The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our Correct Beliefs

by Peter Enns

  Faith isn’t simply something that happens between God and us. Faith is a community word.

  One of Paul’s favorite ways for summing up faithfulness toward one other is humility: the attitude and act of putting others before our own wants and desires. “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves” (Philippians 2:3). That in a nutshell is pistis.

  But there’s more.

  Faith also describes what God does—which is a big clue that “having faith” doesn’t quite cut it. God doesn’t “have faith,” but God is faithful. How? We see God’s faithfulness by what God does.

  We saw this already in Psalm 89. Again and again, the psalmist writes of God’s steadfast love and faithfulness (‘aman). Remember, the complaint of Psalm 89 was that God was all talk and no action. Promises are fine, but only if God actually does something—preserve David’s line of descendants. If not then God isn’t faithful, no matter what God says.

  Likewise in Psalm 40, David praises God for delivering him from some threat:

  I have not hidden your saving help within my heart,

  I have spoken of your faithfulness [‘aman] and your

  salvation.

  (verse 10)

  In the New Testament, God’s steadfast love and faithfulness are seen, not in an act of deliverance from foreign enemies, but in sending the Son and raising him from the dead to enact a global rescue mission (Romans 8:3).

  Jesus is God’s supreme, grand, climactic act of faithfulness.

  Not only that, but faithful also describes Jesus. Paul writes,

  . . . we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. (Galatians 2:16; emphasis added)

  A better reading is “faithfulness of Jesus Christ” (which is found in footnotes of many Bibles), and the two readings couldn’t be more different. (And I have a rather long note explaining this in the back of the book.)

  Paul isn’t saying, “You are not justified before God by your efforts, but by your faith.” The contrast he’s making isn’t between two options we have. The contrast is between your efforts and Jesus’s faithfulness to you—shown in his obedient death on a Roman cross. Paul is interested in telling readers about what Jesus did, about Jesus’s faithfulness, not what we do.

  God’s grand act of faithfulness is giving his only Son for our sake. God is all in.

  Jesus’s grand act of faithfulness is going through with it for our sake. Jesus is all in.

  Now it’s our move, which really is the point of all this.

  Like God the Father and God the Son, we are also called to be faithful. On one level, we are faithful to God when we trust God. But faith—pistis—doesn’t stop there. It extends, as we’ve seen, to faithfulness toward each other—in humility and self-sacrificial love.

  And here is the real kick in the pants. When we are faithful to each other like this, we are more than simply being nice and kind, though there’s that. Far more important, when we are faithful to each other, we are at that moment acting like the faithful God and the faithful Son.

  Being like God. That’s the goal. And we are most like God not when we are certain we are right about God, or when we tell others how right we are, but when we are acting toward one another like the faithful Father and Son.

  Humility, love, and kindness are our grand acts of faithfulness and how we show that we are all in. “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:12). Loving each other is the closest we get to seeing God.

  Being “in” with God is about much more than the thoughts we keep in our heads, the belief systems we hold on to, the doctrines we recite, or the statements of faith we adhere to, no matter how fervently and genuinely we do so, and how important they may be. Being obsessed with making sure we have all our thoughts about God properly arranged and defended isn’t faith. How trusting we are of God day to day and how Godlike we live among those around us day to day is.

  As the book of James puts it, a faith without actions is dead—without value:

  What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith. (James 2:14–18)

  We miss what the biblical writers were after if we think of belief and faith as “correct thinking” words. They are deep and hard words, more than we might have been led to expect. And they are beautiful words that move us deeper into the presence of God.

  “All to Jesus I Surrender”

  “Trust God no matter what” is a big idea throughout the Bible—whether you’re a nonagenarian couple and God promised you a child, a psalmist looking to God for deliverance, or a parent entrusting to God a dying child. But trusting God isn’t just for when the chips are down and we’re bunkered in a foxhole. Trusting God is for every moment, the normal state of those who say they believe.

  This idea is driven home in a demanding yet also quietly comforting portion of the book of Proverbs.

  Trust in the LORD with all your heart,

  and do not rely on your own insight.

  In all your ways acknowledge him,

  and he will make straight your paths.

  (Proverbs 3:5–6)

  In the Old Testament, “heart” isn’t simply where the emotions reside. It’s also the seat of one’s thoughts, moral compass, and will. “With all your heart” means “all of you, every part of you—what you feel, think, do, and will.”

  Trusting God with all our hearts is a complete surrender, a life decision to be all in all the time rather than relying on our own “insight,” our ability to understand, to fathom, to solve, to figure out. Trust remains when our reason betrays us, when we don’t understand the mysteries of God and faith, when we don’t see what God is up to—including when God for all intents and purposes is not faithful or trustworthy.

