“And have mercy on those who doubt” (Jude 11).
The Discovery of Doubt
Around here, faith isn’t easy. You discover this when you get into pastoral ministry, when you suddenly find people letting you behind the social curtain they put up in most situations. For some reason not clear to you, and probably not to them either, people give you access to the quiet part of their thinking. With you, they say the quiet part out loud, the unsanctioned things that feel out of place at church. Things about God and life and the strange movements that can happen in the soul. They talk to you about doubt.
You might expect doubt in a baby believer or a college student at a state school. But pastoral ministry—or really, any kind of ministry to people—will make you realize that doubt appears in a thousand forms, sneaking into all kinds of people. Established businessmen, high school athletes, first-time moms. Even senior saints who seem to glow with godliness. Even they may grab your forearm and tell you the dark things.
I think that was the single most surprising thing to me early on. Men and women who appear formidable to everyone else often do not see themselves that way. I remember feeling unease as older saints, their faces lined and leathered with proof of their endurance, suddenly got wet in the eyes, looking at me pleadingly. I, a young man with my springtime faith, listened as these wintered saints disclosed their doubts and uncertainty. Those winters had gotten into them. It was difficult for me to understand, looking out at life through the overconfident eyes of youth.
Doubt is temporary unbelief. That’s why it can stalk genuine believers. It’s not a permanent state of disbelief. It’s not an outright refusal to acknowledge that God speaks only what is true because he himself is true. It’s not the fixed position of a heart void of faith, dead from the life of God. But, boy, can it feel that way sometimes. The strongest and longest Christians, who have overcome impossible odds time after time, can still fall into seasons of doubt, seasons when it’s hard to take God at his Word.
God’s Mercy on Those Who Doubt
That’s an uncomfortable truth, isn’t it? That even the mighty ones are not so mighty. Believers never escape their weakness. They never grow past their need—their right now need—for God to sustain their faith.
And have mercy on those who doubt. Jude’s words come as an unexpectedly soft close to a letter that up to that point feels more like a closed-fist punch. This short letter is a solid jab to the chin. The whole letter is twenty-five verses, the majority of which are on the offense against a certain kind of danger. Jude warns believers of creepers and deceivers, of scoffers and rebels who are trying to unseat their faith. His descriptions of these bad guys are punchy, insightful, and poetically brilliant. It lands right on the chin.
But notice whose chin. His fist is aimed not at the doubting believer, but at the opposing forces that wear them down and put them in a weakened state, so that doubts find their way through. His main exhortation to believers, repeated and emphasized, is to contend for the faith. Yes, that’s the faith once for all delivered to the saints—an identifiable confession that Jesus is the Christ, against all other claims. But Jude’s purpose in this short letter is not to spell out the exact contents of this doctrine. He left that to more loquacious writers, like Paul and Peter. Rather, he uses his limited ink to emphasize that each believer must personally guard their belief against these opposing forces. Contend for your faith. Strive against anything that opposes your own trust that Jesus is who he says he is. Fight against your doubts.
Keeping the Faith is Overwhelming, and Christians Get Weary
Jude’s main exhortation in this letter has sweat behind it. His opening command “contend for the faith” (v. 3) is echoed in the twin command to “keep yourselves in the love of God” (v. 21), which involves “building yourselves up in your most holy faith” (v. 20), “praying in the Holy Spirit” (v. 20), and “waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life” (v. 21). Fighting, guarding, building, praying, waiting. There’s sweat behind these verbs.
But this sweat is not the strain of simple labor. It is a strain against something. The whole letter is about the opposition that must be resisted. Hungry, grasping opponents who work their way in and work your faith down. Jude calls them creepers, perverts, sensualists, deniers of the Master (v. 4). They were rebellious like the generation delivered from Egypt, rebellious like the angels who followed Satan on his villainous arch, rebellious like Sodom and Gomorrah in their corruption (v. 5–7). They claim authority that the archangel Michael himself would not dare to claim (v. 8–9). They are brash, harsh, and unrelenting. They demand that their new way is best, against the old way of believing.
It is exhausting to contend all the time. Christians find themselves in one battle after another, against a world that seems to manufacture bad ideas—new ways of getting around the old truth that Jesus Christ is Master and Lord. Think for a moment of the innumerable messages of unbelief shelling the ears of believers in the world they occupy. It wears on a believer’s soul. It saps their strength for fighting back. It makes them weary.
Keeping the Faith is Tedious, and Christians Can Wander
What makes this constant shelling all the worse is that their message appeals to the very weariness it creates. It offers pleasure and rest from the strain of holding fast. This is by design. The hostility of the world wears believers down, then offers them an escape from their weariness. It makes them fight for what they believe, but then appeals to the darker comforts they secretly want. And this strategy is made all the more effective because it is not usually a full-frontal assault but a steady artillery pounding. There is no thrill of battle, no assurance that, as intense as the fighting is, at least it will be over soon. No, these opponents let believers sit in their muddy trenches, tediously bombing them every so often throughout the night.
Contending for the faith is boring like that. It is as thrilling as keeping your feet dry and your head down. Opponents know this, and that’s why their appeal is all about personal desire. Jude describes their motivation as “following their own sinful desires” (v. 16) and “their own ungodly passions” (v. 17). They are like animals living on instinct, urging believers to join them (v. 12). Like Cain and Balaam and Korah (v. 11), like the wicked men proliferating across the land in Enoch’s day (v. 14–16), these are grumblers, malcontents, following their own sinful wants.
