way out of it you didn't get into it just by thinking and you're not going to get out of it just by thinking you need to immerse yourself into community of worship and of learning and of faith and of of prayer if the object of our faith is not a thing if it's a person if we believe and trust in a person then it also of course i'm not going to think my way out of this you know what i mean i can rearrange like the furniture in my head all day long about my wife that absolutely does not replace going and seeking out to talk to my wife i can think about her all day long and i'd like to she's actually really wonderful a wonderful person who is not getting any sleep these days by the way this little baby but that's okay and so i could think about it all day long and but that never replaces actually seeking her out and seeking her out in the context of the little community that is that is our family and that's what that's what he's getting at here and so who knows what that means what did he go and immerse himself in the scriptures did you go and pray and meditate did you go join a chorus of song that was singing truths that reminded him of who god really is and helped him process we're not told but if doubts arise from a life experience that throw you off then what you need to do is immerse yourself in another kind of experience that'll help you process from every different kind of angle and so if it is a set of ideas if it is a set of intellectual questions then go find the intellectuals in your community i guarantee you're not the only one asking the question that you're asking i guarantee it i mean this is a 3 000 year old poem and he's asking questions that every one of us is asking today you know what i'm saying if if it's a matter if if his heart is moved primarily by by his emotive side then going and joining in song and meditation and prayer might be precisely what he needs maybe he just straight up feels alone what i'm saying so i can't i mean i don't even know how many cups of coffee i've had somebody's super struggling in their faith they have questions who are you talking to about this are you in any kind of reading group to maybe read some books about your question no i actually kind of quit going to church well ago i don't really have any christian friends you know well duh like duh you know what like put two and two together you're in a life circumstance that's gonna be corrosive to you in the season of dao you need to go to the temple immerse yourself in in a new community which is precisely what he does he goes to the temple and he reshapes his mind you might you might be like in a class setting or something and you know you've encountered some new uh some new blogs or websites or reading some books or something about the history of christianity and it just totally throws you off but think of what's really going on there you probably have a teacher who has an axe to grind against christianity in the first place there's probably a whole bunch of other students like that too and you're afraid to say that you're the christian in your classroom or in the workplace and you're meeting all these other intelligent people maybe who are even more moral and nicer than you are and they don't believe in god at all that's an experience you know thing and you're not going to think your way out of that you need to enter into the temple i'm riding this horse really hard but i really think it's important you guys with me here because we don't we don't do this we do at least i've known many of people who don't do this and they don't they don't deconstruct their doubt they don't immerse themselves in a community to move towards their questions and they fade they just go off the map and they certainly never get to the next place which is what he does next and i think this is this is really really important look at verse 18 he says surely you place them that is the wicked you you place them on slippery ground you cast them down to ruin now this is good poetry right here what did he say about himself and his own experience of doubt do you remember how did he describe it what did he say i almost i almost slipped i almost lost my foothold but he moves towards his doubt he deconstructs his doubt he immerses himself in a community and then all of a sudden he realizes that the people that represented this this opposite view that were making him question everything he realizes like okay i say that god is good and there's injustice and suffering in the world okay that's a problem i got to work through that but if i actually compare my foothold to their foothold they're way worse off their way because they reject god altogether do you see what i'm do you see what he's doing here he's comparing footholds you could say and you you especially in our cultural setting you absolutely must learn how to do this our culture wants to press it on us that the opposite of faith is reason right or that you there's belief or unbelief and that's just a complete it's it's just a farce it's what it is it's belief versus belief the only way that you question a belief in in scriptures or in christianity is because you are standing on some other truth claim by what you're saying is superior to the truth claim of the gospel or of christianity it's not like there's some neutral place where oh this is always true and then there's like the belief that we're not sure is true that's utterly ridiculous there's belief and then there's other beliefs and you need to compare them you need to compare them and this is this is a crucial skill to learn in 21st century american culture you're going to sink i'm not joking you're going to think if you don't learn how to think in our culture as as a christian and this is not about being super bookworm intellectual this is learning how to process process your faith i can't put it uh better than sheldon vanakken anybody sheldon vardaken a severe mercy he talk it's a friend of c.s lewis as he talks about his own conversion as a young adult in college years to christianity