‘Stronger than my doubts.’ God’s faith in us matters more than our faith in God.

Given the nature of my jobs as a pastor and a contributing newspaper columnist who writes mainly about religion, I hear from people who say, “I don’t believe in God.”

Some are Christians struggling with their faith, as most of us do periodically. Some are atheists. Some seem embarrassed or guilty about their wavering beliefs. Some proclaim their disbelief proudly.

Whatever the case, I usually reply: “That’s OK. God still believes in you.”

That epiphany occurred to me a few years ago—that God himself operates by faith, and that he’s placed a big chunk of his own faith on us mortals, betting we’ll eventually succeed in grasping his wondrous presence in the universe and that we’ll learn to live accordingly, in love and mercy and humility. He’s got his money and reputation riding on us, so to speak.

Once I’d seen this, I couldn’t unsee it, and I couldn’t figure out how I’d missed it for so long. I also couldn’t figure out why I hadn’t heard others saying the same thing.

Indeed, as best I could recall, I’d never heard anybody else say it.

Well, now I have, and this guy said it way better than I ever could.

During the darkest days of the pandemic, I took up walking several times a week. It was a way of getting out of the house without endangering myself or others. I’ve kept at it. Out in the fresh air alone, I pass the time by listening to podcasts as I walk.

Among my favorite podcasts is Premier magazine’s “The Profile.” Premier is a British Christian journal. Its related podcast is both thought-provoking and encouraging.

Last week, I listened to an archived interview with the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who was England’s chief rabbi and a recipient of the Templeton Prize, sometimes likened to a Nobel Prize for religion. He passed away in November.

Sacks described God’s faith in us as being more important than our faith in God.

I was so excited by what he said and how eloquently he said it that I went home and looked him up online. I quickly found his website, which is still maintained by staff, apparently.

There, the rabbi had written at length about God’s faith in humans.

In a 2012 op-ed for the Times (of London, I assume), he talked about the importance of sheer grit in the achievements of J. K. Rowling, William Golding, Steve Jobs and the Beatles—and in his own life:

Like those others, he had failed repeatedly, he admitted. But he’d learned to accept and even embrace failure.

“Why?” he asked. “Because at some point on my religious journey I discovered that more than we have faith in God, God has faith in us. He lifts us every time we fall. He forgives us every time we fail. He believes in us more than we believe in ourselves. He mends our broken hearts. …

“The greatest source of grit I know, the force that allows us to overcome every failure, every setback, every defeat, and keep going and growing, is faith in God’s faith in us.”

In another entry, Sacks compared two opposing worldviews about the origins and meaning of life.

“There are only two serious possibilities to be entertained by serious minds,” he wrote. “Either the one put forward by the Torah that we are here because a Force greater than the universe wanted us to be, or the alternative: that the universe exists because of a random fluctuation in the quantum field, and we are here because of a mindless sequence of genetic mutations blindly sifted by natural selection. Either there is or is not meaning to the human condition. The first possibility yields Isaiah, the second, Sophocles, Aeschylus and Greek tragedy. The Greece of antiquity died. The Israel of Abraham and Moses still lives.

“I respect those who choose Greek tragedy over Jewish hope. But those who choose Judaism have made space in their minds for the most life-changing idea of all: Whether or not we have faith in God, God has faith in us.”

From Adam to the Holocaust, humans have ignored or willfully disobeyed God’s vision for us, Sacks said. Still, God has kept on believing we will learn to get it right.

I agree. When I’m struggling, it bucks me up to remind myself God has faith in me, to think that, as the New Testament promises, even if I’m faithless he will remain faithful. His faith is stronger than my doubts.

I’ll leave you with these beautiful words from Sacks:

“We may lose heart; God never will. We may despair; God will give us hope. ... We may sin and disappoint and come short again and again, but God never ceases to forgive us when we fail and lift us when we fall. Have faith in God’s faith in us and you will find the path from darkness to light.”

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.