Why the Believer Doubts, Part 2

Doubt, honest doubt, is not a bad starting point.

It's just a bad finishing point. Because as a starting point, doubt serves us very well. In fact, I think doubt, the capacity to doubt is connected to rationality. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. C. S. Lewis said that sometimes when he prayed, he wondered if he wasn't posting letters to a nonexistent address. Maybe you've had similar doubts about whether God is really there and really listening, and whether Jesus is everything he claimed to be. Well, do you realize, even people who were close to Jesus, who truly believed in him, had their doubts as well. How did Jesus help his followers get past their doubts, and how could doubt actually be helpful? John MacArthur has some encouraging answers in his current series, When Believers Doubt.

And now here's today's lesson. We find ourselves in the seventh chapter of the gospel of Luke, and verses 18 to 23. Let me read the text for you so that I can set it in your mind. Starting in verse 18, the disciples of John, that is John the Baptist, reported to him about all these things. And summoning two of his disciples, John sent them to the Lord, saying, Are you the expected one or do we look for someone else? And when the men had come to him, they said, John the Baptist has sent us to you, saying, Are you the expected one or do we look for someone else? At that very time, he cured many people of diseases and afflictions and evil spirits and granted sight to many who were blind. And he answered and said to them, Go and report to John what you have seen and heard. The blind receive sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have the gospel preached to them and blessed is he who keeps from stumbling over me. Now I've entitled this particular portion, Believing Doubt...Believing Doubt.

I know that's paradoxical, that's kind of an oxymoron, but it's reality...Believing Doubt. And interestingly enough, the doubt here we find in the believer named John the Baptist, of all people, the greatest man who'd ever lived up until his time by the statement of Jesus Himself, the greatest of all Old Testament prophets, the one who was the forerunner to the Messiah, the one miraculously born late in life to Zacharias and Elizabeth to be the Messiah's herald, this great man who had seen Jesus come down to the Jordan River and had baptized Him there and heard God affirm Him as His Son and seen the Holy Spirit descend upon Him and who Himself had identified Jesus as the coming one and the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. This John who had said, I must decrease and He must increase, this John who had known Jesus all his life because they were related, this John has some doubts about whether Jesus is the expected one or not. And that is the key question in verse 19, repeated in verse 20, are you the expected one? Expected one being a technical term for the Messiah, the coming one.

Are you the one? After all that John had been told by God Himself, after all that had been revealed to John directly, certainly we wonder why he would ask the question. Well, we're learning a little bit about that as we go. We're introduced to the fact that even the best of men, the greatest of men, the noblest of men, the greatest of men who had ever lived can experience doubt. And so we're talking about doubt, believing doubt. As I told you last time, in the gospels, in the four gospels, whenever you run into somebody with doubt, they are believers. Doubt is an issue with people who believe. It's a matter of completing their faith. Doubt is something that occurs among immature believers. It can also occur among very mature believers, but in that case it's really sinful. Whereas doubt, in the case of a young believer or an immature believer, may not necessarily be sinful. Let me tell you what I mean by that. Doubt, honest doubt, is not a bad starting point.

It's just a bad finishing point. Because as a starting point, doubt serves us very well. In fact, I think doubt, the capacity to doubt is connected to rationality.

It's connected to being created in the image of God. God is a rational being and when He created man, He created man a rational being. And part of rationality is to be able to discern what is true and what is not.

That is absolutely critical to God's plan, isn't it? If God creates people to whom He's going to reveal truth, then it's absolutely essential that He give those people the apparatus to sort out information to come to a correct conclusion. One of the features of that sorting process, one of the components of rationality is doubt, or if you will, skepticism, a healthy kind of skepticism. I know from a personal standpoint, doubt has served me well through my life, particularly when I was very young. I tended to be skeptical about what people said. And so I tried to follow a pattern that I learned about fairly young as a Christian in the 17th chapter of Acts and verse 11, a pattern that was established by a group of Jewish believers in a town called Berea.

