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Truth

John 20:24-31

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Truth 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, of course, can have many different causes. Granted that it is a fallen world, some aspects of doubt may, in fact, be salutary. You get some young man or young woman growing up in a Christian home in a conservative framework eventually going off to university somewhere in a secular environment, and part of growing up is going to be finding out how much of my belief system is merely inherited and how much is genuinely my own. That is frequently accompanied by some passage of doubt. It was certainly true in my own case.

Sometimes doubt is prompted simply by ignorance. About 30 years ago I was serving a church in Vancouver on the West Coast of Canada. We had 100 or 120 college-aged young people in this church. They were full of life and enthusiasm. One charming young woman named Peggy was a student at the University of British Columbia.

She was vivacious, artsy, energetic. I don’t think she could rub two thoughts together in a straight line. She was not given to linear thinking, but when it came to adjacent thought she was absolutely terrific. She was warm-hearted and was devoted to Christ just as you’d hope for. She came to me one day and said she had recently been asked by a young man on the campus named Fred, a hunk on the University of British Columbia football squad, if he could take her out. He wasn’t a Christian. She asked what I thought of that. I said, “Peggy, be careful.”

“Oh, it’s nothing romantic. I just want to talk to him about my Jesus.” She was one of those. Really enthusiastic. I said, “Yes, but your heart can run away with you. Please be careful.” “I’ll be careful. I’m talking about Jesus.” I said, “Fine. Talk to him about Jesus. When you’ve had your date, bring him to see me.” I thought that was the end of it. It was just an off-the-mouth comment.

That Saturday night at 10:30 or 11:00 I was in my study at the church. “Hi, Pastor Don. This is Fred. Fred wants to meet you.” I looked at Fred, and I didn’t think he wanted to meet me at all! I think he saw me as a rite of passage to Peggy. That’s all. We went out to an IHOP (International House of Pancakes) so I could get to know Fred. We talked for a couple of hours about this and that around the mulberry bush and back in time for tea. I was beginning to find out he was completely stone biblically illiterate.

The next Saturday night they came again. They had been to a movie and out we went to an International House of Pancakes. This time Fred had a long list of questions. We went through all the questions. We were there till 2:00 in the morning. For 13 weeks every Saturday night.… I don’t know what it did to my sermons for those weeks. I gave him books to read. I told him what parts of the Bible to read. He’d come back with another list of questions.

At the end of 13 weeks, he said, “All right. I’ll become a Christian,” and he did. What can I say? He was as dour and as straight and as linear as she was vivacious and tangential. Today they’re happily married, having reared their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. In his case, all of his unbelief was bound up in bone ignorance. What can I say?

Sometimes ignorance is grounded in a systematic moral choice. I could give you long passages, for example, from Michel Foucault and from Jean Paul Sartre. This one comes from Aldous Huxley in his book Ends and Means. They all say something similar, but this was written in 1937 so some of the philosophical categories are now a bit dated.

He writes, “For myself, philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation.” The liberation he desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and a 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 we judge it unjust. The supporters of these systems claim in some way they had bought into the meaning.

The Christian meaning, they insisted, of the world. There was an admirably sinful method of confronting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves and our political revolt. We would deny the world had any meaning whatsoever.” Many contemporary, postmodern thinkers (the most honest of them) have said very similar things. Here, then, is doubt based on systemic, philosophical commitment.

Sometimes doubt is fostered not so much by deliberate worldview choice as by deliberate atomistic choices. Someone goes off to university perhaps from a Christian background and never, ever says, “I will be an atheist. I am becoming committed to agnosticism.” Rather he or she chooses not to read the Bible, chooses not to pray, chooses not to go to church, chooses not to bear any witness, chooses companions who gradually get him or her into more and more alienation from anything to do with righteousness or integrity, chooses what to do with time, chooses friendships.

Five years, ten years, or fifteen years down the line, he or she wakes up one morning in bed with the wrong person and says, “I never did believe all that crap anyway.” At no point has he or she ever actually made a systemic choice. It has been a thousand little choices. This is not a result of a deep, philosophical assessment.

Sometimes doubt is the byproduct of lack of sleep. If you get worn out enough, you can become very cynical about a lot things and a lot of people. One of the most interesting youth conventions I ever spoke at, almost 20 years ago now, was in Australia. It was a convention of about 7,000 young people between the ages of 18 and 30.

