Don Carson / Faith & Doubt / John 20

the passage that was read to you from John chapter 20 is the event in the life of Thomas which has gained for him the label across the centuries doubting Thomas it's not quite fair since he shows up elsewhere sometimes in almost heroic colors but here clearly he's a man characterized by doubt and before plunging into this passage I I want to remind you that doubt can take many forms many years ago I was pastor of a church in Vancouver Canada it wasn't a large Church but we had quite a substantial number of University students and one in particular was a young woman called Peggy if we put all 80 students together in the room 79 at one end and Peggy at the other end 90% of the energy in the room was at Peggy's in she was one of those she was with Bhatia's energetic creative non-stop tangential and her thinking she she couldn't have worked out an engineering problem if her life depended on it she didn't think linearly she thought associatively she was immensely and creative and courageous in her Christian witness in the University of British Columbia and one day she came to me and said I have pastor Don there's there's a young guy at the university called Fred he wants to take me out and I want to go with him so I can explain Jesus to him I said ah no no no no no no you mustn't think anything like that i'm i'm not i'm not trying to be compromised my faith i'm trying to share my faith i said no no no you're thinking bad things i just want to share my faith I don't wanna get emotionally entangled with someone who's not a Christian I said fine fine girl with him then bring him to see me okay the next Saturday night I was late in my study I was still single in those days though it was pastor of his church and on the door of the study duck duck Duck Duck 10 o'clock at night in flounces Peggy and behind her is this big stud of a guy Don this is them this is Fred he wants to meet you well I could see right away that that wasn't true he didn't see me as anything more than a barrier to Peggy I said come on let's go for coffee so we went to a 24-hour coffee shop and I tried to get him to relax and tell me something of who he was and his stories it turned out him he had no Christian background at all never been to church complete secularist background and so on I just tried to get him to relax a bit next Saturday night back tuck tuck tuck tuck I was a coffee shop by this time he had one or two questions and we talked drank coffee till about 2:00 2:30 in the morning and I gave him some things to read and we talked about whatever he wanted to bring up next Saturday morning duck duck Duck Duck was out Saturday night tech duck took the 10 o'clock out to the restaurant the coffee shop till 2:00 2:30 in the morning and this time he had read everything I had given him to read and he had another list of questions nice Saturday night duck duck Duck Duck this went on for 13 weeks what I was doing to my Sunday morning sermons I have no idea it's all blur but at the end of 13 weeks he said alright I'll become a Christian now I've been in the ministry for 40 or 50 years but that's the only chap who ever became a Christian quite that cold irrational away usually it's much more complex there's their levels of emotion and intensity to it he was just extraordinarily linear and the reason he started off with so much doubt was simply because he had no information but he needed to resolve his initial doubts was data that's what he needed he didn't know anything about the gospel he he didn't know anything about the evidences for the resurrection he didn't know who Jesus was or what the cross meant do you see he needed information other people doubt for different reasons here are the words of Aldous Huxley famous atheist from about 270 years ago and his book ends and means he writes for myself the philosophy of meaninglessness which is what he espoused and was quite common in the 30s for myself the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation the liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality we rejected the morality we objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust the supporters of these systems claimed that in some ways they embodied the meaning even the Christian meaning they insisted of the world there was an admirably simple method of confronting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic we wouldn't deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever in other words behind a systemic rejection of biblical revelation can sometimes be an even more deep-seated commitment to political or emotional or sexual revolt then you've adopted what Tim Keller likes to call defeat our beliefs that is beliefs that defeat other beliefs to see if you believe today for example that no religion can be right they're all equally right or equally wrong and you believe that passionately with every ounce of your being that's a defeater belief that defeats any possibility of listening to the claims of any particular religion sometimes don't Springs from 10,000 choices all of them wrong not from some deep philosophical system rather that of Michel Foucault or that of Aldous Huxley but from a lot of bad decisions for example I have known young men and young women who began about your age to put their trust in Christ and to grow in grace and in the knowledge of God and in faithfulness and building up a Christian family and being involved in Bible studies and the like but somehow they get to middle age and they're climbing up the corporate ladder and and faith seems a little less urgent and besides they've got more corporate responsibilities and they're reading the Bible less they're praying hardly at all and they show up for things a little less they're not doing any evangelism anymore and then lo and behold if the chap the