01.02. Doubt
THE QUESTION OF DOUBT ’Art thou He that should come, or do we look for another? ’
Mat 11:3 The Jewish race, more than any other, lived with its eye upon the future, and in this respect John the Baptist was the representative of his race. He believed in the Hope of Israel. He believed there was One who should come, a King and a Saviour, to do for the nation all that its noblest spirits had ever longed to see done. After He came, the final and perfect representative of God, there could be no other to look for; the history of Israel would have reached its term. This great hope, which floated in the people’s minds, waiting impatiently the appearance of some one whom it could claim as its champion, and whom it could invest in all the strength of a nation’s faith, had been identified by John with Jesus. He had spoken of Jesus, while yet unknown to Him, as One mightier than himself, who could do what he had failed to do — baptize with holy spirit and with fire; he had consecrated Him to His life-work, as the instrument of Israel’s hope, in baptism; he had seen heaven opened, and the Spirit of God descend and rest upon Him; he had borne witness that He is the Son of God. Nay, by a sudden flash of revelation, as he looked upon Jesus he had seen that sin is not to be overcome, as he had tried to overcome it, by direct and violent assault, but by a method more mysterious, painful, sacrificial, even divine. Behold, he had said, as Jesus passed before him. Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.
It is this which makes the subsequent doubt of John so disconcerting; yet that doubt can be explained, if not justified. It is evident that John had somehow been disappointed in Jesus. The lofty witness which he bears Him, and which is recorded in the Gospels as the essential point in his relations with Him, probably represents the height to which John rose at the crises of his career, not the ruling quality of his thoughts. John belonged, we cannot forget, to the Old Testament, and his anticipations of the works of the Christ were shaped on Old Testament models, and on too partial a selection even of these. It would be wrong to say of one who was filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother’s womb that he was an unspiritual man, but his hopes were of a cast which failed to do justice to the spirit of the new era. God’s Kingdom must come, he thought, in a moment, suddenly; the axe that lay at the root of the tree would flash and smite; the fan would wave in the Judge’s hand; in an instant the judgment would be consummated; the old order and its wickedness would be annihilated; the new would be set up, to last for ever. But John had not observed Jesus long till he saw that these anticipations were not destined to fulfillment, and the question inevitably rose Have I been right in attaching the hope of Israel to this Nazarene? Is He the Coming One of prophecy, or must our eyes turn again to the unknown future? The crossing of hope and experience was aggravated in John’s case by his own unhappy fortune. He had prepared the way of Jesus. Jesus had entered into his labors, had found in the circle of John’s disciples every one of those who became His own most intimate followers, and yet to all appearance had forgotten him. All his services had not earned bare gratitude. As he pined in Herod’s prison, and felt that power was still in bad hands, he could not but doubt whether the Kingdom of God had come in Jesus. It did not look like it. He might have been hasty in identifying the hope of Israel with Him, and he resolved to send two of his disciples to put the question point blank. The answer of Jesus is of course an affirmative, but not in express terms. Not even to John the Baptist did He say, I am the Christ. The only religious convictions which are ultimately superior to doubt have to be attained in another way; they are revelations on the one side and discoveries, or insights, on the other. They have little to do with Yes or No. When the doubt of John was submitted to Him, Jesus answered by exhibiting to John the grounds of His own certainty that He was the Messiah, the Hope and the Saviour of Israel. How did Jesus know Himself that He was the Coming One? What was the nature of that self-consciousness which certified to Him that He was the Sent of God, the Redeemer of men? The question has been much discussed by those who have written His life, but as far as we can make out the answer, it is here. ’ Go and tell John the things that ye do hear and see: The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.’ These manifold blessings, bodily and spiritual, which were all one with the presence and work of Jesus upon earth, identified Him in His own mind with Him that should come. The features of the Coming One were adumbrated in those prophecies which had nourished His youth, and as He looked into them it was His own features that looked back upon Him from the divine page. Jesus recognized Himself in the great Servant of God, of whom it had been written, " He shall not cry, nor lift up nor cause his voice to be heard in the street. A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench; he shall bring forth judgment in truth." He recognized Himself again when He read in the synagogue at Nazareth, "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord hath anointed me to preach glad tidings unto the meek." He recognized Himself once more, and the fruits of His work, in that bright vision of Isa 35:1-10 : "Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped; then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert’. The correspondence between prophecies like these and that which He knew Himself to be, and saw around Him, identified Jesus to Himself as the Promised Saviour; He implies that the argument should have weight for John, and, with the proper qualifications, for us also. The argument from prophecy has been discredited by abuse; but the proper application of it — that which is made by our Saviour here, and which goes to show the fulfillment of the Old Testament in the New, or, in other words, the substantial unity of revelation — can never go out of fashion. The first generation of Christians was overwhelmed by its force, and the more it is understood the more highly it will be valued.
