Former Australian Prime Minister John Anderson said, “Doubt is a good place to start, but an awful place to stop.” Doubt can be the threshold to new truth or it can be the pitfall to despair. To our skeptical, doubting age God issues a challenge in Malachi 3: “Prove me...”
We can prove that God is. We can’t do this by scientific means for God cannot be crammed into a test tube or worked out by a mathematical equation. But we can know him by experience. We need not be surprised that we cannot see God. Blasts of wind set all things moving, swinging, and shaking, and the eyes do not see the blast of wind. Yet we need not see it to feel its coolness in our face. So people need not see God to feel his breath on their lives. Who has never felt God’s nearness? It has been the experience of all people everywhere to feel God’s presence.
When Horace Bushnell was young and unbelieving he wanted to find God if he existed. “I prayed to the dim God, confessing the dimness for honesty’s sake,” he wrote. Then he said he arose from his knees saying, “A being so profoundly felt must inevitably be.”
We can also prove that God cares. It is not enough to just believe that God “exists” as we may believe that the Statue of Liberty "exists" in New York City. We need to believe in a God who lives and loves and reaches out to us. But how can we be sure that God is alive and loving? We can perform a spiritual experiment just like an experiment in physics or chemistry. We hear that if we mix two ingredients, a certain result will happen. So we try it for ourselves and see if it is true. The experiment of faith is just as simple. Mix the promises of God with your own fulfillment of the conditions and see what happens. You will thus discover in the laboratory of your own life that God is alive and that he loves you.
We can also prove that God is able. He has abundant resources. Oftentimes our lives are shriveled and poverty stricken because we do not trust him. But he “is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20).
German philosopher Goethe reminds us, “Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by action.” Do you doubt that God is or that he loves or that he is able? Prove him. He invites you to do so.