chap is is beginning to get a roving eye discovers this a secretary at work who who listens to him more sympathetically than his wife does and after a little while they're in bed together and he wakes up after 3 or 4 or 5 years and he looks at himself in the mirror and he says I don't believe all that rubbish anyway why has there been some revolutionary epistemological crisis but it's the result of 10,000 little decisions all of them bad sometimes doubt is generated by sleep deprivation of course students know nothing about that the point is were corporate spiritual mental emotional complete beings and everything works and falls apart together so it's easy to become very cynical when you're tired even mean some people function quite nicely on five hours sleep a night God rests you if you're one of them but if you're one of those people who needs who need eight hours of sleep a night or else you're grumpy when I would argue you're morally obligated to try and get eight hours sleep a night because you don't have the right to be grumpy but it's not just a question of general grumpiness it's a question also of how you view the world you can be actually more open to listening to things when you're not being cynical smart-mouthed tired and I could give you several more examples but my point is not to list all the characteristics of doubt or all the kinds of doubt but to recognize that there are some peculiar elements of doubt in this passage this passage does not answer every doubter with us would you expect from it you're looking for too much but it does answer certain kinds of doubt so it is important to remember this passage in its context before we hear what the Word of God here tells us whether in the first century or the 21st century so let me set the stage for you so that you recall the context in which this passage occurs Jesus has been crucified he was buried the disciples saw the tomb and although Jesus had predicted repeatedly that he was going to be beaten up and sacrificed by crucifixion his disciples didn't believe it sometimes Jesus spoke in enigmatic ways and they probably thought to themselves always speaking deep mysteries again deep deep will understand someday but they couldn't believe that he was going to die and it was partly because they were consumed by a certain kind of vision of what the Messiah the Christ would be like he would be triumphant he would prevail over all of his enemies and besides the evidence was that Jesus could perform spectacular miracles how are you going to take him on he can feed the sick he could raise people from the dead even if he had his own army what's the point of killing them we can raise them from the dead Jesus could not possibly be beaten and so Israel would rise triumphant again the Roman hordes will be thrown off the political yoke would be gone and Israel would rise triumphant the great established kingdom of David Jesus kept talking about his kingdom in different terms they had no category for it they couldn't accept what he said and the proof is is in the fact that after Jesus is buried dead in the ground we read that the disciples are in an upper room cowering afraid that they'll be next they're not up there saying yes I could hardly wait till Sunday because they didn't think that sunday was going to bring the resurrection they hadn't listened to what Jesus said but then on that first Resurrection Sunday the reports first came in the woman here a couple of women there the two on the road to emmaus Peter and John finding the tomb empty eventually Jesus appears to the disciples the apostles 11 of them at least one had committed suicide and Thomas wasn't there but ten of the twelve were there and they found it hard to believe but but they ate with him they they saw that he's sort of materialized like a Star Trek film material I had never done that sort of thing before he materialized in a locked room and and he ate with him and conversed with them and then he disappeared when they hadn't expected that either and they told Thomas about it and that brings us then to our passage the cry of a disappointed skeptic verses 24 and 25 Thomas also known as didymus which means twin one of the twelve was not with the disciples when Jesus came so the other disciples told him we have seen the Lord but he said to them unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were and put my hand into his side I will not believe so what kind of doubt is that it's not the doubt of a philosophical materialist that is someone who believes that all there is is matter energy space time that's it don't stop there's nothing more he is after all a first century Jew he believes there's one God who made everything to malama shall give an account he believes that there's a difference between right and wrong he believes that there's more to reality than the materiality he's a first century Jew that's not the nature of his don't know his doubt is the result of the deepest kind of religious disappointment he really did believe that Jesus was the Messiah he really did believe that he would win he had the utmost respect for Jesus and his teachings and what he had done he believed that somehow he manifested God himself and that all of his deep dreams were crushed Jesus was dead and so I suspect that what he thought when he first heard the stories of the resurrection was hoodwinked by your own desires you're projecting your hopes on to your dreams you're believing something because you want it to be true you can't face reality so you imagine things I'll tell you the kind of evidence I would need he said I need the kind of evidence that convinces me that the same body that went into the tomb came out I don't want that twins suddenly to appear III want evidence that that the body that went into the tomb is the body that came out and I'll tell you how