And when they heard the gospel, it says they received it with eagerness, but then they searched the Scriptures to see if these things were so. That's a healthy skepticism. So if you come to my door and you're trying to sell me snake oil, you're going to be met with doubt. I'm not very gullible, I hope.

Doubt will serve you well next time you go to the used car lot. Healthy skepticism, you understand what I mean. There's a certain amount of doubt that serves you well even when you go to the doctor. And somebody says, if you're smart, you'll get a second...what?...opinion because you don't want to be sucked up into something that may not be quite right.

That is part of being made in the image of God. Doubt in that sense is a very, very good gift. And when somebody is gullible, that's not a compliment.

When we say about someone, they'll believe anything, that is not a compliment. So we're not talking now about having all the evidence and not coming to a reasonable faith. We're talking about an honest kind of doubt that serves you very well. Doubt is a very good starting point.

It's just not a good ending point. And for many of the people who heard Jesus and saw His mighty works, doubt was the beginning and the end. And they treated Jesus with criticism and indifference and rejection and hatred and hostility and even a conspiracy to execute Him. And the best some of them ever offered Him was curiosity or fascination and they retained a certain measure of doubt. Doubt's a good starting point, I say again, but not a good place to finish. And I really do believe that God has wired us with a certain measure of skepticism for the sake of self-protection. You just know not to trust everybody and everything.

And people who do are seriously wounded by it, spiritually and even physically. Now some of the great heroes of the faith were really pretty monumental doubters to start with. Abraham was filled with doubt when God told him that he was going to have a son.

He doubted that seriously since he was a hundred years old and had never been able to have children. He had a healthy case of doubt. But Abraham is now known to us as the father of faith. What started out as doubt, having been resolved by God, then transformed itself by God's power into faith.

Sarah, along with him at the age of 90, when she was told she was going to have a child, laughed with a serious case of doubt. Sarah, of course, eventually did bear that son of promise that God had pledged she would bear and her doubt became faith. And she too was included among the heroes of faith in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews.

When it comes to listing all the great people of faith, you have Abraham and Sarah. You have another one by the name of Moses. And Moses had a very formidable case of doubt when God told him to lead the people of Israel out.

He said, I can't do it, I'm not a very good speaker, etc., etc. You remember the story. And Moses became the greatest leader in Israel's history, led them in the great exodus from Egypt, led them through 40 years in the wilderness to the edge of the promised land where his leadership ended and Joshua took over. Moses too is listed among the heroes of faith. And to Abraham and Sarah and Moses are given the greatest portion of the eleventh chapter in describing those people whose lives are marked by the most monumental faith. And then in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, you have a whole lot of other names of people who could give testimony to periods of doubt in their lives, but whose lives ended up as great monuments to faith, including a man named Gideon who seriously doubted that he was some kind of mighty warrior from God when God identified him as such, didn't believe that he could carry off a great victory but did, and his doubt was resolved into faith.

In Judges chapter 6, we learn the story of Gideon whom God used in such a mighty way that he too is included in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews as a hero of faith. Well you get into the New Testament. Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, certainly doubted his capacity to give birth to a son late in his life, probably in his eighties. When he was told that he would be a father in old age in Luke 1.18, this was something beyond his capability to believe.

It was very unreasonable. He said, I'm an old man, my wife has advanced in years, this is impossible. But he began to doubt her and ended up a man of great faith who gave magnificent tribute to the Messiah at the end of the first chapter in that powerful, powerful statement of Zacharias that ends Luke chapter 1 in which he shows how the Messiah fulfills all the Old Testament covenant promises. And then you have among the apostles the most famous doubter, the apostle by the name of Thomas. We all know about doubting Thomas. Thomas, unfortunately, is saddled with that label of being a doubter, but the fact of the matter is, Thomas is the one apostle who made the most unequivocal, clear statement about who Jesus was of any of the apostles. It was Thomas, you remember, who said concerning Jesus, my Lord and my God.

