A strange title?

Maybe you are thinking.... "Christians are all about faith... doubt is the opposite of faith.. doubting is bad..."

But can I suggest that rather than doubt being the opposite of faith, doubt actually helps us to grow good faith.  Doubt helps to grow faith that makes sense. The importance of doubt is that it helps us work through whether what we believe is actually reasonable.

And lets face it, we are all people of faith or belief. We all put of faith or our trust in things & people all the time.  Some of our faith things are small.  We trust our car,  mostly, to get us where w need to go.  We jump into bed at night trusting it to hold us up.  We all have lots of little faiths all the time. So small that we never much think about it except when they let us down.  "I'm not trusting that alarm clock ever again!"

But along with our small faiths all of us have big faiths too, big beliefs in the big questions of life.

For example how about this question:- "What happens to you after you die?"

That's undoubtedly a big question. And I'm sure that of the people reading this there would be lots and lots of different answers to that question.  Our answers might include:- 'go to heaven' or 'nothing apart from the decomposition of my body' or 'I expect to be reincarnated' or 'I become an angel' or 'it depends on how I've lived my life' or 'I don't know' or even 'I don't care'.  Lots of different possible answers.  But here's the thing:-  behind each one of those different answers is a faith, a belief, a trust.

It might be a belief that there is no God or gods but just matter and stuff. It might be a belief in a system where good is rewarded & bad is punished even beyond the grave.  It might be a belief that whatever happens isn't very important. But whatever your answer is. its based on belief.

And so here's the importance of doubt.  Its really important that we doubt our beliefs so as to help us figure out if our beliefs make sense or not.  Its really important that what we put our trust in is trustworthy and doubt helps us do that. What we believe should not not be unexamined or untested.  Especially our big beliefs because they're too important.

 

So why do you believe what you do about what happens to someone after they die?   And why do you believe it?   What reasons do you have for believing it?  

 

With a question as big as the future of someone after death you'd want a fair degree of confidence in your belief.

 

As a Christian my belief is shaped by the Bible and in particular the promises of Jesus Christ.  He promised this:-

Jesus was making some massive claims about himself & his ability to save people from death.  I believe he backed up the promise by rising from the dead.   So I take him at his word.

I believe that what happens to someone after they die depends entirely on their response to Jesus while they are alive.  If they believe in Jesus than beyond death they live forever.  That's what I believe and why I believe it.  It rests on my confidence in the historicity of the resurrection.

If you believe something different to that answer,  what are your reasons for believing it and are those reasons more reasonable than mine?

 

Doubt can be a very helpful thing in making sure that what we believe makes sense. 

I commend it to you!

 

 

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