Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Person of Christ from John 20:24-31
“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.’ Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”
This is the Word of the Lord.
Doubt can be caused by many things. When I was still pretty young in ministry, I served a church on the West Coast of Canada. It had 100-odd college and careers and young 20-something people in it, and one of the people in this group was a young woman. We’ll call her Peggy. Peggy was the sort of vivacious, energetic, creative soul who, if you put her at one end of the room and the other 99 at the other end of the room, had about 90 percent of the energy at her end.
She couldn’t think linearly. She was a student at the University of British Columbia, but mercifully she wasn’t in engineering. On the other hand, in terms of creativity and associative thinking and sheer enthusiasm for the Lord Christ, she was a wonderful young woman. She came to me one day and said, “There’s a guy at the university called Fred. He’s on the football team, and he doesn’t know anything at all about the Bible or Christianity. He wants to know more and he wants to take me out, and I’d like to explain to him the Christian faith. Would that be all right?”
I said, “Uh-huh.” She said, “No, no, no. I’m not trying to do anything surreptitious. I’m not going to compromise myself or get involved emotionally with an unbeliever. I would just like to share my faith with him.” “Uh-huh.” Well, this went back and forth two or three times, and finally I said, “Great. Go out with him. Share your faith, and then bring him to see me.”
That Saturday night I was in my study. I was still single in those days. I was in my study at the church at 10:30 at night. Knock! Knock! Knock! In bounces Peggy. “This is Fred. He’d like to meet you.” I could see that wasn’t true. I was merely a barrier on the way to Peggy. Let’s be quite frank here. We went out to IHOP, the International House of Pancakes, and talked. I was trying to put him at his ease and find out what he thought, and he asked a few desultory questions about Christianity.
That went on until almost 2:00 in the morning. Then he went off and I went to bed. The next Saturday night at 10:30 or so.… They’d been out to see a movie. They came back. Knock! Knock! Knock! In they came. Out to IHOP. This time he had a list of questions. We spent three hours going over his list of questions, suggesting things he should read. I gave him some articles to look up and read in a couple of books. Off he went, and I went off.
Next Saturday night. Knock! Knock! Knock! Another list of questions. More reading. He had done all of his homework and come back with another round. This went on for 13 weeks. What this was doing to my Sunday morning sermons I don’t want to think about. At the end of 13 weeks, this chap, who was as linear and dour as she was tangential and associative, turned to me and said, “All right, I’ll become a Christian.” And he did.
He really was genuinely transformed. He was genuinely converted. I baptized him, and today he’s a deacon of a church. He brought his own children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. What was his problem? Oh, I know there’s sin and blindness and all the rest. Unless the Lord opens up your eyes you don’t actually see. I know that, but at a certain phenomenological level, what he needed was information. He didn’t know anything.
Then there’s another kind of doubt. This is the kind of doubt that is associated with a philosophical or moral stance, a big decision. Here, for example, is the witness of Aldous Huxley, a famous British atheist, writing in his book Ends and Means. He writes, “For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness,” which is what he espoused.… Doesn’t that really turn you on? “The philosophy of meaninglessness.” It’s what he espoused in any case.
“… 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 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 way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was an admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever.” At least he’s honest. I have found very similar passages in Michel Foucault, who’s one of the founding thinkers of postmodernism.
Sometimes disappointment can engender doubt. Think of Elijah. He is so convinced that after his heroic withdrawal and the confrontation on Mount Carmel that reformation and revival are about to break out he has no category at all for what happens. Jezebel is now on his tail, and he’s on the backside of the desert having a pity party. “Even I only am left, and they seek my life to take it away.” What has happened here? He has been massively disappointed by the turn of events. Now he’s not sure what’s going on at all.
Sometimes doubt is engendered by lack of sleep. It doesn’t start off that way, but if you’re the sort of person who needs a certain amount of sleep and you start burning the candle at both ends, the first signs often show up in a certain kind of crankiness, and then the crankiness turns to cynicism, and then the crankiness plus the cynicism mean that together they force you to stop reading your Bible.
After that, it becomes a sort of skepticism toward the Lord and his activity, and finally just plain frank, old-fashioned doubt. At that point, I have to tell you the godliest thing you can do in the entire universe is go to bed. Not pray all night. There’s a place for that, but not here. Here, go to bed. We are physical, spiritual beings. We’re all wrapped up together, and one part of our being affects everything else in our being.
