I Have My Doubts (eBook)

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Doubting God’s Trustworthy Word

Eve in the Garden of Eden

Is the Bible really true? Is God trustworthy enough for us to take him at his word? Sometimes we have our doubts.

In his novel entitled In the Beauty of the Lilies, John Updike describes a Presbyterian minister who falls under the influence of critical, skeptical scholarship and abandons his commitment to Christ. Little by little, the Reverend Clarence Arthur Wilmot questioned the central doctrines of the Christian faith. One day, as he sat “in the rectory of the Fourth Presbyterian Church at the corner of Straight Street and Broadway,” Wilmot

felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The sensation was distinct—a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward. . . . His thoughts had slipped with quicksilver momentum into the recognition, which he had long withstood, that . . . there is no . . . God, nor should there be.

Clarence’s mind was like a many-legged, wingless insect that had long and tediously been struggling to climb up the walls of a slick-walled porcelain basin; and now a sudden impatient wash of water swept it down into the drain. There is no God.1

Wilmot’s spiritual struggle and ultimate surrender resulted directly from his doubts about the word of God. Maybe this is true of all our doubts: if we trace them back far enough, we discover that in one way or another they all begin with our skepticism about the Scriptures.

If the Bible is trustworthy, then we have a solid place to stand. We know who made us: the God who in the beginning created the heavens and the earth, and first breathed life into Adam and Eve. We know that despite the evil we bring into the world, God is working all things for good. We know that through the atoning blood of Jesus Christ there is forgiveness for our sin and shame. We know that we have a purpose: to glorify God and proclaim his gospel to the world. We know that God will guide us and protect us as he leads us to glory. We know all this for the simple reason that the Bible tells us so.

Without the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, we would only be hoping and guessing. In a book called The Certainty of Faith, Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck wrote:

In essence, all truths of the Christian faith come to man from the outside. They are known to him only through revelation, and they become his possession only when he accepts them like a child in faith. . . . Not a knowledge gained through personal investigation, argument and proof, through observation and experiment. But a knowledge gained from a reliable witness.2

But what if the Bible is unreliable? What if it is a false witness? What if Jesus never said some or all of the things attributed to him in Scripture? Where would we stand?

Did God Really Say . . . ?

Essentially, this is the same doubt that Satan sowed in the heart and mind of Eve when he spied her alone in the garden of Eden. With malicious intent, the crafty devil said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?’” (Gen. 3:1).

What Satan said to Eve demands careful scrutiny. Although there is such a thing as an honest doubt, notice that the first theological question anyone asked was a deliberate deception. God did not say, “You shall not eat of any tree in the garden.” As the devil knew full well, what God said was this: “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:16–17). Satan cleverly turned what was primarily a permission into exclusively a prohibition. When we have questions about something in the Bible, it is vitally important for us to make sure that we are reading it carefully and know what it really says!

The first part of Eve’s reply shows that she had been listening carefully to her Creator. “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden,” she said (Gen. 3:2). Yet the rest of her answer went beyond the plain word of God. According to Eve, God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden”—so far, so good—“neither shall you touch it, lest you die” (Gen. 3:3). Here Eve went too far. God had only forbidden our first parents from eating this particular fruit, not from touching it. By saying more than God said, Eve put herself in spiritual danger. If we want to stay safe from theological error, we should be careful neither to add to nor subtract from the word of God, but to hold to the line of Scripture.

When his first attack failed, Satan decided to attempt a less subtle stratagem. This time, instead of a deliberate distortion, he uttered an outright contradiction. “You will not surely die,” he said. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:4–5). With these unholy words, the liar called God a liar and made him out to be a miser. By forbidding this fruit, God was not protecting Eve from death, Satan alleged, but preventing her from knowing something she had a right to know.

This accusation assumes there is some place where Eve can stand outside of God’s moral authority—a neutral vantage point from which she can critique his character and evaluate his instructions. But if God is God, there is no higher standard. When we claim the right to assess the Almighty on our own terms, we are not simply on shaky ground; we are standing nowhere, in a place that simply does not exist.

Sadly, Eve believed the devil’s lie. Doubting the truth of God’s trustworthy word and believing instead “that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate” (Gen. 3:6). Eve regretted this moment for the rest of her life. We all do, living as we do in a fallen world. Unfortunately, we see the same story of undue skepticism repeated far too often. People who know what God says start raising some questions—“honest questions,” they may call them. But before long they are in open denial, especially about biblical ethics. Thus, a discussion that starts with “Did God actually say?” and “Do I really have to?” ends with “No, he didn’t” and “No, I don’t!”

We see a decline of biblical confidence happening today in the United States. According to The State of Theology survey published in 2022, growing numbers of Americans in general (from 41 percent to 53 percent) and of evangelicals in particular (from 17 percent to 26 percent) believe that “the Bible, like all sacred writing, contains helpful accounts of ancient myths but is not literally true.”3 Given these beliefs, it is hardly surprising that immorality of all kinds also seems to be on the rise. The State of Theology documents this as well. For example, when asked whether “the Bible’s condemnation of homosexual behavior” still applies today, fewer Americans and fewer evangelicals say yes. According to the prevailing cultural logic, if we do not believe that what God says is true, then we do not have to do what he says.

We have so much to learn by looking carefully at the dialogue in Genesis 3. From the story of naive Eve and the sly serpent, we learn that when doubts arise, the person who is most desperate for us to disbelieve the truth of God’s word—including, perhaps, the truth of his own existence—is the devil. We learn that when doubts are dishonest—when, for example, we are not genuinely open to changing our minds about God—they usually have disobedience somewhere on their agenda. We also learn that when doubt expresses itself as disobedience—as it sometimes (but not always) does—we are headed for destruction. Eating the forbidden fruit did indeed lead to death, just as God said.

When We Have Doubts of Our Own

If we are honest, we have to admit that what happened to Eve is a temptation for us as well. Sometimes we have our doubts about the stories we read in the word of God, about its moral convictions and the promises it makes.

We know how truly human the Bible is, and we wonder if it is also fully divine. We question whether Adam and Eve were the parents of the entire human race. Can we square biblical teaching with scientific evidence? Our culture struggles with the Bible’s sexual ethics, and maybe we do as well: two sexes, two genders, and one definition of marriage, in which a man and a woman are united in a lifelong covenant. Is the Bible right about the sanctity of life inside and outside the womb? Is it for or against women? Does it have a righteous view of justice, including racial justice? Does it give us a true perspective on the fundamental unity and the eternal diversity of humanity? Is it really true that our bodies will rise again and that we will all stand before God’s throne for judgment?

In the face of such questions and objections, many skeptics believe (!) that the Bible is “scientifically impossible, historically unreliable, and culturally regressive.”4 Most...