The organizer of the conference said some things I’ve never heard at any youth conference anywhere. He got all the leaders together (about 350 of them) and said, “I have some things you must do. The first solemn charge I put on you is make sure those for whom you are responsible get enough sleep because I don’t want people so worn to a frazzle that they start making decisions for Jesus because all of their reserves have been exhausted. The gospel does not need that kind of help. Make sure your charges get some sleep.”

The fact of the matter is you can move people to do almost anything (good, bad, or indifferent) if they’re exhausted enough. Sometimes the godliest thing you can do in the entire universe is get some sleep. Not pray all night. Get some sleep.

I could list several other causes of doubt. Why have I taken the time to wander down this rabbit warren.? Because doubt can be caused by many different things, and the solutions must correspond to the cause. Doubt is not always the product of one thing and cannot be remedied by one thing. All the kinds of doubt I talked about are reflected somewhere in Scripture, and there are several others I haven’t even mentioned.

When we come to so-called Doubting Thomas, we must then initially see Thomas does not represent all kinds of doubt or all forms of doubt. He reflects certain kinds of doubt, and this passage speaks powerfully to those kinds, but it does not speak to all kinds of doubt. It is important to understand this as we approach the text.

Let me remind you, then, of the setting. Jesus has been crucified, and quite frankly, his own disciples had not expected this to happen. Despite the fact that he had talked specifically about his impending death, they didn’t buy it. They thought he was using metaphorical language again or speaking evocatively. They had no category for a crucified Messiah.

Once Jesus was actually in the tomb, you do not find them in an upstairs room saying, “Yes! I can hardly wait till Sunday.” They simply had no category for a crucified Messiah. Then the reports began to come in from the women, from the two along the Emmaus Road, from Peter and John in the race to the tomb, and eventually from the Eleven. Ten, actually, because Thomas wasn’t there. Now we turn to our text, and it will be useful to follow the three points.

1. The cry of a disappointed skeptic.

“Now Thomas (called Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came.” The account recorded in the previous verses. “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 committed philosophical materialist. That is, someone committed to the view that all there is are matter and energy and time and space. That’s it. After all, he was a devout Jew. He believed the Old Testament Scriptures. He believed he was a created being and believed in the difference between right and wrong. This is not the doubt of a philosophical skeptic. Nor is this the doubt of someone who has taken a really nasty moral turn somewhere and now is trying to justify his erotic revolt after the fact.

What kind of doubt is this? This is the doubt of someone who wants to distinguish between gullibility and doubt. He thinks he has been fried. He thinks he has been had. He had such immense confidence in Jesus he expected him to be the Messiah, a Messiah who would win, a Messiah who would triumph. Instead, he ends up a crucified, condemned, odious criminal.

At one level, I’m sure he still held that Jesus was a good man, that the trial was on trumped up charges and the whole thing was unfair, but in his own thinking the Messiah wins. Instead, he has been executed with the most odious of the three execution methods of the Romans. So all of his faith and his confidence now look at him as if it is nothing more than gullibility. He believes too quickly and he will not believe quickly again. He has been had.

Before we condemn this man, Thomas, we need to think a little more about the distinction between gullibility and faith. Most of you are too young to remember the chap by the name of Popoff who about 20 years ago in California was exposed by the American Broadcasting Corporation. Popoff was a certain brand of faith healer.

He brought people in by the thousands to his large meeting hall, and he had a certain technique when they were all seated there. Someone in the course of the meeting would say, “Oh, the Lord is telling me in row J, seat 46 there is a woman with severe back pain. The Lord commands you, ‘Come forth and be healed!’ ” Sure enough there was a woman there in J 46 who had severe back pain and she came forward.

Well, the press caught onto this and tried interviewing these various people who came forth every night to find some collusion, and no one would admit to it. It just looked too good to be true. One of the observers (someone from ABC) observed Popoff wore a hearing aid. What a faith healer is doing with a hearing aid I will not go into. In any case, they had their suspicions and began to investigate more fully.

It turned out Mrs. Popoff was one of the people at the door who greeted people as they came in and gave them prayer cards. “If you have something you want us to pray about, put it down.” If they filled in something like, “Severe melanoma with 6 weeks left to live,” that card landed in the rubbish bin. If it was something that had any chance at being at least partially psychosomatic, then Mrs. Popoff would carefully observe where this person sat and write on the card, “Woman, severe back pain, in J 46.”

In the middle of the meeting, she had a little radio, a microphone, which signaled down to what was not in fact a hearing aid but a radio receiver in his ear. In the middle of the meeting she would say, “What we have here in J 46 is a woman with severe back pain.” “The Lord is telling me …!”