I'll know I want to see the wounds now in those days when men and women were crucified it was a pretty ghastly process the vertical pole was left on the ground of the place of crucifixion after sentence was passed in some criminal Hall or the other the person was taken out and whipped and then was forced to carry the cross bar the horizontal bar on his or her shoulders out to the place of execution that was meant that was what was meant by carrying your cross at that point there was no hope and when you got to the place of execution you were either tied or nailed to the cross bar when the cross bar was hoisted up to be notched into the vertical and then your legs were either tied or nailed to the vertical operator the physical pain of crucifixion was muscle spasm you pulled with your arms and shoved with your legs to keep your chest cavity open so you could breathe and the muscle spasms would start so you collapsed in an agony and then you couldn't breathe so you pulled and pushed and you could breathe gasped and then you collapsed and that cycle could go on for days but if there was some reason or other why they wanted to finish you off a little quicker perhaps because there was a feast today coming as was the case in Jesus crucifixion then they come along and smash your shin bones when you couldn't push with your legs anymore and you'd suffocate in a few minutes but Jesus had been repeatedly beaten when they got to him they discovered that he was already dead so the two that were crucified with him they smashed their fin bones but when they got to Jesus one of the soldiers took a short javelin and shoved it up under Jesus ribcage pierce the pericardium and blood and water flowed up so that meant that Jesus had an atypical wound that was done once in a while in the ancient Roman world Jesus is not the only one who ever had his side pierced but it was singularly rare because if they wanted to finish you off in a hurry they broke people shins the only reason they didn't break his is because they thought he was dead they were just making sure Sarepta Strama say unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my fingers where the nails were and put my hand into his side I want that wound I will not believe in other words this is a man who wants to have his faith based on truth there is a difference between faith and gullibility there are some Christians who believe every nonsensical story that pops around but that's not necessarily faith it may be quite frankly stupidity availability a number of years ago close to 25 now there was an American faith healer called Popoff in California and he had a particular shake he would invite people to these great meetings in a large hall and then in the middle of the meeting he would say the Lord is telling me the Lord is telling me there's a woman in row J seat 18 you have terrible back pain come forward and be healed come forward and be healed and sure enough there was a woman in J 18 or 24 or whatever it was and and she came forward she had terrible back pain and he'd lay hands on her and prayed for her and she was healed and so forth well the press got wind of this and immediately thought there was collusion so they tracked down a lot of these people and not one would admit to any collusion it really did seem clean an ABC American Broadcasting Corporation being as cynical as they are they thought there's a there's a rat in this thing somewhere so they went in with radio scanning equipment they had noticed that Popoff wore a hearing aid now what a faith healer is doing with a hearing aid is another question that I won't go into but they had their suspicions and a radio scanner for the technologically challenged simply the scans the frequencies of radio and locks on the signal that is strongest and they eventually uncovered that mrs. Popoff was one of a number of people at the entranceways who passed out to faith prayer cards if you've got a real concern write it down on this will collect the cards and we'll pray for you and so on and then and then then if she saw somebody I'm on stage for cancer I'm expected to live not more than two months she threw it in the dustbin if on the other hand it was something that had a decent shot of being at least partly psychosomatic and she carefully note where they sat down j18 is rate of the guard j18 and then she'd radio down to what was not in fact a hearing aid but a small radio receiver and Popoff's ear saying things like we got one there's a woman in j18 psychosomatic probably do severe back pain and so on so on national television in the united states they presented what this looked like to these secret cameras both with and without mrs. Popoff's intrusion the Lord is telling me the Lord is telling me there's a woman in row J a team then they played it again dear we got one a J 18 a woman the Lord is telling me to learn it well what can I say his ministry popped off and what now why am I telling you this it brings me no pleasure the reason I'm telling you is because there are all kinds of Christians that were taken in by this gullibility Irish should have been Christians that had exposed the gimmick rather than ABC there is a kind of so-called Christian faith it is not faith at all so he's not based on truth space-time manipulation and Thomas wasn't going to be one of those so here's the cry of a disappointed sceptic second the adoration of an astonished skeptic verses 26 to 28 a week later his disciples were in the house again and Thomas was with them though the doors were locked as the previous type Jesus came and stood among them and said peace be with you then he said to Thomas put your finger here see my hands reach out your hand and put it into my side stop doubting and believe Thomas said to him my Lord and my god so renowed week one a week after the initial resurrection