If you’re the sort of person who needs X hours of sleep a night, whether X is five or six or seven or eight or nine, and you regularly only get X-minus-one or X-minus-two because you insist on watching the late-night talk show or you’re burning the candle at both ends, you’re making choices that are ungodly, and the godly thing you ought to do so that you’re not biting everybody’s head off and feeding your doubt is go to bed and get some sleep.
Sometimes doubt is part and parcel of growing up in a broken world. If it were an ideal world, you wouldn’t go through those cycles. I know that. But granted that it’s a broken world, supposing you’re reared in a godly Christian home. You’ve been catechized from your youth, and you know the basics of the gospel. You’ve seen only godly parents. You’ve been loved and cherished in a righteous home.
Then you go off at some point or another to a job or university, and for the first time in your life you’re meeting sophisticated, intelligent, respectable, enjoyable people who don’t believe anything you believe. Your teacher of English says to you, “Well, Maryanne, why do you think you’re a Christian?”
“Well, I’m a Christian because the Lord saved me.”
“Abdul here is Muslim, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you think he’s a Muslim? Do you think maybe it had something to do with the fact that his parents are Muslim?”
“Well, yeah, I suppose so.”
“So do you think maybe the fact that you’re a Christian has something to do with the fact that your parents are Christians?”
Gradually there’s an undermining and uncertainty, and the student goes back and starts rethinking everything again. It can be agonizing as you start trying to figure out what is really yours and what is merely inherited.
It shouldn’t happen that way. In an ideal world, it wouldn’t happen that way, but granted that it is a fallen and broken world, those periods of doubt until you come into your own maturation, when you struggle with these things and examine the foundations all over again and the Spirit of God begins to work in you, can be part of growing up.
Sometimes doubt is the result of 10,000 tiny atomistic decisions. Instead of one great big whopping philosophical stance, 10,000 tiny atomistic decisions, all of them bad. So you’re going along in a church, and things are going well. You’re participating, maybe even enjoying the music or teaching in a Sunday school class and reading the Bible. You’re happily married. You’re rearing your children in the things of the Lord.
The middle years come in, and now you’re in middle management at work. They’re wanting you to put in 12- or 14-hour days, and you’re away quite a lot. The time pressures become pretty hard. Now it’s the spouse at home who looks after the devotions, because you don’t have time anymore. You’re down to, at most, once-a-week attendance at anything, and even then it’s sort of a distant thing. “Good morning, Pastor. Goodbye, Pastor.” Out the door. There’s no vitality or joy in the Lord anymore.
Then it’s maybe once a month. After all, you really are very busy, and when you do get home you need some relaxation time. Gradually, things slide until you wake up one morning in bed beside somebody you shouldn’t be in bed with. You get up and look at yourself in the mirror and say, “I don’t believe all that rubbish anyway.” How did you get there? Some deep philosophical doubt? Some deep systemic suspicion? Nah. Ten thousand atomistic choices, all of them bad.
Now why have I taken so much of my time running through these sorts of things when I have a text in front of me? The reason is because doubt has many causes. I haven’t listed them all. I’ve only listed some. Therefore, the responses to those different causes are also a bit different. All of the kinds of doubt I’ve mentioned here are mirrored, in one fashion or another, in Scripture, and if I had time I could show you how Scripture does respond to all of these and more.
In other words, this passage, which deals with a man whom history now dubs “Doubting Thomas,” deals with only one kind of doubt. If you think this passage deals with all kinds of doubt, you may be expecting it to address certain things it doesn’t directly address. It addresses certain kinds of things with extreme potency, but it doesn’t address every kind of doubt. The kind of doubt this passage addresses is very important, and it afflicts many of us, in one fashion or another, sooner or later.
Let me remind you of the context. Jesus has been crucified, and quite frankly, his own disciples have not expected this to happen, despite the fact that Jesus had spoken often enough of his impending crucifixion and death. They didn’t have a category for a crucified Messiah. They thought the Messiah would live. He’s the conquering King. He’s the Sovereign. Besides, he could do miracles.
How do you bump off a guy who can raise the dead? How do you bump off a guy who can still a storm and heal people and cast out demons? How do you get rid of someone like that? So they really had no category for a crucified Messiah, despite all he had taught. When he taught about these things, I’m sure they muttered under their breath, “There he goes again. Deep enigmatic utterances we can scarcely understand. Deep, brother, deep.” But they didn’t understand. Do you know the proof that they didn’t understand?
