In J.M. Barrie’s famous work, Peter Pan, there is a character named Toodles who has lost his marbles. In the real world he is viewed as a ditzy old man who isn’t altogether there. But as it turns out, he really did lose marbles that belonged to him. I picture a person who has genuine faith in Jesus and then loses it, as a character like Toodles. He knows he isn’t crazy but the Christian world thinks otherwise. To lose one’s faith in Jesus if equivalent to losing your earthly purpose and heavenly hope for the future. Why would anyone do that to themselves? They must be crazy.
But Toodles wasn’t crazy. His quest was located in a reality devoid of the supernatural and his goal was to return to Neverland, where eternal life existed. People who lose their faith, symbolized by marbles, want to find it again but they can’t because they have rejected the idea that they live in the intersection between the physical world and the spiritual one. For them, the physical world is all there is, and if faith can’t be found in concrete facts, then it’s a deception, a mirage created by devious people from ancient times. They think their earlier conviction in Jesus was the result of childlike ignorance.
Can believing Christians help a person who has lost their faith in Jesus? Well, yes and no. They can help him look for his marbles, maybe even put them in his hand, but only he can look to find them, to be willing to reject his previous conclusion and seek something spiritual again; otherwise, his marbles are just spheres of glass. Put another way, restoration to faith is a spiritual work of God, and believers, at best, are only indirect helpers. We are ignorant of God’s timetable and purpose for tolerating one who values his own logic above the testimony of God. We can’t see why God allows a former believer to diminish God’s greatness by disavowing Jesus. And we certainly don’t understand why God delays restoring his lost child to fellowship.
So, we do what we can do. We pray for God’s intercession in the life of his lost child. We hope there is a meaningful future for that person, that their life would not devolve to avarice and self-aggrandizement. And we remind ourselves of the words of Jesus in the gospel of John, chapter 10, “My Father who has given them to Me is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of My Father’s hand.” As a consequence of this statement, if a former believer is certain there is no life after physical death, he will wake up to a moment of embarrassment, followed by an eternity of joy, for the best reasoning of man is no match for the promise of God.
There are some people who think they can remove themselves from the covenant they established with God through Jesus, the covenant requiring their acceptance of salvation. Perhaps they are angry at Him for some tragedy that He allowed or they have been convinced by the words of some erudite scholar that God doesn’t exist. Here again, they fail to comprehend the greatness of God. God’s covenant with a believer is unilateral, depending only on God after it is established. So whether a lost child finds his marbles or not, he is still God’s child and he will be claimed by God when his physical life is over. It is a Father’s love for his wayward son or daughter that evoked God’s promise to begin with, and it is His mercy that will fulfil it.
Some comfort for the family who cared about Toodles is found in Barrie’s story, when the ditzy old man finds his marbles and returns to Neverland, restored to his youthful exuberance. That is the destiny of every former believer in Christ, regardless of his subsequent erroneous thinking. But the old man spent his whole earthly life looking for what he lost instead of building on what he had previously found. This is the real tragedy of lost faith. A life of potential ministry is scuttled by self-seeking experiences with no eternal value.
Still, it may be premature to write off the life of such a character, that he will be of no future use to God. There are characters in the Bible whose service to God germinated in later life. Moses, the clearest example, lived the first decades of his life espousing the theology of man, followed by forty years of God’s corrective instruction, before he was put into service. And what a service it was! Deuteronomy chapter 34 records that since his death, “No prophet ever again arose in Israel like Moses, who knew the Lord face to face. He did all the signs and wonders the Lord had sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh, all his servants, and the whole land, and he displayed great power and awesome might in view of all Israel.”
So there’s hope for a believer who has lost his faith to still be of service to God, even if he’s a character like Toodles who wasted most of his life searching for what he once had, or a person distracted by worldly things, like Demas in Second Timothy, chapter 4, or a recalcitrant partner like Moses. God has provided a way for all believers, even former ones, to return to him, and it is independent of their wayward steps in this life. Such generosity toward one who has believed and then denied knowing the Lord is a demonstration of forgiveness that exceeds the best intentions of man. It is a reminder why God is God and we are not.
