# 22 Bible Verses About Doubt

Source: https://christianpure.com/learn/bible-verses-doubting-god/
Publisher: Christian Pure (https://christianpure.com/)
Published: 2026-02-01
Updated: 2026-09-28

The Bible treats doubt in two ways. People who served God, from psalmists and prophets to Jesus' own disciples, question him, his promises and his fairness, and several of their passages record the reply.

The teaching of Jesus and the letters warn against doubt in the person who asks, and tell the church to be merciful to those who doubt.

## Asking God how long and why

### Psalm 13:1-2

> "How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?"

**Reflection:** David asks "How long" four times in two verses: how long God will forget him, hide his face, leave him wrestling with his thoughts, and let his enemy triumph. Verse 3 asks God to "look on me and answer", and no answer is recorded. The psalm still ends in trust: "But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation."

### Psalm 22:1

> "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?"

**Reflection:** Jesus cried the first line of this psalm from the cross: "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" (Matthew 27:46). David goes on, "I cry out by day, but you do not answer" (22:2). Later the psalm says the reverse of its opening: God "has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help" (22:24).

### Psalm 77:7-9

> "Will the Lord reject forever? Will he never show his favor again? Has his unfailing love vanished forever? Has his promise failed for all time? Has God forgotten to be merciful? Has he in anger withheld his compassion?"

**Reflection:** Asaph asks six questions in these three verses, all of them about whether God has changed: whether his favour, his unfailing love, his promise and his mercy have ended. The questions came at night; "You kept my eyes from closing," he says in verse 4. His answer to them is memory: "I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago" (77:11).

### Habakkuk 1:2-3

> "How long, Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, ‘Violence!’ but you do not save? Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and conflict abounds."

**Reflection:** The prophet complains that he calls for help and God does not listen, while violence and injustice go on in front of him. God's reply, that he is raising up the Babylonians (1:6), leads to a second complaint: "Why then do you tolerate the treacherous?" (1:13). Habakkuk then stations himself on the ramparts to wait for an answer (2:1), and the reply includes the line "the righteous person will live by his faithfulness" (2:4).

## Doubting that God is fair or near

### Psalm 73:13-14

> "Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure and have washed my hands in innocence. All day long I have been afflicted, and every morning brings new punishments."

**Reflection:** Asaph's doubt began with envy: "my feet had almost slipped" when he "saw the prosperity of the wicked" (73:2-3). Here he wonders whether keeping his heart pure has been for nothing. He held the thought back, since saying it aloud "would have betrayed your children" (73:15), and it troubled him "till I entered the sanctuary of God; then I understood their final destiny" (73:17).

### Job 23:8-9

> "But if I go to the east, he is not there; if I go to the west, I do not find him. When he is at work in the north, I do not see him; when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him."

**Reflection:** Job wants to find God so he can "state my case before him" (23:4), and he cannot find him in any direction. The next verse holds the other side of his doubt: "But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold."

## Questioning a promise or a call

### Genesis 15:8

> "But Abram said, ‘Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?’"

**Reflection:** Two verses earlier, "Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness" (15:6). When God then promises him the land, Abram asks how he can know. God answers the question with a covenant: animals cut in two, and a smoking firepot and blazing torch passing between the pieces (15:17-18).

### Judges 6:17-18

> "Gideon replied, ‘If now I have found favor in your eyes, give me a sign that it is really you talking to me. Please do not go away until I come back and bring my offering and set it before you.’ And the Lord said, ‘I will wait until you return.’"

**Reflection:** Gideon had already told the angel of the Lord, "if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us?" and "now the Lord has abandoned us" (6:13). He asks for a sign that it is really God speaking, and fire flares from the rock to consume his offering (6:21). Later he asks twice more, with a fleece, saying "Do not be angry with me" (6:39), and God does as he asks both times.

### Exodus 4:11-12

> "The Lord said to him, ‘Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.’"

**Reflection:** Moses doubted both that Israel would believe him (4:1) and that he could speak well enough (4:10). God answered the first doubt with three signs and the second with these questions about who made the human mouth. When Moses said "Please send someone else," the Lord's anger burned against him, and Aaron was given to speak with him (4:13-14).

