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It’s hard to think of the disciple Thomas without recalling his skepticism concerning the first reports of Jesus’ resurrection. In truth, the life of every Christian is characterized not by faith or doubt, but by faith and doubt. Thomas experienced assurance when he saw and touched Jesus for himself. By what means can we experience assurance that we are in the presence of a risen Savior who cannot be seen?

 

This message was preceded by personal sharing by Brad Thompson.

Real disciples have real doubts. Maybe you’ve been led to believe that that just isn’t so. Maybe you assume that a church may be defined as a fortress of unassailable certainty – a place where spiritually minded people no longer have serious questions about God’s existence, or the meaning of life, or what happens after we die. And if they do have such questions, they most certainly aren’t going to ask them out loud.

But the truth of the matter is that real disciples – lifelong learners of Jesus – frequently have real doubts. The kinds of questions and concerns that Brad has so openly shared with us may demand years of searching and reflection. And that process isn’t suddenly terminated just because someone takes the momentous step, as Brad has done, of choosing to become a follower of Jesus. The hardest spiritual questions I have ever faced came my attention after I became a Christian. And almost 40 years into that journey, I still wrestle with the challenges of yielding myself to a God I cannot see or hear or touch, and whose existence I cannot prove.

It is a relief to discover that the original circle of Jesus’ followers, the Twelve, had their doubts, too.

Rather often we enthusiastically quote the last three verses of the book of Matthew. They comprise the so-called Great Commission – the ongoing global task that Christ assigned to his followers shortly after he rose from the dead. But what about the two verses that immediately precede the Great Commission? “Then the eleven disciples [that would be the Twelve minus Judas] went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.” Now we may say, “If only I could see Jesus for myself, all my questions would be answered.” But even in the presence of the resurrected Son of God, it’s amazing how worship and doubt were mingled together.

This summer we’re making the case that the dozen men to whom Jesus first said, “Follow me,” were ordinary human beings. Part of their ordinariness is that they were broken. And part of their brokenness is that doubt, uncertainty, and skepticism seemed to dog them in their efforts to walk in Jesus’ footsteps. Today, as we look into the life of the disciple named Thomas, we’ll hear the good news that our doubts and questions are not automatic spiritual disqualifiers. They may in fact turn out to be the very things that drive us into the arms of God.

Real disciples have real doubts because the real world is a mixture of sunlight and shadow. The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who was fiercely devoted to Christ, suggested that the death of a single infant calls into question the existence of God. At the very least, therefore, a church has to be a place where there are honest answers for honest questions – and that means humility, and transparency, and no more trotting out Dr. So-And- So’s list of the ten reasons why Christians are right and everybody else is out to lunch. Why should we expect the kids of our church to take Christ seriously if they aren’t given the freedom to admit their skepticism and to wrestle openly with the classic Christian answers to life’s most important questions?

This becomes even more urgent in the climate of the 21st century. We live in a culture where skepticism is equated with great wisdom, and intelligent people are lampooned for even considering the claims of Christ. The last generation has produced a group of authors who have come to be called the New Atheists.

Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most outspoken member of this group, suggests: “Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate… Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.” Sam Harris adds: Faith is “nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.” The late Carl Sagan counsels us, “Better by far to embrace the truth than a reassuring fable.”

Scott Altran believes that religion asks for a commitment to what he calls “factually impossible worlds.” And atheist Michel Onfray has declared that it is time for the world’s bright people to wage a “final battle” against Christianity. Is it reactionary to suggest that our colleges have become a spiritual battleground for our own kids? Listen to acclaimed philosopher Richard Rorty: [Students are fortunate to be under] “people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.” [As professors] “we are going to go right on trying to discredit you [parents] in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly instead of discussable.”

To put it bluntly, a great many contemporary Western centers of learning are not neutral about God. They are not tolerant or even agnostic. They are relentlessly dismissive of even the possibility that there is such a thing as an invisible world. Doubts about God win applause. Spirituality in the end is not about facts, but about the feelings that you feel about your own feelings.

