The Question That Nearly Stopped Me Returning to Faith
Sometimes the questions that threaten our faith become the very ones that deepen it.
Welcome to today’s reflection.
Each weekday, paid subscribers receive an exclusive reflection designed to offer a thoughtful pause amid ordinary life. My prayer is that these brief pieces create a little space for curiosity, contemplation and wonder amid the noise of the day.
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For ten years, I wanted very little to do with church.
It wasn’t that I had become hostile to Christianity. If anything, I was disappointed by it. The faith that had once fascinated me had become strangely predictable. Too many easy answers were being offered to questions that deserved much more careful thought.
One Sunday, I remember hearing a preacher confidently declare:
“Jesus fulfilled hundreds of Old Testament prophecies. That’s the proof he was the Messiah.”
In many respects, he wasn’t wrong.
The Gospels repeatedly tell us that events in Jesus’ life happened “to fulfil” what had been written centuries earlier. Read Matthew in particular, and you can hardly miss it. Again and again, he pauses the story to tell us that something happened “so that what was spoken by the prophet might be fulfilled.”
It all sounds wonderfully straightforward.
The prophets predicted, and Jesus fulfilled. Except for me, it wasn’t.
Instead, a question lodged itself in my mind that refused to go away.
Were the Gospel writers really describing events that fulfilled prophecy, or were they just shaping the story so that it looked that way?
At that point in my life, it genuinely mattered.
Because if the Gospel writers had massaged the facts to make Jesus appear to fit the Scriptures, the whole foundation began to wobble. I wasn’t looking for a clever explanation. I simply wanted to know whether I could trust what I was reading.
That question followed me for a long time.
Ironically, it was one of the questions that eventually brought me back.
