The title alone is probably more than enough to get most people not to read this blog post. I get it.
God created man in his own image which means he created us to be like him. We are driven to understand and to create. When we see something or find something new, we are driven to understand what we saw or found. We don’t like not knowing.
God is one of those things we will never understand, except, and I do preface it with “maybe” the day we stand in front of him. Try as we might to explain as many aspects of God as we can, we still do not know if we are right. I have heard Christians say, “If this isn’t true, then the whole bible isn’t true.” They are predicating their belief based upon their doctrinal understanding of something in the bible. The Doctrine of the trinity is a fine example. Our so-called early church fathers had to deal with a balance. In Judaism there is but only one God, but now all of a sudden there is Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Two additional beings of sort. Seems we have three now, so how does that balance with Judaism’s monotheism? Well, lets create a doctrine that simply says they are all the same one God, just three aspects of him. Let’s forget we pray to each one separately as if they are three individual Gods.
I am not writing this to dispute the doctrine of the trinity, just rather shine light on the fact that we need doctrine to understand God even if it is not correct or even totally fabricated by man. Having a basic understanding of God comforts us. It gives us a since of knowing and understanding. Nonetheless, it is still putting God in a box of our own making. Faith alone is what we need. Jesus healed people, raised them for the dead based on the faith of the person or a relative. His metaphor about the mustard seed is not to demonstrate how powerful a little faith is but how little the people had he was talking to. So, let’s look at Hebrews 11.
“Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” Faith is believing in that which we cannot see or touch. Do we need a doctrine to have faith? No! and I am sure some will say, our doctrine comes from our faith. I’d say no it does not. When I hear Christians claim that if their doctrine is not true then all of it is a lie, they have faith in the doctrine. Doctrine is a fallacy because it is not faith, it does not give faith. Faith is as stated in Hebrews 11. As a teacher, I have developed the concept, “If I cannot teach my subject in a bamboo hut, using only a piece of slate and chalk, I do not need to be teaching.” If I cannot have faith in my Lord with no doctrine, I do not have faith and I never will. The Lord comforts us, not our doctrine, not our pathetic attempt to understand the Lord, to fold him over a million times, times seven for the purpose of shoving him into our box of understanding. There is but one doctrine and that is what is in the bible. If it is not there, it is then manmade.
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