Is Jesus The One?

In the Christian life, there are a number of things that we believe, things that we have committed ourselves to. We believe that the Bible is the Word of God. It’s not just a book like any other book. It’s not just a book written by a human author. It is God’s Word inspired by His Spirit, and it speaks truth to us. We believe that there is a God who exists, and He created us and the heavens and the earth and everything that is in them. We believe that Jesus is the Son of God and the Savior of the world, who was sent from heaven to earth to be our Redeemer. We believe that Jesus’ death on the Cross was payment for your sin and mine. And if we believe in Him, if we give our lives to Him, we will be forgiven of our sins, and we will be given eternal life.

We believe all of these things. That is the Christian faith. But we live in a world that is filled with people who don’t believe in any of those things. Yet for Christians, this is life. It has transformed us. These things that we have committed ourselves to have changed our lives. To some of us, it happened a long time ago. To some, it might be a recent event in their life. But there are certain things that we, as Christians, believe.

But I imagine that there are many believers who have had periods of time in their walk with God who have been filled with doubt. They have questioned whether the things they say they have believed in are actually true. There may be many of you who are now going through a time period when you are wondering, Are the things I say I believe really true? Or have I somehow been duped into believing these things?

Some of you were raised in the church. You’ve grown up in the church nearly your whole life. Your parents taught you these things, and you went to Sunday school classes that taught you these things, so you’ve grown up believing these things. But at some time in your adulthood, you began to wonder, Do I believe these things simply because I was told these things are true, or do I really believe these things are true?

Maybe some of you have gone through some really traumatic times in your life, which made you question. “If there really is a God, then why did He allow these things to happen in my life?” It has caused you to wonder if God really exists, and if He really cares.

Some of us have non-Christian family and friends, who may often stir the pot a little bit. They’ll start an argument with us and begin to question us on some things. And maybe sometimes you don’t have really good answers to their questions. And you leave the conversation wondering if you really believe the right things. Have I committed myself to things that are actually true? Or have I believed they were true, but they’re really not true?

When you, as a believer, begin to doubt, that could be a very frightening time. Sometimes we have an experience like that and we keep it to ourselves. We don’t want to acknowledge it. We don’t want to verbalize it to let others know that we are questioning our faith. So we keep it to ourselves and then wrestle with those notions. It could be a difficult time period. Am I losing my faith?

I want you to know if you are in that situation now—or if you’ve ever been there—you’re not alone. There are many of us who have given our lives over to the Lord who have had, at times, periods of doubt, due to circumstances in our life or questions that have been asked that we can’t answer. So we begin to doubt the very things we committed ourselves to.

Not only are you not alone, but you’re not alone when we look back at Scripture. We see that even some of those who walked with the Lord in times past had bouts of doubt. We are going to look at one of those situations in which someone in Scripture was beginning to question the things that he had believed.

His name is John the Baptist. He is someone we might not normally think of as a doubter or someone who questions. But we’re going to find him doubting here in this passage.

Let me first give you some background to our passage. I want to bring you up to speed on what is taking place here. At this point in our text, John the Baptist’s ministry is essentially over. He had a call of God on His life that he was to be the forerunner, to go ahead of the Messiah and proclaim the fact that Jesus was soon to come on the scene. John the Baptist was out there in the Judean wilderness preaching, and thousands of people were coming to hear him and get baptized by him. He was proclaiming, “I indeed baptize you with water; but One mightier than I is coming, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to loose. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire,” Luke 3:16.

And the day came when Jesus met John in the wilderness at the river, and John baptized Jesus. As that baptism was taking place, the Spirit of God descended out of heaven in the form of a dove and alighted on Jesus’ head. “And suddenly a voice came from heaven, saying, ‘This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,’” Matthew 3:16-17. After that John began to proclaim the name of Jesus. He would point people to Jesus and say, “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” John 1:29.

At that point, John began to decrease as Jesus began to increase. Jesus became more popular as John began to fade into the background. And John was fine with that; he knew that his role was not to be the guy but to proclaim the guy. When Jesus, the Son of God, the Savior of the world, came on the scene, John would fade away. Then John was arrested and put in a prison cell.

Now at the time of our text, John is in prison, and Jesus is going about His ministry. Jesus is getting more popular as more and more people hear about Him. In Luke 6, Jesus preached the sermon on the mount, where His wisdom is spilling forth on the multitudes. They were hearing words of wisdom like they had never heard before. And then in Luke 7, we see Jesus working His wonders, and the power of the Son of God is displayed. He raised up the servant of a Centurion who was almost at the point of death. And Jesus brought back to life a little boy who had died. So the wisdom and power of Jesus had been on display. But John the Baptist, being in prison, had not seen these things happen. But he has disciples, who bring him reports to let him know what’s going on, what Jesus was doing.
Now we find ourselves caught up to what’s happening in our text, starting at Luke 7:18-20. “Then the disciples of John reported to him concerning all these things. And John, calling two of his disciples to him, sent them to Jesus, saying, ‘Are You the Coming One, or do we look for another?’ When the men had come to Him, they said, ‘John the Baptist has sent us to You, saying, ‘Are You the Coming One, or do we look for another?’”

