Your teenage son isn’t home yet– 30 minutes late for curfew. What assumptions pop into your head? “He was in a terrible car accident! He’s dead in a ditch somewhere! He’s been kidnapped!” But…5 minutes later, he walks through the door totally fine, just a forgetful teenager. A young woman’s boyfriend hasn’t texted her back in over an hour. “He’s probably going to break up with me! Do you think he’s cheating on me?” Then he texts back—his phone battery died while he was out shopping for her Christmas gift. When I work late and have to walk around this dark, empty building to turn all the lights off, I’m certain there are murderers lurking in the shadows. But I make it home completely unscathed, as once again, there were no murderers at Mount Olive.
In hindsight, we laugh at the silly, unreasonable assumptions we sometimes make. But isn’t that how our brains work? When something doesn’t go according to plan, or follow the tidy expectations we’ve created, we jump to extreme assumptions and doubts that are contrary to what we know.
So it’s not very surprising that our thoughts sometimes seesaw between trust and doubt when it comes to our faith. When the test results come back worse than expected; when the reality of our life is far less grand than how we envisioned our life; when everything seems to be rolling downhill, do we doubt God’s plan? God’s love? God’s existence? As Christians, we will wrestle with doubt. So how should we go about Dealing with Doubt to prevent our doubts from spiraling into unbelief?
We need to know, because no one is immune to doubt. Most are surprised to see who the “doubter” is in this text. “When John heard in prison what Christ was doing, he sent his disciples to ask him, “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?”
Why would John, who the prophet Malachi, 400 years earlier, had predicted would “prepare the way before” the Savior, need to send his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you really the Savior?” Scripture records so many examples of John’s faith in Jesus that it seems crazy he could suddenly doubt Jesus’ identity! Last week, we heard how boldly John preached, “Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is near!” to prepare people for Jesus’ coming. As Jesus joins him in the Jordan River to be baptized, John incredulously says, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” John proclaims as Jesus passes, “Look! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” Literally, from the womb, John knew Jesus was the Savior, as he leapt in his mother’s womb at the sound of Jesus’ mother Mary’s voice. How could a man who so firmly “got it” suddenly have doubts about the Christ?
In fact, some people are so surprised, that they try to explain it away. They say, “John wasn’t doubting himself. He just sent his disciples to Jesus for their own sake.” But why? Certainly, John’s disciples benefitted, but why would we assume that John was incapable of doubting?
Look at the circumstances of John’s life at this point! The message John preached in the wilderness included warnings like, “Repent! The kingdom of Heaven is near!” “The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” “The Savior will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
But there sat John, the man who warned that the Messiah who would cut down the wicked and bless the believers, chained up in the prison fortress of wicked King Herod. It seemed far more imminent that Herod’s ax would be coming for John’s neck than that God’s ax was coming for the roots of the wicked.
And what was Jesus doing, the one John warned would come with unquenchable fire? Not cutting down unbelievers; he was healing– the sick, the blind, the deaf, and the lame! He ate with sinners! He proclaimed the good news of forgiveness! While John was rotting in a dungeon, Jesus was showing grace and mercy to the wicked? How could that be right?
Like the constant drips of Chinese water torture, Satan repeatedly attacked John in that prison, seeking to drive doubt into his heart. “Was I wrong? Is Jesus not who I thought? Have I worked so hard and risked my life…for nothing?” Things weren’t as he expected, so John assumed the worst, as contrary as those assumptions were to what he knew. Satan tried to break down the walls of John’s faith, because he knew if he could get Christ’s forerunner to fall, he could make many more people stumble. In this moment of weakness, John wrestled with doubt—“Is Jesus really the promised Savior?”
That’s a powerful reminder for us, isn’t it? If Satan could use difficult circumstances and unfulfilled expectations to make John doubt, won’t he do the same to tempt us to doubt?
