Dr. Susan Lim met Jesus years before she believed the Bible was his word. Her story answers a question many believers carry quietly: can you trust Jesus while you are still unsure about Scripture? You can, and her story shows how trust in the book can grow from there. For Lim, faith in a person and confidence in a text came as two separate steps. The second step did not have to be faked, and she did not have to take it alone.
This matters because many Christians assume the order always runs the other way. You accept the Bible first, and faith in Jesus follows from what it says. For some people it happens that way. For others, the encounter with Christ comes first and the book comes later, full of questions. If that second group thinks their order means something is broken, they tend to hide their doubts instead of working through them.
Meeting Jesus before trusting the book
Lim grew up in a Buddhist family. Her mother was the more devoted of her parents, and the household kept a Korean ancestor rite on the anniversaries of relatives’ deaths. They set a table with food and a photograph of the deceased, as if the dead would come and eat. When the family moved to Guam, her parents put the children in Catholic school because it was the best school on the island. She grew up believing in a spiritual world and knowing a little about the God of the Catholic school. She did not know Jesus.
Her first encounter came when she was about twelve, during a devastating stretch of childhood. Lim describes a night when she did not know how to keep living, though she is careful to say she had no plans to end her life. Then she sensed a presence enter the room. She knew in that moment that God existed, that he was all-powerful, that he was enough, and that he saw her. She did not yet have a name for him. (If you are in a night like that now, please talk to someone today. In the US you can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, at any time.)
She got the name at seventeen. A friend invited her to church. Her mother forbade it, warning that other gods would war against the Buddhist god and bring havoc on the family, so Lim snuck out. In a small group after the service, a leader explained the gospel plainly: we need a Savior, Jesus died for our sins and rose again, and he must be received. Lim says the Spirit then connected the two moments for her. The presence she felt at twelve was Jesus. In her words, “that was me and my name is Jesus.”
Then someone handed her a Bible. When she opened it, she asked, “how can that emotional, real powerful experience be tethered to this book”. She kept reading and found that “parts of it are beautiful, but parts of it were hard for me to believe.” Jonah inside the fish. Esther made to spend months preparing herself for a king’s bed. Whole peoples marked for destruction in Israel’s early wars. Her love for Jesus was real, and so were her questions. One did not cancel the other, which means a person can hold both without either being fake.
Why the doubt went underground
Lim’s doubts did not fade when she joined a church. They went underground. Pastors would say some version of “this is God’s holy word,” the congregation would applaud, and she would applaud with them. She was soon teaching Sunday school. The church, she says, “felt like a club of sort like where you’re in and your ticket in is to believe in this word.” She does not blame anyone for her silence and wonders aloud whether it came from her own pride or insecurity. Either way, she had no place to say she wasn’t sure.
Lisa Fields offers a picture of how common this is. She compares the way many people take on the Bible when they come to faith to clicking agree on a phone’s terms and conditions. You accept the whole thing without knowing what is in it. Later, life gets hard, or you find a passage you never knew was there, and you start asking whether you actually believe the book you signed off on. Some believers never read the terms. Others, like Lim, read them, struggled, and felt they could not say so. Both end up with thin trust, because nobody admits it is still growing.
The second confession
Lim’s turning point came well after her conversion. She was reading the Bible one day when she sensed the Spirit telling her to stop: “let’s take a moment here ’cause you don’t really believe this”. Her first reaction was relief. The secret was out, and God himself had raised it.
From that moment she developed what she calls the second confession. The first confession is the one churches celebrate, often with baptism: Jesus is Lord. The second is coming to believe that the Scriptures are God’s word. For many believers the two happen together. For Lim they were years apart. She puts the question directly to her readers: “have you made your second confession?”
Her advice on how to begin is simple: “it starts by asking God point blank, is this your word? And he wants to answer that.” She aims the question at God himself. The doubt goes into the relationship with him you already have. If you trust Jesus enough to call him Lord, you can trust him with your uncertainty about the book that tells his story.
The New Testament shows faith and doubt living in the same person. In Mark 9:24, a desperate father brings his son to Jesus and says, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.” Jesus heals the boy without waiting for the father’s faith to be complete. The passage is narrative, so it describes rather than commands, but it describes an honesty Jesus received without rebuke.