The proof they didn’t understand is when Jesus is actually in the tomb. They are in the upper room, and they are not saying, “Yes! I can hardly wait till Sunday.” They have no category for things yet. Then on that first resurrection day, Jesus appeared to Mary and to other women, to Peter alone, to Peter and John (the race to the tomb, recorded earlier in this chapter), the two on the road to Emmaus, and 10 of the 12 apostles. Not Judas, who by this time had committed suicide, and not Thomas. That brings us now to our text. We’ll divide it into three parts.
1. The cry of a disappointed skeptic.
Verses 24–25: “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.’ ”
What kind of doubt is this? This is not the doubt of a philosophical materialist; someone who says all there is in the universe is matter, energy, space, and time. After all, this was a devout first-century Jew. He believed the Old Testament Scriptures. He believed already that God exists. He believed God had made everything. He believed the Old Testament storyline.
Nor was this the kind of doubt of a man who had made 10,000 bad decisions and was now shacked up with somebody he shouldn’t be sleeping with. What kind of doubt was it? This is the doubt of someone who feels he has been religiously snookered. This is someone who really had confidence in Jesus and now doesn’t know what to think anymore.
This is someone who has been deeply disappointed in his faith, and he does not want to believe something just because it’s convenient. He does not want to confuse faith and gullibility. He hears these other apostles, and he wonders deep down, “Well, yeah, it would be nice to believe it, but give me a break. People coming back from the dead? I don’t think so. Besides, they might have talked themselves into it.”
I mean, there are some people who believe Elvis is alive. Now there are some people who believe Jesus is alive. If you want something badly enough, you can chat yourself up into it. Some mass hallucination. What’s going on here? Besides, we all hear these mystery stories around us. Maybe Jesus had a twin brother, and now he has suddenly appeared and everything gets twisted around.
“I’ll tell you what. What I will demand is the only kind of evidence that can deal irrefutably with this kind of doubt. I want to be assured that the Jesus who was put into the tomb is the same Jesus who ostensibly has come out. I want to see the wounds. Not only the wounds in the hands; I want to see the unique wound.”
In the first century, the Romans had three methods of executing you. Crucifixion was by far the worst. It was for non-citizens and scumbags, for traitors and slaves. When they crucified you, they either tied you up or nailed you to the cross. Then you would push with your legs and pull with your arms to open up your chest cavity so you could breathe.
Then the muscle spasms would start, so you collapsed. Then you couldn’t breathe, so you’d push with your legs and open up with your arms to clear your chest cavity, and you’d take some more breath. The muscle spasms would start, and you’d collapse. This cycle could go on for hours and hours, even days.
If, for some reason, they wanted to kill you a little faster (as they did in this case, because there was a holy day coming and they wanted the bodies down from the crosses), then what they would do was come along and simply smash your shin bones. Then you couldn’t push with your legs anymore, and you’d suffocate in a few minutes.
When they got to Jesus, they discovered he had already been so badly battered physically that he was already dead, so instead of smashing his shin bones, one of the quaternion of soldiers had a short javelin and shoved it up under Jesus’ ribcage. It pierced the pericardium, and out flowed blood and water, which meant Jesus had a unique wound. So Thomas says, “Unless I see the nail prints and put my hands there, and put my hand into the wound in his side, I will not believe it.”
There is a deep sense in which Thomas should have believed. Yes, he should have understood what Jesus was saying. I understand all of that. Yet at another level, there is something attractive in this, because he wants to distinguish between faith and gullibility. Do you know there are an awful lot of people in the world who want to believe things that are associated with Jesus’ name that really have no substance whatsoever, fabulous stories of something or other that just aren’t true?
A number of years ago, in the glorious state of California, there was a faith healer by the name of Peter Popoff. He had a peculiar shtick to his ministry. Some of you with longer memories may recall. In the middle of his meetings he would say, “The Lord is telling me, the Lord is telling me there’s a woman row J, seat 46. You have back pain. Come forward and be healed.” Sure enough, there was a woman in J 46 with back pain, and she’d come forward.
Well, the press got onto this pretty fast and figured out there had to be collusion, so they started going to these people who were being singled out from particular rows and seat numbers. They couldn’t find any collusion. They couldn’t find anybody who would admit to any collusion anywhere. But ABC television was suspicious, so they came in with a tiny video camera and a radio scanner. A radio scanner is a device that goes back and forth across the radio signals of the electromagnetic spectrum and fastens on the strongest signal.
They had noticed that Peter Popoff wore a hearing aid. Now what a faith healer is doing with a hearing aid is a question I won’t go into, but they noticed it, and they had their suspicions. It turned out that Mrs. Popoff was one of the attendants at the door. When people came in, the attendants handed out cards and said, “If you have prayer requests, please fill out these cards, and we’ll pray for you.” She was one of the attendants who pulled them in.