ABC went in there with a tiny camera and a very powerful radio scanner. A radio scanner fastens on the strongest radio signal around. They showed on national television what the meeting looked like, first of all, without the dub from the radio scanner, and then they did the whole thing again with her dub back in. I have to tell you, Popoff’s ministry popped off. About five years ago, I was back in California in a hotel room flipping on the channels, and he was back. People have such short memories.

Why did I tell you this? The reason I told you this is not because God cannot heal (that’s not the point) or because everybody is a charlatan (that’s not the point). The reason I told you this is because undoubtedly thousands of people who attended on his ministry were ordinary Christians who were being duped, unable to distinguish between faith and gullibility. That’s the real tragedy.

Here is the skepticism of someone who has been through massive religious disappointment and does not want to be snookered again. What he asks, therefore, is for the most personal and concrete demonstration of this ostensible resurrected apparition, this Jesus whom the other disciples claimed to have seen, really as genuine, physical continuity with the Jesus who was actually executed on the cross and put into the tomb.

He doesn’t even want some other resurrected, crucified person. He specifies the actual wound in the side. You see, when most people were executed by crucifixion in the ancient world, they were either tied or nailed to a cross. The physical pain of the crucifixion was really bound up in muscle spasms. You pulled with your arms and pushed with your legs to open up your chest cavity so you could breathe.

That started the spasms, so you’d collapse. You’d want to breathe, so you’d pull and push again. That could go on for hours, and in some cases, if you hadn’t been beaten too badly first, it could go on for days. Then if, for some cultural reason, the Romans wanted to finish you off a bit sooner, they’d come along and smash your shins. Then you could no longer push with your legs, your chest would collapse, and you’d suffocate in a few minutes.

But when they got to Jesus on that fateful day, it turned out he was already dead. One Roman soldier simply took short javelin and shoved it under his rib cage. That just wasn’t done. It meant that Jesus’ wounds were unique, so what Thomas asks for is, “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.” He wanted to be sure this ostensible resurrected apparition had genuine physical contact with the pre-death Jesus who hung on the cross and received distinctive wounds. So here’s the cry of a disappointed skeptic.

2. The adoration of an astonishing skeptic.

“A week later his disciples were in the house again. Only this time Thomas was there.” Jesus appears again using the same words he used on the first occasion, pregnant words, “Peace be with you,” which could be just a greeting, and yet this side of the cross has extra weight. Peace, now, between God and rebellious human beings. Peace, now, that reconciles alienated rebels back to God. Pregnant words.

Then, although apparently he hadn’t actually been there when Thomas voiced his doubt, he turns to Thomas and says, “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!” We need to think seriously about this confession. Four things.

A. It is important to see what it does not mean.

If you talked with your local friendly Jehovah’s Witness about this verse, they’d have two explanations for it. I’ll just mention one. One of them says what Thomas really said was, “My Lord! My God!” In other words, on this reading, Thomas’ response at seeing the resurrected Jesus is to blaspheme. It is inconceivable to imagine a first-century Jew using blasphemous language of that order.

Besides, it doesn’t make sense of the little word and. “My Lord and my God.” I mean, at the greatest stretch of your imagination you might be able to believe somebody, caught on a really down day, in the first century swore in this kind of way, “My Lord! My God!” But how do you swear saying, “My Lord and my God”? There’s no way that’s what it means. No way.

B. On the face of it, the response seems to go farther than what the evidence demands.

Why doesn’t he simply say, “You are alive” or “Oops” or “I was wrong, and you convinced me”? Something along those lines. How do you get from what he actually now sees and touches to this massive doctrinal confession? How do you get there?

You must remember, although it has taken me 30 seconds to read these verses, he has had a whole week. Can you imagine what’s going through his head? “Supposing my fellow disciples are telling the truth, what falls from that?” You can imagine all his memories about all the things Jesus said, all the things Jesus taught.

Just a few days earlier Jesus had said, “Have you been with me such a long time and yet have not known me? He who has seen me has seen the Father.” What do you do with that? What do you do with a Jesus who says, “Before Abraham was, I am”? It’s not only the confessions in John’s gospel that hark back at the kinds of things that have taken place throughout Jesus’ ministry. Do you recall the dramatic scene in the great list of miracles in Matthew 8 and 9 that parallels?

