The Bane Of Doubt

Reading John Piper’s book, “Suffering And The Sovereignty Of God,” I’m struck by the notion that the enemy’s prowling and attacking isn’t something that is necessarily a finite or limited attack that I should always and only just “watch out” for and then go back into surveillance mode waiting for the next attack (as if the enemy wasn't attacking in the interim), but more often there are barrages of energy-sucking, faith-stealing, faith-eroding types of attacks that are always going on in the background that I should probably be constantly ringing my alarm bell for.  We have to be wary of when the enemy jumps on our back and wants us to spit fury back at another in revenge, but when that type of immediate and more obvious attack isn’t impending, we need to realize that he is, and always has been, trying to wear us down with his other attacks on other fronts: His dark, dirty rivers are always wearing down our borders with ever-flowing floodwaters of doubts with their undercurrents of contempt; slowly melting away our infrastructure of faith.  That makes me think that all hope - any hope then - is the counterpoint of doubt and is it’s bane, it’s remedy, and cure.  Hope grants immunity to any doubt.  Hope shores up the receding shores of our ever-dwindling island selves.