Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Mark Daniels: Welcome to Hear the Word of God, the online and broadcast teaching ministry of the Reverend Eric Alexander.

Eric Alexander: Now the events that we read about in this last paragraph of chapter 20 of John's Gospel really span two Sunday evenings as you will know. The first of them is the first Easter day when Jesus appeared in the evening to his disciples as we read on verse 19. When the disciples were together with the door locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." And he showed them his hands and side, and the disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.

But Thomas, one of the 12 disciples, was not with them when Jesus came on that first Sunday evening. For some reason or other, he was absent from the gathering. So I suppose it was that I recollect being asked to speak at a Christian Union many, many years ago on the subject Thomas: The Man Who Missed the Evening Service. And I suppose he did. Whether it was his own fault or for some other reason, nobody can tell.

But afterwards, the disciples sought him out and with great joy they told him that they had seen the risen Christ, that he had appeared to them. And doubtless breathlessly they told Thomas the story, explained the details of it, and the excitement of it must have come over to him. And they would have waited, I imagine, to see the response on Thomas's face. And instead of what they expected, that Thomas would join them in glorifying God and rejoicing that Christ had risen, they found a strange reluctance to share their joy.

And Thomas responded to them with a statement of firm unbelief. "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," he said. Now, in many ways, Thomas's response is not too surprising. He appears twice already in John's Gospel. You may be able to recollect, once in John chapter 11, when Jesus is set upon going to Jerusalem and the disciples say to him that the Jews have recently sought to stone you there, "Are you going again to Jerusalem?"

And Jesus's mind is clearly made up and he is adamant. And Thomas with a shrug of his shoulders says, "Let us go also that we may die with him." It is the kind of despair of somebody who, far from really being committed to Christ, is resigned to Christ and to the business of following him. Again in John chapter 14, you may remember that Jesus is describing to the disciples how he is going to prepare a place for them when he leaves this world and promises them, "I will come again and receive you to myself, that where I am, there you may be also, and the way you will know."

And Thomas says to him, "We do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" he says. And he is disputing what Jesus is saying. He is uncertain of it. You certainly get the impression of Thomas that he is in the position that I discover many people are really in if the truth were told. He is standing like somebody outside looking in. Here are all these other disciples, and Thomas doesn't share their excitement, the discovery they have made, the transformation it has brought to their lives, the thrill they experience.

He is an observer of it, not a participant in it. And he finds himself in some real sense detached from the whole situation, even although he was much involved in other ways with Jesus. It is a very significant thing. Now we need to understand Thomas, I think, a little better than we do. And I want to spend a little time this evening trying to get closer to him because he is undoubtedly somebody with whom many people identify. For example, we usually call him Doubting Thomas.

And many people say, "Now, there is a man with whom I really can identify. He knows what it is to be unsure. He has uncertainties. He experiences what it is to be skeptical of things other people easily believe." And we say that Doubting Thomas is someone we perhaps can relate to. It is rather an important thing for us to grasp, I think, that in actual fact the New Testament does not call him Doubting Thomas.

Ah, you say, well you haven't read very carefully the bit we read tonight because it does say, "Stop doubting and believe" at the end of verse 27. But you know, Thomas's problem, as I want to explain to you in a moment, was not just doubt. Thomas's problem was unbelief. Because in fact, what the NIV translates at the end of verse 27 "Stop doubting and believe" should really be translated "Stop being an unbeliever and be a believer."

Because the difference between the two words is simply that in the first word, the negative goes in front of it. He says, "Believe, stop unbelieving." And it is not the word for doubt, of which there are several in the New Testament. It is quite simply the word for unbelief. And it is an important thing for us to see the distinction. In the New Testament, the idea of doubt is really the idea of being in two minds about something.

So probably the best book that has been written on the subject recently is a book by Os Guinness, whose father used to be the OMF secretary here in Scotland. And he has written amongst some other splendid books, a book entitled Doubt and the subtitle is Faith in Two Minds. And that's a good subtitle because it carries the idea that doubt carries in the New Testament, the whole business of having a divided mind. Doubt, someone has said, is a state of suspension between belief and unbelief.

But Thomas was not in two minds, you notice. Thomas had already made up his mind. He says, "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." Now I don't think Thomas really wanted to do that. I doubt very much if he did it when Jesus appeared to him. What he is doing is predicating the utterly impossible.

He says there is no prospect of doing this sort of thing. "But unless I was able to take my fingers," you imagine the gruesome nature of it, "and thrust them into the holes the nails had made and put my hand into his side into the wound, I will not believe it," he says. Now that is the language of unbelief. Because if doubt is a suspension between belief and unbelief, unbelief is a willful refusal to believe or a deliberate decision to disobey.