Jesus is seen in this crowded house. Everybody is squashed in. A quadriplegic is brought to Jesus. The friends who were carrying him can’t get through the crowd. They can’t get by the press. So they climb up on the typical flat roof of the day and remove some tiles. They listen to find out where Jesus is, and they lower him on his mat down on the heads of the people.

That gets people to move back. That’s one way of crowd control. They start squishing back and squishing back, and finally, this paraplegic is set out before Jesus, and Jesus turns to him and says, “My son, your sins are forgiven.” The crowd is outraged. “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Do you understand what’s going on?

For argument’s sake, supposing you were gang raped or brutally mugged and smashed up within an inch of your life and by some fluke I found your attackers, and I went up to them and said, “I forgive you.” What would you tell me? You would say, “You don’t have any right to forgive them! You’re not the one who was raped! You’re not the one who was bashed up! Only the person who has been offended can forgive the offender. Only the person against whom the crime was committed can actually do the forgiving.”

That’s one of the big themes in the Holocaust literature. One of the most moving books I’ve ever read about the Holocaust was written by Simon Wiesenthal called The Sunflower. All of his family died in the Holocaust, but he himself survived right toward the end of the war, a skinny, emaciated bunch of bones. He was pulled out of a work crew by his guards and brought to a young German soldier who was dying from his wounds. He had received a mortal wound and his blood was ebbing away.

He had asked to speak to a Jew. Wiesenthal was pulled out and brought into this room. The Nazi turned to him and begged for forgiveness for all the things he had done and that other Nazis had done to the Jews. Wiesenthal reasons this way. He says, “Most of the victims of the Nazis are dead. Only the offended can forgive, but the offended are dead, so there’s no forgiveness for the Nazis.” He said nothing and walked out of the room. He almost got it right.

C. In any offense we commit, the most offended party is God.

That’s why David, after his adultery and murder, actually can address God and say, “Against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.” At one level, that’s not even true. After all, he sinned against Bathsheba, sinned against Uriah, sinned against his commanding general, sinned against the covenant of God, sinned against the people on whom judgment falls.

There’s hardly anybody he hasn’t sinned against. He even sinned against the baby who is conceived and who dies. Yet, he has the cheek to write, “Against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight,” because biblically speaking, the one most offended is God himself always, which is why at the end of the day in any ultimate sins, only God can forgive sin.

There’s Jesus who has definitely not been set upon by this quadriplegic now saying, “My son, your sins are forgiven.” Thomas thinks about this. He runs through all the things he has seen Jesus do, all the things he has heard him say, and he begins to get some glimpse, “If Jesus really has risen from the dead, he is not simply one more man! All the things he has been saying about himself, the things Scripture has predicted.

What do we make of Isaiah 9? All of these things come true. He is not only sitting on the throne of his father David, as Isaiah 9 says, but he shall be called the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.” Suddenly these things are less enigmatic than they are true. He falls before him and says, “My Lord and my God!”

Maybe, too, the sheer horror of the fact that God-man would suffer speaks volumes. World War I was terribly bloody. Two sides across a 2,000-mile trench across Europe. Machine guns and Howitzers blasting over four years for the gain of a few yards either way. Ten million men on both sides mowed down for no gain. Out of it emerged some poets of rare power. Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and others. One of them was Edward Shillito. His most moving poem refers to this sin.

If we have never sought, we seek Thee now;

Thine eyes burn through the dark, our only stars;

We must have sight of thorn-pricks on Thy brow;

We must have Thee, O Jesus of the Scars.

The heavens frighten us; they are too calm;

In all the universe we have no place.

Our wounds are hurting us; where is the balm?

Lord Jesus, by Thy Scars, we claim Thy grace.

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

Only reveal those hands, that side of Thine;

We know to-day what wounds are, have no 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 can speak;

And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.

But there’s more. It is not certain Thomas had it all put together at this point. Certainly, Paul had some very similar sorts of reasoning. He thought the whole notion of a crucified Messiah was bizarre, because Scripture says the person who hangs on a tree is cursed. Then, if you come to the conclusion this cursed person, this damned man, is, nevertheless, sinless then for whose sins is he damned? Whose curse has he taken?

D. The beginning of a full-fledged doctrine of substitutionary atonement turns on understanding Jesus was cursed and didn’t deserve it, that he was damned but not for his own fault.

One cannot help but observe this is a fore point. This is not merely a liturgical confession (“Our Lord and our God”); it is a personal confession (“My Lord and my God”). It is not enough simply to name himself with the apostles for now. His confession is his: personal, deep, and irrevocable.

