I recently went through a deep crisis of faith and while I don't want to say I’m completely "fixed", there is still plenty of work to be done, I have made significant progress.
I felt compelled to share my story here for anyone else wrestling with similar feelings.
I’m going to start by outlining the exact doubts and grievances that ate away at me for years before I share how I found peace.
It starts at the very beginning with the garden of Eden and original sin.
We are told God created the Garden and created Adam and Eve. Humanity was in direct communion with Him, walking beside Him and openly conversing with our father. Supposedly, it was perfect.
But God also created the serpent. And God created the Tree of Knowledge.
Our omniscient, omnipotent God not only knew we were going to fail, he built the exact mechanisms of our failure and placed them directly in our path.
"Perfection" seemed to have a couple of massive, glaring flaws right out of the gate.
If God knew humanity was going to fall, and was Himself responsible for creating the conditions of that fall, why are we the ones paying the ultimate price for Adam's choices?
For a long time, I was furious about the sheer asymmetry of it all.
All the power, glory, and required gratitude belong to him, but all the danger, consequences, terror, and judgment fall squarely on us.
I was expected to repent and feel overwhelming gratitude that God sent Jesus to rescue me from the weight of sin. Sin that he allowed into the world in the first place.
To my logic, it felt like being forced to thank a firefighter for saving me from a burning house, while knowing full well he was the one who doused my kitchen in kerosene.
Not only that, I had to ask the firefighter to rescue me, being saved wasn't a foregone conclusion.
Growing up in the Evangelical church, all I ever heard was the Courtroom Model of God.
In that framework, God sits on his throne with a gavel in His hand, legally obligated to condemn us for our transgressions, until Jesus steps in as our defense attorney or substitute to take the punishment we deserve.
I cannot tell you how deeply I despise this model.
Why do we automatically "deserve" eternal damnation for failing inside a broken world we didn't ask to enter?
We are declared guilty for sins introduced by a serpent that God created and we are driven by a fallen nature God allowed us to inherit.
To make matters worse, Jesus raises the bar in the Sermon on the Mount.
He claims that keeping the external law isn't enough. You have to keep it in your heart. Anger is equivalent to murder, lust is equivalent to adultery. Jesus effectively turned an already difficult moral standard into an absolute human impossibility.
Even if by some miracle you did manage a sinless life, it wouldn't matter because we're condemned by Adam's original sin.
Whenever I brought up these structural issues, people would point me to Paul’s argument in Romans 9. The lines about the Potter and the clay, "Who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, Why did you make me like this?"
Honestly? That response always infuriated me. It felt like a cheap, authoritarian "because I said so" cop out.
I am not an inert lump of clay.
Supposedly I am a conscious soul created in His image, endowed with the very capacity for logic, reason, passion, and desire for justice that He built into me.
Being told "How dare you question God? Shut up and accept reality." just felt insulting.
How is it "perfect justice" to build creatures with weak hardware, give them an impossible moral bar, declare them inherently unclean for missing the mark, and then claim they don't even deserve mercy?
In a human court, if a judge built the environment, engineered the defendant's flaws, set an impossible standard, and then condemned them, we would call that a corruption.
We'd say the game was rigged from the start.
I felt like if God knew man was going to fall from the moment He said "Let there be light," and chose to create us anyway, then the absolute bare minimum He owed us was a clear path back to Him. But I also knew that if I walked into church and suggested that Jesus was obligated to die on the cross for us, I’d be chased out with pitchforks.
The turning point for me started when I began to dismantle that courtroom model entirely.
I found out that the early Church didn't view God as a prosecutor and us as criminals waiting for execution. They viewed sin as a disease and God as a doctor.
Jesus didn't come to a courtroom to pay off a judge. He stepped into a quarantine zone to heal the sick.
Shifting away from a courtroom to a hospital model helped, but the real breakthrough didn't fully land just yet.
Beyond the courtroom, there was the issue of free will.
On paper, we are told we have a free choice. But in reality, the options boil down to choose Jesus, or face oblivion / eternal conscious torment. The jury is still out on which one.
It was impossible for me to view that as a genuine, uncoerced choice when one of the options is execution.
God says He wants us to come to Him willingly out of love, but how can I love freely when I feel like I'm making the decision with a gun to my head?
I know He loves me. I know He died for me.
I genuinely wanted to choose Him.
But if I was being intellectually honest, I couldn't get past the feeling that I was making that choice under duress.
I struggled with this for years. When I brought these doubts to well meaning believers, the answer was always, "Well, Jesus emptied Himself of His divinity when He became human."
I never bought that.
Walking on water, feeding five thousand people with a couple fish, commanding storms, raising the dead, and being attended to by angels in the desert didn't look like he was emptied of divinity.
I don't want to say it looked like "easy mode," but it certainly didn't look like the average human experience either.
It was easy to view Jesus as a divine being in a human disguise who coasted through life on a cheat code.
Then I read Job 9 and 10.
Job doesn't pull any punches.
He cries out against the enormous, terrifying gulf between our infinite God and finite man.
In Job 9:32–33, he laments that there is no Arbiter, no mediator who can lay one hand on Almighty God and one hand on a broken human heart to make things fair.
Reading that blew my mind. Job was feeling the exact same rage I was feeling, thousands of years ago.
He was begging for an Arbiter. He was calling out for Jesus long before Jesus arrived.
Yesterday, as I was wrestling with all of this again, a realization hit me seemingly out of nowhere.
I stopped looking at the divine being performing miracles, and I looked at Gethsemane.
Jesus literally sweat blood in that garden. He fell on His face in the dirt, terrified, begging His Father if there was any other way for the cup to pass from Him.
And then, on the cross, as the weight of this broken, heavy system was poured onto Him, He experienced something far worse than Roman nails.
He felt the literal, cosmic gulf form between Himself and the Father. He cried out, "My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?"
Think about that.
Here was a man who had known unbroken, perfect, eternal oneness with God from before time began. He had never known a single second of isolation. When He took on our reality, He didn't just physically die, He experienced the absolute, terrifying abyss of abandonment.
Jesus had it worse than any human ever could.
Not because He was tortured, but because the eternal bond of His existence was severed.
That was my turning point.
In that moment of clarity, I realized He didn't go through His life on easy mode.
He went through it knowing that he was walking towards the worst torture anyone could ever endure.
And He did it for me.
All this time, I thought I was raging against a tyrannical, cold Architect sitting safely behind the clouds, judging us from His golden throne.
I suddenly realized I wasn't fighting a tyrant. I was raging against a man, my Arbiter, my friend, who looked at the terrifying brokenness of this world, saw how heavy it was for us, and stepped directly into the fire to take the brunt of it on His own body.
After that realization, I prayed for the first time in a long time.
I mean really prayed.
Sure I said grace at dinner and bowed my head in church, but that prayer was the first one I really meant in I don't know how long.
It wasn't an eloquent prayer by any means. All I could do was repeat a few simple words over and over as I cried.
I'm sorry, thank you.
I don't need to have every single cosmic detail of the plan or the mechanics of the afterlife figured out today.
I just needed to know that the one holding the universe isn't standing over me with a gun.
He is standing beside me with nail scarred hands.
In that moment, I felt completely weightless. It felt like dropping an invisible, crushing burden that I had been carrying for years without even realizing it.
For anyone out there who feels like their logic, their grievances, or their anger makes them a "bad Christian", please know that God isn't afraid of your questions.
He certainly wasn't scared of mine.
If anyone is struggling like I was, please know that you don't have to settle for cheap, legalistic answers. Sometimes you just have to push through the arguments and the doubts until you come all the way back around to Jesus.
Because it was always all about Him.