When a believer doubts; Luke 7:18-23

Those of you who were here a couple of weeks ago may remember that we looked at the story of Jesus healing the centurion’s servant.  And one of the principal points in that passage was the fact that Jesus was amazed at the centurion’s faith.  The centurion was, of course, a Roman soldier, outside of God’s covenant relationship with Israel, and yet Jesus holds him up as an example of faith.  Jesus said, “I say to you, not even in Israel have I found such great faith.”

Now today, we come to another passage of scripture that we will begin looking at this week and conclude next week, and one of the principal points that is made in this story is that Jesus says, “I say to you, among those born of women there is no one greater than John.”  Now I think it is significant that Luke has chosen to include both of these stories almost concurrently in this passage, and  I believe he has done so to illustrate for us the doctrine of faith by giving us two human examples of it.

The centurion had great faith according to Jesus.  And John the Baptist was the greatest man born among women up to the time of Christ.  So, that being said, we know that the Bible says in  Hebrews 11:6 that  “without faith it is impossible to please Him.”  John the Baptist was obviously pleasing to God, so therefore it is obvious that John the Baptist had faith.  In fact, we saw many evidences of that faith earlier in our study of Luke, especially when John saw Jesus coming and proclaimed, “behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” 

Yet today we are looking at the other side of faith.  Not the faith by which we are saved, the saving faith like that of Abraham who believed God and God counted it to him as righteousness.  But the faith of someone who has already become righteous as a believer, but now finds himself at a crossroads or crisis in their life when their faith to continue starts to falter.  A time perhaps like as the hymn writer said, “when all around my soul gives way…” A time “when through many dangers, toils and snares we have already come….” and we find ourselves at a place of uncertainty, of great crisis, when God doesn’t do what we expected Him to.  When life didn’t work out the way we thought it should. 

Now I don’t know about you, but I have found myself in that place many times, when I start to doubt, when I start to question why God allowed something to happen that I don’t understand and though it is a place that all of us believers will find ourselves in from time to time in our Christian walk, at such times we need to go to the right place to find the right answers, so that we will not stumble and fall.  And so I believe God has providentially provided this great story of this great man in just this place, to show us that even great men of God, great men of faith, can doubt and start to question what is going on, to wonder where is God in their situation.  And I trust that as we look at this passage we will find the answers to those questions when doubt creeps in to our hearts.

Today we are going to look at 4 reasons that doubt comes into the believer’s heart.  Four things that can cause us to start to doubt God.  But first, let’s go back and get some background on what is going on in John the Baptist’s life.  Back in chapter 3, we were introduced to John the Baptist, a wild man living in the wilderness, who God called to be a forerunner of the Messiah.  And John came preaching repentance and the judgment to come.  He was clothed with camel’s hair and ate locusts and honey.  He was a prophet in the Old Testament style of fire and brimstone, and he wasn’t afraid to call the leaders of Judaism a brood of snakes and rebuke them in front of the multitudes.  John wasn’t afraid of the king either.  When Herod the Tetrarch committed adultery with his brother’s wife, John the Baptist rebuked him publicly.  And so Herod locked up John in a remote dungeon in one of his castles.  Meanwhile, Jesus is going around preaching the gospel and almost a year goes by and John is still in prison, and he is starting to doubt he will ever get out. 

And we know that John the Baptist never does get released from prison.  Eventually, Herod will have a big banquet, and the daughter of his illicit wife will come in and dance a provocative dance for Herod and his guests, and perhaps in a drunken state of excitement, Herod offers her anything she wants, up to half the kingdom.  And the girl runs back to her mother and asks what she should ask for, and her mother tells her to ask for the head of John the Baptist on a platter.  So Herod has John beheaded. 