3. The example of the converted skeptic.

Verse 29, I suggest, is often misunderstood. “Then Jesus told him, ‘Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’ ” The way this verse is often understood today is, “Yes, yes, yes. Thomas came to belief. Jesus very kindly gave him some evidence, but it’s better if you believe without the evidence. It’s better if you just believe.”

That fits the contemporary world in which for most people on American streets say is personal, subjective, religious choice. It’s not connected with truth. It’s personal, subjective, religious choice. “You have your faith; I have my faith.” Jesus now is saying, “Don’t talk about the evidence and the proof and the reasons and all of that. What is crucial is simply that you have come to faith. You believe.”

“Okay, Thomas. Well enough. You believe, but blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed.” That completely misunderstands text. The point is the Christian revelation is historically grounded. Do you remember what Paul says about the resurrection when he writes to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 15? He says, “Let’s tease out now the implications of the supposition that Jesus did not rise from the dead.”

First, he says, “The apostles and all the other witnesses (all 500 of them) are a bunch of liars.” In other words, the only way we have access to historical information is through historical witnesses and the records they have left behind. The central Christian claims turn on the fact that God disclosed himself in history through witnesses and our access to the fact is, in fact, through those witnesses. He says, “If Christ did not rise from the dead, start off with the fact the apostles were either mistaken or deceived, but in any case, not to be trusted.”

Secondly, he says, “You’re still lost. You’re still in your trespasses and sins because, granted we are condemned before God, the resurrection attests that God has accepted Jesus as a sacrifice on our behalf. If he hasn’t risen from the dead then how do you know who has paid for anything? As far as I’m concerned, you’re still lost in your trespasses and sins.”

Thirdly, he says, “Your faith is in vain.” Do you see that? Because in Scripture, the validity of your faith is tied to the truthfulness of its object. Write that down and underscore it. The validity of your faith is grounded in the truthfulness of faith’s object. You can believe till the cows come home with all of the passion and intensity of your life, but if you’re believing something that isn’t true from a biblical point of view, it’s not faith. It’s gullibility or stupidity. It’s idolatry. Something. It’s not faith!

Never, ever does the Bible use the word faith, although it can use it in several different ways, to refer to subjective, personal choice that is unrelated to the question of truth which is why, in Scripture, you improve faith by talking about truth. You don’t improve faith by talking about faith; you improve faith by talking about truth.

Finally, he says, “You’re of all people most to be pitied. If you’re in this situation where you believe something that isn’t true, you’re not to be commended for your spirituality; you’re to be pitied for your gullibility.” Within that framework, all of that is presupposed here. Now you see the connection between verse 29 and the last two verses.

The point is the first generation came to know the truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ by actual historical manifestation (touch and feel). They ate with him. They saw him eat fish. They saw it was the same person. They saw the identity of the wounds and all the rest. They heard it on various occasions and in different contexts over 40 days, sometimes in ones and twos and sometimes in a crowd as big as 500. They all heard and saw and touched.

Jesus knows full well, however, another generation is coming and another generation and another generation and another generation and another generation and another generation, none of whom will have the ability to have the firsthand evidence for themselves, so John goes on to comment, “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 the Messiah is Jesus, the Son of God.”

In other words, Thomas himself becomes part of the link that produces the written groundwork in this book. “Yes, Thomas, you have believed, but blessed are the many who are coming who have not seen and have yet believed precisely because of your testimony, because of what the first witnesses did write down in this book.”

That is the connection between verse 29 and verses 30 and 31. It is a historical claim. Brothers and sisters in Christ, there is no valid Christian faith that does not wrestle with the truth of what took place in space-time history 2,000 years ago in a little manger, on the dusty hills of Galilee, on a rugged cross outside Jerusalem, and in front of an empty tomb.

Your faith is grounded as you come to see these things are true, and in consequence, you trust Christ. You trust him absolutely, and by his Spirit, you see this shapes all of your life (your priorities, your living, your values, your hopes, your fears) because these things are true. “These are written that you may believe the Messiah is Jesus and by believing you have life in his name.” Let’s pray.

In a generation, Lord God, that is snookered by mere subjectivism removed from what took place in history, we bless you afresh for your forbearance with us, for the facticity of the foundational acts of the gospel. We thank you that you did not give us a formula, a scheme, or a philosophy, but a Redeemer, an incarnated Lord, a suffering servant, a resurrected King. Lord, we believe. Help our unbelief. In Jesus’ name, amen.