the unbelieving believers

What do fully-vaccinated mask-wearers and a lot of Christians have in common?

This question popped into my mind while I was reading one of my favorite books on walking with God called Sidetracked in the Wilderness, written by Michael Wells. In the first few chapters of the book, Wells makes the case that most Christians, despite their miraculous born-again status, are living in a state of defeat borne out of none other than the original sin: unbelief.

Stay with me.

As we’ve probably all heard by now, the CDC recently changed their guidelines regarding masks for the vaccinated population, causing a lot of businesses to relax their rules about wearing masks indoors. At Spuds, we are no longer requiring customers to wear masks, under the assumption/ideal that those who choose not to have had the Covid-19 vaccine.

Inevitably, this has created yet another us-them dichotomy in the general population. Over the course of this pandemic we’ve had the maskers and the anti-maskers, the vaccine-enthusiastic and the vaccine-hesitant, and now we have the “masked vaxxed” vs. the “unmasked vaxxed.” Today during my shift, we had two middle-aged women with two completely different approaches; one of them saw our “Masks Optional” sign on the door and immediately took her mask off, saying she was vaccinated; the other pointedly told me at the cash register, “I’m vaccinated, but I’m not taking this thing off.”

One of the women believed that because she had received the vaccine, her body had created the antibodies necessary to protect her from the virus, and her mask was therefore unnecessary. The other probably also believed in the efficacy of the vaccine, or she wouldn’t have bothered to be vaccinated—but she did not trust that her body would do its job if she came in contact with the virus. She kept her mask on.

These two women remind me of what Michael Wells writes:

Let me explain that an unbelieving believer is someone who is a Christian, is born again, and will arrive in heaven; the problem is that this person has never believed in the Lord Jesus with his whole being. That is, with his mind he receives and believes all that is told him about the grace, care, concern, and love of the Lord Jesus; he is a believer. Yet at the same time, he feels that he is in charge of every aspect of his Christian life, that he must change the lives of those around him, bring transformations into his own life, and work to make himself pleasing to God. That is, in his emotions he is unbelieving.

- Sidetracked in the Wilderness

I think we can all identify with the concept of the “unbelieving believer” at some point, or perhaps at many points, in our walks with God. We are all sometimes the fully-vaccinated mask-wearer—the wholly-justified do-gooder. We are all sometimes tempted to add our own works of righteousness to the complete work of Christ on the cross, even though “all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment” (Isaiah 64:6). We all have days of fear, doubt, and uncertainty when we’ll slap a germ-laden cloth over our mouth and nose just in case the power within us isn’t as powerful as we once believed.

For some, the lifestyle of the unbelieving believer, like that of the masked-vaxxed, becomes a religion—a system of rules that slowly blinds him to the truth, binds him with fear, and ultimately leads both himself and others away from God. Have you ever wondered why, as a “Covid precaution,” your takeout at McDonald’s is now handed to you on a tray—when you know that someone had to touch the bag to get it on the tray in the first place, so what’s the point? Then you might also be apt to wonder why the Pharisees tithed “mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness” (Matthes 23:23a) or, more pointedly, why you can read your Bible and pray every day but still walk through life in the defeatedness of legalism and stubborn self-reliance.

I will venture a suggestion: It’s because you—we—do not trust that the power of God is truly within us, or that if it is, it’s truly enough.

If you’re vaccinated, the scientific research currently indicates that you are at extremely low risk of contracting Covid-19. If you somehow do get sick, you are almost certain to have an extremely mild or even asymptomatic case. There is no data to suggest that vaccinated people pose a risk to unvaccinated people. So your mask, if you choose to wear it (which is totally fine, I’m not here to tell anyone what to do), does nothing but betray your fear, inhibit your breathing, and signal your views to others.

So it is when we try to layer our self-powered good works onto the perfect sacrifice of Christ. He paid our debt in full; our mere pennies of righteous acts are an insult to that magnificent price, and if we insist on throwing them at His feet anyway, it’s because we are acting to appease our self-focused fears and to impress those who might be watching, not because they have any value with which to pay the debt we owe.

It is Christ alone who has done the hopeless work of reconciling our lost souls to God, and it will be the Spirit alone who does the equally hopeless work of sanctifying us into His likeness. Jesus says, “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:20b). How can any of us outdo those who followed the letter of all 600+ commands of the Law, right down to the very last jot? Only by receiving our righteousness from Someone else, and then living freely and wholeheartedly in the reality of it.