and here's here's how he puts it and i cannot put it any better he says when it came to believing in christ there was a gap between what was possible and then what could be proved it was possible that jesus is god and that this is all true it's possible but can it be proved i don't can't prove it so there's this gap and so he says how am i supposed to cross that gap if i'm going to stake my whole life on the risen christ i would like some proof i wanted certainty i wanted letters of fire across the sky and i got none of these he says so i continued to hang out about the edge of the gap but then came my second breakthrough and this is it he says the position was not as i had been comfortably thinking all these months that there was only a gap before me my god there was also a gap behind me now too there might not be certainty that christ was god and so that would require a leap but by god i had no certainty or proof anymore that he was not god and so therefore to go back would now require a leap of faith as well do you see what he's saying here this is a british way of putting it this was not to be born he says i saw that i could not now reject jesus without a great leap of faith and once i saw that leap of faith behind me i flung myself over the gap towards jesus do you see what he's saying here this is crucially important whenever you're in a moment of doubt you're doubting about your forward movement towards christ but you always have to deconstruct it out and say on what other belief am i standing on by which i'm saying that's a ridiculous leap of faith there's some other faith belief that you're believing in and whether it's faith in somebody else's view of reconstructing history and that jesus never really was who he said he was then dude like go talk to somebody about whether or not that guy you heard on npr is actually saying something that's legit you know saying oh no actually he's totally weird he doesn't even have a phd and he's like saying you know what this is totally how i can't tell you how many cups of coffee i've had like this you know and so it's never belief versus unbelief it's belief versus another belief and so i wanna i wanna belabor it just because i'm up here in your captive audience now but uh he he's struggling he's struggling through the issue of injustice and suffering which i think is one of the most formidable kind of challenges in following jesus it's a hard one to work to work through but just let's just do it really quickly because it's actually not very difficult if if the reality of injustice and suffering is a problem for the christian i would argue it's actually even more of a problem for for the atheist or for the non-christian and here's why i'm going to quote a philosopher and that'll be boring and i'm going to quote andy dillard and that will be awesome okay so so alvin plantinga he puts it uh he puts it this way he's a philosopher at uh at notre dame in indiana he says the most appalling kinds of human evil and wickedness they're a problem for anybody who believes in god but they're at least as big if not a bigger problem for people who don't believe in god you've heard again you've probably heard of the problem of evil against the existence of god have you heard about the problem of evil as an argument for the existence of god it's quite prominent in philosophy circles it just doesn't seem to sell on the media and so it never makes it but it's actually he's about to explain it these are the only two alternatives can there even be such a thing as evil and wickedness if god does not exist and we are all here only by random chance i don't see how an atheistic view of the world has no logical place for genuine moral obligation the strong eating the weak is completely natural you have no foundation for saying it's wrong or evil therefore if you think that there really is such a thing as good and evil that's not just an illusion you have a very powerful reason to believe in god now there's a philosopher talking do you get did you follow that do you see it it's quite compelling right it's it's a classic example of sawing off the branch that you're sitting on if injustice and suffering in the world outrages you and makes it so you can't believe that a god exists it you have to go back and say okay but where did i get the idea that the universe should be a just good place in the first place you know and then all of a sudden the thing that outraged you actually assumes that you believe in god to be outraged and if god doesn't exist then you might not prefer to be eaten by a lion or something and you might not prefer for people to rob your house but please don't say that it's wrong what a ridiculous thing to say if there's no such thing as morality you know what i mean if we're just molecules bumping into each other you have to compare footholds okay that's philosopher's way of putting it andy dillard is much more sarcastic and funny she says there's not a person in the world who behaves as badly as praying mantises okay sorry here's the context this pulitzer prize winning book she went to go spend a year in a cabin isolated cabin by by tinker creek as kind of like a refreshing break and to write a book and so she she wrote a book talking about this whole experience and what she walked away with is nature is incredibly unforgiving of violent a violent place right where the strong devour the weak and then the book kind of what does it mean to be a human being if the whole world is like this she says there's not a person in the world who behaves as badly as praying mantises but wait you say there's no right or wrong in nature right or wrong is a human concept it's exactly exactly we are moral creatures living in an amoral world consider the alternative that this is just a human feeling that's freakishly amiss all right then we are the freaks and the world is normal so let's all go have lobotomies and restore us to a natural state and we can leave lobotomized and go back to the creek and live on its banks untroubled as