I imagine that most Christians would acknowledge that they’ve had doubts about their faith at one time or another––big doubts, little doubts.  I know I have.  There was a time, about two years after I put my faith in Jesus as my Savior, when I seriously doubted that faith.  

It was the summer of 1974.  I was a relatively new believer.  A friend of mine who was a struggling agnostic posed a question to me regarding the love of God that put me back on my heels.  I gave him a lame rejoinder but, truth be told, the question stumped me.  It stumped me so bad that the more I thought about it the more I descended into a growling pit of uncertainty and confusion.  And then I got angry with God about it.  

“Yeah, what about that, God?”  

And then I judged Him.  God couldn’t be a God of love.  I was done with being a Christian.  I threw a temper tantrum and walked away from the faith.  

God is a gentleman.  He said, in essence, All right, Michael, go your own way.

What followed was a descent into hell.  Not hell-hell, but maybe the tip of the iceberg, or fire-berg, if such a thing is possible.  I remember vividly the darkness that I felt in my soul.  It was a clawing, snarling, palpable darkness.  My soul writhed in anguish with no relief.  I was miserable.  I didn’t want to see anyone, talk to anyone, including Cathy.  We weren’t married at the time, thankfully, or I would have been a very poor husband.

The Bible speaks of hell as being a place of outer darkness (Matt 8:12, 22:13, 25:30).  Jesus spoke of Gehenna, a physical illustration of hell, where the “Worm dies not, and where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”  It will be a place of fiery torment, a perpetual burning.  

I believe that God allowed me to experience these phenomena to a limited degree, in order to give me a bitter taste of life without God.  It was frightening.

God left me alone (from my perspective) for three days and three nights.  Each day was worse than the day before.  And then God entered into the picture once again and spoke to me.  Not in the whirlwind, not in the earthquake or fire, but in a still small voice (1 Kings 19:11-13).  

Did He answer the question that so troubled me?  No.  Instead, He showed me Jesus.  In my mind’s eye I saw Jesus on the cross, bloodied and bruised, with all of man’s sins––my sins; all of man’s filth––my filth poured upon His bleeding shoulders as He suffered under the wrath of God the Father––the Just for the unjust.  God became a man and suffered the punishment that was due me.  If this isn’t a picture of love I don’t know what is.  

It was enough.  

I repented.  I stumbled out of that snarling pit, singed and bruised, and gazed heavenward.  I was thankful for God’s love and mercy.  My Redeemer lives!  

I immediately wrote a song called “But You Came,” which, when I first sang it at Village Christian Church, in Burbank, California, the church where Cathy and I were later married, I could not finish for the tears that overwhelmed me.  I sat in front of that congregation and wept after singing the following chorus:

But you came and you followed me,

You called my name so lovingly,

My little child, if you’d believe in me,

I would take your life and your burdens and set you free.

No, God didn’t answer my question back then.  It still remains, as do other questions that trouble the people of God.  But He gave me faith to trust Him until we see Him face to face.  On that day we will know the good that God worked through all of our doubts and pain and tears, through the loss of our loved ones, through our fears.  We will see Jesus in all His glory, and we will be like Him.   

What a day of rejoicing that will be!

Onward and Upward!