Now Thomas is rebuked by Jesus, you will notice in verse 27, not because he refused to believe without enough reasons, but because he refused to believe with more than enough reasons. And it's that that I want us to notice particularly this evening. Let me say that again. Thomas is not rebuked by Jesus for refusing to believe because he didn't have enough reason to believe. He is rebuked for not believing when he had more than enough reasons for believing.

For three years, for example, he had been with Jesus and heard his teaching that he was bound to suffer and die and rise again. He had had the opportunity to examine Jesus's character and to recognize that here was someone of all the people he had ever known in the world whose truthfulness and integrity could be relied upon. No man had a closer opportunity to scrutinize that than Thomas. So his lack of faith was not caused because he had too big a credibility gap.

It was caused by his refusing to believe the most reliable evidence that he could have found, namely the word of Jesus. But also, he had already listened to the eyewitness accounts of his fellow disciples, and he refused to believe them. And Thomas therefore had an abundance of evidence. He had the kind of evidence, for example, directly so to speak from the horse's mouth that the Apostle Paul presents to the Corinthians for the resurrection of Jesus.

Paul says to them, "He was seen by this man, he was seen by that man, then he was seen by 500 all at once." And these disciples all come to Thomas and they say, "We have seen the Lord." And he says, "I will not believe it unless I stick my fingers into the nails in his hands and put my hand into his side." So Thomas's doubting is really unbelief, not in the New Testament sense doubt. It is important for us to grasp that.

Second thing that you will notice is that Thomas appears to have regarded his fellow disciples as somewhat more gullible than he. You may recognize the picture. Here is Thomas listening to the disciples who come and tell him that they had seen the Lord. And Thomas says, "Well, that kind of evidence that has convinced you most certainly would not convince me. As for me, unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe."

So Thomas says for myself, some scientific inquiry is going to be necessary. Now that kind of approach, I think, is one of the things that makes Thomas appealing to many of our contemporaries in the modern world. They will say, "I am not the kind of gullible type who is so easily persuaded. I need a great deal more evidence before I believe." Like people who will say to me in many universities, "I am scientifically trained, you know. And of course, you don't expect me to believe that kind of thing without evidence."

And this is precisely the kind of thing Thomas is saying. I have often pointed out to people that there were many who were scientifically trained, probably marginally better than they were, who were believers in the full biblical sense, and it didn't seem to have been a great problem to them. But there are many who have this view that Thomas had. It is a view that imagines that faith is a form of gullibility divorced from reason.

Now in the Bible, that is the one thing faith is not. So God invites men and women to come to him and says, "Come, let us reason together," says the Lord. When he is inviting us to have dealings with him about salvation, he begins to argue with his people. He reasons with them, and faith derives from that kind of reasoned approach that God makes to us. But neither on the other hand is faith a mere intellectual assent to certain facts or propositions.

It's a very interesting thing to see how the New Testament almost has to invent a new verbal form in order to describe what biblical faith is. It speaks of believing into the Lord Jesus Christ. It is therefore not merely a mental assent to a certain amount of truth. It is something which involves a moral commitment. It is, I suppose as I've often illustrated it to people, the distinction that there is between being asked, "Do you believe in modern medicine, modern medical theory?"

So that people may well find themselves able to say, "Yes, of course I believe in modern medicine. It has demonstrated the truth of so much of what it says that it's almost impossible not to believe in it." But there comes a different moment when someone has been afflicted with a mortal sickness. And the question that then arises is, "Do you believe in Doctor So-and-so enough to take yourself and your condition and put them into his hands?"

Now it is in that sense that the New Testament speaks about saving faith. It is having examined the evidence and then taking the step of absolute commitment of the whole of life to a person. Because New Testament faith is not merely faith in a set of propositions; it is a commitment to a person. Now Thomas's real problem derived not from an inability to be convinced, I think, but from an unwillingness to be committed.

Let me just examine with you a little this proposition of Thomas's. Seeing is believing. This is how Jesus describes it to him in verse 29. Then Jesus told him, "Because you have seen me, you have believed." Now Thomas actually had gone further. He had said, "Unless I see the nail marks in his hands, I will not believe," but also, "unless I put my finger where the nails were and put my hand into his side, I will not believe."

Now you will realize that if you look carefully at this proposition, "seeing is believing," we would all repeat that from time to time, wouldn't we? It is a common phrase that's used amongst us. "Seeing is believing," we say. But if you think about it, it is possible to see and not to believe. The classic example of that, of course, is Jesus's story in Luke chapter 16, which you may recollect tells us the story of the rich man and Lazarus.

Now the rich man had died and Lazarus the beggar who sat at his gate had also died. And you will remember that the rich man begs Abraham to send Lazarus to his father's house in Luke 16:27. And the reason he gives, he says, is, "I have five brothers. Let him warn them so that they will not also come to this place of torment." So he says, "Send a messenger to my brothers."