No wonder so many Christians have come to see doubt as a terrifying monster. How can we batten down the hatches of our faith and make sure that not a single doubt or question sneaks in? Let me propose that there is a far healthier way to go forward. What disciples need – and what the world needs to see in us – is an honest and open encounter with the claims of Jesus of Nazareth (which means bringing all of our doubts along as part of the package), resolving to do what Jesus himself urged us to do: We must follow the clues that he has provided, and go wherever the truth leads us.

Amongst the Twelve there is an exemplary model of this strategy. His name is Thomas. Most of what we know about Thomas is found in the gospel of John. For instance, when Jesus heard that his friend Lazarus had died in Judea, he proposed traveling there, even though the Jewish authorities had placed a bounty on his head. We read in John 11:16: “Then Thomas (called Didymus) said to the rest of the disciples, ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him.’”

Now this is not exactly what you would want to say if you were campaigning to be president of the Optimists Club. As one commentator puts it, this is not expectant faith but loyal despair. Yes, Thomas does have great resolve. And he is definitely not a quitter. But by nature Thomas appears to be a glass-half-empty kind of guy.

Thomas’ words are also recorded at the Last Supper. When Jesus said, “You know the way to the place where I am going,” Thomas responded, “Lord, we don’t have a clue where you are going, so how in the world are we supposed to know the way?” Jesus famously answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Unquestionably the most famous Thomas text is found in John chapter 20. Even though Jesus has risen from the dead, Thomas is so far the only disciple who hasn’t seen him. We begin at verse 24:

Now Thomas (called Didymus), 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 it.”

A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, 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!”

Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Now there is no truth to the rumor that all Thomas really had to do was to look at the bracelet on Jesus’ wrist – the one that said WWID, which stood for What Would I Do? One of the things that actually jumps out in these texts is Thomas’ name. Twice he is called Didymus. Thomas is an Aramaic word, and Didymus is a Greek word. They both mean “twin.” Today we tend to think that twins are special. But in the ancient world twins were considered bad omens. They messed up the way inheritance was distributed, and it was assumed that twins were simply going to have a tougher time in life – and this was way before Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen.

Notice that the word “doubt” comes from the same root word as “double” – they both begin with d-o-u-b. To doubt is to be in two minds about something. Double-mindedness is skepticism. I’m stuck in the muddled middle between two convictions or conclusions, and feel afraid to commit to either one.

And that’s where Thomas the twin finds himself during the week after Easter. He is torn. He wants to hope. He wants to believe that the promises of Jesus might still be true. But real disciples can have real doubts. All of his prior experience screams that dead people do not reappear.

During the movie "The Shawshank Redemption" the characters have a running discussion about hope. Morgan Freeman’s character, who has come to accept the likelihood that he will never leave prison, says, “Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can break your heart.” But for Tom Robbins’ character, who is new to the prison, the day you quit hoping is the day you start dying.

In his excellent book "Faith and Doubt," John Ortberg notes that on the pages of Scripture there are two different kinds of hope-generating stories. There are 40-day stories and there are three-day stories. Forty-day stories are about patience and perseverance. Moses went up on Mt. Sinai for 40 days, and the people of Israel had to wait for him. Noah and his family rode out 40 days and 40 nights of rain. Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness confirming God’s purposes for his life. In each of these stories hope emerges after 40 days of patient waiting.

Three-day stories are different. They happen bang-bang-bang. On day one something goes terribly wrong. On day two there is a hold-your-breath kind of waiting. On day three God had better show up and do something, or all hope will be lost. Joshua is told, “Three days from now you’re going to cross the Jordan and enter the Promised Land.” When Queen Esther learns that her people have been targeted for genocide, she asks everyone to fast for three days before she approaches the king. Jonah spends three days in the belly of a big fish. Ortberg suggests that the whole time he was praying, “God, please just let me go out the way I came in.”

In the Bible, three days becomes a kind of shorthand for waiting in hope. The passion of Jesus is just such a three-day story. On Good Friday there is the disaster of the crucifixion. On Saturday there is waiting and uncertainty. On Easter Sunday there is the spectacular in-breaking of God’s power. What John 20 tells us is that while all the other disciples have experienced the third day of the story, with its grounds for hope, Thomas is still stuck on Saturday. Real disciples have real doubts because we live in a second-day world.

