Exchanging Certainty For Trust

I love Proverbs 3:5-6, not just because of how I read it now, but because of how different my reading now is from how I used to read it. The Bible is alive that way. Here it is, from the ESV:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
and do not lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make straight your paths.

My takeaway from those verses in high school was this: “If I believe in God (whatever that meant to me at the time) and ask Him for guidance on life decisions (like where to go to college), He will provide that guidance (He will tell me directly where to go to college, so I don’t mess it up).” I can’t say that’s a wrong reading, since some people may have had that experience, but in the years that have passed since high school, it has started to mean something more comforting.

I was raised in a faith tradition that called me to be certain about what I believed. And I was! I knew the tenets of my faith, was certain that they were correct, and had faith in God based on the correctness of those tenets. But as life has happened, as I moved out of my home and home churches, certainty felt out of reach. Doubt crept in to so many of those core tenets that I started to wonder if I had faith at all any more.

I know this experience is not unique. Life can do that to you. And I think the Bible tells us, and models for us, that this is okay.

Thank God for the Bible

In Judges 6, the Midianites were oppressing Israel to the point that the Israelites were forced to live in caves in the mountains. Here begins the story of Gideon, a man who was about to be called to lead the armies of Israel against the Midianites. Gideon was hiding from the Midianites in a winepress when an angel appeared and told him that God was with him. Here’s Gideon’s response:

"Please, my lord, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all his wonderful deeds that our fathers recounted to us, saying, 'Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt?' But now the Lord has forsaken us and given us into the hand of Midian.” (Judges 6:13, ESV)

I can relate. I’m glad that the Bible gives me people to relate to, not only to demonstrate how to praise and be faithful, but also to capture how great men in the story of Israel doubted God, despite the stories that had been passed down to them. There were times when I was certain that the stories and principles my parents and church leaders told me were true - a worthy foundation for my faith - but the metaphorical Midianites of modern Christianity found their way to me eventually. And it all started when I switched churches in 5th grade, and I realized not everyone thought about baptism the same way my family did.

To Baptize, or Not to Baptize?

The first church I remember attending regularly was a Salvation Army church in Illinois (yes, the Salvation Army is a church; all four of my grandparents were “officers”, i.e. pastors, in the church). The Salvation Army holds doctrine that would not be shocking to anyone familiar with the mainline, conservative, Protestant, Evangelical church.

Except for one glaring difference - they don’t hold sacraments as necessary. In fact, they avoid them. In my time at the church, I didn’t see a single baptism and we didn’t take communion once. They wouldn’t say that the sacraments are wrong, but rather that they are not necessary and are often not helpful for the believer, specifically when they are seen as necessary for salvation by those pursuing faith. Fair enough.

In 5th grade, we moved from Illinois to North Carolina, where I would attend a large Southern Baptist church (part of the Southern Baptist Convention) with my family until I graduated from high school. I probably don’t need to explain what they thought of baptism - it’s in their name. (Because of this, I didn’t get baptized until pretty recently; I was baptized at a Presbyterian church in early 2018.)

I thought about this a lot growing up. I met great Christian people at both churches. I heard the Bible preached every Sunday. I knew that God wrote the Bible to tell us things like this. So how did two churches that seemed to be genuinely pursuing the Christian faith end up at such opposite conclusions? Who had it right? I found the Baptist church’s arguments more compelling, especially because I was obsessed with theological correctness at the time and they appealed more heavily to scholarship, but I never really forgot what the Salvation Army church practiced, which seemed to be driven by genuine interest in removing barriers between people and faith.

This is the first thing about faith that I remember not “knowing”. I was not certain which of these two churches’ doctrines was right, or if either was right. But more “not knowing” was coming down the pipeline at me, with subject matter and questions that were far more consequential.

Here Come the Midianites

There was a time when I knew that the earth was about 6,000 years old. That’s all I had known, all I had been raised in. That came into question for me sometime in high school. I didn’t know anymore. At this point, I’m fairly confident in where I’ve landed on the question, but at the time it was really difficult for me to grapple with.

When I was younger, I never doubted that God was good. I knew He was good. I had read The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis, I could rationalize foreign wars and famines that were far off, which were as real to me as a sad movie or book. But then two friends and my pastor took their own lives, and I didn’t really know God’s goodness anymore.

There’s more, but you’re not here to read my entire journey of faith. You’re here for the point of this article. So let’s get to that.