And sometimes believers wander after them. The message of the opponent gets into them—the message of discontentment, dissatisfaction with their natural place, falling into unnatural desire. They begin to navigate not by the fixed morning star of Jesus Christ, but by the “wandering stars” (v. 13) of false desire.
When Christians are Weary or Wandering, Doubts Find Their Way In
This is the deadly brilliance of the opponents’ strategy. Wear believers out and get them to wander, then their defenses thin out. Those thin spots are where doubts can enter. As I said earlier, doubts are temporary unbelief. They are the misgivings a believer has about the Lord and about what the Lord has said. In short, it is to distrust God’s character and God’s Word. Doubts are conditioned by suffering (like weariness) and by sin (like wandering).
Didn’t Simon Peter display both in the mighty presence of Jesus? On one occasion, having toiled to fish all night with nothing to show, Peter was nevertheless commanded by Jesus to lower his nets one more time. At Jesus’s word, Peter was so overwhelmed with success that his boat began to sink. His response? “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Luke 5:8). He feared the presence of this man who was God. Why? He was made suddenly, sharply aware of his sin.
On another perhaps more famous occasion, Peter saw another miracle of Jesus as he walked across the sea in the middle of a windstorm. The disciples were terrified—first of the storm, then of Jesus himself. Nevertheless, Jesus commanded Peter to join him out on the water. “But when he saw the wind, he was afraid, and beginning to sink he cried out, ‘Lord, save me'” (Matt 14:30). Peter feared the magnitude of those opposing forces. Why? He was suddenly, sharply aware of his weakness.
Doubts gain their place in our hearts when we see any opponent as more prominent than our Lord. Peter would eventually learn that his sin was not stronger than his gracious Master. And he would also learn that the raging water was no match for the One who called him. But the Lord used the presence of doubt in Peter’s heart as an opportunity to teach him something about their relationship.
Doubts Become an Occasion for Believers to See Again What God Contributes to the Relationship Versus What They Contribute
Sometimes the chronological order of things is of the utmost importance. Such is the case in Jesus’s response to Peter sinking faithlessly into the sea. “Jesus immediately reached out his hand and took hold of him, saying to him, ‘Oh you of little faith, why did you doubt?'” (Matt 14:31). Jesus’s first response to Peter’s doubt was to reach out and take hold of him. His second was to point out his doubts. In pastoral ministry, we must never reverse that order.
Jude follows this same pattern. You see it when you step back and look at the whole letter. At first glance, it seems like the main thrust of the letter is to exhort believers to contend for the faith and to keep yourselves in the love of God. To keep is to hold onto. It seems that Jude’s main concern is that they hold onto God’s love. But a second, more lingering look at the letter makes something else more prominent. He begins with, “To those who are called, beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ” (v. 1) and closes with “Now to him who is able to keep you” (v. 24). To keep is to hold onto. The same verbal concept, but with a different actor. Not us, but God.
What God teaches believers through their doubting is this: “I keep you. You don’t keep yourself. So take me at my word.” The difference between how God relates to us and how we relate to him is simple. His love for us is the cause, our love for him is the effect. In other words, his keeping us is the cause of our keeping faith with him. It is never the reverse. We contribute weakness and doubt, while God contributes strength and certainty. The Lord never wearies and never wanders in his love for us, though we often do so in our love for him.
Even faith is a gift. To anyone who asks, faith is a gift sent from a generous Father, secured by the faithful Son, delivered by the present Spirit (Luke 11:10–13). Remember, doubt is temporary unbelief. It is not the permanent state of a believer, not because of anything the believer himself produced.
Shepherding the Weary and the Wandering is Best Done With the Stubborn Voice of Mercy
It always blows me away that the mighty disciples, on whose testimony Jesus has built his church, had doubts among them even after seeing the resurrected Jesus. The end of both Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels note this. When Jesus came and stood among his chattering disciples, he said, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?” (Luke 24:38). Even the verse directly preceding the Great Commission that ends Matthew’s Gospel says, “And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted” (Matt 28:17).
Jesus’s response to doubt in both situations is to draw their attention not primarily to their failure, but to his success, from their weakness to his strength, from their insufficiency to his sufficiency. Look, see my hands and feet. It’s me. I won life back for you, just like I said. All authority in heaven and on earth is mine. I am with you. Trust me.
That’s what mercy is. It is Jesus Christ disclosing himself to us, and stubbornly insisting that his love is the main issue at hand, not our weariness or our wanderings. To shepherd the weary and the wandering, pastors need to speak with the same voice.
The (Re)Discovery of Mercy
Around here, faith isn’t easy. The biblical writers knew this. That’s why they insisted on mercy for those who doubt. Even many-wintered saints, who ought to know by now the magnitude and unchangeability of God’s love for them, sometimes forget. The opposition wears them down. Winter gets into them.
What they need is mercy. Mercy in the same form as what Jesus gave: a stubborn insistence that our confidence must be God-to-us, not us-to-God. This is the very thing that strengthens faith and obedience. To rediscover the astonishing truth that God’s love, like the sun in winter, has not lost a single degree in its measureless output of heat. The change was never in God. The change is only in a world tilted away from him. That’s what winter is.
But the sun burns on, untouched by the tiltings of this world. That’s true for young believers fresh in their discovery of mercy. That’s true of aging believers leaning heavily on that old mercy. All of us rely on God’s insistence to do what he intended before the beginning: to welcome his children into the eternal summer of his presence.