There can be no greater statement made. One who was labeled a doubter became the man who made as great a confession as is made in the gospel accounts. And even the twelve who were little faith kind of characters eventually had their faith strengthened to the point where Luke says in Acts 17, 6 that they actually turned the world upside down.

So doubters, whether Old Testament or New Testament, and those are just a few of many, can become heroes of the faith, listed with the great. Doubt then is a good place to start, it's just not a good place to finish. And so we all understand the man in Mark 9, 24 who said, Lord, I believe, help my unbelief. I believe as far as I can believe, but if I'm going to believe any more than this, you're going to have to help me by giving me what I need to believe it.

And then in there again is that rationality. I want to believe if you'll give me reason for faith. Doubt is very real.

And it's most real in immature believers who don't yet have enough understanding to continue to believe to a greater and greater degree. And amazingly, the greatest man who ever lived, John the Baptist, struggled with doubt at the beginning of his exposure to the gospel. He was very little different than the disciples, the apostles who had little faith. And so we began to look last time at John's situation.

Let's pick it up in verse 18 where we left off. And the disciples of John reported to him about all these things. Jesus was going everywhere teaching and healing.

He was demonstrating power over disease, over demons, over death. John the Baptist was in prison at the time and he's going to be beheaded not long after this incident happens. John's response in verse 19 is that he identifies two of these disciples, we don't know how many there were at this time, and he sent them to the Lord saying, Are you the expected one or do we look for someone else?

This is the instruction he gives them. You go back and ask Jesus if He is really the Messiah. John knew and it says in Luke 3 16 that John said, The coming one will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. So he had identified the coming one. He knew it was Jesus because the Father had said so, the Spirit had come, John had baptized Him.

But now he's having doubts. And so he says to two of these men, You go back and you find out for sure if He is the expected one, the coming one, a term for Messiah, or do we look for someone else? And I told you last time, and I think it needs to be repeated, to get his doubt resolved, he went to the Lord which shows that he believed. He was a believer or he never would have asked the Lord to resolve his doubt.

He knew that the Lord Himself was the one who could help him with the doubt. And remember, the picture wasn't clear to John. He wasn't there for first-hand testimony.

He was getting things by hearsay. And Jesus hadn't yet died. He hadn't risen. He hadn't ascended. He certainly hadn't confronted the apostate religious leaders. He hadn't confronted the corrupt people in Israel. He hadn't established the kingdom of God on earth. He hadn't defeated the Romans and all the enemies of Israel and set Himself upon the throne of David. He hadn't brought Abrahamic blessing.

Everything that John sort of expected to happen hadn't happened. And I think John had a pretty clear picture of what should happen. John knew well the Old Testament. His father was Zacharias, a high priest and...not a high priest, but a priest. And because he was a priest, he was a student of the Old Testament who two weeks of the year would do priestly duties in Jerusalem. The rest of the year he would live in the hill country of Judea where his home was, and he would be teaching the Old Testament.

That was his duty. And so John would have been raised on the Old Testament. He would have known messianic prophecies. He would have known what the Messiah was going to do when He came, and he had certain expectations. So you can be sure that John grew up understanding when the Messiah comes, redemption comes. When the Messiah comes, salvation comes, salvation from enemies, from all who hate the Jews.

Mercy comes. The Abrahamic covenant is unfolded. The Davidic covenant is unfolded. The New Covenant is unfolded. Holiness, righteousness comes.

The sun rises and light floods the land and darkness disappears and death disappears and peace arrives. That was John's messianic view. And when the Messiah came, it didn't happen.

It didn't happen. And he comes to this point and he's down in a dungeon in Fort Machaerus east of the Dead Sea, completely out of circulation, and all he hears about Jesus is that he's traveling around healing people, raising dead people, casting out demons. And these are people that aren't believers.

These are sinful people, people who are part of the apostate system of Judaism. It's all confusing to him. So he struggles with doubt. Sorting through that, just kind of pulling it apart a little bit to look at some of the components, I suggested to you there are four things that contribute to this kind of doubt for us, as for John.

