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Three Big Words: Part 3 – Resurrection

John 20:24-31

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the resurrection 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.

This is the passage, of course, that has earned Thomas the label Doubting. It’s not quite fair when you think of the other things that the Bible says about Thomas. Nevertheless, until the end of the age, I’m sure, when we hear the word Thomas, many of us will automatically put Doubting in front of his name.

Yet it is important to recognize that there are many different kinds of doubt. Some doubt is generated by sheer want of information. Ignorance. When I was pastoring a church three decades ago on the West Coast of Canada, we had quite a lot of college-and-careers and young 20s in the congregation.

One of the young women was called Peggy. She was the sort of energetic soul who, if she was at one end of the room and 100 of the rest of them were at the other end of the room, 90 percent of the energy in the room was at her end. She was a student at the University of British Columbia. She was as tangential and associative and non-linear in her thinking as you can imagine. It was a jolly good thing she wasn’t studying engineering. She was a very keen and vibrant Christian.

One day, she came to me and said, “There’s a chap on the football squad.” This is American football. Well, it’s the Canadian version of it, which is a bit different, but it’s not soccer. It’s not proper football. It’s football without the feet. “He’s asking questions about the Christian faith, and he wants to take me out.” I said, “Uh-huh.” She said, “No, really. I’m not interested in compromising my faith at all, but I’d like to go and talk with him. What do you think?”

We went around that two or three times, and I said, “Fine, fine. Go out with him. Then bring him here to see me.” She agreed. The next Saturday night, I was in my study late. (I was single in those days, so I could stay very late many, many Saturday nights.) There was a knock on my study door, and in bounced Peggy with Fred. “Hi! Fred wants to meet you.” One look at him told me that was not the truth! I was merely the obstacle on the way to Peggy. That’s it.

We went out to a late night restaurant called IHOP, which is the International House of Pancakes. It’s slightly grotesque for a Saturday night, but we went there. We were there until about two in the morning. I plied Fred with questions, tried to chat him up, and get to know him. It wasn’t going anywhere, but it was at least breaking down some ice.

The next Saturday night, there was another knock on my study door. We went to IHOP again. This time, Fred had a list of questions. He came from a completely secular, pagan background. His questions were very elementary. I went through them one by one. We looked at the Bible together, and I gave him a list of readings.

The next Saturday night, there was, once again, a knock on my door. He had done all the readings. We were back at the IHOP until two in the morning. We talked a bit about football. We went through his list of questions again, looked at more Bible verses, and I gave him another set of readings.

The next week, the knock came again. We went through 13 weeks of that. What this was doing to my Sunday morning sermons, I have no idea! At the end of the 13 weeks, Fred, who was about as dour and linear as Peggy was tangential and associative, said, “All right, I’ll become a Christian.” And he did.

We prayed. I baptized him. Today, he’s a deacon of a church and has brought up his children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. And yes, it was Peggy that he married! Now you see, all of his initial skepticism was bound up, at least in part, in the fact that he didn’t know anything. He was just bone ignorant.

Sometimes, doubt is the fruit of systematic moral choice. Here’s the famous atheist Aldous Huxley, in his book Ends and Means: “For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness …” This is what he espoused and promulgated. “The philosophy of meaninglessness 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 claim that, in some way, they embody the Christian meaning of the world. There was an admirably simple method of confronting 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.”

Well, at least he’s honest! I’ve stumbled across very similar passages in Michel Foucault, one of the fathers of postmodernism, for example. In other words, here is not so much ignorance as massive philosophical, moral choice.

Sometimes, doubt is fostered not so much by some deliberate massive philosophical, systemic choice as by ten thousand atomistic choices. So you’ve been reared in the church. You have, to all intents and purposes, been faithful. You’re married; you have 2.4 children. Things are working out quite nicely. You’re being promoted at work, and there’s more pressure on your time now. Upper-middle management calls, and it’s a little harder to get to prayer meeting these days. The Sunday evening service has to drop off, of course, but you’re still there on Sunday.

Of course, your wife has to do much more of the praying with the kids these days. You’re often absent from family devotions, and then family devotions slide, of course. Things just move on and on and on until you’re hardly at church. Five years down the road, you wake up in bed with somebody you shouldn’t be in bed with. You step into the loo, and you look at yourself in the mirror and say, “I don’t believe all that rubbish anyway.”

How did you get there? Was there some massive point where you weighed everything to the best of your ability, there was an epistemological shift, and, as a result, you came to disbelieve in the doctrines of grace? Nah. It was ten thousand atomistic choices that were all bad.

Sometimes, disappointment generates doubt. Doubt can be the product of massive disappointment, even theological or spiritual disappointment. Remember, after all, Elijah. Elijah is convinced that after this period on the backside of the desert and then this massive confrontation with Ahab, now at last things are turning away. God has intervened with a miracle, no less. There has actually been a slaughter of the pagan priests and priestesses.

Now there will be a reckoning. Jezebel’s number is up. The gospel, as Elijah understood it under the terms of the old covenant, would be promulgated afresh in the land. Now he’s running for his life and finds himself on the backside of a desert. He is deeply in despair and depressed, because he had a set of expectations of what had to flow out of that, and his expectations were, in fact, unrealized.

Sometimes doubt is fostered by sleep deprivation. I’ve always had a fair bit of energy, but on the other hand, if you push me hard enough so that I have too little sleep, first of all, I get grumpy. Then I get cynical. I’ve never quite got to the point of massive, systemic doubt because, by that time, all my red lights are flashing. Nevertheless, you watch it in people, don’t you?