## Doubt among those who followed Jesus

### Matthew 11:2-3

> "When John, who was in prison, heard about the deeds of the Messiah, he sent his disciples to ask him, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?’"

**Reflection:** John the Baptist sent this question from prison about the man he had announced. Jesus answered with what John's disciples could report: "The blind receive sight, the lame walk... the dead are raised" (11:5). As they left, Jesus told the crowd that "among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist" (11:11).

### Matthew 14:31

> "Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. ‘You of little faith,’ he said, ‘why did you doubt?’"

**Reflection:** Peter had walked on the water toward Jesus until he saw the wind, became afraid and began to sink. Jesus caught him first and asked the question afterwards. The Greek verb for doubt here, *distazo*, to waver, is the one Matthew uses again in 28:17.

### Mark 9:24

> "Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, ‘I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!’"

**Reflection:** The father of a boy with an impure spirit had said, "if you can do anything, take pity on us," and Jesus had answered, "'If you can'? Everything is possible for one who believes." The father's reply holds belief and unbelief in one sentence. Jesus then drove out the spirit (9:25).

## Doubting the resurrection

### Luke 24:25-26

> "He said to them, ‘How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?’"

**Reflection:** Two disciples on the road to Emmaus, kept from recognising Jesus, had told him, "we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel" (24:21). Jesus called them slow to believe the prophets, and then, "beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself" (24:27).

### Luke 24:38-39

> "He said to them, ‘Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.’"

**Reflection:** The disciples thought they were seeing a ghost. Jesus showed them his hands and feet, and when "they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement", he asked for food and ate a piece of broiled fish in front of them (24:41-43).

### John 20:25

> "So the other disciples told him, 'We have seen the Lord!' But he said to them, 'Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.'"

**Reflection:** Thomas, one of the Twelve, had not been there when Jesus appeared to the other disciples. His terms were exact: to see the nail marks, to put his finger where the nails had been and his hand into Jesus' side.

### John 20:27

> "Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.’"

**Reflection:** A week later, behind locked doors, Jesus offered Thomas the same terms Thomas had set. John does not say whether Thomas touched the wounds; he records his answer, "My Lord and my God!" Jesus replied, "blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed" (20:29).

### Matthew 28:17

> "When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted."

**Reflection:** The eleven disciples met the risen Jesus on a mountain in Galilee. Matthew records worship and doubt in the same sentence, and does not say who doubted or whether the doubt ended. The next verse begins, "Then Jesus came to them," and he sends all eleven to make disciples of all nations.

## Doubt in the teaching of Jesus and the letters

### Mark 11:23

> "Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them."

**Reflection:** Peter had pointed out the fig tree Jesus cursed the day before, now "withered from the roots" (11:20-21). Jesus answered, "Have faith in God," and then spoke of the one who tells a mountain to throw itself into the sea and "does not doubt in their heart." The next verse applies it to prayer: "whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours."

### James 1:6

> "But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind."

**Reflection:** James is speaking about asking God for wisdom, and God "gives generously to all without finding fault" (1:5). The doubter he warns against is "double-minded and unstable in all they do" (1:8), a person pulled two ways while asking.

### Romans 4:20-21

> "Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised."

**Reflection:** Paul describes Abraham facing the fact that "his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old" (4:19). In Genesis 17:17, when God promised him a son by Sarah, Abraham "laughed and said to himself, 'Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old?'" Paul's summary of Abraham is that he "did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God."

### Jude 1:22

> "Be merciful to those who doubt."

**Reflection:** Near the end of his letter, Jude tells his readers to build themselves up in their faith (1:20), then turns to how they treat others. Those who doubt are the first group he names, and the instruction for them is mercy.

### 2 Timothy 2:13

> "If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot disown himself."

**Reflection:** This is the last line of a "trustworthy saying" (2:11). The lines before it match what we do with what Christ does: if we die with him we live with him, and "if we disown him, he will also disown us." The last line breaks the pattern: faithlessness is met with faithfulness, "for he cannot disown himself."

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