the initial appearances and Jesus suddenly appears again he says peace be with you which is what he said the week before - in Hebrew probably simply shut up or not an Arabic would say Salaam that's a pregnant expression it can be the equivalent of hi but it really does mean peace and in certain contexts Shalom means well-being human flourishing peace with God peace with one another did you see and Jesus uses the expression in a way that is weightier than mere hi there he means now that there is peace with God and peace amongst the people of God because of what Christ has done and dying and rising from the grave it's a it's an expression that is weighted with with pregnant theology and then although apparently he had not been present he turns to Thomas and says take a look at these wounds well on touching take a look look at this hole in my side put your hand there stop doubting believe and Thomas says the most amazingly surprising thing he says my Lord and my god now we need to think that one through very carefully but before we do it's worth reminding ourselves of what some people say it means if you have friendly neighborhood Jehovah's Witnesses for example who do not believe that Jesus should be considered truly God they offer two explanations for what Jesus meant by these words I will only mention one of them I don't have time to go into both of them one of them suggests that Jesus that the Thomas said something like my lord my god in other words what he did was blaspheme worse yet Jesus goes on to say well blessed are you Thomas so Jesus blesses Thomas for blaspheming this really won't work every culture has its blasphemies and vulgarities and profanities of course but it's hard to imagine a Jewish man in the first century with the religious propensity zuv a Thomas taking that kind of vulgarity to his lips hard to believe and moreover it doesn't account for the little word even if by some crazy stretch of the imagination you could believe that Thomas managed to say under the shock of the moment my lord my God how can you imagine saying my Lord and my god the the and blows it he is addressing Jesus do you see he's not uttering a profanity he's addressing Jesus but what is surprising about this to a believing reader is the Thomas confesses so much why doesn't he simply say you are alive well boy was I wrong or let me give you a hug or even groups a night I can imagine all of those answers why does he confess quite so much my Lord and my god what makes them confess that much it seems too much for the evidence standing before him well if we're to glean an answer from this Gospel of John you have to put this passage in its context again so you have to remember the themes that have been developed in this book you have to remember what Jesus said to the disciples on the night that he was betrayed which after all was barely ten days or so earlier on the night that Jesus was betrayed and arrested and beaten up the day before he was crucified he said things like have I been so long with you Philip and yet have you not known me he who has seen me has seen the father and that was the Apostle said deep deep they certainly hadn't sorted a full-blown doctrine of the Trinity at that point deep deep but now Thomas has had a week to think about it couldn't Jesus be telling the truth when he says something like that and then inevitably they could think of other things that Jesus said that were reported in this gospel for example in John 8 before Abraham was I am an Abraham had been dead for 2,000 years that's claiming at least pre-existence if you tell if he's telling the truth and because the very word I am was one of the self designations for God himself before Abraham was I was a stupendous claim and when the Apostles heard it and utterly they said deep deep core in John chapter 5 for example Jesus insisted that it was the father's determined will that all should honor the son even as they the father it's impossible to imagine God saying something like that about the prophet Isaiah about King David how about Joshua Moses but Jesus insists that God's determined will is that all should honor the son even as they honor the father that is to say to give Jesus the adoration and honor and glory that is reserved for God himself either that is a blasphemous thing to say oh it's telling the truth one of the time I'm sure the Apostle said deep deep but now in the light of the resurrection some of these claims have to be integrated they have to be weighed they have to be thought through maybe somehow it is the truth maybe at this point John thought of Old Testament texts like the ones were about to sing as we approach Christmas and resume size sung all over the world and many many many languages a lot of the words are drawn from Isaiah and I unto us a child is born unto us a son is given he shall reign on the throne of his father David of the increase of his kingdom there shall be no end he shall be called the wonderful counsellor the mighty God the everlasting father the Prince of Peace is that simply the straightforward truth and then of course so far we've restricted ourselves to the Gospel of John a couple of Old Testament references but there were other things that Thomas saw during the days of his flesh that are recorded in other Gospels for example there's the spectacular account of Jesus preaching in a packed house no chairs or anything everybody's jammed in there and four men come up on the four corners of a kind of portable mat carrying a paralyzed man they try to shove their way into the door others say you know wait your turn the pastor is preaching you know just keep quiet but don't bother the man we're listening they refused to take that advice so they climb up the outside stairs which were common in Palestinian homes in the first century so the people could go up on the