Sometimes the godliest thing you can do in the entire universe is go to bed and get some sleep. Not pray all night, but sleep! There may be times for praying all night; don’t misunderstand me! Nevertheless, we need to remember that we are body and spirit, complete human beings. If you push yourself too far, then you, too, will crack. “He gives his beloved sleep.”

I could mention some more things: dysfunctional families and other kinds of things that can generate doubt. Why have I taken so much of my time to run through these sorts of examples? The point is that because doubt has so many causes, we must recognize that the answers to doubt depend a bit on the particular cause of the doubt.

Here is an instance of doubt that is bound up with the resurrection, as we’ll see, but this is not an instance of every kind of doubt. The kind of answers that this text gives addresses this kind of doubt, but not every kind of doubt. Do not expect from this text what it is not prepared to give. All of the kinds of doubt I’ve mentioned find some sort of echo somewhere in Scripture, but this is not primarily a passage about universal doubt. It’s about the resurrection of Christ, in the context, no doubt, of Doubting Thomas, which has certain things to tell us.

Part of pastoral astuteness is making good spiritual diagnosis of what is causing whatever belief, unbelief, disobedience, dysfunction, or moral misbehavior one can see in a person. If you diagnose incorrectly, you may prescribe the wrong medicine. This is why the Puritans spoke of the “cure of souls.”

Now then, let’s look at this passage more closely. Jesus has been crucified and, quite frankly, his own disciples had not expected this to happen. The most powerful proof is the fact that when Jesus is in the tomb, the disciples are not in an upper room saying, “Yes! I can hardly wait until Sunday!” Rather, they are in massive discouragement. They did not expect the resurrection.

Indeed, on the evening of that first Sunday, Jesus had appeared (after appearing to a number of individuals) to his band of closest followers. At least, he appeared to 10 of them. One had committed suicide, and Thomas was not there. So now we turn to our text, and it will be useful to follow it in three points.

1. The cry of a disappointed skeptic

“Now Thomas 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. That is, of a person who believes that all there is is matter, energy, space, and time. That’s all there is and, therefore, discounts the possibility of the divine, in biblical terms, or of the miraculous. After all, Thomas was a first-century Jew, a devout Jew. He believed the God of the Old Testament. He believed that God lives, is personal, is sovereign, reigns, and has created all things. He hasn’t discounted any of those beliefs. This is not the doubt of a philosophical materialist.

Nor is it the systemic doubt of an Aldous Huxley or of a man who has been compromised by ten thousand atomistic choices, a man who is in deep moral failure because of sleeping around. What kind of doubt is it? This is the doubt of someone who feels he has been snookered in religion and doesn’t want to be snookered again. It’s the doubt of someone who was absolutely convinced that Jesus is the Messiah, but now he’s not so sure anymore, precisely because Jesus has been executed.

In Thomas’s understanding of things, despite the long-standing teaching of Jesus, which he clearly did not understand, he has no category for a crucified Messiah. That’s an oxymoron. It’s like boiling ice cream. How do you have a crucified Messiah? Messiahs win. Messiahs reign. Messiahs are powerful. Especially one like Jesus, who could raise the dead! How do you kill someone who can raise the dead? Now Thomas has been disappointed. He has been crushed.

So the reports come in of Jesus being alive, and Thomas thinks, “That’s just too good to be true. I don’t want to stand with the other disciples and hype myself into something.” Have they talked themselves into it? Some people believe that Elvis is alive. Others believe that Jesus is alive. What do you do with that? If you believe enough, it’s true for you. Thomas is the sort of man who will not make the confusion between faith and gullibility. At this point, he’s not too sure but that the disciples are gullible, and he doesn’t want to go down that route.

In California, a number of years ago, there was a faith healer by the name of Popoff. Popoff had a particular shtick. He would invite people into his large meeting hall, and in the midst of the meeting, he would say, “The Lord is telling me, the Lord is revealing to me, that there is a woman in row J, seat 46 who has back pain. Come forward and be healed!” Lo and behold, there was a woman there in J 46 who had back pain, and she would come forward and be healed.

Well, of course, the press soon picked up on this one and smelled a rat. So they went around talking to these people afterward to see if there was some sort of collusion, but they could never find any collusion. They would never find anybody who would admit to any collusion, at least. Deeply suspicious, ABC (which is American Broadcasting Corporation) went into one of these meetings with a mini-camera and a radio scanner, which is a device that sweeps across the electromagnetic field and locks on the strongest signal.

They had observed that Popoff wore a hearing aid. Now what a faith healer is doing with a hearing aid is an issue that I won’t address, but they had observed this and had their suspicions. As people came into this great hall, there were a number of attendants who would pass out slips of paper and invite people to put on their prayer requests and their concerns.

One of the attendants was Mrs. Popoff. If somebody put down, “I have a vicious melanoma and only six weeks to live,” she would take it and drop it in the rubbish bin. But if there was something there that had a good chance of being psychosomatic, then she would note where the person sat and write, “Woman. J 46.” Then in the middle of the meeting, she had a little radio, which was signaling down to what was, in fact, a radio receiver, not a hearing aid, in this chap’s ear. She would say, “Dear, we have one. There’s a woman in J 46 who says she has back pain.”