  Our level of insight does not determine our level of trust. In fact, seeking insight rather than trust can get in the way of our walk with God.

  Just ask Adam and Eve. When tempted by the serpent to eat the fruit from the forbidden tree of knowledge (Genesis 3), Eve would have done us all a favor by taking a step back and asking herself who in this transaction is worthy of her trust—her Creator or the crafty serpent. But instead, she reached for knowledge, for insight, and the result was a rather serious rupture of their relationship with God. Insight was gained—they knew they were naked—but at a price.

  The Adam and Eve story is about what happens when knowing is elevated above trusting.

  Trusting God isn’t simply something to do in crisis, but “in all your ways”—even when we think we can figure things out, when we feel on top of the world because our theology and our experience are on the same page, and when God and our world make perfect sense (unlike Qohelet, Job, and our psalmists). Even then—precisely then—we should not slip into thinking that we actually do have a handle on it all, that we can “rely” on whatever insight we have.

  “To rely” in Hebrew suggests “leaning” or “supporting oneself.” Great concept. When I lean back in my sofa while watching ESPN, I don’t give a thought to whether the cushions will be there and whether they will keep me from falling through the sofa and onto the floor. When I lean against a tree or wall, it never enters my mind that the oak or drywall aren’t up for the task and might give way.

  As I’m typing this I am leaning back against my chair, and the thought never enters my mind. You’re probably leaning back against something right now, too. We are, in effect, trusting these objects right now without a care in the world.

  Only God is worthy of tha
t kind of all-in lean, that kind of trust. Our own insights are not worthy. They come and go and never apprehend the true breadth and depth of reality.

  Again, leaning on God isn’t just for the challenges, but also the moment-to-moment life we live, where we tend not to give much thought to God and God’s ways. Spiritual maturity is living a God-conscious existence of being aware of the responsibility to choose whether we are going to trust God with all our moments, or trust ourselves.

  After all, it’s the little things that get to us, isn’t it? When Sue and I were first married and I was in seminary and then graduate school, we had no money. If we had twenty dollars left over, we bought pizza. That was the extent of our budgeting. If it weren’t for scholarships and help from parents and friends, I’m not sure how we would have made it—in fact, looking back, I’m not sure how it was that we didn’t wind up living in a cardboard box on the sidewalk.

  But we were happy and essentially worry free. That began to change slowly after I got my Ph.D. and took my first teaching job. Over time—about three to five years—my attitude had changed about money. We bought a house right out of graduate school, our three children took music lessons and played soccer, and I had home repairs, life insurance, and real estate taxes.

  I remember standing in my living room when it finally hit me how I had changed over the last few years. Nothing big happened. Life had just snuck up on me slowly, bit by bit. Things had been going comparatively well, which fooled me into thinking, “Thanks, Creator of the universe, I’ll take it from here”—never consciously, but just deep enough under the surface that I didn’t realize what was happening. Looking back, I was very good at the “Lord, deliver me” part of faith but not the “in all your ways” part. I’m still working on it.

  Hence, “In all your ways acknowledge him.” The Hebrew says literally, “In all your ways know him,” which I like better. “Acknowledge” is a weak word, something we do with a nod of the head to someone across the room or when passing out an employee-of-the-month plaque. But we are to “know” God, intimately, with our whole being, along every path at every moment.

  That sounds all pious and beautiful when I type it, but I actually can’t think of a more threatening idea: don’t make a move without complete, trusting surrender to God, rather than relying on our own thinking. The proverb, after all, doesn’t say, “Believe in the LORD with all of your heart,” but “trust.”

  Trust is an all-in, no-wiggle-room word. It’s a hard word.

  There Goes Jesus Being Jesus Again

  And then there’s Jesus. He tells a famous story that turns upside down any distorted thoughts we might have of what it means to “believe” in God.

  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his audience not to worry and fret about how much they have, what they wear, or what they will eat. That’s what people of “little faith” do. Rather, the focus should be on seeking to live in harmony with God’s will and to trust God for the rest (Matthew 6:25–34).

  I have a love-hate relationship with this story because it both is liberating and also tells me to do something I don’t want to do and that I’m not very good at it when I try. A simply delightful nature-nurture trait I picked up from my immigrant parents is a disposition toward anxiety, a preoccupation with all sorts of possible futures. Fretting about the things Jesus says not to fret about is what I do best.* I should offer a graduate-level course, and maybe one day I will. It’s my safe space, my home field. But Jesus says not to worry about what might happen and instead trust God for now and tomorrow.

  Okay. Fine. I’m listening.