In her case, whatever the other attendants did, if somebody wrote down, “I have a vicious melanoma and six weeks left to live,” she threw it in the garbage, but if somebody put down something that had the ghost of a chance of being psychosomatic, she would watch where they sat and write on the card, “Woman, J 46, back pain.” Then in the middle of the service, she had a little radio, which went down to the receiver in his ear. It wasn’t a hearing aid at all. It was a radio receiver.
She’d say, “Dear, we have one. There’s a woman in J 46. She has back pain.” “The Lord is telling me! The Lord is telling me …” So on national television, ABC showed first what it looked like without the radio signal, then did it again dubbing in the radio signal. Am I allowed to say that his ministry popped off? Well, for a short period of time. He’s back, believe it or not. He’s back on the air. It’s disturbing. People have such short memories.
Now understand why I’m telling you this and understand the reasons that are not valid for telling you this. I’m not denying that the Lord can heal, nor do I simply wish to mock this man, although he was a charlatan and a fraud, a wicked man. I’m telling you because undoubtedly there were many thousands of people who went to hear him thinking it an exemplification of Christian faith and, in fact, it was sheer undiluted gullibility.
There are some people who are so eager to believe something miraculous, something sensational, something wonderful, something powerful, they have no discernment at all. They’re just gullible, and Thomas doesn’t want to be in that crowd. So on the one hand, yes, he is to be blamed. He’s trying to be careful about the wrong thing here. On the other hand, there is something admirable about this cry of a disappointed skeptic. He’s not going to believe anything that comes along and call it spirituality.
2. The adoration of an astonished skeptic.
Verses 26–28: “A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked …” That was also so the previous week when Jesus had shown up. He had never done that before his death and resurrection. He always went through doors in a more or less normal way. But on that first resurrection Sunday he had suddenly appeared, and now he does it again. He just shows up.
“Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you!’ ” Now it may have simply been shalom, modern Arabic salaam, which in a certain cultural setting doesn’t mean much more than, “Hi there,” hello or goodbye, depending on the context. Yet the word has another layer of associations in the Old Testament. It means something like well-being. Not just peace in some psychological sense, but well-being with God and those around so that there’s justice and rightness and integrity and well-being for the entire community.
The ultimate hope of believers is a new heaven and a new earth, the home of shalom, the home of righteousness, of peace. This side of the cross, that is precisely what has been achieved already. Jesus has said, “My peace I leave with you, my peace I give you,” and now this side of the cross he comes along, and he’s saying more than, “Hi there.” This is what he said to the disciples the first week. “Peace be with you.” Now he says it again. “Peace be with you. Understand the significance of what has been achieved by the death and resurrection.”
Then he turns to Thomas and says, “Reach out your hand and put it into my side.” Although Jesus hadn’t been there, apparently, to pick up on this, nevertheless he knows. “ ‘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!’ ”
This is an amazing confession. The obvious question to ask, first of all, is.… Why does Thomas confess so much? Why doesn’t he simply say, “You are alive” or even “Oops”? Why does he confess so much? After all, there had been one or two other resurrections. Look at Lazarus just a few chapters back. Nobody said, “My Lord and my God” to Lazarus. So the first question to ask ourselves is why Thomas confesses quite so much. There seems to be an inference beyond the actual evidence of the resurrection.
I want to say four things quickly about this confession. First, let me say what it does not mean. Do you have friendly neighborhood Jehovah’s Witnesses in Sacramento? Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe Jesus is truly God. He might be a lesser god, but he is not truly God, so inevitably they’re a bit uncomfortable with this text.
They have two explanations to try to domesticate this text in their favor. I won’t go into the second. It would take me too long. But the first explanation is this. Some of them say that what Jesus is really saying is, “My Lord! My God!” which means the first thing Thomas says when he sees the resurrected Christ is blasphemy, and then Jesus approves him for it in the next verse.
Every culture, every ethnicity has its own vulgarities and blasphemies. It’s a damned world. But it is inconceivable that a first-century Jewish man brought up in a devout heritage would use God’s name the way our high schoolers do when they say, “God!” Inconceivable. Even if by some vicious stretch of your imagination you could think that is what Thomas is saying, what are you going to do with the little word and?
Even if by some stretch you could imagine that Thomas is saying, “My Lord! My God!” how can you turn that into, “My Lord and my God”? It is so bad. No, you have to take this at face value. This is a profound confession. You cannot duck the power of the text. This is a confession. It confesses that Jesus is Thomas’ Lord and God.