So on national TV, there was broadcast the appearance of the meeting (“The Lord is telling me there’s a woman …”). Then they replayed it and dubbed in Mrs. Popoff’s voice: “Dear, we have one. There’s a woman in J 46 …” Along with, “The Lord is telling me …” Am I allowed to say that Popoff’s ministry popped off? Unfortunately, not long enough, five or six years later, I was back in California for something, was in a hotel room, and flipped on the TV. There he was, back on TV, doing his stuff all over again.

Now why have I told you this? Because I don’t think that God can heal people? Of course he can heal people! He can act sovereignly and do what he pleases, so of course he can heal people. The reason I tell you this is not to laugh at a fraud, although he deserves being mocked. The reason I tell you this is because there were countless thousands of people who were being duped by what was not true, and many of them were Christians who could not distinguish between faith and gullibility.

Thomas would not be numbered among them. There is something honorable about Thomas. No doubt, he should have believed, because this was the truth, but he didn’t see it as the truth. He wasn’t going to pretend he believed it as long as he didn’t see it as the truth. He was going to distinguish between faith and gullibility. It was painful to him. He was a devoted follower of Christ.

Way back in John 11, when Jesus had spoken of going back up to Jerusalem and when the others said, “Oh, you mustn’t go there. It wasn’t all that long ago that the Jews tried to kill you. You go down there, and the Judeans are out to get you,” Thomas was the one who said, “Let us go with him, that we also may die with him.” He was a devoted follower. So here’s the cry of a disappointed skeptic, and it is the doubt of someone who refuses to talk himself into belief in that which he does not think is true.

2. The adoration of an astonished skeptic

Verse 26: “A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked …” As they had been when Jesus first appeared to the band of the 10 disciples. “… Jesus came and stood among them …” He had not done that with his pre-resurrection body, but this is the second recorded time that he has done it with his post-resurrection body.

“He came and stood among them, though the doors were locked, and said, ‘Peace be with you!’ ” A pregnant saying. This is probably simply “Shalom” in Hebrew or “Salaam” in Arabic. It is sometimes not much more than the Semitic equivalent of “Hello” or even “Goodbye,” depending on the context.

Yet it has a freight to it that speaks of well-being. Ultimately, it speaks of the well-being with God that engenders the ultimate well-being of the consummation itself. When Jesus speaks like this on this side of the resurrection, he is speaking of peace with God, peace with one another, and peace in anticipation of the consummation. He’s not just saying, “Hi guys!” He’s speaking with pregnant language that they are meant to think about.

Then, although he had not been physically present when Thomas had made his protestation, Jesus turned to Thomas and said, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” The demand that Thomas had made must be understood. “Unless I see the scars, unless I put my hand into the wound in his side, I will not believe it.”

Why is that determinative for him? Because he wants the clearest test that the pre-death Jesus is the ostensible post-resurrection Jesus. That’s what he wants. Otherwise, what are we going to do? Pull a twin out of a hat, maybe? Have the whole setting shrouded in mist in a Cecil B. DeMille film? Are we going to have the whole thing done in darkness with flickering lights and spookiness? Is this a psychological fear? No.

Thomas wanted concrete evidence that the pre-death Jesus is physically to be identified with the post-resurrection Jesus. Even the specification of not only the wounds in the hands but of the wound in the side becomes important. As you know, in crucifixion, people were either tied or nailed to the crossmember, and the physical pain of crucifixion was bound up with muscle spasm.

You would pull with your arms and push with your legs to open up your chest cavity so that you could breathe. Then the spasms would start, and you would collapse. Then you couldn’t breathe, so you pulled again and pushed. Then you collapsed. That could go on for hours and, in some cases, even days. That was the physical pain of crucifixion.

If there was some reason, then, why the soldiers wanted to take you down from the cross early, wanted to finish you off a little early (and, in this case, there was such a reason because the high day was coming), they would come alone and simply smash your shins. Then you couldn’t push with your legs anymore and you’d suffocate in a few minutes.

You recall the account. When they got to Jesus, they discovered he was already dead. They never smashed his legs. One of the soldiers in the quaternion had a short javelin and shoved it up under Jesus’ rib cage, and out ran blood and water. We’re meant to understand that the pericardium was pierced. Whatever symbolism is in the blood and water, he was dead. However, that meant he had a well-nigh unique wound.

After all, there were three on the hill that suffered persecution. Once a person is dead, there’s a certain commonness or ambiguity to death. If you’ve dealt with a lot of dead bodies.… Oh, I know today that in some of our mortuaries, we try to fix them up and make them look pretty and say, “Oh, he looks just as he did when he was alive.” In this age, however, without endless mortuaries and artificiality, there’s a certain common ruggedness in death. But only one of them had a pierced side.

Thomas said, “Unless I see the prints in his hands and put my hand into the wound in his side, I will not believe it.” Jesus said, “Thomas, that’s what I want you to do. See my hands. Go ahead, Thomas, put your hand right there. Stop doubting and believe.” Then Thomas said, “My Lord and my God!” Here is where we really must pause for a few moments and think through this confession very carefully.

Let’s begin with the way Jehovah’s Witnesses and other Arians take it. Jehovah’s Witnesses have two explanations for this confession. I don’t have time to go through both of them; let me just pick one. In one explanation, some Jehovah’s Witness leaders say that what Thomas really said, in effect, was, “My Lord! My God!”

This would mean that the first response of Thomas to seeing the resurrected Christ was blasphemy. Worse, Jesus then blesses him for it in the next verse. Now every culture has its blasphemies and vulgarities. First-century Judaism certainly had its blasphemies and vulgarities, but it is impossible to imagine that any first-century devout Jew would use “My God!” as a form of blasphemy. It’s just unthinkable.

