In reply to my article, Was Jesus Lying, on substack,
Daniel: This is an intriguing topic to explore. Such thoughts often receive a sharp dismissal, “Your faith is wavering,” but as you rightly point out, this is a reality for many. Does it alter the nature of God as an entity? I don’t believe so. However, these questions persist in my mind. It’s one of the topics I would undoubtedly seek His wisdom on in eternity regarding our lives on Earth, as it sometimes seems unfair, yet we persevere.
This is the reply I have written back.
Hi Daniel. First of all, thank you so much for such an elaborate and personal response. This one here shaped up out of C. S. Lewis’s Letter XI to Malcolm (from the book, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer) As do all the ones I have read so far, Letter XI also tackles a difficult subject as regards petitionary prayer; faith, and the apparent reality that we don’t always receive whatever we ask. As it is, Jesus himself asked of the Father what He(the Father) wouldn’t give, and indeed He, before giving up His spirit, cried, “my God, my God why have you forsaken me?” Our Saviour’s experience in Gethsemane, and on the cross, deceptively seems easy to explain: it just wasn’t God’s will to grant the request. C. S. Lewis then asks if we are always to add the clause, ‘if it be thy will’, to every prayer we make? The Lord’s will isn’t always so clear to us, and when it is, we desperately would want it to be different. Like Jesus we often seek if there’s perhaps a chance that the cup could pass. Don’t we now see it isn’t as easy as we had at first thought? For then, what happens to our faith in the context of such a stark likelihood of a refusal, or indifferent silence?
I am reminded of Frederick Buechner’s words:
If you tell me Christian commitment is a kind of thing that has happened to you once and for all like some kind of spiritual plastic surgery, I say go to, go to, you’re either pulling the wool over your own eyes or trying to pull it over mine. Every morning you should wake up in your bed and ask yourself: “Can I believe it all again today?” No, better still, don’t ask it till after you’ve read The New York Times, till after you’ve studied that daily record of the world’s brokenness and corruption, which should always stand side by side with your Bible. Then ask yourself if you can believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ again for that particular day. If your answer’s always Yes, then you probably don’t know what believing means. At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so. The No is what proves you’re human in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that’s choked with confession and tears and . . . great laughter. (From The Return of Ansel Gibbs)
Sobering, aren’t they?