That question, coming out of the mouth of John the Baptist, should shock us a little bit. Yet later in this very chapter, Jesus said of John the Baptist, “Among those born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist,” Luke 7:28. Jesus didn’t just call John a great one among the prophets, but the greatest prophet. Think about some of the great prophets of old: Moses, Isaiah, Daniel, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Yet Jesus calls John the Baptist the greatest of them all.

Why did Jesus do that? Jesus really didn’t explain Himself. But what we see when we look at John the Baptist is a guy who is wholly committed to the ministry that God had given him to do. John was unashamed of his faith, he was not afraid to stand out among the crowd and he was not afraid to be controversial at a time when he had a lot of enemies who opposed him. We would be hard-pressed to think of a prophet who did more or who was more committed to what God had given them to do.

Yet in this moment, John the Baptist himself is saying, “Jesus, are You really the one, or are we to expect somebody else?” And this was after John had seen the Spirit descend on Jesus and after he had heard the voice of God saying, “This is My beloved Son.” Now John is asking, “Are You the Coming One, or do we look for another?”

We have to ask ourselves, “What in the world would have happened in John’s life that he would be going from “the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world” to “Are You the Coming One, or do we look for another?”

But maybe you have been in that place before; there was a time in your life when your faith was so rock solid that you were able to stand up and declare, “Behold! The Lamb of God,” and pointing people to Jesus. Yet in recent times, you have, in the back of your mind thought, Is He really the One? Is this really true? Is the Bible telling me that it’s real? Is God even there?

What would cause John the Baptist to doubt? I want to sum it up in two words: unmet expectations; that Jesus was not doing what John expected Him to do. John had proclaimed the coming of a Savior, of a Messiah and there were certain statements that John had made concerning the Messiah who was to come. And one of the things John proclaimed was that this Messiah was going to judge the wicked. John said things like, “His winnowing fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clean out His threshing floor, and gather the wheat into His barn; but the chaff He will burn with unquenchable fire,” Luke 3:17. That was speaking of the Messiah coming on the scene and bringing judgment to the wicked.

At that time, the Roman government was ruling over Israel, the Jews were an oppressed people, because Rome was in charge, which was a wicked empire. So perhaps John thought that Jesus would come on the scene and overthrow the Romans. And the religious environment was also very corrupt and hypocritical. John the Baptist had called them out numbers of times. So John may have thought that when the Messiah comes on the scene, He’ll not only get rid of Rome, but He would revamp the whole, religious system and get rid of all the hypocrisy to bring restoration. And he surely believed that this Messiah was going to set up His kingdom and rule and reign in righteousness.

But those things didn’t happen. The reports John was getting back from his disciples didn’t include Rome being overthrown by Jesus, the bad religious leaders being kicked out, Jesus setting up some righteous religious leaders who will teach the truth and walk the right way. But John wasn’t hearing these things.

When doubts stir up in our own hearts, it almost always is going to stem from unmet expectations. We have certain expectations of God: the way He works in the world, the way He works in our lives. And if they go unmet, we begin to wonder if He exists. Maybe this isn’t real.

I would think that a number of you actually came to Christ in the midst of a life crisis you were going through. Maybe it was a financial disaster, a divorce, a great loss, a health crisis—something else that we would call a “life crisis.” But that brought you near to the Lord, because you realized there were things in life that you couldn’t control, you didn’t have answers to, you needed strength and support, you needed a lifeline. And Jesus became that lifeline to you. You turned to the Lord in that moment.

And you had certain expectations of what would take place. With Jesus in my life, certain things are going to happen. I’m not going to be depressed anymore. I’m going to have joy in my heart again. My spouse, who left, is going to want to work it out. I’m going to be healed. But maybe those expectations don’t materialize, and we begin to wonder, Maybe this isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. I was sold a bad bill of goods. This isn’t really real!

We may know people who said, “Yeah, I tried that Jesus thing a long time ago. But it just didn’t work for me. So I realized that wasn’t the way.” Unmet expectations is the source of a lot of doubt.

And it doesn’t just end there. There are other expectations that we have. We think that God ought to deal with the wickedness that is going on in the world right now. We watch the news. We see what’s going on. Sometimes we scratch our heads and wonder why God isn’t doing something about it. We look at innocent lives being destroyed, and we think, If God is there and God is good, then why doesn’t He step in and do something about it?! Because we have these expectations that if God exists and wickedness is happening, He’s going to bring an end to wickedness. If God is there and He cares about these young ones, He’s going to protect these young lives.