Even if you could, by some extraordinary stretch of your imagination, suppose that Thomas could have said that, the deepest problem with this view is the little word and. For even if you could imagine (and I don’t see how you could) that Thomas could have responded by saying, “My Lord! My God!” it’s difficult to imagine how that could have been turned into, “My Lord and my God!” It’s not only blasphemous, but it’s also ridiculous.

Yet after we have said what the text does not mean, it is an astonishing confession. On the face of it, you must ask yourself (inevitably, you do ask yourself), “Why does Thomas infer so much?” After all, others had been risen from the dead: Lazarus, for example. In the Old Testament, you recall the account of the Shunammite’s son and one or two others.

Why doesn’t Thomas simply say, “You are alive!” or “Oops”? Why does he infer so much? It is a strange confession of faith, precisely because it seems as if it is inferring too much for the evidence that has been presented. Yet clearly, it’s important in the book. Why does Thomas infer so much?

It’s helpful to remember that a whole week had passed between the first expression of doubt and, now, this second appearance to the Twelve. Can you imagine what is going through Thomas’s mind during that week and as he interacts with the rest of them? After all, it had only been a few days earlier, in what we now call the Farewell Discourse of chapter 14 through 16, where Jesus had said things like, “Have I been with you such a long time, and have you not known me? He who has seen me has seen the Father.”

Clearly, at the time, the disciples didn’t understand what was going on. You can imagine them muttering under their breath, “Deep, deep. More enigmatic stuff from Jesus.” He said all kinds of things they really didn’t understand until after the resurrection. This was part of it. They could remember that only a few months earlier, Jesus had said, “Before Abraham was, I Am.” They could remember that, what is found three chapters earlier yet in John 5, Jesus had said that the Father has so ordained things that all should honor the Son even as they honor the Father.

All of these things that just seemed a bit enigmatic or not quite clear or a part of Jesus’ mystique.… Now they’ve had time to think about them, to turn them over in their minds, and he’s come back from the dead. I imagine Thomas was thinking, “It can’t be. It can’t be. But they all say that he really did.”

You can imagine the disciples saying, “Thomas, we’re telling you the truth! We didn’t expect him either. And not only so, but he appeared to Peter all by himself, and he appeared to some of the women. And then there were those two on the road to Emmaus. It’s not just us. It’s happening again and again! He is alive! We have seen him; we have touched him!” John the Evangelist could pipe up, “I raced with Peter to the tomb. Let me tell you about the grave clothes.”

Thomas says, “Unless I see the marks, I just can’t believe it,” but he was likely thinking, “But if it is true, what does it mean?” It’s not just the evidence that is accumulated in our gospel of John. It’s evidence that is accumulated throughout the years of Jesus’ ministry, even when it’s accumulated, in our records, in the Synoptic Gospels. If Thomas was there, it was part of what was in his memory.

Let me just give you one example. Do you recall the dramatic scene where Jesus is preaching in a crowded house? Not with chairs, but with people standing and squished in. He’s preaching inside the house and, on the outside, come four men who are carrying a litter with a paralyzed man on it. They try to push their way into the house to get to the Healer and, of course, the others won’t give way. “Wait your turn! Wait your turn! The Master is speaking. Wait your turn! Why interrupt him?”

But they won’t wait. So they climb up the external stairs. So many houses in those days in Israel had flat roofs so that people could take the coolness of the air in the evening. They went up the external stairs, walked across the flat roof, listened carefully for where Jesus was standing, and took off some tiles. Eventually, there was a big enough hole.

They dropped this chap down on the heads of those beneath. If they weren’t going to give way out of compassion, they will give way because there is a bed on their heads! Gradually, the crowd moves away and then the paralyzed man is lying there, suspended from these ropes. Jesus turns to him and says, “My son, your sins are forgiven.” The Pharisees say, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Do you hear the profundity of that objection?

Suppose, God forbid, on your way home, your car is jacked. You are gang raped, mugged, beaten up, and left for dead in the ditch. Somehow, you survive. I find you when I come back from Cape Town next weekend. I go and visit you in the hospital. In the peculiar circumstance of things, I go to you and say, “Be of good cheer, brother. Be of good cheer, sister. I have found your attackers, and I have forgiven them.”

What will you tell me? I suspect my remarks will not contribute to your healing. They may contribute to your blood pressure. You will be outraged! “What right do you have to forgive them? You’re not the one who was attacked! You’re not the one who was raped! You’re not the one who was mugged! I’m the one. It’s only the offending party who can forgive. How dare you speak like that?” Isn’t that what you would say?

Because, in point of fact, it is only the offended party who can forgive. That is correct. That simple perception generated one of the most powerful and moving books to come out of the Holocaust. It was written by Simon Wiesenthal and is simply called The Sunflower. Wiesenthal lost his entire extended family in the Holocaust. While he was in a work gang at Auschwitz, in the closing weeks of World War II, just before he was released by the Russians coming in through Poland, Wiesenthal was suddenly pulled out of line from the work gang.

He was thrust into a small room where there was a young German, maybe 19 or 20 years old, who was clearly dying from his wounds. This young Nazi didn’t have more than hours to live, and he begged Wiesenthal for forgiveness, not only for what the Nazis had done to the Jews as a whole but for things that he himself had participated in. Now he was about to die, and he begged Wiesenthal for forgiveness. Wiesenthal reasons it out in his mind. That’s what most of the book, The Sunflower, is about.

