THE Rev Canon Edmund Newey offers some reassurance for believers at moments when they might question their faith SOME people find it easy to believe in God, some find it difficult, but most of us are somewhere in between.

I count myself lucky to be closer to the first group. I have always been a believer, but for as long as I can remember I have had times of doubt and questioning.

That is why it was such a comfort when someone first pointed out to me that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.

We don’t need to have faith in the existence of our cat or car or county – these are just matters of certainty, at least when our mental health is stable. But God is different.

God isn’t another item in the catalogue of things that exist in the world. God is the reason those things exist in the first place: the ground of our being.

So faith in God can’t be a matter of certainty. It requires of us what a famous local opponent of belief would call an “appetite for wonder”.

“Once a thing is explained it ceases to interest us,” said the philosopher Nietzsche, but God cannot be explained and so is inexhaustibly interesting.

Have you noticed how reticent the Christian scriptures are in telling us what God is?

Only three times in the New Testament is there a sentence beginning “God is”.

The first is Jesus’s saying in John’s gospel, “God is Spirit and those who worship God must worship in spirit and in truth.”

The second is from a letter of John: “God is love and those who abide in love abide in God and God abides in them.”

If you stretch things a bit, there is a third example in one of the titles given to Jesus in Matthew’s gospel “and they shall name him Emmanuel which means ‘God is with us.’”

None of these statements quenches our appetite for wonder. They are not abstract observations. They keep us involved, telling us how we must worship and love and live with the God about whom we wonder, the God in whom we are invited to have faith.

And if we turn to the Old Testament we find something even more surprising. For faithful Jewish believers the chief name of God must not and cannot be spoken: “YHWH”. The name revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai is unpronounceable.

The Bible reminds us that belief in God has never been simple, obvious or certain.

And whether it comes to us easily or with great difficulty, faith in God is really about learning to inhabit something infinitely greater than we are. We believe literally in God: within God, in the embrace of God.

As soon as we begin to wonder about God we are already embarked upon a journey.

And the higher or deeper we travel on that journey, the more we learn of the length and breadth of God’s mystery.

God is always greater: endlessly deeper, more intimate and more loving than we can imagine.

As Saint Augustine said: “If you have understood, then this is not God. If you were able to understand, then you understood something else instead of God. If you were able to understand even a little, then you have deceived yourself with your own thoughts.”

Great is the mystery of our faith!