flat roof in the evening and get the fresh air breathing by and so they get up on the flat roof and they listen carefully to where Jesus is down below and when they find him by his voice coming through the roof they start taking off the tiles and once they've got enough tiles to let the men through they lower them down so if the crowd won't give way out of compassion they give way because it's a bed coming down on their heads and so gradually gradually they they give way and suddenly he's down in front of Jesus and Jesus says my son your sins are forgiven and the religious leaders who hurt him said who can forgive sins but God alone you see that's exactly right there's a very famous story that is told in a book called the sunflower you can download it from the web it's only 80 pages he was written by a Jew who was in Auschwitz his entire family was killed in Auschwitz during the war during the closing weeks of the war he who was dragged out of a work crew and shoved by his Nazi captors into a room where there was a young German soldier eighteen or nineteen years old who was bleeding to death he wasn't going to make it was pretty obvious and he had asked to talk to a Jew the young soldier barely able to talk coughed up blood and said listen I know that we have done so many wicked things to you and I'm I'm afraid to meet God please will you forgive me 60 or so of the 80 pages of this book summarize what went through that Jews mind in the next minute the essence of the question that he asked himself was this do I have the right to forgive him the people most afflicted by the Nazis are dead I'm not dead I have not suffered enough yet to be in the position forgive supposing i go back to my hotel room tonight and then i hear that on your way home you get mugged very badly beaten up on your way home and I squeeze time into the NEMA conference tomorrow and I say I'll go and visit you in the hospital so I I come to your hospital bed and I I say to you be of good cheer I have found your muggers and I have forgiven them and you tell me will be explosive with rage every right do you have to figure you're not the one that was mugged you're not the one lying in a hospital bed with six broken limbs um you know this is ridiculous you have the right what what kind of what kind of stupidity is that did you see because you see it's only the offended party that has the right to forgive so the thinking in this young Jews mind was if the most offended parties are dead then none is alive to pronounce forgiveness so there is no forgiveness to the Nazi so without saying a single word he turned and walked out of the room after the war was over he wrote the little book sunflower the sunflower and he send it to Christian and Jewish and Muslim ethicists all around the world with a simple question did I do right and kicked off an enormous ethical debate from a Christian perspective I would argue that he almost got it right it is right to say that only the most offended party can forgive you don't have the right to pronounce forgiveness where there is no offense to you but you see that also explains why this utterance of Jesus my son your sins are forgiven is so important because according to the Bible whenever we sin the most offended party is God do you ever have David in the Old Testament commits adultery and murder and eventually is confronted by the Prophet and he's eventually brought to contrition and repentance and in the wake of that he writes song one of the things he says in Psalm 51 recognizing how sinful he is is addressing God you against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight of course it in one level I wasn't true he's sinned against Bathsheba he seduced her he sinned against her husband Uriah the Hittite he cook cold in him and then had him killed he sinned against the military High Command he corrupted them he sinned against his family he betrayed them he said against the nation because that's the chief magistrate he was supposed to uphold justice and he was leading in a crime it's hard to think of anybody that he hadn't sinned against he had the cheek to say addressing God against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight but the most profound level that was exactly right it was the most offended party whenever we sin is God that's why the Bible insists that whatever else we must have in terms of reconciliation with one another and all the other important things what we must have is forgiveness from God so when this paralyzed man comes down in front of Jesus and Jesus says my son your sins are forgiven the Jews were right when they said who can forgive sins but God alone just so and Thomas was there what do you infer from that that Jesus was blaspheming and that he really could speak for God those are only alternatives so remembering all of these things adding them up in his mind he's had a whole week to think about them now a whole week to turn them over and remember Jesus utterances and remember Old Testament texts and for the first time it's all coming together the prophecies that Jesus himself gave about is his death and resurrection and and what what he was coming to do he might not have had a full Christian understanding of the significance of the atonement yet but pretty soon it would come up wasn't already there that that he died not as a victim the first martyr he died not because the political shanigan of the day trapped him and he died not not not because he was too weak he died as a voluntary sacrifice the same Jesus it said in John chapter 10 no one takes my life from me I have the authority lay it down I have the authority to take it up again this authority I received from my father he's not a passive victim in a stupid political miscarriage of justice a kangaroo court in the eastern end of the Mediterranean in the first century he's