After Doubt By A. J. SwobodaSample

Day Four: Trusting the Right Way

Scripture: Genesis 3: 1-5, Proverbs 3:5-6

Two trees swayed in Eden’s wind: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The command given to Adam and Eve is an invitation to trust God at His word. Was the forbidden tree bad? Not at all. In fact, that tree was “pleasing to the eye” and “good for food.” Still, they were not to eat it. God said so, plain and simple. Along comes a serpent. He says to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’ . . . You will not certainly die” (Genesis 3:1, 4). 

The gospel invites us to trust God above people. The echoes of the serpent’s words can be heard throughout Western culture’s insistent rejection of authority. Question your parents. Question your pastor. Question those with authority. Question every leader. Question the past. Question everything! Trust only in the self. Perhaps part of deconstruction and doubt is learning to desire truth over people-pleasing—something worth applauding.

How does this relate to the garden? After Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden tree, they knew good and evil. Their eyes were opened. I catch myself doing a double take every time I turn off my phone and it flashes an apple with a bite taken out of it like I’m back in the garden of Eden. That’s our world now. We can eat from whatever tree we wish. And our eyes are “open.” All the while we are dying inside.

It’s essential to recognize that any act of deconstruction is simultaneously an act of constructing some other trust, love, or faith structure. When we reject the faith, we end up embracing new faith in the fickle tyranny of what’s fashionable at the time. Vox populi. The voice of the people becomes the voice of God.

When we don’t trust God, we trust the crowd. Or the peer-review process. Or ourselves. Or love. Or even reason. Whatever it is, everyone trusts something. We have to trust something. We better recognize what we trust when we acknowledge to God what we believe to be true. 

There is power in telling God that you want to want him. Ask God for the desire to want the desire. It sounds like a trick, but it isn’t. It is called confession. God loves it. You can’t fake desire. But you can humbly ask for it. To ask is to begin to reconstruct faith.