There have been many subjects and questions that have launched me into periods of not knowing, both long and short, concluded and ongoing. And in many of those instances, the not knowing was foundation-shaking. I would work so hard to come to an answer because the answers to such questions were the core of my belief, the content of my faith. If I didn’t know what I believed, did I really have belief at all?

The not knowing was a crushing pressure. And it culminated in the one big question.

Did I know that Jesus was God? We have strong evidence that he existed, so that was never really in question for me. But how did I know he was divine, God willingly incarnated as a man out of love for humanity? I slowly realized that I didn’t know, and that I never would. There isn’t a way to have certainty, not in the same way that I’m certain that the sun is in the sky, even when it’s covered by clouds.

This is core. This is the question that actually needed an answer. Or maybe not an answer, but at least a solution. And I make that distinction because the solution was not a concrete answer to the question, but a reimagining of the question. Was I supposed to be certain, or was there an alternative? And in that new question, I found an answer.

I was never going to be certain, but I could choose to trust.

Lean Not On My Own Understanding

It has been a relatively recent realization that with almost all of these questions and “not knowing” situations, I was trusting facts, not God. Actually, I wasn't even trusting them, because there's no such thing as trusting a fact - I was certain they were true, and this served as the basis of my faith. I had identified my faith in God with my thoughts about God, which gave me a crippling preoccupation with believing the correct things. So when I wasn’t certain that I was believing the correct thing, I was lost.

My faith was defined by what I thought, not by the One in whom I trusted.

This was a revelation for me. I was able to let go of so many things that I knew - or, at least, that I was trying really hard to know. Was John Calvin more right, or Joseph Arminius? I am less sure about this now than I was in 9th grade, but I also care less. Which of my childhood churches was right? I think less about that now, and more about how blessed I am to have been raised in the positive aspects of those communities, and in my family that chose those traditions before me. It’s not that these things don’t matter, but they are no longer the object of my faith or a source of anxiety.

This is what I think about now when I think about Proverbs 3:5-6. I don’t try to lean on my own ability to figure it out anymore. When Jesus called us to “child-like” faith, I don’t think He was calling us to abandon rationality, but rather to trust Him about things that we can’t comprehend with rationality, in the same way I trusted my dad as a kid when I asked him why the sky was blue and he gave me an answer. I didn’t fully get the answer, but I didn’t have to - I just trusted that he had it, and that was enough.

At this point you may be thinking, “Well, duh, of course this is how it works!” And that’s good, because it means you don’t have this specific bagged. But others might be thinking, “If I assume this point of view, what do I stake my life on?” Or, to be more dramatic, “What am I willing to die for?” Well, for me, it’s exactly the same stuff; the same core, just with some fat trimmed off. Staking my life on the core tenets of Christianity doesn't necessarily mean I know for a fact they are true, it means I choose to live out the Christian faith because I trust that those things are true.

Faith certainly has content, and mine is no different. After all, I can’t really trust in God separate from thinking about what He is like. But I see it now more as a working model, not as things that I know for a fact. I have a set of things that I think are most likely right, but I am willing for those to be challenged and changed in the face of new evidence, strong arguments, or - most importantly - revealing experiences. And when those things get shaken, my faith is now less likely to waver, because my faith no longer relies on me thinking correctly about God.

I don't think God was ever asking me to be certain - where's the faith in that? He is asking me to trust Him. No easy task for someone who has tried to be certain his whole life.

No Fleece For Me

Like I said, I don’t read Proverbs 3:5-6 the same way anymore. Maybe God will give me guidance on the rest of my big decisions in life. That would be cool, and I would welcome it. But so far, life hasn’t really turned out that way. I don’t get fleeces like Gideon did, but he had a slightly larger task ahead of him, so I’ll let that slide.

I would welcome a fleece, but I also don’t put all of my hope in one now. I don’t feel like I have to be certain anymore. I don’t need to have all of the answers, I don’t need to get it all right. I don’t need to figure out if the Salvation Army or the Southern Baptist Convention is right about baptism (I mean, I have opinions, but what do I know?). I don’t need to know ahead of time what the right answer is to every challenge I’m going to face or to every theological question. I just need to trust in God, who has revealed himself to His modern people in the Bible written by His ancient people, in the person of Jesus 2,000 years ago, and in the Spirit’s presence with us now.

This frame of mind has led me to new, hard questions that I’m still grappling with, but I have peace in the fact that what I’m grappling with is just content, and that the One in whom I trust is more trustworthy than my own thoughts about Him could ever be.