Secondly, what does it mean? Why does Thomas make this leap? Well, you must remember that a whole week has gone by. What has he been thinking about? This is not simply a matter of raw speculation on our part. What we have is the entire storyline of John’s gospel up to this point. We know, for example, that just a few days earlier, the night before Jesus was betrayed, Jesus had said things like, “Have I been with you such a long time, Philip, and yet have you not known me? He who has seen me has seen the Father.”
I’m sure at the time they weren’t thinking in Trinitarian terms. They hadn’t gotten their Christology sorted out. I’m sure they were muttering under their breath, “More deep, deep thoughts.” But now he has had time to think about it. You can almost hear the gears going around in Thomas’ head. “Could Jesus really be alive? Oh, no way. It doesn’t make sense. But they all think it’s true. No, it can’t be. But supposing it is true?”
Now you’re forced to think back all of the things that have happened. He has a whole week to think back all of the things Jesus said and did. If they think back a little bit farther, a few months earlier, recorded in John 8, Jesus says, “Before Abraham was, I Am.” Or three chapters before that, in John 5, “It is the Father’s intent that all should honor the Son even as they honor the Father.” How do you honor the Father? He’s God.
It’s bigger than that, because it’s not just John’s gospel. Thomas was present also for all of the incidents reported in the Synoptic Gospels in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Let me just mention one of them, and you’ll see what I mean. Do you recall the account in the miracle list of Matthew 8–9 when some friends bring along a paralyzed man for Jesus to heal him?
They get to the house where Jesus is preaching, and there aren’t chairs out like this. They’re all squashed in there. They’re spilling out the door. These men are hoisting along the paralyzed friend, saying, “Let us in. We want to see this Jesus. We understand that he can perform miracles.” “Stand outside. Wait your turn. The Master is preaching. Wait at least till he’s finished. Don’t be so rude.”
Well, these chaps aren’t going to wait. In those days, a lot of the houses in Israel were flat, so in the cool of the day you could go upstairs and sit out on the roof and catch the breezes going across. So they trot up the outside stairway and get on the roof of the house and listen carefully to where Jesus is preaching and start picking up the tiles.
Then they drop their friend down on ropes. If the crowd wasn’t going to make way for this paralyzed man out of compassion, they’re going to make way because a bed was coming on their heads. Eventually, this bed comes in front of Jesus, and Jesus turns to him and says, “My son, your sins are forgiven.” Some of the theologians in the crowd are scandalized. “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Do you understand what’s going on there?
After World War II, there was a very famous book written on the Holocaust. There are many important books on the Holocaust, but perhaps the most famous of all was written by a Jew with the name of Simon Wiesenthal. He wrote a book called The Sunflower. It’s only 80 or 85 pages. All of Wiesenthal’s family was wiped out in the Holocaust. Every single one of them.
In the last weeks at Auschwitz, he was still alive and still on a work crew. It was just before the Russian troops came in through Poland and released Auschwitz. He was pulled out of the work line one day and shoved into a room where there was a dying 18-, 19-, or 20-year-old German soldier. He was clearly so badly wounded he wasn’t going to make it.
It turned out that this dying German soldier had asked before he died to speak to a Jew, and in the peculiar providence of God, Wiesenthal was the one who was pulled out of the line and shoved in this room. What the Jew wanted was forgiveness. He begged forgiveness for all of the terrible things that were done against Jews and even some of the things he himself had done against Jews. He wanted a kind of pardon before he died.
Wiesenthal thinks all of this through. It’s only an 80-page book, but 55 pages of it is what goes through Wiesenthal’s mind in about a minute and a half as he listens to this young dying German. His reasoning is this: Only the offended party can forgive. Do you see that? Supposing, God forbid, I go home tonight to the hotel I’m staying in, preparatory to taking a flight out tomorrow morning, and you go home, and somewhere on the way home you get mugged, brutally beaten up, maybe gang raped.
Then my flight is canceled, and strangely I find out who has done this. I go to your bedside tomorrow, and I take your hand and say, “Be of good cheer. I have found your attackers, and I have forgiven them.” What would you tell me? Wouldn’t you be outraged? “Who do you think you are? What right do you have to forgive them? This was done against me. Have you been gang raped and you’re going to forgive them? What right do you have?”