It's a very significant thing incidentally. Here is a call and appeal for a missionary movement to begin towards this man's brothers. And it comes not from the throne of God or from the need of the world around, but from the pit itself. "Send somebody to warn them," he says. And you will notice the answer that comes from heaven. Abraham replied, "They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them."

In other words, the Scriptures are their warning. They need to listen to the Scriptures. And the rich man disagrees. "No, father Abraham," he says, "but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent." In other words, if they see the miraculous appearance of somebody who has been raised from the dead, that will make them believe. Now Jesus says in the story, "If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead."

In other words, they might see the figure of someone coming back from the dead, but they would not be convinced, they would not believe because it is not true that seeing is believing. It is possible to see and not to believe, and there are many examples of precisely that. You notice the other side of the picture. That is that it is necessary and reasonable sometimes to believe before we can see. Have you thought about that?

As a matter of fact, that is part really of the scientific method if you think of it. There comes a time when people have examined a theory and done their research and performed experiments and they have come to the point where then they say, "So far as we are able to understand at the moment, this theory is a reliable theory and now it needs to be put into practice." And that's the moment for experiment, for what you might call a step of faith.

And the only way by which that theory is proved, that is that people see and say it is true, is when they believe as a means towards seeing. That, of course, is what happened when Louis Pasteur did research into the microbic nature of infection and Lister in Glasgow Royal Infirmary performed operations on that basis, believing that this was how the whole nature of infection was to be understood. And he performed the operations on that basis and believing for him was seeing.

Now precisely this is what the New Testament teaches us in the spiritual realm. Commitment comes so often as a means of seeing. And it was the amazing grace of the Lord Jesus that he came to Thomas and showed him his hands and his side and said to him, "Do what you have wanted to do. Put your finger here, reach out your hand and put it into my side." And then he said to him, "Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

So the answer to Thomas's unbelief lay not simply in the fact that he was able to do what he had laid down as his condition. As I say, I doubt very much if he did it. But confronted with the living Christ, he surrendered to him and cries out, "My Lord and my God." And Jesus said, "Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed," because what they have done is to take the word of Jesus and rest upon it and the testimony of the apostles and rest upon that.

And there is greater blessing, he says, to them than to you. Now that is why John then goes on to say, "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." In other words, the way to faith is through the words that God has written. He is saying to him, "You see, how do you come to faith? Here we are gathered together this evening."

Now my dear friends, we need to ask ourselves, do I stand as an observer outside looking in? Am I in the same position as Thomas, somehow or other uncommitted and non-committal? What is going to make the difference to my life? Well, many of us might imagine, "If I had some miracle performed, if the heavens opened, if Christ came and confronted me, that would make the difference. That is what would produce faith in me." Not in the slightest, says Jesus.

The route by which faith comes is by hearing the word of God. Faith comes by hearing, hearing comes by the word of God. And John says, "These things are written that you might believe." How then do we believe? Not by some miraculous display of the physical presence of Jesus. My dear friends, that wouldn't convince you. If you are amongst the great uncommitted this evening, that wouldn't make the slightest difference to where you stand.

What will make the difference is when you are ready to hear the words of the Lord Jesus, to listen to what the Scripture says concerning him, to pour over it and soak yourself in it and cry to God and say, "Lord, I believe, help my unbelief, convince me, convict me, write your word in my heart and open my eyes that I may see Jesus." Now when faith is born within us, what it does is to produce eternal life.

You notice that at the end of verse 31. "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." So you see faith, which for Thomas was going to be a kind of a satisfaction of his own unbelief, became instead the means of his surrender to the lordship of Jesus Christ. Thomas answered, "My Lord and my God." And to his obtaining eternal life.

So where are you this evening? Standing outside looking in? Or with Thomas kneeling at the feet of Jesus and saying to him, "You are my Lord, you are my God." That is the kind of commitment that will really make all the difference in the world. Let's pray together. Our gracious God and Father, we thank you that by your word you lead us to faith. We thank you that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.

And therefore we bless you for your holy word this evening. Pray that in your grace you would lead many of us to join Thomas at your feet and cry to you, "My Lord and my God." Through Jesus Christ our Savior we pray. Amen.

Mark Daniels: You're listening to Hear the Word of God with the Reverend Eric Alexander, a minister in the Church of Scotland for over 50 years. To access more Bible teaching from Reverend Alexander, visit hearthewordofgod.org where your generous contribution will help us sustain and grow this ministry. That's hearthewordofgod.org.

You could choose instead to mail a check to this address: 600 Eden Road, Lancaster, Pennsylvania 17601. Or call 1-800-488-1888. This program is a presentation of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. I'm Mark Daniels. Thank you for listening. Please join us again next time for Eric Alexander and Hear the Word of God.