Commentary on Why Believe by Bill Rhea

What follows are the passages I found most powerful and insightful, along with my reflections on each.

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“There is no hypocrisy in Jesus.”

The word hypocrisy gets a bad rap, but deservedly so because of how it is used in the New Testament. The word literally means to be under judgment. When a select group of elites place themselves under their own assessment, they are judging themselves — evaluating how God must think about them because that is how they think about themselves. When we reach the conclusion that our inner circle will certainly be judged superior, we have adopted all the negative associations of the word. But hypocrisy also has an important positive usage. When we place ourselves under the judgment of God, when we find ourselves crucified with Christ on the cross, that judgment is absolutely wonderful. There is no place we would rather be than inside the judgment of Christ. It is also the place we want to be a million miles away from. Both are true at the same time. Inside the humanity of Christ resides the perfect judgment of God. We are found guilty and innocent at the same time.

For those newer to the faith, this may be the single most liberating idea in the Christian message: you do not have to earn your standing before God. The verdict has already been rendered, and it is — against all expectation — in your favor.

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“Our God, our God, why have you not forsaken us?”

This is a stunning turnabout on the words of Jesus from the cross — “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In that supreme, eternal moment of the glory of God, His Crucifixion, even God Himself has lost the plot. The presence of God in His most forgiving moment is experienced as His judgmental absence. It is going to be no different for us. We are most Christ-like when we are shouting at God, wondering where He is.

If you are new to faith and have already had moments of wondering whether God is really there, take heart — you are in good company, and according to this author, you are in very good theological company indeed. Doubt and cry out; it turns out that is exactly what faith looks like.

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“Darkness and mystery reside within the wisdom of God.”

The darkest, most mysterious moment is the death of God on the cross and God’s own civil war regarding the event. Father and Son appear to be estranged in the very event that brings unity. The cross of Christ is God’s first word and final word. It is all He has to say: This is who I AM, and who you are. Does your life feel like a cross-bearing, pain-filled, rejected misery? God has branded you with His identity. Adam once named all the animals, placing his stamp on each of them. The second and final Adam places His name on each of us. The stamp of Jesus is the cross of His identity. If Christ were a cowboy, his branding iron would be in the shape of a cross.

In plain terms: the suffering you carry is not a sign that God has abandoned you. It is, remarkably, the very mark of belonging to Him. The cross is not the worst thing that can happen to you — according to the Gospel, it is where God meets you most directly.

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“Wretchedness of soul is an essential element of our salvation.”

But whose wretchedness of soul are we talking about? Our own, or the wretched body of Jesus in His most glorious condition? He is enthroned, lifted up on high, wearing a crown of thorns and drawing all men to Himself. At this moment on Calvary, you are with Him in heaven’s definition of paradise.

This is counterintuitive and worth a few minutes: Christianity does not ask you to clean yourself up before approaching God. The wretchedness — yours and His — is precisely the meeting place. You do not need to have it together to belong.

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“The gospel is not what we expect it to be.”

Apparently we are not alone in this assessment. Even the eternal God, Jesus Christ, in His most Trinitarian moment, is filled with doubt. The man who is faith itself — the poster child for faithfulness and trust — shows us what that actually looks like. Doubt is not the enemy of faith, nor even its opposite. Doubt is an essential ingredient of the man of faith.

For anyone who has ever felt that their questions or uncertainties disqualify them from faith, this is important news. Doubt is not a detour around faith — it is woven into the fabric of it. Jesus Himself models this from the cross, which means your honest wrestling is not a failure of belief but an expression of it.

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“Pierced are the feet that follow Jesus.”

Throughout Easter and for forty days thereafter, Jesus revealed Himself to hundreds of people, and every time He did so, no one recognized Him. We recognize one another by looking at each other’s faces. Jesus never directed anyone to look at His face. The real “face” of Jesus is found where He directed us to look — the holes in His wrists and ankles. Scars He seemingly never had when they “knew” Him before turn out to be His real identifying, iconic marks. Jesus has always been the Crucified One. Easter is the Resurrection of His Crucified body.

Put simply: the Resurrection did not erase the cross. The risen Jesus still bears the wounds. This means that when we look for God, we should not be looking for a picture of triumph and power — we should be looking for the marks of suffering and love, which turn out to be the same thing.

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“The tree was good for food, a delight to the eyes, the tree was to be desired to make one wise.”

This refers to the centerpiece of the Garden of Eden — not some incidental ornament or ancillary aspect of God’s good creation. The original “center of attention” in paradise was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Sin had not yet made its appearance, and yet, there on full display is a tree containing everything one needs to know about evil. Its fruit is good. It is beautiful. And it contains all the wisdom of the Universe, from A to Z, from good to evil. That tree is the cross of Christ. In the day we eat from it we die, even as our eyes are unexpectedly opened. Our death on the cross with Christ is the moment we see who we have always been, partaking of the fruit of His righteousness. A death that opens our eyes to see reality the way God does, places Golgotha right in the middle of God’s plan from the very beginning.