First, personal tragedy, remember that last time? John's circumstances didn't seem to fit with his faithfulness. How is it that he being faithful to his calling, preaching what he was told to preach, no indication that John was anything other than faithful to the very max in his ministry, why is he languishing in a stinking dungeon?

Months and months in prison, headed for a rendezvous with death. How can this come? This is the doubt that comes because the circumstances don't seem to match our devotion or our faithfulness or what we think we deserve or what we think has been promised. Doesn't this look like the triumph of evil and not the triumph of God?

Isn't this the triumph of a wretched, wicked Herod and not the triumph of Messiah? So John began to stumble into doubt, it just didn't seem to make sense. So he's questioning, are you really the Messiah?

Or are you just one in the line? And that takes us to the second reason for his doubt, popular influences. There was a view existing that there would come Elijah and then Jeremiah and then prophet A, prophet B, prophet C, however many, and finally Messiah. And John is saying, well are you prophet B or A or C or D and the Messiah's not here yet? Is that the idea? So popular influences, popular ideas, popular concepts can create doubt.

They still do that. There are those people who develop a popular image of Jesus and when the preacher who preaches the true Word of God doesn't preach what fits with the popular idea of Jesus, people doubt and wonder because they've accepted unbiblical notions of the Savior. And we talked about that last time. But let's come to the third and the fourth one. And this is really the crux of it.

These things aren't necessarily separate from each other, they're kind of intertwined a bit. The third reason, and this is the compelling matter, doubt arises out of personal tragedy when we can't square our circumstances with our faithfulness, out of popular influences when we start to believe the popular image of someone, including Jesus. They also come because of incomplete revelation.

This is really the crux of the matter. John's doubts came because he didn't have full information. And what John couldn't understand was, why doesn't the kingdom come? Because John didn't have the information that Jesus would come, he would be rejected, the Lord would then turn from Israel to the Gentiles, establish the church, the church age would go on at least 2,000 years, which it has, and Jesus would then come back, return, and then set up His kingdom. That's mystery in the Old Testament. The Old Testament does talk about the kingdom, that the Messiah will come fulfill Abrahamic promise of blessing and a land, prosperity and all of that, Davidic promise that Israel would have a king, a great king, a son of David and that he would reign over Israel and Israel would literally rule the whole world, the New Covenant promise, the forgiveness of sin, mercy and grace and salvation, all of that was there. But the Old Testament didn't show this mystery period, this 2,000-year at least period in which God turns from Israel and carves out a new channel of witness to the world, namely the church made up of Jew and Gentile.

And not until that period ends and Israel is saved does Jesus return to establish the glorious promised kingdom and bring to pass the fulfillment of everything He pledged to Abraham and to David. John didn't have that information. So he's functioning with some incomplete information. He needs what Peter said a more sure word than his own experience.

He needs to see the truth of God or to hear the truth of God. And some of the apostles, of course, were in the same situation, even after the resurrection. They didn't know Jesus was raised. Jesus had been killed. They were on the road to Emmaus.

They were moaning and groaning that everything was over with, it was all done, that the whole thing was pointless and useless. Jesus was dead and Jesus showed up. You remember Luke 24 says He opened the Scripture and spoke out of the Scripture of things concerning Himself and helped them to understand that this was all part of the plan from Scripture.

Now this was pretty typical. Even after the cross and the resurrection, the disciples struggled. Acts chapter 1, they said to Jesus, are You at this time going to bring the kingdom? Are You going to bring the kingdom? Is this the time for the kingdom to come? And Jesus said, it's not for You to know that. God has that in His own purpose and He'll bring the kingdom when it's time to bring the kingdom.

It's not for You to know the times and the seasons of the kingdom. So their whole expectation was about the Messiah arriving to bring the kingdom. When He came and didn't bring the kingdom and it looked like things were getting worse and worse and it turned out that they were and He was executed, it was like the whole plan dissolved.

So they had an incomplete revelation. They could have understood more had they better interpreted the Old Testament. Matthew 22 and 29, Jesus said, You are mistaken not understanding the Scriptures. You are mistaken not understanding the Scriptures. The Scriptures do speak about a suffering Messiah, don't they? Isaiah 53, Psalm 22.