Wiesenthal had gotten that all sussed out. If the most pitiful victims of the Nazis are dead, then what right does he, as a survivor, have for forgiving the Nazis? So he listened to this plea, and he thought to himself, “I don’t have the right to forgive. If the victims of the Nazis are dead and they alone have the right to forgive, then there is no forgiveness for the Nazis.” Without saying a single word, he looked at that young German soldier, and then turned and walked out of the room.
After the war, he wrote this all up. That was the little book The Sunflower. It’s called The Sunflower because as he goes into this room, he sees some sunflowers by the side of the road and has some meditations on it. He sent his little book to ethicists, both Jewish and Christian, all over the world with one simple question. “Did I do the right thing?” It sparked up a huge debate in academic circles. You can still track a lot of it down today.
Wiesenthal almost has it right. It is surely the case that only the offended party has the right to forgive. That is surely right. The one thing he overlooks, however, is that in the Bible God is always the most offended party. So there’s David. He commits adultery. He commits murder. He’s finally caught out, and he repents. As a result, he writes Psalm 51. Tonight go home and read it. Amongst the things he says in Psalm 51 as he’s addressing God is, “Against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.”
At one level, that’s a load of rubbish. He certainly sinned against Bathsheba. He sinned against Uriah; he had him bumped off. He sinned against the baby in Bathsheba’s womb, who dies. He sinned against the military high command; he corrupted them. He has sinned against his own family; he has betrayed them. He sinned against the nation. In fact, it’s very difficult to think of anybody he hadn’t sinned against.
Yet he dares say with a straight face, “Against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.” At another level, that is exactly right. For all the damage that we do horizontally, the most offended party, the party against whom we so transgress that what we are doing is not just social damage but sin, the very destruction of the relationship between Creator and created, the de-Godding of God.… That is against God alone.
When you cheat on your income taxes, God is the most offended party, not Uncle Sam. When you betray your spouse, God is the most offended party. When you nurture unrequited bitterness, God is the most offended party. When you burst out in one more round of rage, God is the most offended party. When you’re a child and you defy your parents, God is the most offended party. God is always the most offended party, which is why, regardless of what other forgiveness we should have, we must have God’s forgiveness or we have nothing.
Now this man is lowered in front of Jesus, and Jesus, who has had no social connection with him at all so far as we know, turns to him and says, “My son, your sins are forgiven.” Who on earth has the right to do that? The theologians pick it up. “Who has the right to forgive sins except God alone?” they say. Just so. And Thomas was there. I’m not saying he understood it at the time, but transparently he has had time to think.
If Jesus is the one who has risen from the tomb, then all of those things that seem so enigmatic, so obscure, all come home to roost, and Thomas falls before Jesus and cries, “My Lord and my God!” Do you know there’s another element to all of this? If Thomas has gotten that far in his thinking, then he cannot help thinking something else. This God-man dies. What sort of God-man dies? What’s going on here?
World War I was one of the most incredibly stupid wars that has ever taken place. It can’t be fit into just war theory. It was just alliance after alliance of bigoted colonialists who were really trying to divide up the whole world for themselves. It was an incredibly stupid war. A huge trench, 2,300 miles long across Europe, where machine gunners and howitzers on both sides gunned down the cream of the opposite side, 10 million each, knocking them down, killing them for the gain of a few hundred yards one way or the other way, year after year after year.
Out of this trench warfare, with so many millions dead, came some very remarkable poetry on the English side. Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and a number of others. I am of a generation, coming from Canada, where we had to memorize a lot of that poetry. It’s mostly gone now. One of them was by Edward Shillito.
Shillito was not a great poet, but he wrote one great poem called “Jesus of the Scars.” He describes all of the death, mayhem, sacrifice, loneliness, and fear in all of this.
Our wounds are hurting us; where is thy balm?
Lord Jesus, by thy scars, we claim thy grace.
He describes all of this, and then he uses this scene in John 20 to describe what’s going on.
If, when the doors are shut, thou drawest near,
Only reveal thy hands, that side of thine;
We know today what wounds are; never fear
Show us thy hands; we know the countersign.
The other gods were strong, but thou wast weak;
They rode, but thou didst stumble to thy throne;
And to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak;
And not a god has wounds but thou alone.
You have to come to grips with the fact that the God-man of the Bible is sovereign. He’s great. He’s to be honored. He’s also the God who goes to the cross.
And to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak;
And not a god has wounds but thou alone.
Paul had to reason things out similarly. He thought the Christians were blasphemous. Worshiping someone who had been hung on a cross? If you’re hung on a cross you’re damned. You’re cursed of God. Doesn’t Deuteronomy say you’re cursed of God? “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” Then he met the resurrected Christ on the Damascus road, and he saw that far from being cursed, this resurrected Christ was vindicated by God.