any muskrat or weed you first right do you see that you can see the point she's made that's a way better way of saying what alvin plantica said right here she's comparing the foothold so you have to learn how to do this when you come across doubts oh they seem really smart they seem like they've read a lot what dude like use your brain or at least go talk to someone else who uses their brain and you realize like oh actually that's not so like airtight of an argument as i thought it was this is especially living in cities where you're constantly surrounded by people who think and live totally differently than you do and they really want to let you know about it you will either have these crisis and you fade or you will go stronger in your faith because you'll learn how to how to compare footholds how you guys doing verse 21 this is the final thing that he does let's ride this horse home he says when my heart was grieved and my spirit embittered i was senseless and ignorant i was a brute beast before you does he sound like he's having a good time he's hit bottom here he's he's just totally he's he's bitter he's grieved he feels like an animal i can't make any sense of my life experience anymore and riot where he feels so alone and brutish and where he feels viscerally god's absence what does he find there yet right there in that place he comes to this realization i'm always with you in fact you've always been holding me by my right hand you guide me with your counsel and afterward you'll take me into glory whom have i in heaven but you here on earth there's nothing i desire besides you you can hear an echo of his envy here wrestling through this journey of doubt deconstructing it realizing he's actually just quite a jealous man and then when he compares the footholds he's come to see that actually the only good thing he has is the nearness of this god whose commitment has been for him all along even when he was a brute beast wallowing in his doubt god's right there holding on to him he says my flesh and my heart may fail god is the strength of my heart and my portion forever those who are far from you will perish you destroy the unfaithful but as for me it is good to be near god now this is this is beautiful he began by saying surely god is good to israel by which what he now realizes he believed is god is supposed to give like the benefits and the hookups to his people all of the time and then that didn't happen and all of a sudden his doubt and his crisis has stripped away all of his assumptions it stripped away his envy and his jealousy it's reduced him to just being he's just a brute human being before the creator god and precisely when he thought god was absent he realizes that was the form of god's presence in his life to bring him to this place of dependence and relationship and all of a sudden he's overwhelming with this with this intimate relational language it's as if this experience of doubt is actually the best thing that could have ever happened to him and so what does it mean to experience the goodness and the nearness of god when you're feeling embittered and grieved and ignorant and senseless and like a brute beast what does that mean and at least i'll just speak for me personally and this is where i've had to go and this is actually where i want to encourage us to go with the time that we have left is that god's we need to look sorry i forgot to say my whole summarizing point i would stop by this point by saying we need to look for god's presence in his absence think of the garden of gethsemane right where jesus he's on his knees he's crying in this garden all of his friends are asleep right they're going to run away from him when he gets arrested in just a few hours and he quotes a number of different psalms he says i'm so grieved i could die right now he says twice father i don't want to do this he's experiencing a deep absence of god's presence and human evil is about to reign in on him and crush him physically literally but it's precisely right in that moment where jesus experiences god's forsakenness that is the moment where god is meeting all of us in our moment of need it's in the it's in the hours that followed that jesus experience of god forsaken us became god becoming god forsaken with us in order to redeem and to conquer our god forsaken us by his love and so for me the garden of gethsemane has become this place where i have to go and kneel beside jesus when i have crises of doubt and and recognize like i was not here first jesus was kneeling here before me and so here i am again i'm a small human being i had this experience or i have a question i don't know what to do with it the world's really screwed up i'm really screwed up i have all i don't even know my motives for asking this question or having this crisis in the first place and what are you going to do you kneel beside jesus in gethsemane and as you experience god's absence that is itself the experience of god's presence and all you're wallowing and i'm a brute beast i'm senseless and i'm ignorant and then all of a sudden you realize jesus is right there holding your hand kneeling alongside you grieving over the state of the world with you and he has the power to do something about it amen and so i don't know where you're at you know so many different stories but um you know as we go to the bread and the cup tonight some of us need to kneel beside jesus at gethsemane and you need to examine your heart and your motives you need to you need to write down like a to-do of who you're going to call and how you're going to immerse yourself in a community of faith or conversations with people how you're going to compare footholds how you're going to join jesus in gethsemane but he's there precisely when you don't think he is that's the paradox of gethsemane of the cross so let me pray for us as we move into worship and as we go towards the bread in the cup you

Channel: Bible Nerds & Tim Mackie Fans

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Published: Wed Jan 13 2021