God's own sacrifice dining not for his sin but for ours and the penny is dropping in Thomas's mind and he says my Lord and my god that's not just a liturgical utterance liturgical utterances you make it plural our Lord and our God this is personal faith it's personal confession what's the point to which every Christian must come finally the service of a converted skeptic verses 29 to 31 the service of a converted skeptic verse 29 I sometimes think is commonly misunderstood Jesus told Thomas because you have seen me you have believed blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed now with a certain contemporary cynicism that might sound as if Jesus is saying alright alright I piled up the evidence for you and you believed fair enough but quite frankly it's a pretty lousy belief you know it's got to wait for a whole lot of evidence much better to believe without evidence just believe ok ok you're in fine you believe you're part of the 12 fine but blessed are those who have not believed in other words belief on this reading of the text is magnified it's it's glorified it's appreciated it's approved it's it's lauded provided it's undertaken without evidence I cannot believe that that's the fair reading of this text it stands against so very much that's in the New Testament do you see as a whole the New Testament does not view faith as something that is enjoined upon you without truth some people think the Bible says believe believe believe believe believe shut up and don't ask questions just believe believe but that's not the way the New Testament works at all and the New Testament faith is grounded in truth the way the New Testament encourages and enjoins faith is by articulating and defending the truth the Bible never wants you to believe what is it true the Bible never asks you to believe what is probably not true the Bible wants you only to believe the truth that is so very different from contemporary notions of what faith is in the modern world faith means one of two things it's either a synonym for religion there are many religions there are many faiths and occasionally the Bible can use faith in that way so Jews speaks of the faith once for all delivered to the Saints that is the body of Christian truth of the Christian religion once we're all delivered to the Saints the second way that the modern world understands faith is something like this a personal subjective religious commitment so it's personal but subjective is not grounded an objective reality it's a commitment but you have your faith I have my faith my spirituality is bound up with Jesus your spirituality is bound up with crystals or magnetic bars that you wear in your wrist or whatever it is it doesn't matter you have your spirituality I have my spirituality of your faith I have my faith then but it's a it's a it's a subjective religious commitment that there's no connection with truth there is some clear talk of truth and in the physical sciences where where you can measure things and repeat them in controlled experiments and so on but when it comes to religion then it's it's subjectivism it's it's it's faith however though the Bible uses the word faith in several different ways it never ever uses the word faith in that way not once in fact the most dramatic passage in the New Testament given with a resurrection that talks about faith is first Corinthians 15 relax I'm not going to expound that whole chapter to you but in the course of that chapter it's worth reminding ourselves that that Paul engages with a kind of thought experiment with his readers so some of them can say okay okay I believe that Jesus rose from the dead but I I really can't believe there's a final resurrection at the end of the age I don't believe that so Paul is upset with him for not believing what he sees clearly to be the truth so he engages them with a thought experiment all right he says let's try this on supposing Jesus did not rise from the dead no better yet suppose there is no resurrection from the dead suppose that the notion of rising from the dead is categorically impossible then what would follow well I said if there's no such thing as resurrection from the dead then Jesus didn't rise from the dead what follows from that well he says in the first place it means all the witnesses who saw are a bunch of liars because the resurrection of Jesus from the dead happened in space time history it happened in in reality he was seen he was touched he ain't with disciples by the seashore in Galilee he he was witnessed the access we have to history is witnesses that's that's the only access we have that's how we know what happens in history and now you're claiming that all of those witnesses were either deluded or stupid or deceptive and so on even though they're willing to die for their faith when Paul writes 25 years after the event he says listen most of the 500 who saw him are still alive go and interview them for yourself do you see this is not exhortation to believe believe believe believe and shut up and don't ask questions he says I ask questions go and talk with these people this happened in real history but you're claiming that didn't happen in history if there's no such thing as resurrection then he says if Jesus didn't rise from the dead worse yet you're all dead you're still lost in your trespasses and sins if you believe everything else in the Bible but don't believe that Jesus rose from the dead then you've got no evidence that Jesus by his death actually paid for her sin we still fall under the curse of God not only so he says but and here's my point your faith is worthless in other words if you believe that Jesus really did rise from the dead but Jesus didn't rise from the dead Paul does not commend you for being sincere rather what he says is your faith isn't worth a plug nickel it's nice not worth