He’s reasoning it all out in his mind. “Only the offended parties can forgive, but those who have been most offended by the Nazis are dead. Therefore, there is no forgiveness for the Nazis.” As that young German Nazi pled for forgiveness, Wiesenthal simply looked at him and looked at him, reasoned it out in his head, looked at him some more, said not a word, and turned and walked out of the room. Wiesenthal was convinced that he didn’t have the right to forgive the Nazis since the most offended parties were dead.

After the war, Wiesenthal was so conscience-struck by all of this that he sent off his manuscript to a number of notable ethicists all around the world and asked, “Did I do what was right?” This generated a huge discussion that eventually became public and was published in various forms. Wiesenthal just about got it right. He was right to say that only the offended party can forgive. He was right. What he overlooked was the biblical perspective that God is always the most offended party. Always.

David understands that. He commits adultery and murder. He deceives. He lies. When he is finally confronted by Nathan the prophet and repents, in due course, he pens what is our Psalm 51. Amongst the things he says, in addressing God, is, “Against you only, have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.” At a certain level, that was a lot of horsefeathers. At a certain level, that’s just not the truth.

He had certainly offended Bathsheba. He had certainly offended her husband, Uriah the Hittite; he had him executed! He had certainly offended the baby that was conceived in Bathsheba’s womb and that would die. He had certainly offended the military high command; he had corrupted him. He had certainly offended his own family; he had betrayed their trust. He had certainly offended the nation; as the monarch, he was supposed to represent the justice of God. It’s difficult to think of anybody that he hadn’t offended!

Yet he dares to say, “Against you only, have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.” Why? Because God is always the most offended party. It’s the offense against God that is so heinous. It’s the offense against God that makes sin, sin. It’s the offense against God that warrants condemnation and damnation. It’s the offense against God that is absolutely paramount. That is why … however much we need horizontal forgiveness, however much we need to forgive each other and to forbear with each other … we must have God’s forgiveness or we have nothing!

Here is Jesus saying to a paralyzed man, “Your sins are forgiven you.” The Pharisees ask the question, “Who can forgive sins but God alone? Who has the right to pronounce forgiveness from God but God, the most offended party?” They were exactly right theologically; they just didn’t understand the entailment.

At this point, the disciples have to re-think everything that happened in Jesus’ ministry, all of their experiences of Jesus, and all of these enigmatic words that now make sense if Jesus did rise from the dead, if he is to be worshiped as God, if he is to be seen as one with God, if he is to be given the same glory as God, and if he is to be seen as God in human form. “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”

Then, inevitably, they would also remember passages from the Prophets. For example, one that we quote from Isaiah 9 at Christmas: “Unto us a child is born, to us a son is given. Oh yes, he shall reign on the throne of his father, David. Of the increase of his kingdom there will be no end. But he will also be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

There had been a lot of stumbling over texts like that from the Bible. Now you start putting them together. If he is alive, this is the entailment. Thomas falls down and worships, and he says, “My Lord and my God!” Immediately, there are other entailments. If Jesus really is Lord and God yet he has died, what does that say about him?

World War I was an incredibly bloody affair, an almost 4,000 kilometers trench across Europe, with machine gunners and Howitzers on both sides, mowing down 10 million young men for no gain, except a few yards one way or the other. It was a bloody, senseless, indefensible, incredibly stupid war. Those who survived in the trenches described it, afterwards, in painful terms as they saw their mates be mowed down and die in the muck and mire.

In the English-speaking world, out of this came a number of very important poets. One of the least of them was Edward Shillito. He was not as well known as Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, or one or two others. Shillito wrote one very important poem regarding his experiences in the war. It’s called Jesus of the Scars.

I won’t recite the whole thing to you. He describes the horrible darkness, the silence of death, the Howitzers with all of their sound, no light, no hope, and no help. All he wants is the help of Jesus of the Scars, as the poem is called. Towards the end of the poem, he writes, using language drawn from this account of Thomas:

If, when the doors are shut, thou drawest near,

Only reveal those hands, that side of thine;

We know today what wounds are; never fear,

Show us thy Scars, we know the countersign.

The other gods were strong, but thou wast weak;

They rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne;

But to our wounds only God’s wounds speak;

And not a god has wounds, but thou alone.

For here, there has to be recognition, not only that Jesus is the God-man, but that he is the crucified and risen God-man. What is that saying about this God? The apostle Paul had similar wrestlings, did he not? He thought that the Christian insistence on the resurrection of Christ was just flat-out blasphemous: “The Bible says, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.’ Christ is cursed by God and cursed by the government. He’s damned, and you make him your Messiah?”

But when he faces the resurrected Christ on the Damascus road, then he knows that Jesus is not only risen but vindicated. If he’s vindicated, then he’s not God-damned. But then what was he doing on the cross? What was that condemnation all about? Then the Christian understanding of the entire antecedent Scripture began to make sense. Jesus was not wounded because he was guilty; he was wounded for our transgressions. He himself was the Paschal Lamb. He himself was the bull and the goat of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Only that made sense in the vindication.

