FAITH SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE Saturday, March 19
1 Corinthians 13:1-3: If I speak in the tongues[ of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Faith can, at times, seem impossible. Five years ago, I found myself working at a church with which I had theological and moral disagreements. I’ll avoid going into too many of the details here, but perhaps give an example. If the belief is that the bible is literal and inerrant, then the story of The Fall is very confusing. God creates Adam and Eve and tells them, “have fun! Do your thing! Oh, but that one tree, don’t eat that. Seriously.” Then a snake comes over and says, “yo! Guys! Have you tried these apples?! They’re so good, you guys! Omg you gotta have one.” Everybody has apples, naked people, yadda yadda yadda, sin is created. I have a two-year-old son. I know that if I tell him “don’t touch that cheese,” the next thing I see will be cheese in his hand. Further, in all honesty, if my wife tells me, “please don’t touch the cheese before dinner,” somewhere the two-year-old inside of me INSISTS that the cheese must be touched prior to dinner. And no serpents live in my home. This whole thing feels like a set-up. God is omniscient. He knew Adam and Eve would stumble into the orchard. God is omnipotent. He made the apple, he made the serpent, and he made Adam and Eve. God made the desire for apples (and cheese). So God made sin. But God hates our sin (or, at least, this is what I was told), and millions of goats had to be killed over the years to atone for it. Then Jesus was killed and now all the sin is forgiven. Wait, what? All the sin gets washed away, but until the apple (which God created), there wasn’t sin in the first place? Why not save the goats (and the Jesus) and skip the whole sin thing all together? An omnipotent God could certainly do this. Would a loving and just God set us up for failure in this way? This is only a single example of an extensive train of thought that lasted for many months. I found that these contradictions seemed to call into question things that seemed like they should be fundamental truths about God - things that seemed like first principles. Was God actually omnipotent? Was God actually omniscient? Was God actually just? Did God really love us? Was God actually good? Did God even exist? So I had questions and I started to look to the community around me to try and find some kind of answers. The answers I was given were very unsatisfactory. They usually oriented around the “mysteriousness” of God’s actions; were built around self-contained, logical contradictions; unprovable negatives; or only raised more questions. 23