What happened after she asked
Lim’s prayer was not tidy. She remembers asking God what came next, and whether this meant they had to break up. What followed was a reading list. Within days, she says, people started mentioning things like F. F. Bruce’s The Canon of Scripture and asking whether she had thought about canonization. She did not even know what the word meant. Subjects she would never have found interesting became, as she puts it, a little light on a dark part of her.
Asking God opened the door to study, and that keeps the second confession from being merely emotional. Lim went on to earn a master’s degree and a doctorate in history and taught for about twenty years. Her habits as a historian shaped how she weighed the Bible’s claims.
Reading from her book, she cites one archaeologist’s count of the places Luke names across his Gospel and Acts: 32 countries, 54 cities and nine islands. She adds that “not a single error has been found in these geographic locations.” That figure is the archaeologist’s claim as Lim reports it, and it is worth checking for yourself. Even taken at full strength, it establishes something specific. It shows that Luke knew the world he was writing about. It does not by itself confirm his miracle accounts or settle whether his writing is inspired. Luke himself claims to be this kind of careful writer. In Luke 1:3 he tells Theophilus that he is writing “having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first.” In the KJV, “perfect understanding” means he had followed the events closely and accurately, not that he knew everything.
She also names writers outside the Bible, including Josephus, Pliny and Suetonius, who show that a rabbi named Jesus lived, caused an uproar and had followers. Those sources leave open whether he was Lord. What they settle is that the person at the center of the book was a real man, not a legend invented from nothing.
Lim is just as clear about the limits. Even if the historical record lines up, she says, “just because that’s true, it doesn’t mean that you’re gonna believe the Bible.” History can remove obstacles. It cannot make the second confession for you.
Isn’t asking God just going in a circle?
This is the strongest objection. If you already trust Jesus and then ask him whether his book is true, aren’t you guaranteed to hear yes?
Lim’s story gives three reasons it is less circular than it looks. First, her prayer led straight into canon history, archaeology and sources outside the Bible, which a skeptic can check. Second, she did not pretend the hard passages became easy. Decades later she still says some stories about women trouble her, along with the violence in Israel’s early history. She offers historical context and notes that the risen Jesus first appeared to women, but she warns against rushing to the redemptive parts. When people pull verses out of context to justify violence, her answer is to read the whole chapter, then the whole Bible. Third, she was not starting from nothing. Her trust in Jesus already rested on an encounter, and the question was whether that encounter and the text belonged together.
Lisa Fields frames this as a matter of pillars. Faith that rests on a single support, whether experience or argument, can crack under pressure. Describing that path in the first person, Lisa Fields says, “I didn’t stay in the experiential place. I went and fortified another space.” Lim agrees: “I experienced him, I studied him.” Each kind of knowing checks the other. Experience keeps study from turning cold, and study ties experience to something outside yourself.
How trust grows over time
For Lim, most of the growth is ordinary. She tells of one extraordinary moment. Her son was born weighing less than two pounds and needed heart surgery in his first weeks. During her regular reading she came to 2 Kings 4, where Elisha raises the Shunammite woman’s son and tells her, “Take up thy son.” She describes the Spirit coming over her as she read, and then the surgeon walking in to say the operation had gone perfectly. She immediately adds that most of the time it is not like that. Usually it is just reading every day. The passage tells what God did for one family. It does not promise the same outcome to every parent who reads it, and Lim does not treat it as a promise.
She also points to changed people. Her father once ran a nightclub, drank heavily, and was frightening to be around. After decades of knowing God, he is gentle and kind. She says “only God can do what he’s done in my dad’s heart”. Lim repeats a line she once heard: “we might be the only Bible that someone reads.” People watch believers before they ever open the book. She says that if she were not a believer, watching faithful people live through hard times and good times would be the most powerful witness to her.
Her prayer now goes past whether Scripture is true. She asks God to “help me to love your word and live it”. Trust in a text deepens when you obey it and find that it holds.
That brings her back to where she started, with a Jesus she had met and a book she could not yet trust. To close the gap, Lim borrows an analogy from C. S. Lewis. Before his conversion, Lewis reasoned that people could no more know God than Hamlet could know Shakespeare. After it, he saw the answer. Lim puts it this way: “Hamlet can know Shakespeare if Shakespeare writes himself into the play.” That is the link she spent years looking for. The Jesus who met her in a dark room at twelve is the same person written into the book she struggled to trust. Making the second confession meant recognizing him there.