A Thomas-like Faith

I often wonder how different life would be if God gave me everything I asked Him for.
Knowing the inclinations of my own heart, I can safely say that I’m glad He hasn’t. One would think that we should be happy to always get what we prayed for…but that’s not always the case. Sometimes, you wish God didn’t give you what you wanted…you wish you could give it back, that there was some type spiritual mulligan you could cue.

Sometimes God answers bad prayers.

What dominates my prayers…and what I would suspect dominates most people’s prayers is the petition for faith. Faith is elusive; Belonging to Jesus is frustrating for this very reason. We are called to believe in the outrageous, the absurd with that which we don’t, in and of ourselves, possess. It’s impossible, which is sort of the point. Anyone who thinks that Christian faith is inherently rational, who thinks it can be aptly explained by nice clean-cut modernistic terminology and tidy little boxes of logic, is in denial. Our constant struggle against doubt and unbelief is evidence of this fact; if our faith was half as reasonable and sensible as we all pretend that it is, this struggle wouldn’t exist in the form that it does.

So we pray. We pray fervently. We go through seasons where we think we’re okay, where we feel like we stand established. Then, in what seems like the very next moment, we feel helpless and lie bare with no faith to give. So we plead to God, asking for faith and we should. Faith is good thing to want.

But often, faith isn’t what we’re really after. Faith isn’t enough. What we are really asking for is certainty; to be completely sure of what we perceive to be an “objective” reality. This is far different. The certainty we want provides immediate gratification as opposed to faith which calls us to endure. While certainty gives us complete intellectual rest and a guaranteed reprieve from anxiety, faith calls us to fight, and to willfully subdue anxiety as its very expression. Certainty knows based on quantitative amounts of “proof” and the application of logical constructs. Faith “knows” simply by way of hope. A great hope. It’s a hope that will be realized, that will be sight, but it is a hope nonetheless. Simply put, certainty ends the struggle. We don’t want to overcome doubt; we want doubt to cease to be a possibility.

This desire is by no means wrong. I think we can all admit that we get tired. We all have had times where we’ve grown worn and weak from the fight with sin…and we want to be completely sure that this isn't all in vain. We want to be absolutely sure of who we are and who God is. This type of certainty though, is reserved for heaven, not earth. It’s not wrong to want, we just want a good thing too soon. We miss it entirely when we try to blend the concepts of faith and certainty into one. Faith, rather, is to act upon the unyielding hope of the certainty we’ll attain in heaven.

The problem with viewing faith in this light is that it’s tremendously unsatisfying. No one can honestly say that they’d prefer a hope of what may be over the complete assurance of a present and future reality. This fact leaves us wanting. Ours souls groan with the rest of creation, wanting a perfect, redeemed existence; One that is free from anxiety, that is free from doubt; a reality where we can rest. Humanity has been after this end since the Garden. We pray for faith. What we really want is sight.

When thinking on this issue, my mind wanders to one person in particular: Thomas. If ever there was someone who really understood this struggle, it was him. He has always been a man with whom I both empathize with and envy because, like none of us, Thomas had his prayer answered. Here’s a guy that was honest; He wasn’t asking for faith, he was asking for proof and without that proof there was no way to he was ever going to believe that Jesus had been raised from death. He boldly asked for what we so often disguise as a plea for faith. He demanded certainty. And then the unbelievable happened. Jesus showed up.

I think of what it must have been like for Thomas in that moment. To be in a state of utter despair and total faithlessness, to the point where you cry out “I will not believe unless!” Then, in the very next moment, Christ is there in front of you; Your risen Lord, looking straight into your eyes. What must he have felt? To be able to touch a living Jesus with his bare hands after he had seen Him brutalized days before must have been an ineffable experience.There isn't a more numinous encounter in all of history than when Thomas finds his certainty in the nail marks in Christ’s wrists and the hole in Christ's side. Thomas says the only thing one could say after having his hand in the side of the Savior: “My Lord and My God!”

Anyone who has ever battled unbelief would give anything to be in Thomas’s place. Anybody who has felt like they were one doubt away from being abandoned, who has prayed that desperate prayer to just to know that God was there, dreams of the day when, like Thomas, they will be able to reach out and touch Christ. Many, including myself, would consider Thomas to be the most blessed of people. But here’s the kicker: according to Jesus, we would be wrong. What Christ says to Thomas next seems insane:

“Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those that have not seen and yet have believed.”

What?

We, who have never even seen Jesus, are more blessed than Thomas, the man who touched the very wounds of the resurrected Christ?

Insane...but true.

This gentle rebuke of Thomas for his need of certainty serves as a rebuke to all of us. With one sentence, Jesus turns the whole story on its head. Where we would identify with Thomas and even envy him for the certainty he was granted, Christ calls us to leave behind such a pursuit. Why?

The matter comes down to what you place your faith in. Do we trust in certainty, and our own ability to discern what that certainty is, more than we trust in Christ? The issue isn’t that there are some things in this world that we can be certain of and other things that require faith. The issue is that everything is a matter of faith. There isn’t one aspect of our existence as self-conscious beings that doesn’t rely an underlying presupposition about the world around us. Thomas’s error wasn’t that he lacked faith per se, it’s just that he lacked faith in Jesus. He trusted his own fallen senses over the internal witness of the Holy Spirit. This is why our longing for certainty will never be satisfied in this life; certainty can’t exist in a fallen world.

That last fact (that our way of knowing, what philosophers call our epistemology, has been busted since the Fall) discouraged me for a very long time. If this true, that means that we’re all very helpless.

And we are. That’s the point. God has allowed us to be totally helpless in every respect. We really have no choice but to look to Him. By calling us to faith and not to certainty, God has made it so we must be completely dependant on His interference in our world for any aspect of our lives to make sense. It’s when we reach this state of complete dependency on God that we are released from the burden of certainty and free to trust in God.

Thomas prayed a bad prayer and God answered, to teach him and to to teach us about faith. So what can we do with this desire for absolute certainty? Where do we go? There’s not an easy answer to that question this side of our very brief lives. One thing we can know is that faith is adequate. It has to be. The truth is that God doesn’t want to give us certainty, at least not yet. Can we “know” anything about God? Yes. We just have to be sure to let the Bible define that word and not traditional Western thought. Our Christian faith is exactly that: faith. And while we are on this earth, God wants us to wait, to hope and to trust Him. As we do, we can say with Paul:

“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”