But as we look at this passage today, at this point John is still alive, suffering in prison.  And after almost a year goes by, he is starting to become depressed over his circumstances.  And furthermore, he is also starting to wonder about what Jesus is doing.  After all, John had preached that the kingdom of heaven was coming and judgment was coming with it.  He had said, “the axe is already laid at the root of the trees; so every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” And “His winnowing fork is in His hand to thoroughly clear His threshing floor, and to gather the wheat into His barn; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”  But that wasn’t what John was  hearing.  He was hearing that Jesus was going around healing people and raising the dead, but nothing about the judgment which the Messiah was supposed to be bringing upon the earth.  So as he lay there suffering in this dungeon, seemingly forgotten by the world and even it seemed forgotten by God, John the Baptist begins to have doubts.  And in vs. 19, John from prison sends two disciples to Jesus to ask a question that seems almost inconceivable for this great man of faith to ask, which was, “Are you the Coming One, or should we look for someone else?”  It’s a question of doubt from a man who we never would have thought would have doubted.  And from his example, we can look honestly at why we too sometimes doubt, and how we can prevent doubt from causing shipwreck in our faith.

So as I said, through this illustration of the life of John the Baptist, we are going to look at four reasons why doubt comes into the heart of a Christian.  Reason number one is, a personal crisis causes us to doubt God. Every believer is sooner or later going to go through fiery trials, a personal crisis that will cause you to question your faith.   John was a preacher of righteousness, he was faithful, he was diligent, he was fearless, and then one day he gets locked up in prison and it seems that they throw away the key.  He is practically forgotten.  He hadn’t done anything wrong, in fact he had been faithfully serving the Lord, and then one day, bam, everything seems to fall apart.  The wheels come off his ministry and he just doesn’t understand what is going on.  In his mind, this is what happens to the enemies of God, not the friends of God.

 You see, like John the Baptist, doubt often comes from our inability to deal with negative circumstances when we perceive ourselves as being faithful people. Our doubts come when we've convinced ourselves that we belong to the Lord, we're loyal, we're faithful, we've lived and served Him and He ought to take special care of us and this is not special care. And if everything doesn't go the way it should, we begin to wonder if He cares or if He's really our Savior.

That is what is so dangerous about the Word of faith movement which is prevalent in so many Christian churches today, that tells us that we can have all the desires of our heart if we just have enough faith.  If we just believe enough, then God will answer our prayers and give us our desires.  It’s dangerous because it is not founded on God’s word, but on man’s desire to manipulate God.  And the end result is often shipwreck of our faith, or at least finding ourselves upon the rocks, ready to bail, ready to jump ship because God didn’t do what we were told He would do, or we wanted him to do.  And when God doesn’t act like a personal genie and do what we command Him to do, we are left with a choice of at least two bad answers: either God doesn’t really love us, or we didn’t have enough faith for Him to answer our prayer.  And both of those are the wrong answers, because they are founded on the wrong principles.  John was struggling with those questions too,  but he did the right thing, he went directly to the Lord for the answers.

There's a second thing that causes doubt. Not only a personal crisis but popular influences. John was to some degree a victim of the current misconceptions about the Messiah. Though there are many, many pictures in the OT of the Messiah, many of the characteristics had been pushed on the back burner in favor of other pictures that the religious community wanted to focus on.  There were many pictures, for instance, of the Messiah being the Passover lamb, the sacrificial lamb, the substitute ram that was caught in the thicket for Isaac, and many other references such as in Isaiah 53 that the Messiah would suffer and die for the sins of the people.  Yet it seems that the Jewish people ignored those and focused on the other prophecies of the Messiah who would come as a conquering son of David the King, to take the throne and overthrow the oppression from their enemies.  The popular view of the religious culture focused on when He had overthrown all their enemies, He would restore the glory of Israel and God would pour out His blessings on the people of the kingdom. 

We find the same sort of unrealistic expectations going on in evangelical churches today, don’t we?  Far too often our theology reflects what we want God to be like, rather that what God is really like.  Today, words like Love are used as a euphemism for the name of God.  And if an attribute of God doesn’t fit into our paradigm of God is love… period, then we throw it out.  We don’t want to consider any characteristic of God that doesn’t fit into our contrived theology of God.