How much of that Thomas understands here, it is impossible to say. Although there are hints that John the Evangelist understands it full well, for already throughout the book, there are these hints of what the disciples only understood after the events. Already in chapter 1, Jesus is described as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

Indeed, one cannot fail to note the repeated personal pronoun my. This is not a liturgical response, “Our Lord and our God.” At some juncture, there must be the personal response of personal faith. Thomas, here, is out on his own. He’s not with the others, as it were. Oh, he’s formally with them, but this must be his response of faith, just as today when people close with Christ. However massive the meeting, however corporate the appeal, there still must be the individual faith that bows the knee and says, “My Lord and my God.” So here’s the adoration of an astonished skeptic. And finally …

3. The function of a converted skeptic

 Verses 29 to 31. In my view, verse 29 is one of the most commonly misinterpreted passages in all of John’s gospel. Let me read verse 29 to you. “Then Jesus told Thomas, ‘Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’ ”

This is very commonly interpreted today to mean something like this: “It’s all well and good to have faith based on evidence, but it’s far better to have faith not based on evidence. You’re blessed, dear ol’ Thomas. I’ve shown you, but it was a mark of weakness on your part. I’ve given you the evidence. I’m glad that you believe. Jolly good. But blessed, rather, are those who do not see and yet believe.”

That, then, feeds into a lot of contemporary assumptions about the nature of faith. That is, faith is believing where there’s no evidence. In fact, in the more secular view of faith, faith is understood to be something like personal, subjective religious preference. This is very important. In much of our culture (I include South Africa, as I include Europe, North America, and many regions beyond) … precisely because of the pluralism, both empirical and philosophical, of our age … most people think of faith as personal, subjective religious preference.

It is intrinsically valuable because it is valuable to you, but it is not valuable because it is saying anything at all about the truth. It is personal, subjective religious preference. You have your faith, and I have my faith. Science deals with facts; faith deals with personal, subjective religious preference. That’s what faith is in our Western world.

This means that, in your evangelism, if you encourage people from this sort of background (which is now, by far, the majority of you) to believe, what they are hearing you say (although I pray to God this is not what you mean to say) is, “Take an existential belief and make a personal, subjective choice to follow Jesus, regardless of any truth claims or the like. This becomes your personal choice to follow Jesus, your religious preference.”

Although faith and cognate words in the New Testament have a range of meaning, depending on the context, not once does faith ever mean personal, subjective religious choice. Not once. Once you recognize that, this interpretation here doesn’t make any sense at all.

Perhaps the most telling example I can give you, to make the point clear, is from another resurrection passage, 1 Corinthians 15. Clearly, some of the Corinthians who do believe, apparently, in the resurrection of Jesus, don’t quite have a category for the final resurrection on the last day.

Paul sees them as part of the same package. If you get rid of the resurrection on the last day, it becomes very difficult to see the rationale or the defense of the resurrection of Jesus. So Paul begins to tease out, “Let’s see what it would mean if Jesus really has not risen from the dead. Let us suppose that Jesus has not risen from the dead. What follows from this?” He works it out in 1 Corinthians 15.

“First of all, it means that the apostles are liars.” That’s astonishingly important because it is claiming that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is something that takes place within the constraints of empirical, space-time history. When Karl Barth, as an old man, visited New York, Carl Henry (who was then still alive and the editor of Christianity Today) went with a whole lot of other press people to hear Barth give a lecture and to ask some questions.

The question that Carl Henry asked at the Q&A was this: “Professor Barth, what kind of event is the resurrection? Is it the kind of event that, if there had been contemporary media present in the days of Jesus, there would have been anything actual to report? Not just reporting the reactions of those around but a resurrection body that would have appeared on film and an empty tomb? Was it an event that took place in history?”

Carl Henry had identified himself as the editor of Christianity Today, and Barth replied, “Did you say ‘Christianity Today’ or ‘Christianity Yesterday’?” Henry replied, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” But that’s the issue. It’s an issue of real history.

Did the apostles … in fact, Paul mentions, up to 500 people who had actually seen Jesus in different times and places … did they actually see him? Did he eat with them, as John 21 reports. Was he handled? Was he touched? Was he recognized? Were the scars there? Paul says that if Jesus is not risen from the dead, then all of the first witnesses are liars.

“Second,” he says, “you’re still lost in your trespasses and sins.” The assumption is that the rest of the Bible is true, but the resurrection is not. What follows from that? The rest of the Bible says that we’re condemned by God. We’re under the condemnation of God. If the answer to that condemnation is Jesus’ death and resurrection, and now he hasn’t risen, then we don’t have a clue what the death was about anymore or if Jesus’ sacrifice was accepted, so we just remain under the condemnation of God.

“Then thirdly,” Paul says, “it follows further that your faith is futile. Your faith is empty.” That is to say, you are believing something that isn’t true if Christ is not risen from the dead. Do you hear that? The Bible never, ever, ever … not ever … asks us to believe something that is not true. It never asks us to believe something that might not be true.

It fully acknowledges that it doesn’t provide a huge amount of evidence for some things that it asks for. We are to trust God because he is a trustworthy God, as shown in so many other dimensions. When we face him in the abyss of our suffering and human need, we may not have a whole lot of explanations given to us. Read Job! But never, ever, ever does the Bible ask us to believe something that is not true. If there is something that is demonstrably not true, then believing it means that faith itself is invalid. It’s futile.

In other words, one of the validations of faith, as understood in the Bible, is the truthfulness and reliability of faith’s object. If you destroy faith’s object, then you don’t have valid faith. Faith is more than believing the truth. It’s more than that. It includes an element of self-abandonment to the God of the truth, an element of trust. It involves, therefore, turning away from our former assumptions. So it brings, within it, a change of frame of reference.

