W.A. Criswell, the long time pastor of Dallas’ First Baptist Church, was one of the greatest preachers of all time. Dr. Criswell will always be remembered as a great expositor of the Word. I heard him in person several times and used to listen to him on the radio every Sunday morning. He lived to be 92 and served that great church for 58 years, 48 of them as senior pastor. In 1994, Dr. Criswell gave his last interview to the Dallas Morning News. At one point the interviewer asks, “Do you have any doubts?”
Dr. Criswell replied, “Oh boy. Along this pilgrim way, sometimes I think I am an infidel.”
The interviewer asked, “How can that be?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, “I just have, sometimes, I have a hard time believing. I just do. The things that happen in life, the things that I see and the things that I watch. Ah, I just struggle with it. I struggle with evil in this world. Why doesn’t God do something? And I struggle with that. And I struggle with the presence of death. Just you and I talking here and we face that inevitable day. Oh, sometimes I struggle. I’ve just battled through those times.
“The reason is very obvious. One is that I have no place to go. If I turn aside I don’t have anything to turn to. It’s just ultimate despair. And second, I don’t care what, it is a blessing to love the Lord and trust in the Lord and even when we don’t understand, we believe that he’ll make it plain in the by and by. So we’ll just trust him for it.”
Dr. Criswell learned to trust the Lord even when he did not understand. He clung to a faith that said God would make it plain some day. So must we.