How Disillusionment Saved My Faith
“Not that I am (I think) in danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is in coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘so there is no God after all’ but ‘so this is what God is really like. Deceive yourself no longer.'” —C.S. Lewis
I will never not believe in the existence of God. For many reasons, a universe without an intelligent designer is simply untenable. What I have found to be at risk of losing though is my interest and love for this God. As I go deeper into the Word, while simultaneously sinking deeper into my own circumstances, I have at times found myself more and more confused, more and more disillusioned, more and more at odds with the simple, tame God of my youth. The ugly truth is that while I have never stopped believing in God, I have come terrifyingly close to detesting Him as I tried to reconcile my circumstances with my long held understanding of what it means for Him to be good and loving, and finding Him apparently lacking.
Habakkuk seems to have shared this experience. Have you ever studied this little tiny book at the end of the Old Testament? I hadn’t. I wasn’t even sure I could pronounce it. Until this past summer. As usual, God brought me to a specific, sustaining truth from His Word. When I was at the edge of my faith, He mercifully brought me to Habakkuk.
Who Was Habakkuk?
Habakkuk was a prophet that we don’t know much about. We do know about Israel at the time of his prophetic service though, and what we know is pretty nasty. For starters, Israel was divided into two kingdoms: the northern and southern kingdom. The southern kingdom, which is the subject of Habakkuk, was known as Judah. Judah was ruled by the wicked nation of Assyria. Having largely assimilated to Assyria’s lawlessness, Judah’s disregard for their covenant Creator ruled the day. Violence and destruction were staples of society, and Habakkuk was appalled. Interestingly though, it wasn’t the people he was appalled at. It was God.
Prophets served as enforcers of the covenant among God’s people. In the book of Habakkuk, however, Habakkuk seems to have turned his corrective attention from the people of Israel to God himself. Look at his words in 1:1-5:
O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,
and you will not hear?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
and you will not save?
Why do you make me see iniquity,
and why do you idly look at wrong?
Destruction and violence are before me;
strife and contention arise.
So the law is paralyzed,
and justice never goes forth.
For the wicked surround the righteous;
so justice goes forth perverted.
Habakkuk is basically saying, “Why aren’t you doing anything to stop evil?” Perhaps even more condemning: “What good is your law if you don’t execute justice on evil?” Habakkuk is like a parenting coach, saying “Listen, if you don’t follow through, they aren’t ever going to obey you”. The wicked surround the righteous, and God appears to be allowing evil to have its way. Habakkuk is confused. What he is seeing doesn’t line up with what he understands to be true about the character of God, and he’s not a fan.
Hard Questions are an Expression of Faith
Before moving forward, I want to just stop and talk about the way Habakkuk is asking, challenging, and bringing God to task. I find that this alone is comfortingbecause I see that I’m not alone in having big questions, disillusionment, and confusion. But beyond this, I find it to be instructive for my own journey of faith. When difficult questions rise up in me, I realize I am in good company when I express them to God. By doing so I am following in the legacy of faithful servants (prophets!) of the Most High God.
Christopher Ash points out in his book, Trusting God in the Darkness: A Guide to Understanding the Book of Job, that asking these big, challenging questions of God are not evidence of weak faith. On the contrary, they are evidence of great faith. Speaking of the problem of pain, he writes:
“It is a problem. But it is important for us to notice that it is a problem only for the believer. When unbelievers say to us they are troubled by the problem of pain and unfairness of suffering in the world, we may say to them, ‘Why are you troubled? I as a believer am troubled, but why should you be? For you do not believe in a living God who is in control and who is good. So why should you expect there to be any logic or any fairness? And yet you do, don’t you? I wonder if that is because we are deeply hardwired to know there is a living God who is in control and who is just’. The irony is that the moment we begin to feel this perplexity, we must admit we ought to believe in a living God. And if you and I don’t feel this pain, it must be questioned whether we really believe. Just to accept it may indicate fatalism more than it does faith. For the true believer will follow Job and rail passionately against the injustice of it all, calling on the sovereign God to do something. The believer takes seriously the ‘goodness’ of God.”
When your loved one is sliding deeper into depression and has become a shell, or the anxiety and compulsions seem to be swallowing your child whole, when their erratic and disorganized thoughts and behaviors have you so scared that you can’t sleep or sit or give yourself even ten minutes alone, when it looks like God is at best absent, or at worst watching and allowing chaos and devastation to rule your home, it makes sense to wonder what He’s doing. It makes sense to ask Him how any of this aligns with what Scripture says about His character. Because the question itself is evidence that you believe those claims to be true. You wouldn’t be wrestling with the apparent contradiction if you didn’t take seriously the truth of Scripture. You believe in His sovereignty and His goodness, so you passionately rail against the pain like Job. You believe in His justice and His protection of the righteous, so you adamantly question Him like Habakkuk. The questions themselves are expressions of faith— because they arise out of a conviction in who He says He is and what He’s said He will do.
Longing For Reprimand
This passionate railing has a direction though. It’s not directionless rage. The critical piece, as we learn from Job and Habakkuk, is that it is to be done in prayer, by talking to God. Prayer is just directing words to God. They don’t have to be pretty, or formulaic. For the purposes of this article, it is passionately questioning God about why He is allowing evil and suffering to run rampant in your life. When directed toward God, these “problem of pain” questions may look like attacks, but I would argue that they are the faith-filled act of going to God for wisdom, to beg Him to make sense of the seeming contradiction between what is seen and what is unseen. And actually, that’s exactly what Habakkuk did.
