Jesus formed an inner circle of people who were called apostles, and that group included doubters. Yes, Jesus invited doubters and included them in His inner circle. Two of those people were Thomas and Bartholomew (also known as Nathanael).
There is nothing wrong with doubt. Honest doubt is always better than false faith. We should never trade our integrity for something that isn’t genuine. It’s better to have no hope than a false hope.
I recently wrote about a statement made about Stephen Hawking: “A great scientist, even like Stephen Hawking, if he had to admit a creator, it would be unavoidable, he would have to seek him because he is a great scientist.” I don’t know if that statement is really true. I’m not sure if Stephen Hawking would really seek God if he thought God existed, but a person should seek God if God exists. There could be no greater or more important finding than that!
Ultimate truth for finite beings like us, however, is always accompanied by doubt. We don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t know everything, and we never will. Yet, we seek for something solid, something we can trust and something in which we can put our faith. We all do that, even atheists, even if all we trust is science (and the human intellectual capacity to understand it).
For these reasons, the stories of Nathanael and Thomas are so significant.
I listened to a Tim Keller sermon about John 1 in which he focused on the revelation that “the Word was in the beginning; the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and God’s Word became flesh and dwelt among us”. You can follow the link in the last sentence to read a summary of the beginning of the message.
In the sermon, Keller made the following statement that is the subject of this piece:
“Jesus is the supreme revelation. If we are to know God, neither rationalism nor mysticism will suffice. For God chose to make Himself known finally and ultimately in a real historical human being.”
Keller doesn’t break that statement down, but he provides an illustration of how both rationalism and mysticism are insufficient to know God. Below I will summarize Keller’s illustrations and provide my own take on the subject of knowing God.
Neither rationalism nor mysticism are sufficient, alone, to enable us to know God. The reason why rationalism and mysticism are insufficient is that God revealed Himself in a person – Jesus. We know God most authentically in the person of Jesus.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men…. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us….”[1] (John 1:1-5,14)
These are among my favorites verses in the entire Bible. When I read them as brand new creation, having just come to believe that Jesus was who He said He was, God in the flesh, and having committed myself to follow Him, these words virtually leapt off the page. They still resonate freshly with me.
As an English Literature major in college, I read the opening phrase – in the beginning was the Word – with wonder. Language, words, were special to me, and here was the very opening phrase in the New Testament placing supreme meaning and significance on the Word, “and the Word was God.”
The Word is God!
Mind blown.
I recently listened to Tim Keller talking about this passage. Tim Keller, if you haven’t ever listened to or read him, is top shelf. No one synthesizes faith and culture better than he in my opinion. He breathes fresh life into this meaning-packed passage with the following observation:
“A person’s word is the clearest and ultimate revelation of who you are.”
Jesus doesn’t tackle the issue of racism or diversity directly, but He lived in a complicated time. He was Jewish, living in a tight-knit Jewish community, which was governed and ruled by foreigners, the Romans. The Jews had a history of living alongside foreigners and were at various times throughout that history governed by them against their will.
Many of the foreigners were very closely related, like the Samaritans, who were of Jewish descent, and the Canaanites before them. The northern kingdom (Israel) and southern kingdom (Judah) split and became foreigners to each other.
The Jews in Jesus’s day believed there were only two types of people: Jews and everyone else (Gentiles). They seemed to have forgotten that the very first words God spoke to Abraham, when He chose to bless Abraham and his progeny, was that God would make a blessing to all the nations. (Genesis 12:1-3) God didn’t choose them simply to bless them, but to bless all nations through them.
Jesus was that blessing. Jesus is traced back to Abraham. He is from the line of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He is the root of Jesse’s seed, father of David. Jesus is the Promised One.
Jesus also claimed to be God in the flesh, so, how Jesus viewed others is the key to understanding what the Bible says about racism and diversity.
Though Paul is often accused of being misogynistic, we find that he carried over a similar view of women from Jesus, declaring that there is neither male nor female in Christ.
I have been exploring an answer to the question: whether the Bible is sexist and racist. The discussion was introduced in Part 1, sexism was tackled in Part 2 by looking at the sweeping theme of the Bible in dealing with men and woman, and an overarching view of what the Bible has to say about racism was addressed in Part 3. In both cases, I started at the beginning, where the Bible expresses poetic form God’s ideals and purposes in creating humankind.
Regarding sexism, Genesis provides a glimpse into God’s motivations, intentions and purposes for men and women. God created an idyllic habitation for men and women to live in harmony with Him and nature, but He allowed people to have free will. In fact, it was part of the plan.
Free will introduced the possibility that people would choose their own values over God’s values and go their own ways. We are told Adam and Eve, the first people (or representative people) did choose their own way, and that choice introduced sin into the world.
Sin means “to miss the mark”. The “mark” would include, among other things, God’s values. People have chosen their own values over God’s values, and the result is that we live in a world in which God’s values are distorted from what He intended. But what are God’s values?
God created men and women as counterparts who, together, reflect the image of God. Neither one is valued higher than the other. We see that God intended them to be fruitful and multiply, to diversify, and not to hunker down in one place with one language in a homogeneous civilization. God wanted diversity.
These are the overarching themes of the Bible. We see them in the penultimate vision of heaven that John describes in Revelation 7:7-9.
The Old Testament is largely the story of how God chose one people through whom He intended to bless all the nations of the world, but His chosen people continually chose to go their own way. They largely did not reflect God’s values in the way they lived.
The Church, today, is not much different in its failure to reflect God’s values in they way they live. Paul says, though every man may be a liar, still God is true. (Romans 3:4) We can’t judge God’s values by what we see people doing – even church people.
In fact, only one person in history, we are told, truly reflected all that God is – Jesus. Jesus was “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15) and the “exact representation of His nature”. (Hebrews 1:3) Jesus said, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) In this segment, therefore, we will look at what Jesus said and did that can be applied to the subject of sexism.
Navigating by Faith 