Does Doubting Make God Angry?

This depends on what you mean by “doubting.” Sometimes we use this word simply to indicate that we find it difficult to understand a particular truth or see how it could be true at all. St. Cardinal John Henry Newman said, “A thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.” So it is reasonable to examine the Faith and to try to resolve the problems our mind has with its teaching.

The same goes with the sometimes extremely troubling events of life that we have a hard time reconciling with what we understand to be God’s will, or plan, or goodness. A sinful doubt would be to refuse the testimony of God’s word in preference for our own or someone else’s reasoning, like the serpent’s persuading of Eve in Eden, so she followed his words instead of the divine command.

This, of course, leads to some punishment for our sin of doubting—for example, confusion, further errors we ourselves commit because we have cut ourselves off from the light of God’s word (this is perhaps the most common punishment), frustration in our activities, and so on. These punishments for doubting God’s word are experienced as though God were angry at us. Of course, God cannot be really angry in the human sense, but his corrections and punishments in order to establish justice and to further instruct us are described in Sacred Scripture as effects of God’s anger because that is how we experience them.

Let us put all our faith and trust in God, so that as difficult as things may seem to us, we always cling to him. As Holy Job said, “Even though he kill me, still will I praise him!” And yet Job had difficulties that he openly expressed to God about the trials he was made to undergo.