The Scriptures do speak about a final and ultimate Lamb depicted in all the imagery of the sacrificial system. But John was really suffering from incomplete revelation. The New Testament hadn't been written. You couldn't say, John, you need to read 1 and 2 Thessalonians, it's all there.

You need to read 2 Peter 3, a day of the Lord is like a thousand years and a thousand years a day. You've got to realize there's some big time gaps here, but that wasn't written. The book of Revelation wasn't written. It wouldn't be written for over half a century. And so John was just without the full information to see the timetable.

Well, you and I don't have that problem, do we? If you say to me you have doubts, then what I'm going to say to you is go to the Scripture because the revelation of God is clear. Read the Word, learn the Word, know the Word, trust the Word. Blessed is the man who delights in the law of God day and night, who meditates on it day and night because it's in the knowledge of the truth that you understand the purposes and plan of God and doubt is dissipated. For me as a young person, those early doubts sent me into the search for the truth and once I determined the truth, the doubt disappeared. Doubt is almost a foreign matter to me and to many of you at this point because the truth has so taken over your mind and your heart. You may be tempted to doubt what you know, but you don't doubt because you don't know.

You have the evidence there. You have the mind of Christ in the Scripture. You can bring every thought captive to Christ, as 2 Corinthians 10.5 says.

You have an anointing from God. You don't need to be taught by men because the anointing from God teaches you all things. First John 2, John just didn't have enough information to be certain. And that's okay.

If you don't have enough information to be certain, then go to the one who has the information. Who's that? The Lord. And where does He reveal His mind? Where is the mind of Christ?

It's right here, 1 Corinthians 2, 16. You have the mind of Christ right here. You don't need to have doubt. That's why I say doubt is a good place to start.

It's a bad place to finish. If you have some doubts, go to the Word of God and get your doubt turned into faith. That's John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Master's University and Seminary, here on Grace to You. He's titled our current study, When Believers Doubt. Now again, this series comes from the book of Luke, and that's a book, John, that you spent a decade preaching through verse by verse, that sort of unhurried verse by verse teaching style that is your style.

It probably seems strange to a lot of people who grew up in American evangelicalism. So let me just ask, why teach the Bible one book at a time, one verse at a time, the way you do it? Is that simply your personal preference that has led you to take that steady and mostly linear approach to teaching God's Word?

It should be obvious I teach that way because God wrote that way. I mean, the Bible is a book, but it contains 66 books. They have a beginning, a middle, and an ending. There's a flow of thought.

There are narrative themes. There are theological themes. But you can't possibly think that what God wrote has sort of graded value.

Well, you know, these truths are like a ten, but that stuff is just a one or a two, so you can ignore that. Every word of God is pure. All Scripture is inspired. It is all God-breathed, and it is all profitable. So I have to teach the Bible the way God wrote the Bible, and that is the ministry philosophy of grace to you.

And we have a half a century now to demonstrate the impact and the power and the effectiveness of teaching the Bible that way. This is the full counsel of God. We're not trying to attract people with feel-good messages. It's not about you.

It's not about your life and your happiness and your fulfillment. It's going to be about what God has revealed in Scripture. It's going to be about sin, repentance, judgment, grace, forgiveness, salvation, redemption, heaven. This is because this is what the Bible is about.

And that's the way it comes across through radio, books, MP3s, CD, television, website. And after half a century of doing that, we know that a hundred years from now, if the Lord hasn't taken us all away and things are still happening down here on earth, this truth that we have taught will be as significant, as true as it has ever been. This is the only way to teach the Bible so that its message, which is timeless, is taught in a timeless way.

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And you'd find that at our website, again our web address, GTY.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Keep in mind, Grace To You television airs this Sunday, and I encourage you to watch it with your family. You can check your local listings for Channel and Times, and then make sure you're here tomorrow for the next installment of John's series, When Believers Doubt. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.