Habakkuk 2:1 reads:
I will stand at my guard post
And station myself on the watchtower;
And I will keep watch to see what He will say to me,
And how I may reply when I am reprimanded.
There goes Habakkuk, up to the tower, like a watchman. He’s posed his difficult questions. He has expressed his frustrations. And now he is waiting for the Lord’s response (which takes faith… just sayin’). But he’s not just waiting for an answer. He is waiting for reprimand (תּוֹכַחְתִּֽי׃– towkati). His posture has changed from seeking to correct God, to waiting to be corrected. Habakkuk has faith enough to know he is not getting it, and he needs God’s help to see clearly. So he waits. He’s made his complaint, now he waits to be corrected. By bringing His complaints to God instead of turning against Him, he took a step toward truth. In essence, he took a posture of “I believe, help me with my unbelief”.
A Plain Answer, A Clear Choice
We don’t know how long Habakkuk waits up on his tower. But whether it was a day or a year, God does eventually respond:
And the Lord answered me:
“Write the vision;
make it plain on tablets,
so he may run who reads it. (vs. 2)
God responds very graciously to Habakkuk. He says “I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen, and you are going to write it down very clearly, so that whoever reads it can persevere and keep on running the race.” Then in the rest of Habakkuk 2, God does just that.
As I thought about this verse, I realize God has done exactly that for us as well. God has communicated his plan for the redemption and restoration of all things. He has told you and me how He plans to heal our loved ones who suffer with developmental and psychiatric disabilities. I mean, come on, have you not read John 3:16? For God so loved the world,that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. And what will that eternal life look like?
Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” (Revelation 21:3-5)
God has given the vision, and had it written down so that we who read it may run.
He has also told us what his purposes for suffering are in the here and now. He has made it plain so that we can lean into His purposes and find meaning in our affliction. Here are are just a few:
1. We suffer so that our lives might glorify God.
As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.” (John 9:1-3)
2. We suffer so that we may be sanctified.
Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. (James 1:2-4)
3. We suffer so that we may comfort others.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort,who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. (2 Corinthians 1:3-4)
Back to Habakkuk 2:2. This little tiny verse in this little tiny book smacked me in the face. He has made his purposes for, and his plan to eradicate suffering plain. He haswritten it down for me. The problem is not that His will and plan are hidden. The problem is that 1) I don’t like them, and 2) I don’t want to wait for them. When I got to this point in my study, I had to take a break and sit with my pain in one hand, and God’s clear prescription for it in the other. I had to decide am I in, or am I out?
I had become disillusioned. “Disillusion” means to be rid of an illusion, something that isn’t real. For some reason, disillusionment is seen as a bad thing, but through this experience I have come to see it, at least in this situation, as a good thing. The illusion, the unreality, has been stripped away. My illusions of a tame God who would do things my way were decimated. My illusions of a God who conformed to mydefinitions of love and kindness were wiped out. I came to know a God far bigger than my imaginings, far more terrifying but far more glorious and loving than I previously conceived. I was reminded of the conversation between Susan and Mr. Beaver, in C.S. Lewis’ famed The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe:
“Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion.”
“Ooh,” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion”
“Safe?” said Mr Beaver, “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
He isn’t a safe, tame God. But He is good, according to His own infinitely better definitions. By God’s incredible kindness and abundant grace, I decided… I’m in.
It’s a question we all have to face. God has made it plain… are you in, or are you out?
We Walk by Faith, Not by Sight… Right?
It’s a very Christain-y thing to say: “We walk by faith, not by sight.” But when our child suffers with compulsive rituals, or self harm, or when a loved one’s mood instability is compromising their safety, relationships and employment time and again, or when your own depression has you either in bed, crying on the bathroom floor, or feeling like a clown as you pretend to be okay in front of other people– that’s when we truly must walk by faith. We must believe that God sees, knows, and loves us despite our current circumstances. We must lean into the purposes for suffering He lays out for us in Scripture here and now, even though they might seem ridiculous. We must look toward heaven and the promise that all things that are sad will come untrue, that every tear will be wiped away, broken brain will be made new. That you will one day know your loved one without the shroud of their illness. It seems so far, but it is so true.
That is walking by faith, specifically because you can’t see it or feel it. If you could, that would be walking by sight. That very Christian-y sentence is probably one of the hardest sentences to live out, and when it comes down to it, it is probably the call of God that most often breaks the camel’s back for many who ultimately walk away from God. They couldn’t see it, so they didn’t believe it. They didn’t have genuine faith.
God knew that it would be hard for Habakkuk to walk by faith and not by sight. Yes, he wrote the vision and made it plain, but He knew that the waiting for it’s manifestation would be hard. Like, really hard. So in Habakkuk 2:3 He empathetically reassures them, it will come:
For still the vision awaits its appointed time;
it hastens to the end—it will not lie.
If it seems slow, wait for it;
it will surely come; it will not delay.
Still making it plain. Wait. It will surely come.
Habakkuk takes us on a journey— he begins by asking God “why aren’t you doing anything?!” and he ends the book by declaring “I can’t see why you’re doing what you’re doing. It all looks dark right now. But I will trust your promises, and I will wait and watch. I will hope in what I know to be true even though I can’t see it.”
Let Habakkuk take you on this journey from dreading God to having a deep and abiding faith in Him— one that starts with hard questions, and one that ends without a change in circumstances, but one that cultivates faith and hope and intimacy with the One who is doing something so big that “you wouldn’t believe it if told” (Habakkuk 1:5).