You know, if you believe the lies that are being told today about the health, wealth, and prosperity gospel, you're setting yourself up to doubt God. There is no blanket promise in the Bible that you're going to be healthy. There is no promise that you're going to get well, that you're going to be healed. There's no promise that you're going to be rich. There's no promise that your career is going to be successful. There are no such promises in the gospel until after we are resurrected. Jesus said in this world you will have trouble.  We overcome this world the same way Christ did, by triumphing over death and being resurrected into glory.  Then all your diseases will be over.

Remember when Jesus tells His disciples about His pending death, and Peter says, "No way Lord, You're not going to die. The plan is You're going to live. The plan is You're going to be the leader and the ruler and the King of the world." And Jesus said, "Get you behind Me, Satan." That's Satan's plan, not Mine. Listen, when you have unbiblical expectations, when you've bought into a false teaching and God doesn't deliver on those promises, you will end up with a problem with your faith. Better not sit under that kind of teaching. It will only bring discouraging doubt that will rob you of your joy and your usefulness and cause shipwreck of your faith.

The third reason doubts come is because of incomplete revelation. John's doubts came because he didn't have full information.  There is a principle in scripture I call progressive revelation.  And John was essentially an OT prophet operating under the veil.  He could not fully see things that the Bible says even the angels long to look at.   And what John couldn't understand was why doesn't the Kingdom come in the fullness of all OT prophecy?   See John didn't have the information that Jesus would come but be rejected, and the Lord would then turn from Israel to the Gentiles, establish the church as the spiritual kingdom, and the church age would go on at least 2,000 years, which it has, and Jesus would then come back the second time and set up His eternal kingdom in a new heaven and new earth.

John had incomplete revelation.  2 Cor. 3:14 says “for until this very day at the reading of the old covenant the same veil remains unlifted, because it is removed in Christ.”  John was martyred before Christ was crucified, before Christ was resurrected and before the Holy Spirit was poured out on the Apostles.  He was operating in light of the veiled OT prophecies which were incomplete, but when Christ was crucified, the veil was lifted and the gospel of the kingdom became clearer under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.  But John didn’t have that vantage point.

We do have that vantage point.  We have the complete word of God, the scriptures. 1Cor. 13:10 states, “But when that which is perfect, or complete is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.”

If you are having doubts in regards to your faith, then the answer is to 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.  When you bathe your mind in the full counsel of the word on a regular, strategic basis, then you will have the foundation of truth that will give you the understanding necessary for your situation.  God may not give a verse or specific revelation regarding a specific crisis or question in your life, but He does give us the complete Scripture which is a lamp to our feet and  a light to our path.  It gives us the framework with which we can understand God’s purposes.

I would add that sometimes doubt comes not because of incomplete revelation, but because of false revelation.  Beware of people that purport to be getting direct divine revelation from God, and want to tell you that God said so and so is going to happen to you in the next couple of months.  They are false prophets, with a false message of divine revelation. They are putting words in God’s mouth.  That is the sin of using God’s name in vain, by the way.  It’s not just saying curse words, it’s claiming that God said something that He did not say.  It’s their words, not God’s words, but to give it more importance and more weight, they want to say that God told them to say it. It’s false revelation.  Too avoid doubt, avoid false revelation.

And then lastly, there was one other component in the case of John that contributed to his doubt, that being wrong expectation. As I said earlier, in the third chapter of Luke we meet John, the voice crying in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. It's a strong message. When the religious leaders show up along with the multitudes, he says, "You brood of snakes, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” John was the was the original hell, fire and damnation preacher.

