FAITH AND DOUBT 02.

WHO GETS TO SAY WHAT GOD IS LIKE?

If you stick with the tradition long enough—Bible, theology, prayer, lament—you’ll eventually run headfirst into the question: Who gets to say what God is like?

In Sunday School, the answer was easy. God is good. God is love. God is holy. But the older you get, and the deeper you dig, the more complicated the portrait becomes. Because all those statements are true—but they’re also curated. Filtered through lenses of culture, history, power, and trauma. If you’ve done any graduate work in religion, you know what I’m talking about.

GOOD GOD BEHAVING BADLY?

If you haven’t, here’s a fun and terrifying game:

try reading only the parts of the Bible where God doesn’tact like you think God should act.

The flood. The genocide in Joshua. The divine silence in Lamentations. The wrath in Revelation. You’ll find yourself asking questions fast.

And then here comes the kicker: maybe those aren’t the parts that should be explained away. Maybe they’re the starting point for a different kind of faith. Not faith as certainty. But faith as relationship. As wrestling.

In the last article, we walked through how God changes shape in the Jewish tradition—from a divine man in a garden, to a cosmic whirlwind, to pure Spirit beyond comprehension. But what does that do to our image of God now?

Let’s get concrete.

If your God is mostly Jesus holding a lamb and quoting beatitudes, that’s beautiful. But that’s not the whole story. If your God is mostly a warrior king establishing justice in the land, okay. But that’s only a slice. If your God is mostly a mystery beyond knowing, hovering over the void, fine—but remember, that mystery once ate a goat in the desert and got mad when you didn’t light the altar correctly.

YOU NEED ALL THE CONCEPTIONS AT ONCE.

The point is not that one image is right and the others are wrong. The point is: all conceptions of divinity form a mosaic.

We piece together glimpses. And like the ancients before us, we project upward the best and worst of what we hope, fear, or long for.

It’s why oppressed communities often see God as Liberator. It’s why the comfortable often prefer God as Manager of the Status Quo. It’s why soldiers want a warring God, and philosophers want an unchanging One. We see in the divine what we most desperately need.

Do you see what happens? We embrace and even project conceptions of divinity which serve our aims and purposes. This is why you need the imagery of God that is foreign or uncomfortable to you— these are the images that actually stretch your thinking and make you grow.

And this is not a bad thing. It’s human. But it means you have to interrogate your image of God. You have to ask: is the God I worship just a megaphone for my own personality and politics? Or is something—someone—speaking back? Or am I at least trying to name a being way way bigger than my limited ideas and beliefs?

YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO WRESTLE WITH GOD.

Even the Bible itself gives you permission to do this. Moses argues with God. Abraham bargains. Job rages. The prophets accuse. Jesus weeps. Peter denies. Thomas doubts. And the psalmists? They file complaints so real they still get censored from church bulletins. “Why have you forsaken me?” is not just a line from the cross. It’s a line from Psalm 22. The tradition has always made room for faith that is cracked open and raw.

But here’s the wild thing: even the cracks have become part of the sacred story. The ancient editors did not remove the conceptions of God which made them uncomfortable; they let all of the imagery sit side by side and in tension.

When people say they’re deconstructing, I get it. Even though I think it’s a buzzword for dismantling something more akin to Zeus than the mosaic of the Judeo-Christian God. But I’ve been there. When you start pulling threads—of doctrine, of certainty, of inherited belief—you worry the whole thing will unravel. But what if that unraveling is the very thing that frees you to encounter God again, not as a puppet of the past, but as Presence here and now?

Because here’s a provocative truth: even your image of God today—no matter how beautiful—is probably not the final form. Like the ancient writers, you’re still painting. Still stretching. Still reaching.

And that’s okay.

In fact, that’s sacred.

GOD CAN HANDLE YOUR QUESTIONS.

Maybe what we need is less “correct” ideas about God and more courageous ones—the kind that risks naming what we see, but also risks unknowing what we once knew.

So if you’re doubting, second-guessing, even deconstructing—here’s your invitation: stay in the story. Stay with the text. Stay with the ache. Because the truth might not be where you expected, but it’s still there.

It’s in the burning bush and the silent tomb. It’s in the mountaintop thunder and the still small voice. It’s in the name you whisper and the one you’ve forgotten how to say.

Faith doesn’t mean never doubting. Faith means carrying your questions to the edge of the Mystery—and stepping forward anyway.

Because maybe God isn’t afraid of your questions.

Maybe God is in your questions.

And maybe the truest thing you can say in this moment isn’t “I believe” or “I don’t”—but the ancient, sacred whisper that echoes from Jacob to Jesus to you:

“I will not let go unless you bless me.”

One thing I do know. When life turns tragic: a spouse betrays you, a friend gets terminally sick, a child you were waiting to meet dies silently before birth, your mom or dad ages and you become a caregiver almost overnight, you are weary every month from finances being too tight… any number of things which leave us wondering, “where is God” and “why did this happen?”

You are going to need God.

And at the same time, you are not going to need a simple, cleaned up version of God.

You are going to need a God who holds the light and the dark, the good and the evil, the explainable as well as the inexplicable.