Letter X: Give God the Benefit of the Doubt
How should we react when faced with difficult teachings?
The following is a real letter written from a Catholic father to his children as a sort of “spiritual life insurance.” It is being shared here in the hopes that that God will use this imperfect letter to communicate His perfect Fatherly love to you as well.
No one is good but God alone.
—Mark 10:18
My Dear Children,
I’m going to make a statement. I want you to read it, then pause for a moment to consider it before you continue reading. Make a mental note of your reaction and the thoughts that this statement provokes within you.
Okay, ready? Here it is:
There are some people who go to Hell, for eternity, for believing that they are better than they really are.
If I have picked a good example, then this statement might not sit well with you, and your first reaction might even have been one of skepticism. After your initial reaction, what were your thoughts? I chose this example for two reasons.
First, because, on its face, it seems as though it is not, or should not, be true.
Second, because it is revealed to us by God and is, in fact, true.
When you are faced with a difficult teaching like this, you have two choices: you can withhold your assent until (and unless) you fully understand it and agree with it, or you can give God the benefit of the doubt. I am writing to tell you to always give God the benefit of the doubt.
We do this rather naturally in our human relationships. If someone we love, respect, and trust says something that is difficult to believe, hard to understand, or even that sounds bad, then we give them the benefit of the doubt. Our first reaction might be surprise, fear, or confusion (depending on the statement). Nevertheless, we trust them, and proceed to ask questions as needed. If we give our human friends the benefit of the doubt, how much more ought we to give the benefit of the doubt to God when His teaching is difficult?
When God reveals that people go to Hell for certain sins, which do not seem that bad to us, we can either doubt God, or we can say to ourselves, “that sin must be much worse than it seems.” It is like how I, as your father, told you not to touch pots on the stove when you were just getting big enough to reach your little hands up onto the kitchen counter. As a young child, that pot may not seem to you like it is very dangerous. After all, your mother lets you play with them on the kitchen floor sometimes! You probably consider pots and pans as nothing more than basically harmless instruments. You might even have gone so far as to have touched a pot that was on a cold stove top, before I gave my instruction, and therefore have no reason to believe that pots are ever anything but cool to the touch. Nevertheless, in this example you are, as yet, ignorant of the workings of a stove, and therefore simply don’t understand that those pots can get searingly hot. Your limited experience with pots thus far does not paint the full picture, and the trust which you give to your father can make the difference between a happy morning and a severe burn.
Our ignorance of the spiritual mechanics behind our eternal destinies, or any difficult teaching, ought to make us more trusting of, and more reliant on, our Heavenly Father, not less.
St. Augustine mentions this attitude of humility and trust in reference to reading the Scriptures in particular:
And if in these Books I meet anything which seems contrary to truth, I shall not hesitate to conclude either that the text is faulty, or that the translator has not expressed the meaning of the passage, or that I myself do not understand.
St. Augustine trusts completely the truth of everything that God reveals to us in the Scriptures. If something seems like it is not true, he rightly attributes it to either a miscommunication on the part of an intermediary (e.g. the translator) or a misunderstanding on his own part. We ought to imitate St. Augustine’s humility whenever we read the Word of God in the Scriptures or receive the teaching of Christ through His Church.
Now, the analogy I gave earlier, about trusting other people whom we love and respect, eventually breaks down because every person on earth, no matter how good, is imperfect. We all sin, we are all ignorant, and none of us can perfectly accomplish our will. This leaves room for error in the statements of those we love, respect, and trust. However, we encounter no such problem when trusting God.
God is, by definition, All-Knowing, All-Powerful, and All-Good. To give God the benefit of the doubt, in this case, is really just another word for having faith.
He is All-Knowing, so He is never mistaken or ignorant.
He is All-Powerful, so nothing can stop Him from accomplishing His will.
He is All-Good, so He always wills the good.
Therefore, it is not reasonable to doubt God, who alone is good. It is, however, very reasonable to doubt ourselves, weighed down as we are by our sins, ignorance, and passions. To reject the very reasonable idea of trusting our Perfect God, in favor of trusting our very imperfect selves, would, ironically, be to fall into the very trap of the statement that I had you ponder at the start of this letter. It would be to believe that you are better than you really are to an extreme degree—to make yourself judge over God who alone is All-Knowing, All-Powerful, and All-Good.
This sin is precisely what caused Satan to fall from Heaven like lightning. Satan’s pride made him believe that he knew better than God. His unwitting followers today continue to echo their despotic master when they claim that God is not good, or worth believing in, if He does not meet their standards or their conceptions of good. Do not be like them, but in humility, consider God as better than yourself.
Remember that we are speaking specifically about revealed truths from God. You are right to be skeptical about what other fallible, self-interested humans tell you. In such circumstances as those you ought always to test everything and retain only what is good. But when we are receiving truth from God, we should always give Him the benefit of the doubt, as we so readily do with people we trust.
None of this precludes us from seeking understanding. Indeed, I would question whether you truly believed a difficult truth if you did not then proceed to try to understand it better. People are not generally motivated to spend time and effort to understand something that they think is false, but faith seeks understanding.
Finally, let me leave you with a perfect illustration of the choice between doubt and faith in the lives of Zechariah and Mary:
When the Angel Gabriel appeared to Zechariah, and gave him seemingly impossible news, Zechariah did not give God the benefit of the doubt. He refused to believe until he understood how this could be. His response was “How shall I know this?” (Luke 1:18). That is, ‘I doubt what you are telling me; how do I know that what you are telling me is true?’ He began with doubt, rather than trust, of someone he should have known was trustworthy. We all know what the consequence was for this lack of faith.
When the Angel Gabriel appeared to Mary, and gave her news that was even more impossible sounding, she gave God the benefit of the doubt—she responded with faith. “How will this be?” she replied. That is to say, ‘I believe what you are telling me, how do I cooperate with this?’ She believed, and then her faith sought understanding. Blessed is she who believed what was spoken to her by the Lord would be fulfilled (Luke 1:45).
I implore you to imitate Mary’s humility and trust.
The Lord summarizes everything I have taken pains to explain to you here in just one verse. Take it to heart, and repeat it whenever you face a difficulty of this nature:
Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.
—Proverbs 3:5
With all my love in Christ,
Dad
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Thanks for writing this. It has actually been weighing on my mind a lot recently. I read the Bible verse that's like, "do not I provide food for the birds and are you not that much more important than they are."
I was thinking, "but birds starve all the time and so do humans." I'm not sure I have necessarily come to grips with that specific verse other than maybe that's why it's important to pray. Maybe if you pray for food God will take care of you in that way. Dunno.
Wonderful letter, Stuart. Thanks for sharing this with the world. I particularly liked this part: "Our ignorance of the spiritual mechanics behind our eternal destinies, or any difficult teaching, ought to make us more trusting of, and more reliant on, our Heavenly Father, not less." How important to remember that!
The way you approach this topic and reason through it brought me right back to a book I read yesterday in my Bible reading: Habakkuk. The ending of that book also marks the beginning of our faith when doubts flash across our mental skies.