Overcoming Doubt

1:6–8. However, God’s provision has some prerequisites. To receive God’s wisdom in trials, the believer must be wise in asking. First, he must ask in faith. He must believe and not doubt (diakrinomenos, the word for “doubt,” suggests vacillating). He dare not come to God like a wave of the sea, blown [horizontally] and tossed [vertically] by the wind. God is not pleased with a double-minded (lit., “two-souled,” dipsychos; cf. 4:8) man who is unstable in all he does, like an unsteady, staggering drunk. The answer from God depends on assurance in God.

4:20–21. In spite of the humanly impossible situation, Abraham did not waver through (lit., “by”) unbelief. “Waver” (diekrithē) means “to be divided” (sometimes trans. “doubt,” as in James 1:6). The patriarch was strengthened in his faith (lit., “was empowered [enedynamōthē, from endynamoō] by means of faith”). God, responding to Abraham’s faith, empowered him and Sarah physically to generate the child of promise. Also he gave glory to God, that is, he praised God by exalting or exclaiming His attributes. Abraham was fully persuaded that God had power (dynatos, “spiritual ability”) to do what He had promised. What confidence in God this spiritual forefather possessed! He “in hope believed” (Rom. 4:18); he was not weak in faith despite insuperable odds (v. 19); he was not divided in his thinking by unbelief (v. 20a); he was empowered by faith (v. 20b); and he was fully persuaded God has the ability to do what He had said (v. 21).

The poem is a sad recounting of how their ancestors forgot God’s works, but it also recounts how the Lord graciously delivered them

14:1–4. Unfortunately the people accepted the majority assessment and began to protest to Moses that they would have been better off to have died in Egypt or the desert than at the hands of the Canaanites. It would be better even now, they said, to choose a new leader and make their way back to Egypt.

119:145–152. The psalmist called on the LORD to deliver him because he obeyed, hoped in, and meditated on His Word (vv. 145–149). His enemies, though near him, were far removed from God’s Law (v. 150). God, however, was also near him and His words were reliable (vv. 151–152)

The Psalmist Asaph cried earnestly in the night from his troubled spirit, searching his soul for an answer to his distress. He found comfort in meditating on God’s mighty deliverance at the Exodus. This meditation bolstered the psalmist’s courage and led him to try to get God to show His mighty power again

The psalmist’s comfort and hope came from his musing on God’s great deliverance of Israel at the Exodus.

The solution to the dilemma was for the Corinthians to separate from the false apostles. Whatever may have been their own and others’ estimation of their spiritual status, Paul considered the false apostles to be unbelievers (cf. 11:13–15) from whom the Corinthians needed to separate. But Paul did not say that Christians should have no contacts whatever with unbelievers. Earlier he argued the absurdity of such a position (1 Cor. 5:9–10). But religious unbelievers might lead believers astray from “sincere and pure devotion to Christ” (2 Cor. 11:3), and the fact concerned Paul greatly. A believer can be rightly yoked only with Christ