Thus far our Lord answers the first perplexity of John — that arising from his disappointed hopes. But when he adds, "Blessed is he that shall not be offended in Me," it seems almost certain that He refers to John’s impatience with his fate. John could hardly believe the Kingdom of God was there, if he was left in prison. Jesus hints, in this warning word, that no man is too good to suffer for the Kingdom, and that no man should allow the necessity of such suffering to shake his faith in Him, and in the fulfillment of God’s promises through Him. The continued existence and power of evil is a trial to Him as well as to us, but it did not shake His faith that God had visited the world in Him, to bless and save it, and it should not shake ours. It is dangerous to weigh our own importance against that of the Kingdom of God, and to argue that it cannot have come — that the hope of the world has still to be looked for — because we are neglected. Jesus knew that the Cross awaited Him, but that did not disturb His faith that the Kingdom had come in Him; and He teaches more plainly elsewhere that the need of suffering wrong in its service, far from being a cause of doubt, ought to be a seal of faith. The doubt of John is one of the most familiar religious phenomena of our own time. People look at the world, after all its long experience of the Gospel, and acknowledge a profound disappointment. ’ Is the thing we see salvation?’ Is Christ really the Saviour of men and of society? Or must we not, when we see the state of things around us, conclude that God has something better to do for the world than He has yet done, and that we just look on into the future for another? Especially when we see how spiritless and ineffective are many of the persons and institutions which carry the Christian name, must we not have doubts as to whether that name can really preside over the future development of the world, as it has no doubt done over much that is good in the past? Christianity certainly has been a power in history; but is it not a creed outworn?
Even in the Church the disposition to ask such questions is strong. The shapes Christianity has taken, the institutions in which it has expressed itself, the ideals it has yielded, are subjected to unsparing criticism. Young people especially, those in whom ’the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come’ makes its power felt, those who look instinctively to the future as their home, yet desire guidance in it, can hardly help asking, Is Jesus Christ still the hope of the race? Is it still at His lips we are to seek words of life?
Happily it can be shown that many of the most characteristic tendencies and hopes of the new age are distinctly Christian in their inspiration. It is a Christian principle which would lead in the state and in society to a more effective recognition of human brotherhood. It is a Christian principle which would try to secure for the honest age of laboring men and women a better abode than the poorhouse. It is a Christian principle which would aim at making every kind of human interest—politics, art, science, religion—accessible to all sorts and conditions of men; at guaranteeing, as far as possible, to every child of the human family his part in the common inheritance. It is a Christian principle, too, which would take care that no transformation of the social or political order should be made, whatever the economical gain to the many, which should involve injustice to the few; and which would provide against purchasing material advantages at a moral loss. Far from the prospect raising doubt under this view, it suggests one of the most solid and astonishing proofs of the truth of the Gospel. The ideal presented by Jesus Christ is always ahead of us, yet always adapted to our situation. He lived on earth nearly nineteen hundred years ago, and the inspiration of the world’s progress still comes from Him. We have not passed this way heretofore, yet when we lift our eyes we see it is still He who is our guide. There are no new ideas in morals, no creative social thoughts, no wisdom of life, for which we have not to be indebted to Him. No: we do not look for another to bring in the world’s hope. And if we turn our eyes from the future to the present, and let the whole discouragement of it sink into our souls, we shall find again that our only hope is in Him. Sometimes it seems impossible to exaggerate the discouragement. Here are great towns, which have been Christian for a thousand years or more, and we know what they are. Is Christ the hope of the race, when after a thousand years’ acquaintance with Him people still live in such houses, with such facilities for drunkenness and vice, with such a practical impossibility of being temperate and pure? Is Christ the hope of the race when, in a society which has known Him for thirty generations, there are whole classes that live by sin, and sell their souls to make their daily bread? Is Christ the Saviour of the world, when after all these centuries the world is manifestly not saved, and as far as great masses of society are concerned, is not the least like being saved? Here is the great cause of doubt and of heart-searching in those who have had hopes of what Jesus would do for men: here is the pain which makes them say to His face, ’Art thou He that should come, or do we look for another?’ Is it not wonderful that Jesus Himself had experience of this trial, and remained sure of Himself and of His divine vocation in spite of it? He saw, if we may say so, the failure of the Gospel. In this very chapter He upbraids the cities that had been spectators of His mighty works, yet had not repented. The way in which He overcame this trial was by looking away from the disappointments and failures to the work which was actually being accomplished and to the spirit in which it was being done. ’Go and tell John the things which ye do hear and see.’ The big town with its misery and vice may be a melancholy sight; but look through it from end to end, search all ranks from the highest to the lowest, and you will be compelled to admit that the hopeful spots in it are those in which Christ is actually at work. Wherever you encounter a truly Christian man or woman you must acknowledge that there is one ray of light in the darkness, one grain of salt in the else unwholesome mass. It is not easy to understand that this is the way salvation works, that men should be so insensible, and God so intolerably slow; but it is easy enough to understand that if the Spirit of Christ were sovereign in all souls, the work of salvation would be done. Why then, because of the slowness of its conquests, should we look for another? Do we not read in the Book of Revelation, not only of the Kingdom, but of the patience, of Jesus Christ? Why should we doubt Him, because we have to share the trial of that patience? ’Blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in Him.’