John the Baptist: Devoted Doubt

i. No one is immune to doubt. 

When John, who was in prison, heard about the deeds of the Messiah, he sent his disciples to ask him, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?”

V 2-3

Those who claim they are have either shut their brain off or their brain never worked in the first place.

John is the one who baptized Jesus, the one who inaugurated his ministry, the one who told the people that he was unworthy to tie Jesus’ sandals. 

Yet in his moment of crises he questions everything.

Doubt is not a bug in your journey of faith it is a feature. Doubt is the tool God uses to give you freedom of choice. 

God won’t force you to believe either against your will. But he also won’t force you to believe by answering all your questions.

He will leave an opening for you to escape, a crack in the wall of an otherwise unshakable faith. And you will have the choice to stare at the crack, meditate on the crack, and eventually crawl through the crack.

Or to be obedient inspire of the crack.

I often tell people when they come up against what seem to be unanswerable questions in their faith “We trust him with what we don’t know because of what we do.”

In other words if you stay in the faith long enough eventually God will have a track record… So does your difficult question erase his track record?

ii. Jesus gives evidence rather than answers.

Jesus replied, “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: 5 The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. 6 Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me.”

V 4-6

Despite what you may hear or think God trusts you to make decisions. We want to be spoon-fed every word from God but more often God puts us in the position to interpret the evidence for ourselves. 

This creates a cycle of mutual trust. He trusts us to do the work to interpret the signs correctly, we trust him to give us what we need to believe.

Interpreting in good faith: many will say if God wanted me to believe why wouldn’t he overwhelm me with evidence?

God always leaves a way of escape.

But there’s a third party included here: John’s Disciples.

Jesus told them to go a report what they had seen. It was up to John to trust those who gave him the report.

Many times we will ask for answers and then when they come we don’t accept them.

iii. It’s what you do not what you doubt.

Truly I tell you, among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet whoever is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

v. 11

Even though his last recorded communication with Jesus was a question he should have known the answer to Jesus did not resent him.