Listening For A Silent God: Exploring Spiritual Doubt, Human Suffering And the Nature of God

By Keith Fowlkes

This first book from Christian author Keith Fowlkes explores many topics from spiritual doubt to modern church life and doctrine from a logical perspective. From an early age, Keith experienced suffering and loss, yet his faith remained strong until a tragic turn of events caused him to question everything... including the very nature of God.

Listening for a Silent God is a search into Biblical Scripture, and a logical discussion on why we doubt God, why God allows His people to suffer and why God may sometimes seem to be silent in our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781098089283

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Listening For A Silent God

Exploring Spiritual Doubt, Human Suffering And the Nature of God

Keith Fowlkes

ISBN 978-1-0980-8926-9 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-0980-8928-3 (digital)

Copyright © 2022 by Keith Fowlkes, M.A., M.B.A.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Reference List

About the Author

Acknowledgments

To my beautiful family: my wife, Talitha, and my children, Grayson and Teagan. Talitha, thank you for your support, love, and patience. I'm a better person because of you. Gray and Teagan, I hope that these words might help you to find Jesus through your darkest days and to celebrate God's blessings more fully in your happiest times. Love you guys.

To my mom, thank you for being my rock when I was small, and even though I only knew you for a short time, your love echoes through my life today.

To my dad, thank you for giving me structure and a sense of responsibility in my life that has helped me to be the man I am today. I know that God had a plan for you in my life.

To my stepmother, Patti, you will never know how blessed I am to have you step into my life when you did. God had a plan for you in my life as He still has one for you today. Love you.

To the mammas, Mama Shirley, Mama C, Mama Elnora, and Mama JoAnn and all the wonderful church families who gathered around me when I was young, thank you. I was a life that was changed.

To Reverend Mike and Jackie Nolen and all my youth group family from Calvary Baptist Church in Union City, Tennessee. Who knows where I would be without you all as my surrogate family. Love you all so much.

Lastly but above all, thank You, Jesus, who this book is for and is to and is for Your glory alone. Thank You for bringing me through my dark night of the soul and never letting go.

Introduction

Silence. That's what I was getting from God at a time that I desperately needed to hear His voice. I began to question whether God had always been silent in my life and I was just hearing my own self-talk in my head. It started a ten-year avalanche of questioning my faith as well as the existence and nature of God.

As you will see, questions like these were earthshaking for someone with a southern conservative Christian upbringing. What was wrong with me? Was the problem with me or with God, or at least what I perceived God to be?

You might be like me until about sixteen years ago: listening to every preacher's scriptural interpretation, smiling and shaking my head to the affirmative during their sermons. I generally don't like conflict, so I was cool with this, usually making a joke or an uncomfortable comment to deflect any debate. (Admit it, you've been there too!) But over the past several years, my mind began to gravitate to questions about why I believed what I believed. After a tragic death of someone close to me, I started doing something that I never thought I could do. I began to question the nature of God and how it was logically reflected in the Bible and other spiritual writings.

So before we begin this journey, I want to say I'm just a regular guy. I'm not a well-published author or a theologian. You will find that I write much like I speak, like a commoner and occasionally, a goofball. I fear that the Christian community has begun to get into the same rut that the Jewish culture experienced in Jesus's time. We all have the tendency to believe that the great biblical minds (in those days, the Pharisees of the temple) are the only people that have anything substantive to add to our spiritual journey as uneducated commoners. I don't think that God would inspire the Scriptures to be written in a way that we uneducated commoners wouldn't be able to understand them and form our own thoughts on it. Right? Nope, you won't get any of that heady stuff here.

This is a journey of faith, logic, and doubt. I think that this will be evident given the emotional state I was in when I started writing this. I was an emotional and spiritual mess. I wrote this over the course of several years and in varying states of mind. I was angry at God and confused about so many things that seemingly had (and still have) no clear answers. I hope you will be patient as you read this and put yourself in my mindset and maybe even identify with the pain that I was going through. In the coming pages, you will see how I came to blame Him for most of the bad things in my life and the world. I started to question everything I had been raised to believe in the church. Many of the things are very logical and some, not so much.

