Have you ever experienced a crisis of faith (assuming you had faith in the first place)?
Maybe there was a time that you looked at yourself in the mirror and said, “How long are you going to believe this stuff? God sending His Son to earth, so that He can die and then come back to life, so that we can live forever?"
If this has happened to you, welcome to my world. It happens frequently to me. As a matter of fact (and allow me to be vulnerable here), one of my worst fears is that when I die and pass into the next world, I’ll go toward the light and say, “Jesus?!” only to be greeted by, “No, not Jesus. I’m Buddha!”
Seriously, though, I feel I know far too much for my own good. Scripture seems to contradict itself in a number of places. A council of humans decided which books would compose the Bible, hundreds of years after the books were written. Countless wars were started in the name of Christ, with Christians attacking Muslims, Catholics attacking Protestants, and Protestants attacking Catholics. All these things pose a realistic challenge to the faith I had as a child.
I have come to realize that I have not been alone in having doubts that Jesus rose from the dead. In fact, one of His own followers, Thomas, when told what had happened, skeptically remarked, “Unless I can see Him and touch Him, I will not believe.” This man, who was surrounded by eyewitness testimony, had so much trouble being convinced that the impossible had happened.
Soon, Jesus appeared to Thomas and said some of the most comforting words I have found in Scripture: “Blessed are those who have not seen, and still believe.” Those words summarize one of my deepest hopes—that someday I will see Him, and He will call me “Blessed,” because I believed something that makes absolutely no sense to me, outside the fact that everyone needs something to believe in.
So if you were to ask me if there is life after this one, I would tell you, “I don’t know.” I don’t know who gets to go to heaven and who does not. I don’t know how the world was made. I don’t even know if there is a God. I don’t know…but I believe.
Next week: Dan's Heresy #1: What really happened in the Garden of Eden!
2 comments:
hey, dan what you said in this article sums up my first sermon. it points right where it should. it draws the line between knowledge and faith. it helps show us how crazy it is for us to put our faith in something that we really will never be able to understand and comprehend. faith will always be summed up by what we do not know and cannot see. it is kind of interesting how something that happened two thousand years ago can seem so irrelevant but yet relevant at the same time.
Dan~ great thoughts! I feel like you were able to say what many are thinking these days. I'm excited to hear more...I'm sure Dr. Bounds would be proud to see you'll have some "heretical thoughts" up on the blog :).
Jess Dvorak
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