The author is drawing a direct line from the very first pages of the Bible to the cross — suggesting that this was never Plan B. For someone new to Scripture, this is a helpful key: the whole story, from the Garden to the Resurrection, is one continuous arc pointing toward Christ.

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“It is shockingly good to be drenched in the mighty torrent of God’s love.”

Why call God’s love a torrent? Because His love looks like a God-Man suffering, rejected, abandoned, cursed, blessed, and loved — all at the same time. The cross is the chaotic waters from Genesis chapter one, over which the Spirit hovers and out of which all things have been created. We have all emerged from the body of God, and His flesh has always been in a mutilated condition — the mutilation that engenders wholeness.

If you have grown up thinking of God’s love as something gentle and polite, this image may surprise you. The author is insisting that divine love is overwhelming, even disorienting — not a calm lake but a flood. And it is out of that flood that everything good is born.

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“The Lord is sun, shield, and shade.”

God as the sun makes perfect sense — He gives light and life to all. God is also a shield, protecting us from harm, danger, fear, and the like. He is shielding us from the intense heat of the sun. He is shielding us from Himself. God is also shade. We are in the shadows. God is hovering over us, placing us in the darkness He Himself is making. He is the day, the night, the good, the bad — as if darkness and light are the same to Him (Psalm 139:12). And that takes us right back to the cross. The day of the Lord is both a day of thick gloom and darkness and the day of the light of the world.

For the newer believer, this is a profound reassurance: even the dark seasons of life are not outside of God’s presence. He is not only the light at the end of the tunnel — He is also with you in the tunnel itself, and the darkness is His doing for your cruciform identity.

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“The wounds we have received from others are no longer our burden to carry.”

Every offense has happened to Jesus. Inside His body, all the hostility of humanity plays out its worst. Jesus is the host and the referee. The final verdict is terrible and wonderful at the same time. It’s all the same to God inside Himself on the cross. Do you love me or hate me? “Love your neighbor as yourself” and “unless you hate your own life you cannot follow me” — both of those words from our Lord make perfect sense as we die into eternal life on the cross.

In practical terms, the cross becomes the place where we are released from the weight of every wrong done to us. This is not a call to pretend the wounds didn’t happen — it is the assurance that Jesus has already absorbed them, and that His body is the place where they are finally resolved.

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“Even chaos is perfectly ordered.”

In the beginning all was chaotic. The waters from which the world emerged were unformed, dark, and void. Those chaotic waters are the cleansing, baptismal waters of the washing of humanity inside the body of Christ on the cross. His baptism of fire is the one baptism into which we have all been purified, refined, and made perfect.

For anyone whose life feels disordered or out of control, this is a word worth holding onto: chaos is not the absence of God. It is, remarkably, the very medium through which He has always worked — from the first moment of creation to the cross.

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“It sounds simple and impossible at the same time.”

Yes, it is. To our ears, that is a foolish, enigmatic riddle. If this burden is so light, how come it feels like a cross? Is the burden mine or does Christ carry my cross? The answer is yes. Either/or thinking belongs to the age of reason, time, limitation, frustration, and penultimate answers. Both/and is, like quantum computing, infinitely more capable than the either/or world of binary logic and Aristotelian algorithms.

The Christian faith asks us to hold two things at once that our minds insist cannot both be true: it is your burden, and He carries it. This is not a contradiction to be solved — it is a mystery to be lived. And the more you live it, the more it makes a different kind of sense.

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“To know truth requires violently wrestling with it.”

Why put the words “violence” and “truth” in the same sentence? Because the cross of Christ is the only truthful place, and it is quite violent. The word “Israel” means those who violently wrestle with God. Jesus is God’s Israel. We are members of His wrestling body. In that conflict lies the peace of God. The Gospel is not what we think it is.

For the newcomer to faith who expects Christianity to be a religion of easy answers and comfortable certainty, this is a clarifying word: it is not. It is a wrestling match, and that struggle is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is the very shape of the life of faith, and it has a name — Israel — which means you are in a long and honorable tradition of people who refused to let go until they received the blessing.

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Why Believe is a book worth sitting with slowly. Its most powerful insight — the one that threads every passage together — is that the cross is not an interruption of God’s story but its very grammar. Every paradox the author raises, every collision of opposites, resolves not in a tidy synthesis but in the crucified and risen Christ. That is the argument, and it is a compelling one.

I’m Frank Balgeman, the physics pastor from the Santa Cruz Mountains. God bless and goodnight.