Look back at verse 24: “Now Thomas (called Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came.” We’re not told where Thomas was, or why he was absent. But it’s conceivable that he was processing the tragedy of that weekend by withdrawing. Perhaps he chose loneliness over togetherness, as some of us do when we feel stressed or wounded. It may be that what we see here is a reminder of the need to stay in the company of other disciples even when we don’t have the answers we want, for the God of hope will indeed break in with hope for his people.

Thomas wants evidence. He sets the bar high. “I want to do my own seeing and I want to do my own touching.” In one of the great scenes in all of Scripture, Jesus presents himself to Thomas and says, “Here I am. See for yourself. Make a choice, Thomas. Stop doubting and believe.”

For many people, verse 29 feels like a frustrating finale to this story. “Then Jesus told him, ‘Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’” To which many of us are tempted to say, “So why can’t I receive what Thomas received? Why doesn’t God provide a private show-and-tell that would erase my doubts forever?”

All it takes is a moment’s reflection to realize that faith is not always about what we see or don’t see. I trust that there is plenty of oxygen in this room, even though I can’t see it and do not have the appropriate equipment to verify my convictions. I believe that an invisible stream of electrons is capable of delivering the emails that I will send this week. I trust that my family members continue to love me, even though they know things about me that I would never dream of revealing in a sermon. And I have an unshakeable expectation that this weekend’s session retreat has put our church on a course that will bring great glory to God. I cannot see that, although I know it is true. And during the days and weeks ahead as we unwrap that retreat for you, I am confident you will come to a similar conviction.

So where does all this leave us regarding the most important question that each of us must address: Should we or should we not bet our entire existence on the reality of a God whom we cannot see or hear or touch or prove?

All of us are required to answer that question. All of us are required to live with our answer. Essentially we have three alternatives: Unbelief, doubt, and trust.

Unbelief means choosing not to believe in God. We can follow the clues and decide that the evidence just doesn’t add up. Philosopher Thomas Nagel has been astonishingly honest about his reasons for unbelief: “I want atheism to be true… It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God… I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”

The Bible assures us that God has made us in such a way that we can actively resist him. We can turn away from God with a long-term, settled intention. The Bible is also clear that this choice has long-term eternal ramifications. Therefore those who choose unbelief must live in the hope that God is not actually there.

The second option is to doubt. That means standing right in the middle. I am in two minds. I’m stuck. I’m skeptical enough about unbelief that I don’t want to go there, but I’m skeptical enough about trust that I don’t want to risk everything by going there. Real disciples have real doubts, and most people who sincerely endeavor to follow Jesus drift into this No Man’s Zone from time to time. But that doesn’t mean doubt has to become a way of life. So what is the pathway from doubt to trust? 

For years I was convinced, like Brad, that the pathway was accumulating enough data or spiritual evidence to compel my mind to make the decision the God. This is like choosing a bank, right, or buying a new car? You come up with a list of pro’s and con’s, and then you go with the option that has the most positives. In my office I have a whole shelf of books that declare, “Here is the critical mass of evidence you need to know that the Bible is accurate and that God is really there.” I strongly encourage reading excellent books, and that page we have prepared lists a number of them.

Except…there’s always another book to read. And there’s always that point/counterpoint with that insightful person you like to talk to at lunch. And there’s always that nagging voice of doubt that says, “Now don’t be rash. Don’t make any sudden moves. Your whole life is at stake here, so you’d better get all the data you need.” And before you know it, you’ve spent your whole life wavering between trust and unbelief.

So what is the real pathway from doubt to trust? It is surrender – surrender not to a stack of evidence, but to a person. It’s embodied in this question: “Do you believe that Jesus of Nazareth knows more about reality than anyone who has ever lived, and that he always tells the truth?” Faith is saying yes to that question. It is a chosen frame of mind that usually comes at the end of a process. Follow the clues. Talk to God in prayer, open your Bible, and ask God to show you his face.

As God begins to answer your prayers – and he will – respond the way that Thomas responded. Did you notice there was nothing halfway about this guy? “My Lord and my God!” he shouted. Will you do the same? Will you bet your life that Jesus is right about everything, and that you can trust him like no one else?