a thing if you're believing something that isn't true he's not worth anything and then he goes farther yet and he says and if you believe something that isn't true then you are of all people most to be pitied your life is a joke he says you base your whole way of life and your priorities and your value system and your goals and your priorities what you do with your money and your time and all the rest on the fact that Jesus rose from the dead when in fact he hasn't risen from the dead and don't go around patting yourself on the back because you're sincere about your faith no no it's a stupid faith of it is not believing something that's true in other words part of the validation of genuine faith is the truthfulness of faith object nothing replaces that now of course genuine faith is more than believing true things after all the devil believes that Jesus rose from the dead believing mere facts is not adequate in terms of a definition of thing it's essential but it's not adequate the devil knows that Jesus rose from the dead but that doesn't save him because it does not call from him trust in this Christ it does not call from him repentance genuine faith sees the truth of Christ's resurrection and then throws itself on him and Trust and repentance and longing and commitment and if you throw in all of the belief and the longing and the commitment against the facts under the assumption that Jesus rose from the dead when in fact he didn't then the faith is worthless in your life's a joke it's typical in the New Testament that God does not ask you to believe something that isn't true because the belief itself is helpful I believe itself is not helpful unless it's the truth but if it's the truth and it is the utmost falling not to believe it not to believe it is not a personal choice it's massive rebellion against the truth against God himself so with all of those sorts of themes percolating through the New Testament some of them in John's Gospel I find it very hard to believe that verse 29 is to be read as as an encouragement to believe things without evidence I don't think that's quite the point at all well verse 29 has to be read in the light of verses 30 and 31 the point is that Thomas belonged to that first generation that did see the resurrected Christ he belong to that first generation that did touch Christ that saw the wounds that aid with him and thus conveyed the truth of what happened to the next generation and the next generation and the generation after that so that we have access to the truth here in Belfast in the 21st century precisely through the witnesses of Thomas and the other people who are there to witness the historical events in the first century do you see so Jesus says you're blessed because you've seen this that is you belong to this first generation that is seen and believed but you know what Thomas there's a whole lot more people coming the generations coming that will not have direct access to me the resurrected Christ they will not see the wounds now indeed Jesus performed this but many other signs verse 30 in the presence of his disciples not recorded in this book but these are written including this presentation to Thomas himself these are written in order that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah the son of God and that by believing you may have life in his name so Thomas becomes part of that privileged first generation slew of witnesses whose witness gets recorded in a book and there are many of these books we call it the documents of the New Testament which are passed on from generation to generation witnesses from the New Testament who saw Christ in the days of his flesh and saw Christ in the days of his resurrected flesh these are written not only the Thomas might believe but did you the new generation a new generation in Belfast might believe that Jesus is the promised Messiah and that by believing you may have life through his name let us pray in truth Heavenly Father we recognize how much we need to re-examine the foundations again and again so that our faith is made secure by the truthfulness of what has been revealed the truthfulness not only of propositions but of these spectacular events the word becoming flesh living for a while among us Jesus agonizing death on the cross bearing our sin his resurrection to attest his vindication before you is rising to seated sit at your right hand Oh Lord God we thank you that these are not made-up stories which we may choose to believe or not believe without serious implications since faith is nothing but subjective religious commitment give us eyes to see and ground our faith the more deeply in the truth of your word in the reality of these things to which your word attests and for some who are here this evening who have never become Christians for whom these things are still strange alien remove from the worldview of the contemporary 21st century Oh Lord God enable them to see that these things are true and if they are true it is folly the worst kind of falling to deny them bring them to an end of themselves to see that they need their sins forgiven they need to be reconciled to God that this takes place because you alone are the God who forgives on the basis of what Christ has achieved on the cross bearing our sins in his own body on the tree so grant where they sit even now your spirit will work in their hearts so powerfully that they will find it impossible to do anything else which cry out lord I believe help my unbelief God be merciful to me a sinner for Jesus sake amen you

Channel: Peter Mackey

Views: 29,977

Rating: 4.8070741 out of 5

Keywords: don carson, christianity, doubt, faith, bible, john 20, da carson, doubting thomas, religon, all saints, belfast

Id: pRzimsL1bfg

Length: 53min 10sec (3190 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 30 2016