  Jesus illustrates his point in what is, frankly, a ridiculously off-topic reference to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air: “See, they’re doing just fine because God takes care of them. So what are you so worried about?”

  Seriously, Jesus? Are you taking questions?

  (I raise my hand. Jesus nods in my direction.)

  ME. I appreciate the effort, Jesus, but to state the obvious, and I think I speak for everyone here, lilies don’t have brains and birds are skittish little things that fly into windows. I, on the other hand, am a human being. I have a brain, not to mention a house and family. I have to pay bills in a crappy economy while trying to keep my kids safe from drugs and predators, let alone getting them into a good college, and somehow paying for it without selling my body parts to science or moving into a storage facility. So forgive my condescending smile when I hear you comparing me and my problems to plants and birds like they’re my role models. Birds are birds and plants are plants, Jesus. By definition, they don’t have the capacity for thought that even makes worrying possible. By definition, they literally have no worries! They are incapable of worry.

  JESUS. You’re right more than you know. Yes, plants and birds by definition are incapable of worry.

  ME. Ugh. Are you going to answer my question without really answering it, like you do with those Pharisees or like Yahweh did to Job? Because that gets old and I’m not in the mood.

  JESUS. I am telling you to consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air because they are, like you said, by definition, incapable of worry.

  ME. ? . . . ? . . . ?

  JESUS. If you truly trust the Father, you too will be, by definition, incapable of worry.

  ME. Uh . . . hmm . . . .

  JESUS. Worry will be as impossible for you as it is for insentient plants and clueless birds. When you trust, when you let go of your life and lean on God with your whole heart, worry will fade from your vocabulary. You will be as oblivious to the cares of this world as are plants and birds. And then you will be free—free of worry. Get it?

  ME. So . . . you mean “Don’t worry” isn’t just a quote for a Bible poster featuring cute animals? You actually mean this?

  JESUS. What’s a Bible poster? And yes.

  Maybe we should train ourselves to use different words to talk about faith. “Believing in God” doesn’t get us to that place Jesus describes here. Belief leaves room for worry. Trust explodes it.

  I don’t mean to sound preachy. I’m far from having that kind of trust. I have trouble trusting my kids to hang the car keys back up so I can find them later, let alone trusting God with my existence. After all, it’s my life we’re talking about here. Can’t I just write books about what I believe about God? I’m doing that right now, and I really like it. I spent like most of my twenties and thirties in school working on it. Or can’t I just go to church, recite a creed, and talk about what I believe, because, after all . . .

  JESUS. If I may interrupt, no you can’t, Peter. No you can’t. It doesn’t work that way. You have to risk, let go, and trust. Trust me that you’ll be better off for it. I won’t let you stay in that safe place where you can play with your thoughts and turn them around in your mind. I will make sure that sooner or later all your thoughts and words will make you (not just your family and students) miserable. You must take the harder path, the way of complete trust that you can’t pull off without trusting me enough to trust me. And yes, I know that’s a paradox. You have to surrender, no matter what you happen to be thinking, no matter what you say you believe at the moment.

  What a way to live. It’s like a high-stakes trust fall—and there’s a reason they don’t call it a “belief fall.” We actually have to fall backwards, not cogitate on whether we “believe” the other person will catch us. Even though we are pretty certain we won’t crack our head on the floor, we still have to go through with it and risk the possibility, with that sudden rush of fear that comes over us.

  Harder still is the Jesus trust fall—because it’s not an icebreaker game at a sales convention and we’re not always sure he’s standing there behind us. In fact, like the psalmists, Qohelet, and Job, some of us might feel as if God has actually let us drop to the floor one too many times. I get that—and maybe that’s why we have psalmists telling us they have trouble sleeping at night:

  I am weary with my moaning;

  every
night I flood my bed with tears;

  I drench my couch with my weeping.

  (Psalm 6:6)

  Trusting God isn’t just hard. Waking up at 6:00 A.M. to go to work when you’ve been up half the night with the baby is hard. Working two shifts is hard. Sending your first child off to college is hard. But trusting God is an all-in surrender that covers our egos with a thick tarp. Trusting God is death. And trusting God can be excruciating when we’re yet again waiting for God to show up and then doesn’t.

  As we’ve seen, some biblical writers were honest about not being able to trust God. They might not even have wanted to trust God at the moment. Yet they’re still talking to God. They can’t let it go. They still want to trust God.

  Sometimes that’s the best we can do. And we’re in good company. Thomas Merton’s well-known prayer puts it this way:

  My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

  Trust is not for the weak. It’s the excruciating option, especially if you feel God has let you down. But it’s the option for the life of faith; there’s no getting around it. Trust takes full surrender and courage all at the same time. Another paradox.