This book is really broken up into three parts. First, an introduction of my past. This is not an autobiography or memoir. I wouldn't put you through that, but a little background will help you to understand why I was struggling so hard with the nature of God and why good people suffer. Yeah, I know, deep stuff.

Secondly, the start of all this writing, I ease you into my essay of anger, doubt, and questioning of God that I wrote over a ten-year period. I jokingly (now) call this "my happy little journal of heresy."

Lastly, I attempt to answer some of the questions that were weighing so heavily on me through Scripture, reading and logical conclusions about my own faith. It is a very simple and sincere attempt to make sense of it all. You may find some things that sound a bit redundant, but please bear with me as I give you background and insights in my life that built the little house of cards that took a hard spiritual tumble later.

I'm sure there are nonbelievers out there that will say that the ideas that I will discuss here are the natural and logical path to the conclusion that there is no God or at least not one that is actively present in this world. Heck, you might think the world was created by ancient aliens. The good thing here is that you won't find any judgment with me here. No aliens stuff in here but maybe a few messed up ideas about the Bible that eventually resolve with time.

I have several good friends (maybe even you) that if they were completely honest, might smile and say that faith is a crutch for the weak, the superstitious, or the uneducated mind. To that I say, I am not convinced of that given the evidence gathered throughout the ages in nearly every culture on the planet. To only grasp the logical aspects of God and faith is to completely discount and ignore the genuine experiences of billions of people down through the ages as well as my own. Logically, to me at least, to ignore the metaphysical things in the world is to ignore a good bit of evidence over the ages of the existence of God. It is also a bit insulting to the vast power and mystery of God (or the universe, aliens, or whatever you may believe in on your journey).

What you will read here is a brutally raw, honest, and occasionally comical account of my journey of faith, logic, and doubt. As I wrote these words, I did not know whether this journey will lead me through my crisis of faith or lead me straight into a brick wall of more spiritual confusion. If you have chosen to read this, all I ask is that you read my entire essay, suspend your judgment, and try and be empathetic with my thoughts (which is an ability that I am very weak with myself!).

I'm sure that some of you are putting up red flags about my use of the word logic to describe my journey here. Many Christians believe that faith and logic cannot exist together, but in my life, logic is part of my reality. The career world that I have lived in most of my life consists of numbers, bits, and bytes and economic and industry trends. I wholly believe that God is a God of logic mixed with wonders that we will never understand.

Years ago, a good mathematician friend of mine introduced me to some of his research in higher level geometry that began with his search for the most efficient way to mow his strangely shaped lawn. My quest for logic, mixed with a bit of OCD I admit, set me on my own three-year journey to work this math out in my mind for my own lawn. I failed, miserably. Thanks a lot, David. I want that time back in my life now.

I believe with all my heart that God loves His creation in us and He proudly gave us the ability to think critically and logically about His word is part of this. I assure you, as you read this, you will see where my journey for logical conclusions to the mysteries of God stop and faith takes over.

As I mentioned, in chapters 2 and 3, I will share with you an essay that started as a personal journal over ten years ago. At the time, I had so many thoughts in my head about God, the Bible, and Christians in general. I felt I had to write them down. I am not a journaler. In fact, I have poked fun at people who journal up until the time that I started myself. Those journalers out there can imagine my surprise when the writing helped clear my head and put a lot of things into perspective. Don't gloat. It was prickly.

While reading this, you might feel that I think too much, and you are probably right, but I wasn't always like this. I have spent most of my life, as many Christians have, listening to country pastors preach fire and brimstone from their pulpits. I was fortunate to have had a great youth minister earlier in my life that did teach biblical truths that helped make me a responsible and moral man. My youth pastor became my second dad after my mom passed away at an early age. But I grew up in a very strict conservative Southern Baptist culture that leaned toward the opinion that to question the preacher's interpretation of Scripture was almost questioning God Himself. You know, like some sort of redneck pope! This idea wasn't ever overtly pushed by any of my pastors. It was just the way it was, and that thinking was just hunky-dory to me when I was a young person. You know…one less thing to worry about, to quote Forrest Gump. Later in life is where things started to fall apart in my head.