If he was vindicated by God, then what was he doing hanging on the tree being cursed? The only possible solution was the one the Christians were giving. He wasn’t cursed for his own sins at all. He didn’t have any. He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. Suddenly, the whole event of the cross looks very different. This one who is God-man is also the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
That brings me to the last observation about this confession. It isn’t cast in public liturgical form: “Our Lord and our God.” It’s cast in private form: “My Lord and my God.” You can be brought up in a nice Christian church and be exposed to all kinds of wonderful people and go through all the ritual, but at the end of the day, unless you come to the place where, in your own transaction with God, you bow before Christ and say, “You are my Lord and my God,” you have nothing. You’re just in a ritual community. That’s it. Somewhere along the line, the faith must be personal, and that’s where Thomas is. So here is the adoration of an astonished skeptic.
3. The function of a converted skeptic.
I suspect that verse 29 is sometimes misunderstood. We read, “Jesus told him, ‘Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’ ” Often this is understood to mean, “Dear ol’ Thomas. He really did come to faith, and it’s a jolly good thing. You’re blessed, Thomas, because you have believed, but you did have the advantage of seeing and touching and all of that.
It’s much better to believe without any evidence. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. That would really be a cool faith: not to have any evidence and believe anyway.” Isn’t that the way verse 29 is often understood? I have to tell you there’s no way on God’s green earth that that’s what the verse means. The only reason we think it means that is because of some social pressures in our day as to what faith means. In the context, it can’t possibly mean that here.
Today, for people on the streets of Sacramento or Berkeley or someplace like that, if you ask them what faith means, then unless they’re Christians, they’re likely to say that faith means something like subjective, private, personal religious preference. It’s not something that has any necessary relation to the truth. It’s subjective, private, personal religious preference. “You have your faith; I have my faith.” It’s not really disputable.
Although faith has different shadings in different chapters of the Bible, not once does faith ever mean that. Not once. Let me give you the clearest demonstration of what faith commonly means. It’s in another resurrection passage: 1 Corinthians, chapter 15. There Paul is writing to the Corinthians, and he’s worried about some of them drifting to the place where they’re not even sure that Jesus himself rose from the dead.
So he works with them, and he starts asking some questions. “All right, let’s suppose Jesus has not risen from the dead. What does that mean?” Well, in the first place, he says, it means the apostles and everybody else who testified that Jesus has risen from the dead are all a group of liars. They’re either hallucinating, they’re fools, or they’re liars. They’re not telling you the truth.
The resurrection is something that happens in real history, and the only access we have to real history is what the witnesses in history actually said. If, in fact, it didn’t happen when you believe it did, then clearly all of the witnesses are mistaken or lying. So the apostles are all a bunch of liars. That’s the first thing.
The second thing, he says, is you’re still in your trespasses and sins. The assumption is that the rest of what the Bible says is true, but now we take out the fact that Jesus rose from the dead. The rest of the Bible says we’re lost in our trespasses and sins. We’re still guilty under God. Now Jesus has died.
Why on earth should you think his sacrifice has been acceptable before God? Isn’t that bound up with the resurrection? If he hasn’t risen from the dead, then you have no reason to think his sacrifice means anything. Just one more martyr, a bit of flotsam in the stream of history, someone else who’s squashed by the imperial power of Rome. That’s it. So you’re still damned.
In the third place, he says, your faith is vain. Your faith is futile. In other words, if you believe something that isn’t true, your faith is worthless. In the Bible, part of the validation of real faith is the truthfulness of faith’s object. The Bible never, ever encourages you to believe something that isn’t true. In fact, the way the Bible regularly helps you establish your faith is by teaching you the truth. By teaching the truth and articulating the truth and defending the truth, you help people come to a genuine, valid faith.
Now faith is more than just believing the truth, of course. There’s an element of personal trust, that you trust this Christ who is the truth. There is a turning over of your life to him. Nevertheless, the actual object (in this case, that Christ actually rose from the dead) must be true or your faith is invalid. That’s why Christian preachers, if they understand the Bible at all, aren’t going to come along and say, “Just believe, believe, believe.” They’re going to articulate and defend and expound the truth, because that is what elicits, in God’s great purposes, saving faith.
