Ken Wytsma’s most recent book The Grand Paradox, addresses many of the tensions believers and non-believers feel toward the Christian faith.
Ken is founder of The Justice Conference coming up June 5-6 in Chicago and is also the author of Pursuing Justice.
Tensions within the Bible and Christianity abound. Many of these tensions push people away from faith. Ken argues they should push us toward it.
Ken argues that if doubt is like thirst in the desert, faith is its water.
This sounds catchy for a pastor to say, but how can this be true when people’s doubts deal with such deep topics as personal pain, suffering in the world, brutality in the Old Testament, and so on? The answer will change your faith and your life.
We live in an age of information overload. Information coming from every person, place, and online outlet under the sun. Skeptics asking questions are typically seeking more information. The silver bullet answer to their doubts. And until they are satisfied, they will remain in unbelief. The truth is, no matter what information they are given, it won’t suffice.
The Grand Paradox hits this square on its head and like the many biblical paradoxes it references within its pages, turns this dilemma on its head as well: (paraphrased from page 78)
When doubt becomes our reality, we completely lose sight of the big picture. Realizing there are limits to our human understanding, more information is not the solution to an overload of information. Stepping out of the current is the answer. The answer is to be able to lean on love and God’s personal nature, not on the need for more information.
After a camping trip to the Manistee National Forest a couple of years ago, I did a sermon series and blog post called “Paving Over God.” On this trip, I experienced firsthand a piece of what Ken is talking about. When you’re on a bluff in the middle of a thick forest overlooking a winding river, you don’t need much information to know God. To know his power. His creativity. His love.
But we don’t live in the beauty of the forest.
We live in a world of warp speed, rat race, dog-eat-dog, data driven, online, stock market driven, information driven pavement. Pavement everywhere. We miss God because we are too busy to see him and there’s too much pavement plastered over our eyes even if we wanted to.
Ken addresses God as the author and source of love. Not in an easy, cliche’ “all religions are the same” “love wins” way, but in a deeply personal, deeply specific way. That God doesn’t exist so we can know everything about him. He doesn’t exist to be the master dispenser of information for all of our curiosity and even objections. He exists to love us. To love us in our greatest joys and in our deepest hurts. And he showed the full extent of his love when he came to earth, teaching and serving us, ending with his death on the cross for our sins, and of course his resurrection from the dead to allow us into his ultimate victory.
Answers don’t change the experience. Love changes the experience.
This love will be the balm on your wounds. More information won’t.
This love can be lived out by his Church, transforming a hurt and broken world. More information isn’t “lived out.” More information doesn’t transform hearts, heal wounds, or alleviate pain.
The question isn’t “why?” or “what?”, it is “how?” And the answer is the love of Jesus.
It’s not that information isn’t important, Ken certainly isn’t saying this. But it doesn’t have the power we typically give it. And thinking it does allows doubt to become our reality, completely missing the bigger picture.
The truth is, we are all a part of something much bigger than ourselves and our lifetimes and even the lifetime of this planet. Our frustrations over unanswered prayer, our longings, and even our doubts themselves hinge on this one issue.
Is God trustworthy within this truth?
Pick up a copy of The Grand Paradox today and find out for yourself.
Ken welcomes questions, especially from skeptics. You can reach Ken and ask him your questions via his website about doubt and faith, www.AskQuestions.tv
He is:
Author of Beyond the Battle: A man's guide to his identity in Christ in an oversexualized world
Host of the The Flip Side Podcast
Join an online men's small group led by Noah and team at BeyondTheBattle.net
Thanks for sharing the book. . . sounds like a great read. Have kept this in my bible awhile, hope it adds to things:
“Faith is going to determine which of two things is going to characterize us. This is the real point. It is either going to be that we are living under a terrible paralysis, as altogether petrified through confusion, perplexity, inability to understand, being unable to disentangle, to sort things out, to see straight and see clearly, to know what is meant by happenings. That means utter paralysis, simply standing with our hands on our hips, helpless and hopeless. That is the effect of the absence of a positive faith. The only way of Life and deliverance from such a paralysis is a deliberate faith in God which causes us to take the attitude that we are going on with God, understanding or not understanding, explaining or not explaining, having light or having no light; we are going right on with God on the basis of what God has done in us, made real in us, of what God Himself is to us by what He has effected in us. We are going on! We, beloved, shall come there and may come there more than once in the course of our life; we shall come to the place where we realize we are going right out into outer darkness and despair and paralysis, to be ruled completely out of any effectiveness, fruitfulness, or value whatever, unless we pull ourselves together and say to ourselves, “The whole thing is an inexplicable, bewildering confusion, a tangle from our standpoint or the standpoint of man; but God is, God is faithful. That is what He Himself says He is.” Thus without questioning God we go on believing God. We have even to believe God to the point of putting over on to Him the responsibility for failures, for mistakes, in so far as we have really and honestly put our lives at His disposal and have become utter for God and are free from personal interests and worldly interests and are here only for God. We have to make over to the Lord’s account things which may have been mistakes or failures, and trust Him with these and go on.”
That’s a great quote, thanks Alan! It again points to the huge difference when God is personal, rather than just a riddle to be solved. When God is personal, we grow to love and trust him without needing to see all of him.
Nothing better or more necessa4y th alibve to
shoot, supposed to say. . . nothing better or more necessary than being alive to God in the Spirit.
Never let your St Bernard jump on your computer 🙂
Often when I have doubts, I think of this verse: John 6:67-68 “You do not want to leave too, do you?” Jesus asked the Twelve. Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
To whom else shall we go? Is following Christ hard? Yes. Do I sometimes wonder if the world has the smarter way to go about some things? Yes. Will I ever give up my faith? Why would I? Where else am I going to go? Has science cured death yet? Can anyone go back in time and bring back to life all those whom we have loved and are lost to us? Does anyone seriously have enough “faith” to believe that they ever will?
What of other religions? How can Christianity be the one in a thousand to be right? Well, like C.S. Lewis, I’ve looked into other religions. Christianity is not the kind of religion that people make up. We don’t get to manipulate our deity. We are called to sacrifice our lives to Him. How so? For example, we don’t get to skimp on things like sexual morality. We are allowed one spouse until death or no sex at all. Sounds stupid right? Except think of all the problems of the world that would go away if we just forced ourselves to be selfless and made our marriages work?
God is smarter than we are.
And if I am wrong, so what? Exactly how much will I regret having “wasted” my life on religion if it turns out that oblivion awaits us all? You can’t win at atheism. So I choose not to play the unbeliever’s game. I’ll stay the course. Even though sometimes my faith shrinks to the size of a mustard seed, I know that if I’m right and Jesus is the answer to all the important questions of my life, it will have all been so much more than worth it.
There is definitely something to be said for a faith who’s founder came and gave up power rather than sought it out and who disappointed a whole bunch of people who were themselves seeking power — which is in stark contrast specifically to Mormonism and Islam where the faith founder was all about getting personal power and the early followers were promised and given power. contrast that with the first Christians who were became poor because of their faith, lost everything because of their faith, and were tortured and killed because of their faith. Maybe they actually met God and found something much greater than anything on this earth???