I invite you to read my journal, now turned essay, now turned book. If you are a Christian, don't freak out with the things I'm going to say. They are hard sometimes brutal dissections of my thoughts, doubts, and fears. If you can be honest with yourself, you may have had the same questions but were too afraid to share them with anyone. If it sounds like I'm writing it to an audience, you would be right. I wrote this thinking of a number of friends who would be both supportive of my struggle and appalled at my suppositions. I hope by the end of this, I will have found some answers or at least a resolution in all these thoughts swimming in my brain.

If you are a Christian, if you are of another faith, or if you have no faith at all, I hope that you will listen through my thoughts with close examination of your own beliefs, why you believe what you do, and how the questions that I'm asking myself apply to you (if they do at all). I'm sure that many of you will identify with my thoughts, and to those who do, I hope that these words will help you to know that others like you go through crises of faith, even an absence of faith. I think it's okay…really.

My plan is not just to discuss my thoughts and feelings but, in future chapters, to try and offer some basic biblical answers (where possible) that might shed some light on my crisis of faith that you will read in chapters 2 and 3. Digging deeper, I found that some doctrinal teachings were digging into me and causing me to question everything. Maybe you are experiencing something similar?

Remember that I ask that you read it all, suspend your judgments, and be empathetic with my journey. Lastly, I hope that you can spend some serious time in introspection and study to answer your own questions about your own life journey.

I have one more thought before the heresy begins. We had just moved into a new town when I was going through some of my darkest times of these writings and we made the decision to start attending a sweet little Presbyterian church near to our house. I made a huge mistake in sharing these thoughts with our new church pastors a bit too early in my journey. As I wrote the essay in chapter 2 and, especially chapter 3, the darkest writings here, I shared them to get feedback from my pastors in our small contemporary (and very conservative) church. Honestly, I think I scared them to death or made them question whether I was one of the elect, a topic that we will visit later. I was so prideful, bitter, and angry, and they had no history on me or my background. I was like a drowning person calling for help, and when someone showed up to try and pull me out, I tried to pull them under too. Sorry about that, my friends. You know who you are.

My wife was also worried, and I cannot blame her. I didn't know what to do with it myself. She had a conversation with our pastor to share her concerns. This process was the scariest and most depressing time of my life. It was a dark time spiritually, and I was needy, arrogant, confused, contemplative, moody, and carried a huge chip on my shoulder at church, specifically toward our leadership. I did everything I could to distance myself from them as well as sharing any real feelings. I was an emotional and spiritual mess.

As you read this, you will note that I refer to the teachings of John Calvin, a French lawyer turned theologian, pastor, and leader during the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s. I promise not to get too deep in doctrinal theology in this book, but Calvin hated the Catholic Church (and oddly enough, anyone who disagreed with his writings) and wrote the massive Institutes of the Christian Religion. These writings have informed many modern reformed religious doctrines, including the Southern Baptist church that I grew up in, as well as many churches where I've served over the years. One of the central teachings is that of election, the teaching that God, at the beginning of time, chose who would be born, live, die, and either go to heaven or hell. I will dive into the top layer of Calvinism later in this book, but know, this key teaching in Calvinist doctrine was a central theme in my anger and confusion with the nature of God that I will talk about in this book.

Please know that some of the background information might seem a bit redundant in some of the later chapters but bear with me. In every stage in my process, a little more detail is peeled back that reveals more detail of why my anger and resentment with people and God grew over time. Again, I promise this is not an autobiography. I wouldn't put you through that agony.

So begins your journey down my stream of consciousness. One of my favorite Christian music artists of the 1980s and 1990s was Bryan Duncan. He was hilarious and spiritually challenging all at once. I think one of his songs is a perfect introduction to the beginning of this book and sums up the way I felt when writing this. It is the title song from Bryan's album Anonymous Confessions of a Lunatic Friend. Here are