But it never, ever involves believing something that is not true. Therefore, part of faith’s validation in the Bible is always the truth of faith’s object. This is why, in Scripture, one of the ways that you ground faith is by articulating and defending the truth. Christians don’t say, “Just believe. It will work out if you just believe.” Rather, they articulate and promulgate the truth.

That’s why the Bible says, “Faith comes by hearing the Word of God.” The Word of God is truth. It is telling true things about God, what God has done, and what God has done in Christ Jesus in space-time history. The gospel is true! That’s why faith is mandated. That is the fundamental answer to a lot of the postmodern fluidity of the age.

We do not invite people to take a trip with Jesus, to try him out. We do not invite them to make a personal, subjective religious choice for Jesus and see if it works out. If it doesn’t, they can always try something else. No, we are insisting that Jesus rose from the dead. This is the truth. If he did not rise from the dead, then your faith is vain.

“Worse,” Paul says, in the fourth place, “you are, of all people, most to be pitied.” In other words, Paul does not say that believing something that is untrue doesn’t matter so long as it’s true for you, so long as it’s psychologically helpful. He doesn’t say that so long as it’s your personal religious preference, then it’s great. He doesn’t say, “You have your religious preference; you have your faith. I have my religious preference; that’s my faith.”

No, Paul says, “Not only is faith invalidated if you believe something that isn’t true but, quite frankly, you’re a joke. You’re just to be pitied. It’s tragic. It’s ridiculous.” This is why, in biblical faithfulness, you can never, ever, ever reject the category of truth, including those truthful witnesses that attest to what God has disclosed of himself in space-time history, and not least the resurrection of Christ. You lose that, and you don’t have Christianity.

A couple of Easters ago, the then-bishop of Perth, Australia (who was then primate of the Anglican church in Australia), was asked on Australian television, “Supposing somehow we stumbled across the tomb of Jesus and there really was irrefutable evidence that this really is the tomb of Jesus, supposing it were discovered that Jesus’ body was there, complete with residual marks, and so on, what would this do to your faith in the resurrection? What would it do to your Christian faith?”

The bishop, Peter Carnley, known for his far-left views, said, “Oh, it wouldn’t do anything. Jesus is risen in my heart.” Well, it seems to me that Paul is a little clearer in this thinking in this regard. Paul understands the entailments. If, somehow, the body of Jesus were found in the tomb, hand in your Christianity card. Resign immediately. The whole thing is a joke. The glory of biblical faith is that God has disclosed himself in space-time history. If there was genuine, convicting evidence that this is not the truth, then don’t believe it. Believing it makes you a joke.

The commonality of this view is everywhere today, sometimes held not very coherently. Did you read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code? Have you been blessed with that in South Africa? There’s a lovely discussion (on page 369 in my edition) between Sophie and the hero, Robert Langdon, who is a symbologist.

Sophie says, “ ‘But you told me the New Testament is based on fabrication.’ Langdon smiled, ‘Sophie, every faith in the world is based on fabrication.’ ” Then the self-contradictory bit (this is lovely): “That is the definition of faith: acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove.”

Thus, he had said two mutually incoherent things in two sentences. On the one hand, he says, “Faith is the acceptance of what we cannot prove,” which doesn’t mean it’s false. But in the first sentence, he says that it’s nothing but fabrication, which means it is false. Either way, Langdon (and Dan Brown) are happy to have a definition of faith that is far removed from anything the Bible says about faith, where, in fact, faith’s validity turns absolutely (not exclusively, but absolutely) on the truthfulness of faith’s object.

Granted that that is the universal witness of the New Testament to the nature of faith, there is no way on God’s green earth that John 20:29 is to be interpreted as saying, “Well, I’ve given you some evidence, but it doesn’t matter if you have evidence or not. Frankly, the kind of faith that has no evidence is better yet.” There’s no way that’s what that means.

Verse 29 must be understood in terms of the flow of the entire chapter, and especially what happens in verses 30 and 31. Jesus knows that, in addition to the first generation of witnesses who see Jesus … who come to believe because they do see, touch, and handle the resurrected Christ … there will also be, in generations beyond that, countless men and women from every tongue and tribe and people and nation who will not see the resurrection Christ until the last day.

How will they know about him? They will know about him by the witnesses of the first generation. Like Thomas! Like John the Evangelist, who now writes these things down, according to verses 30 and 31. That’s why verses 30 and 31 are there. “Jesus did a whole lot of other things. But these are written that you may believe.” In other words, part of Christian proclamation is the truth of what Jesus said and did in the first century.

Of course, in Christian proclamation, there is also appeal to the transformation of life right now, the convicting work of the Holy Spirit, the witness of transformed lives that bear their own testimony to the power of the gospel today, and all the rest, but ultimately, the Bible insists that biblical Christianity turns on great turning points in redemptive history, climaxed by the death, resurrection, exaltation, and ascension of Jesus Christ, without which there is no biblical Christianity.

Supposing you go to Thailand and get to know a whole lot of devout Buddhists. Supposing in Thailand, in your communication with Buddhists, somehow (I have no idea how, but somehow) you manage to prove that Gautama the Buddha never lived. Would Buddhism be destroyed? Of course not. The credibility of Buddhism turns on its coherence as an entire philosophical quasi-theological system. If it’s detached from the life and death of Gautama, it doesn’t really make much difference.

Now go to India. Supposing somehow (I have no idea how) you could prove that the great Hindu god Krishna never lived. Would you destroy Hinduism? No, of course not, because there are millions of gods in the Hindu pantheon. In the Hindu way of things, truth emerges in everything and in all things.

