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The UK Bible Students Website Christian Biblical Studies |
DOUBTING AND BELIEVING
All Scripture references are to the New International Version, UK edition of 1984.
Thomas the disciple certainly needed the evidence of his own eyes before he could believe that his Lord had risen from the dead.
Chapter 20 of John’s Gospel records the event that forever labelled the exacting
Apostle as ‘Doubting Thomas’:
24 Now Thomas (called Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. 25 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.’
Does Thomas’s
demanding disposition betray a serious character fault?
What of our own
doubts?
Having perhaps a more enquiring mind than his companions, Thomas wanted direct personal assurance of such an amazing event.
He was more than willing, even eager, to believe but needed the personal satisfaction of seeing for himself.
His faith would be founded on fact, not on fancy.
And it may be argued that the original visual manifestation of Christ’s having risen from the death state was essential to faith. In this instance, therefore, seeing was believing.
Thomas thus becomes a trusty eyewitness for us, we who inhabit this sceptical age, acting as a sort of proxy on our behalf, demanding the visual evidence which we ourselves might have demanded had we been there. Thomas is a credible witness precisely because he first doubted.
The disciples needed incontrovertible evidence to convince them that Jesus was alive again.
Actually seeing the risen Jesus was the obvious way of leading them to belief.
And when the promised ‘Counsellor’ the holy spirit later brought to their minds all that Jesus had taught them, they received a greater understanding of truths hitherto beyond their grasp (John 14: 26).
They came to know that the risen Lord had relinquished a humanity He would never take back.
He had paid the price of sin, had given His human life for the life of the world, and was raised an immortal, divine being, soon to ascend to the right hand of God, His Father, in heaven.
Through the precious
fleeting days until His ascension, Jesus’ appearances in various human forms
comforted and reassured those who had learned to love Him as the man
Christ Jesus. His lingering with them for forty days also demonstrates a
compassion for their feeling of bereavement. Had He been whisked away and they
had not seen Him with their own eyes, touched Him and talked with Him, they may
have questioned the reality of His resurrection.
The Apostle Paul, previously a denier of Christ, some years later presented the same assurance of Christ’s bodily resurrection, based on a large number of eyewitnesses to the fact more than 500 brethren having seen Him at the same time, most of whom were still alive when Paul wrote this.
Intriguingly, Paul asserts his own experience of seeing the risen Lord, no longer presented in human form, but in the divine nature, as the glorified Messiah.
It was only a glimpse, but its brilliance blinded Paul, and he understood the appearance as unique to himself, as to one born prematurely into the heavenly condition. It was an affirmation of his destined apostleship. For Paul, seeing was believing, and he regarded the visible evidence of Jesus’ resurrection as an indispensable aspect of Christian faith (1 Cor. 15: 6-8).
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April 2015. You are free to reproduce this article without express permission; please acknowledge the source.