Maybe your unbelieving friends, classmates, or co-workers have torn down your faith so much, that Satan has you wrestling with, “Is Jesus really God?” Maybe the media has so filled your ears with anti-Christian rhetoric that Satan has you wondering, “Is believing really worth it?” Maybe some of you have never doubted whether Jesus is God. But Satan drives us to doubt with different questions too.
When a family member dies too soon, do you doubt God’s power? When your breakthrough business deal falls through, do you doubt God’s generosity? When loneliness overpowers you, do you doubt God’s love? When you feel sapped of happiness, do you doubt God’s ability to bring you fulfillment and joy? When the world seems to be falling apart, do you doubt God’s control? When unbelievers prosper, but you keep failing, do you doubt God’s plan? When the unknown or the unexpected spring up, do we jump to extreme assumptions that are contrary to what we know? “God doesn’t exist.” “God doesn’t care.” “God doesn’t provide.” “God doesn’t love.”
Whether we struggle with doubts about God, or about our relationship with God, there is struggle. Just like John, we sometimes feel imprisoned; chained to doubt, and locked away from peace and joy inside four walls of fear. But as we sit in that prison, Jesus directs us to follow John’s lead. When he wrestled with doubts about Jesus, John reached out to his lifeline for reassurance, to chase away his doubt. He took his doubts about Jesus, to Jesus!
And Jesus answered! Not by laying out God’s precise step-by-step plan; John wouldn’t be able to understand it. Instead, Jesus directs John to what he could understand—God’s Word. Although John couldn’t see anything but the four walls of his prison cell, John’s disciples would be his eyes and ears—to answer John’s doubts with this reminder: “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.”
Jesus had been performing powerful miracles that counteracted the effects of sin– healing people from disease, death, and unbelief. By pointing to these miracles, Jesus wanted to remind John what the prophet Isaiah had prophesied about the Messiah 700 years earlier. “Then the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout with joy.”
Imagine how the joy of understanding must have shattered the darkness of John’s doubts, even in that dungeon. Jesus reminded him, “All these miracles I’m doing—they’re exactly what the Scriptures proclaimed the Messiah would do. The grace and mercy I’m showing isn’t evidence you were wrong. It’s evidence that I am indeed the promised Messiah you’ve been proclaiming!” Beautifully, Jesus shows the same grace and mercy that first drove John to doubt whether Jesus was the Savior, to his struggling forerunner, in order to cast away John’s doubts. And he shows the same mercy to us in our doubts, by assuring us, “Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me.” Blessed are those who answer their doubts with “Yes, Jesus is God” and “being a believer IS worth it,” because those who don’t fall away from the faith, have the certainty of eternal life! No matter the circumstances, or unfulfilled expectations, the believer is always blessed in following Christ.
Because God’s plans often remain hidden from us, and because of our sin, God’s plans will sometimes lead us to grieve, to fear, and to wrestle with doubt. If we fixate on things we can’t understand, then our doubts can lead us to slip and fall away altogether. That’s why Jesus implores us, like John, to bring our fears and doubts to him! Jesus directs us to cling to the promises he’s made in his Word when we’re chained by doubts. Because our foolish, fear-driven doubts don’t change the unchanging promises Jesus has made to us!
Like John’s disciples, we too can give a report of Jesus’s miracles that we’ve seen and heard. The Lamb of God has freed us from our prison of eternal death. The Messiah has healed us from the disease and handicap of sin, even our sins of doubt. Our God has brought us out of the desert of unbelief, and led us to drink deeply from the Water of Life. He has given sight to our blind eyes, opened our deaf ears to hear, and mended our crippled feet that we might leap with joy in the assurance of salvation.
When you find yourself chained with doubts about God, bring those doubts to Jesus. While he may not explain every step along the way, the darkness of our doubt is shattered by the work of the Holy Spirit, as we cling to the sure promises Jesus gives in his Word. As the Spirit works through the word, God “strengthens our feeble hands, steadies our knees that give way; he says to us with fearful hearts, “Be strong, do not fear; your God will come.”