7 Responses

1. Appreciate the different views regarding doubt and assurance. Thanks for sharing: David, Steve & Kelly, and Rachel! I’m beginning to like this ‘personal distancing’! Blessings ………. George

2. Thank you all for your rich insights today. Thomas is one of my “heroes” of the gospel. In fact I have been studying the gospel of Thomas while staying at home and enjoying more richness of growth. Kelly, thanks for your words about choice. At our last MOYA lesson we talked about claiming our beloved-ness each day and then going out in the common places of our life to share Him. Shalom.

3. Thank you all for your rich insights today. Thomas is one of my “heroes” In the gospel. I have been studying the Gospel of Thomas a little while here at home and am enjoying more insights. Kelly, your comments about choice were so great. At our last MOYA lesson we learned to claim our beloved-ness each day and to use it for Him in our common places of life.

4. This passage tells us a lot about Jesus and how far he will go in the face of our difficulties in believing him.
   As David noted, in verse 27 Jesus says to Thomas, “be not unbelieving, but believing.” The difference of one letter – alpha – placed in front of the word “believing” is for us the difference between life and death – forever! The author of Hebrews pretty well summarizes the teaching of all of scripture on this point when he is summarizes the plight of the Israelites who were wandering in the wilderness, “So we see that they were unable to enter [the Promised Land/heaven} because of unbelief.” (Heb 3:19)
   So is it all over for us if we have trouble believing or if we once believed but now are getting shaky and confused? Three or four examples from the New Testament.
   Paul, on the road to Damascus, was blasted out of his unbelief by a blinding personal appearance of Jesus. Paul later came to understand that this happened to him because God wanted to use Paul as a powerful example of Jesus’ patience with a person who had “blasphemed and persecuted and insulted him.” (Phil 1:13-16)
   In a beautiful passage on God’s kindness towards the Gentiles he has ‘grafted’ into his family, Paul says in Romans 11:23, “And even the others [the unbelieving Jews], if they do not persist in their unbelief, will be grafted in, for God has the power to graft them in again.”
   And one my favorites, the one I sob out to God over and over again when I can’t see him or hear him, much less trust him, the cry of the father of the epileptic boy in Mark: “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mk 9:24)
   It seems to me that scripture is showing us that God understands our difficulties in believing him much better than we do ourselves. When we are stubborn, proud, and rebellious, like Paul, he gives us a punch in the gut to get our attention. When we think we need more information, like Thomas, he gives it to us. When we are desperate, emotional, and lost, he gives us just what we need to calm down and sense his presence.

   1. I love the three examples from the NT that you give.

      I also think of Jacob wrestling with God. Jacob is making demands of God, wants to be blessed by God, won’t let go of God, and persists. He is forever changed because of it. He is both wounded and renamed. Something about the image of Jacob refusing to let go Even though the exchange was rough, and knowing that God could have utterly destroyed him, God instead engages the tension. (One could even argue that God instigated the entire episode).

5. Thank you so much David, Rachel, Kelly, and Steve! A very thought-provoking discussion.

   It’s interesting to me that humans seem to have such a need to point fingers, beginning in the garden of Eden. We so readily label Thomas the “Doubting” one. But it seems to me that the ones who most doubted were all the rest of them who continued to hide in the room even AFTER seeing the risen Lord!

   Whenever I think of the interplay between doubt and faith, I think of CS Lewis’ Law of Undulation, described in Chapter 8 of The Screwtape Letters. We have these times because we are trapped between two worlds, our human side and the divine nature of our souls. And it is when we are obedient during these times of doubt (as discussed today by each of you) that God grows us.

   Here is the discussion from Screwtape:

   My dear Wormwood,

   So you ‘have great hopes that the patient’s religious phase is dying away’, have you? I always thought the Training College had gone to pieces since they put old Subgob at the head of it, and now I am sure. Has no one every told you about the law of Undulation?
   Humans are amphibians– half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy’s determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for as to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation– the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life– his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.
   To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite. Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself– creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because he has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in,, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.
   And that is where the troughs come in. You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs– to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot ‘tempt’ to virtual as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
   But of course the troughs afford opportunities to our side also. Next week I will give you some hints on how to exploit them,

   You affectionate uncle
   Screwtape

6. Really great discussion – reminds me of my own struggles with doubt for decades, but gradually coming to understand that I had a reason to choose – not proof but believable scriptural witness. In fact when I think about it, I have had several of these times throughout my life, Thank God for the still small voice, the calm observation…. From Lynn’s comment I can see Thomas as the type of person Wormwood was working on. I think of Thomas as the scientist – his hypothesis was that people don’t rise from the dead and Jesus, therefore, did not. He even pointed out how his hypothesis could be disproved to him — by seeing the hands, feet, and side. — and God falsified his hypothesis. QED for Thomas. I think God knows us and what we need and will provide it when we need it.