Finally, Paul says, if Christ hasn’t risen from the dead, you’re of all people most to be pitied. Your life is a joke. If you believe something that isn’t true when you think it is, this is not a mark of maturity and spirituality, believing against the evidence. It means you’ve gotten snookered. You’re just gullible. That’s all. It’s ridiculous. A couple of Easters ago, the Anglican archbishop of Perth in Australia was asked on the media in Australia, “Supposing we found the tomb of Jesus.” Does this sound contemporary? It comes about every Easter, doesn’t it?
“Supposing we found the tomb of Jesus and it were shown conclusively that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. What would that do to your faith?” The archbishop replied, “It wouldn’t do anything, because Jesus has risen in my heart.” Paul thinks a little more clearly. If Christ has not risen from the dead, then disband. Go and join a soccer club or play bridge or do something useful with your life.
There is no incentive whatsoever in Scripture to believe that which is not true, and incidentally, this latest bunch of jokers, James Cameron, James Tabor, and so on.… If you’re troubled by that, I’ll give you some sources afterwards. Believe me. These chaps really do not know what they’re talking about. I debated Tabor on TV myself, and he really is a very ignorant man.
Do not let these chaps trouble you. They come along again and again and again about every Easter time. It makes really good press releases on the TV. On the other hand, if they did really have convincing evidence that Jesus really is dead, then abandon your faith, because the Bible never encourages you to believe what isn’t true. That’s just pathetic.
That brings us then to what this verse is about, and with this I close. You will only understand verse 29 when you see it in connection with verses 30–31. Jesus says, “ ‘Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’ Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe.”
Jesus knows full well that that first generation of believers, the 10 who were there in the room when Jesus first appeared and now Thomas who has been added to the lot, the 500 who meet with Jesus up in Galilee, the ones and twos over 40 days and 40 nights, men and women in small groups and large groups of people, who saw and touched and ate with Jesus and watched him have fish and shook his hand and put their hands to the wounds …
All of these people believed because they saw and touched, but Jesus was leaving. After 40 days he was going to be out of there. How do we come to faith today? I haven’t seen the wounds. I haven’t touched Jesus. Have you? I don’t mean some vision in the night. I mean have you actually touched the resurrected Jesus? How do you and I come to faith today?
Oh, I know it’s by the work of the Spirit of God, but don’t we come to faith today because we have listened to the witnesses who were there in the first century? That’s what the text says. “Thomas, you are blessed because you have seen and believed. You know what, Thomas? There’s a whole group coming who aren’t going to see but still believe. Do you know how that’s going to work out? Because you’re now part of this stream.”
Jesus has done a whole lot of other things, but these are written, including these events just mentioned, the events with Thomas … “Everything else has come before. These now are written that for centuries on, men and women will come to faith in the living Christ, confidence in the resurrection. They will put their faith in him because of what has happened to you, Thomas.” “These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”
Brothers and sisters in Christ, you must come to grips with immutable things that have happened in history that God has done to bring about our salvation. I know there’s deep theology connected with all of these things, but God has disclosed himself in a real God-man, in real history, such that this God-man, this Word made flesh, could be touched and handled. He died on a real cross and rose from a real grave and was seen by real people. All of our faith turns on the significance of those events. That can be worded a lot of different ways. Here are some resurrection events.
They came alone: some women who remembered him,
Bowed down with spices to anoint his corpse.
Through darkened streets, they wept their way to honor him
The one whose death had shattered all their hopes.
Why do you look for life among these tombs of stone?
He is not here. He’s risen, as he said.
Remember how he spoke to you in Galilee:
“The Son of Man must die—and must rise from the dead.”
Or again:
The two walked home, a portrait of defeat and loss,
Explaining to a stranger why the gloom—
How Jesus seemed to be the King before his cross;
Now all their hopes lay buried in his tomb.
“How slow you are to see. Didn’t this have to be?
Don’t you believe the words the prophets said?
Christ had to suffer first, then enter glory.”
Then he unveiled their eyes in the breaking of the bread.
Then our scene:
He heard their words, but not for him that easy faith
That trades the truth for sentimental sigh.
Unless he saw the nail marks in his hands himself
And touched his side, he’d not believe the lie.
Then Jesus came to them, although the doors were locked:
“Cast away doubt and reach into my side.
Trace out the wounds the nails left in my broken hands,
And understand I am the resurrection and the life.”
Long years have passed, and still we fear the face of death;
It steals our loved ones, leaving us undone.
It mocks our dreams and calls to us with icy breath,
The final terror when life’s course is run.
But this I know: my Lord traveled this way before,
His body clothed in immortality.
The sepulcher’s sting is drawn, the power of sin destroyed.
Death has been swallowed up in his mighty victory.