And John expected that Jesus would fulfill that message right then by bringing the fire and brimstone type of judgment that many of the OT prophets prophesied would come.  Well here comes Jesus and what does He do?  He heals everybody. That's not judgment. He makes everything better. It's all compassion and grace and love and mercy and He's doing all these things that express the compassion of God. And He's doing them to unbelievers. Where is the confrontation of the faithless and wicked people? Where's the axe in the hand of Messiah? Where is the fire in His hand? Where is the winnowing fork? It just doesn't seem to be going the way he assumed it had to go because John was getting people to repent so that when the Messiah comes they didn't get burned up. And now the Messiah came and they were getting healed and dead people were getting raised, demons were being cast out.

How did the Lord respond to him? Let's go back to the text. This becomes very clear to us, verse 21, here's how He responded.  "At that very time He cured many people of diseases and afflictions and evil spirits and He granted sight to many who were blind.” And then in verse 22, "Go report to John what you've seen and heard. Tell him this, the blind receive sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have the gospel preached to them. Blessed is he who does not take offense or stumbles over Me.”

What Jesus is saying is tell John that what you're seeing is what the prophet said would happen when the King came. Remember Isaiah 61, we commented on it at length in the fourth chapter of Luke.  Jesus’ first message that Luke recorded was from Isaiah 61 which Jesus read, “THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD IS UPON ME, BECAUSE HE ANOINTED ME TO PREACH THE GOSPEL TO THE POOR. HE HAS SENT ME TO PROCLAIM RELEASE TO THE CAPTIVES, AND RECOVERY OF SIGHT TO THE BLIND,

TO SET FREE THOSE WHO ARE OPPRESSED,TO PROCLAIM THE FAVORABLE YEAR OF THE LORD.”

What Isaiah was prophesying was that when the Messiah comes the dead will be raised, the blind will be healed and the gospel, the good news, will be preached to the humble, the poor and the afflicted. And Jesus is saying to John’s disciples, I’m doing exactly what I am supposed to be doing.  I came to save, not to destroy.  I came not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Me.

Jesus illustrates that He is doing exactly what had been prophesied of Him.   And he tells John in verse 23, blessed is he who keeps from stumbling over Me. John, you're going to be blessed if you believe this, don't be offended by it, don't let your personal tragedy, don't let popular views and influences, don't let the lack of revelation, don't let your wrong expectations cause you to stumble over Me, cause you to be offended by Me, cause you to doubt Me. But realize that I am inaugurating the Kingdom even now, though not in the way that you expected.

There is a very important final note. John was beheaded before Jesus died. He was beheaded before Jesus therefore rose from the dead. He never heard much of what the Lord taught cause he was a prisoner. He never personally saw the miracles. But when he died, his disciples came to tell Jesus, which was exactly what John would have taught them to do.  Because as he had stated earlier, Jesus must increase, but I must decrease.  John died in prison without seeing the Kingdom come in it’s fulfillment, but I believe that John died with no doubts.  I believe at the report of his disciples as to what Jesus was doing, John realized that salvation had come.  Grace and mercy was coming first, by which the Messiah would establish His kingdom, would save a people out of the world who would be called by His name. 

Listen, doubt is part of human nature.  We are going to all go through times in our life when we don’t understand what is going on, when we don’t understand what God is doing.  But the answer for us is the same answer that it was for John.  When we doubt, go to Jesus.  John 1 tells us that Jesus is the Word.  And today we have the whole unfolding of Biblical history, of all prophecy, all of Jesus' life, death, resurrection, ascension, intercession, the whole explanation of the gospel found in the epistles, and the book of Revelation to tell us about the future. If you're a doubting believer, you don't need to be. You can erase that doubt  if you'll go to the Word and get the full counsel of God’s word. Jesus said, "Blessed is the one who doesn't stumble over Me." I pray that if you are in doubt today, if you are in crisis today, if you have been influenced by a wrong theology, if you have been a victim of false revelation, or had the wrong expectations of God, then you turn to the same source that John turned to; the Word of God.  It is sufficient for every situation.