There’s a wholeness to it all, and it emerges in literally millions of gods. If you abandon the Krishna temple, there’s always a Shiva temple down the street and lots of others. You can never even know all the gods. Hinduism isn’t jeopardized by any historical claim that Krishna never lived.

Now go to Mecca. Or go to your friendly neighborhood imam and ask him, “Sir, I have a question for you that I would like you to explain to me, please. Do you believe that Allah, blessed be he, could have given his final revelation by somebody other than Muhammad?” He will probably misunderstand your question, and he will say, “No, no, you don’t understand. We believe that Allah spoke through the prophet Abraham, the prophet Moses, and the prophet Jesus, but the ultimate prophet was Muhammad. That was the final revelation.”

You reply, with great courtesy, “Sir, I know that’s what you believe. You know that I’m a Christian and don’t believe that, but that’s not quite my question. My question is a bit different. My question is had he wanted to do so, might Allah have given his final revelation to somebody other than Muhammad?”

Once he has understood your question, I’m quite sure the imam will reply, “Well, I don’t believe that’s even thinkable. Nevertheless, obviously Allah is Allah. He can do what he pleases. He’s utterly sovereign. He can give his revelation to whomever he likes. We believe he gave it to Muhammad. He could have given it to somebody else, but he did give it to Muhammad. He could have given it to anybody else. After all, Muhammad himself is not the revelation. He’s just the one to whom God chose to give the revelation.”

Now to come to Christianity. Do you believe that God could have given his final revelation to somebody other than Jesus? It’s not even a coherent question. Jesus is the revelation. If the incarnation isn’t true, there is no Christianity. That’s not a theological concept alone. It’s a historical concept with huge theological freight. If Jesus did not die on the cross and rise again on the third day, then Christianity is incoherent. It’s making false claims.

In other words, Christianity is so deeply a historical religion that, in principle, it is falsifiable by the canons of history. That’s also unthinkable; don’t misunderstand me. I believe with all my heart that these things are true. Nevertheless, this is a revelation, a disclosure from God, that takes place in space-time history. The access to the historical elements of the Christian faith, the access to the truth of these elements that we have, is found in historical witnesses.

It is why so much of the New Testament is bound up with the theme of witness. The witnesses saw this; the witnesses did that. In fact, if Jesus did not rise from the dead, then the first witnesses are liars. That is the access that God has given us to those events. That access has been inscripturated. “These are written that you may believe.”

Again, please do not misunderstand me. I am not, for a moment, suggesting that if you just become good historians you’ll all become Christians. Human epistemology is far more complex than that. Amongst the reasons why we doubt are our moral obtuseness, our denial of God, our desire to be god at the very center of things, our deep sin and rebellion, our moral blindness, the noetic effect of the fall on our minds, that we must have the work of the Holy Spirit to enable us to see, and all the rest.

But what we see is what God has disclosed of himself, not only in the abstract words of an abstract thesis that we call the Bible but in great redemptive events in history to which the Bible bears witness. At the heart of all of that is the incarnation, the atonement in space-time history on a damned cross, and an empty tomb and witnessed resurrection … again and again and again … in anticipation of a final resurrection.

Part of our proclamation of the gospel, our invitation to believe, is not to say, “Give Jesus a chance.” It is to say, “This is the truth. Re-read the accounts. It is the truth. How dare you not believe what is, in fact, the truth, when God has left himself with witnesses? How dare you not believe? God commands all men everywhere to repent because it is the truth.”

This means, then, we can go through the various accounts of the resurrection, describe the women with their spices, look at the two on the road to Emmaus, remember the 500 on a hillside in Galilee, remember Thomas. There are 10 or 11 discrete occurrences that are mentioned in the New Testament in their own peculiar, historical settings. And we bless God that he has not left himself without witness.

This, then, becomes the factual foundation of our Christian faith and hope in the resurrection still to come at the end of the age. For this resurrection is but the firstfruits of the consummation. It’s been put in a variety of ways.

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 up from the dead.”

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 prophet said?

Christ had to suffer, then enter his glory.”

Then he unveiled their eyes in the breaking of the bread.

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 face the fear 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’s been drawn, the power of sin destroyed.

Death has been swallowed up in his mighty victory.

Let us pray.

It is an astonishing thing, Lord God, that you, our Maker, should become one with us in the person of your Son, a human being. It is an astonishing thing that he who knew no sin became sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. It is a wonderful thing that death could not hold him. Forever, your dear Son will be not only the eternal Son of God but a vindicated, resurrected human being, the firstfruits of those who believe. On the last day, we will join him because of what he has done on our behalf.

O Lord God, in our efforts to evangelize, in our study of your Word, in our love for brothers and sisters in Christ, in our desire to plant churches, in our crying to you for revival, in our concern that the church be made up of men and women from every tongue and tribe, in our desire to understand and grow, we beg of you to keep us at the center of things, the culminating disclosure of the gospel in Christ Jesus, in his incarnation, in his death, in his resurrection, in his ascension, in his exaltation, and in his anticipated return until, finally, on the last day, there shall be a new heaven and a new earth.

The old order of things will have passed away. There will be no more death or crying or tears. All of the residue of sin will be gone, snuffed out. In anticipation of that day, Lord God, we look back to the cross and resurrection, and we join him who said, two centuries ago, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” We join with the church in every generation, look forward, and cry, “Yes. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” In his name we pray, amen.

 

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.