But if those things are not happening, this is a reason why a lot of people have rejected the notion of God. They see the evil in the world and they think that if God is powerful enough, and He’s good enough to do something about it but doesn’t do anything about it, then there is no good and powerful God. Or surely He would do something about it.

So John the Baptist was in a place where he expected certain things of Jesus. But those things were not being done, so it caused John to question if Jesus was the One he thought Jesus was and who he proclaimed Jesus to be.

You and I might, with the same sense of expectation, feel like God hasn’t done what we thought He would do, hadn’t been there when we thought He should, so maybe He’s not real.

John’s expectations were not wrong. They were just in the wrong time. The things that John proclaimed were true. They will happen. They just weren’t happening at the time that John thought they should happen.

And so it is a lot of times with our doubts. It’s not that we’re believing wrong things about God. We’re just not allowing God to fulfill things on His time clock. We think He should do it on our time clock. And when that doesn’t happen, doubt sets in and we think we must be believing mythological things.

But if you are a believer and you wrestle with doubt, it can be a fearful place to be in. You begin to think, If I have these kinds of doubts—and surely God knows I have them, even if I haven’t voiced them to anyone—maybe He’s angry with me. Maybe these doubts are the very thing that is going to keep me from His presence, if in fact He is real.

Let me say this. There is a huge difference between doubt and unbelief. They are not the same thing. A Scottish evangelist named Henry Drummond said, “Christ never failed to distinguish between doubt and unbelief. Doubt is ‘can’t believe’; unbelief is ‘won’t believe.’ Doubt is honesty; unbelief is obstinacy. Doubt is looking for light; unbelief is content with darkness.”

That says a lot about the difference between the two. What it’s telling us is that doubt is actually searching for answers, whereas unbelief is searching for excuses. Doubt wants the truth, even if that truth is inconvenient. But unbelief will settle for a lie, if that lie is more convenient.

Let me give you some illustrations in Scripture that show those who were in doubt and those who were in unbelief.

In John 20, after Jesus had risen from the grave, He revealed Himself to His disciples, so they could see that He was alive again. They were blown away. But Thomas was not there in their midst when Jesus revealed Himself to the disciples. When Thomas returned, the other disciples said to him, “‘We have seen the Lord.’ So he said to them, ‘Unless I see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe,’” verse 25. That’s why we call him “Doubting Thomas.” He is the one disciple who had the reputation of needing more proof.

But the next time Jesus showed up, Thomas was there with the disciples. Jesus didn’t pull Thomas aside and say, “Thomas, I can’t believe that after all the things you have seen Me do, after all the things I have taught you, even after all your best friends have testified that they have seen Me, you still don’t believe. Sorry, buddy; you’re just not part of the team anymore. I’ve got to find somebody else to replace you.” That’s not how Jesus responded.

Thomas was not in a place of unbelief; he was in a place of doubt. He was not content with the darkness; what he wanted was light. “Unless I see…put my finger…put my hand.” He basically said, “I need to know those things, because I really want to believe. But I just need a little bit more.” And Jesus was willing to give him that.

Contrast that with another story. In John 11, we have the story of Lazarus, who had died and had been buried for four days in the tomb, when Jesus showed up. Jesus went to the tomb, and said, “Take away the stone” and “Lazarus, come forth!” Then this man, who had been dead four days, comes out of the tomb wrapped in grave cloths.

This incident was done publically, and there was a crowd looking on. They had seen the body of Lazarus placed in the tomb. Now they see the same man walking out of the tomb, alive again. The news of this spread throughout the region, with a testimony of who Jesus was. He was a man who had the power to raise a dead man back to life.

In John 12, we read that the religious leaders of that time wanted to put Jesus to death. They began to plot how they might kill Jesus. But the Bible says they also plotted to kill Lazarus, verse 10, because Lazarus’ life was a testimony of the truth that Jesus was who He was claiming to be. They didn’t like that. They would rather put an innocent man to death, just because his life testified that Jesus was “the way, the truth, and the life.” That is unbelief. That’s what it looks like to be content with the darkness.

So doubt and unbelief are not the same. If you are in doubt, the Lord is more than willing to show you the light, because you are looking for light. You want answers. But if you are in unbelief, it means that you are content with the darkness. There is no amount of truth that can change a heart like that. The only way a heart like that can change is with God’s intervention that opens the eyes and softens the heart.

Maybe you have been in that place before. You had no interest in God. You were in complete unbelief, and you were happy to be there. But now here you are in church. The only way that could have happened is that God intervened in your life—to change you, to open your eyes.

But for those of you who might be believers and your faith is struggling, I want you to be encouraged by knowing this: the Lord isn’t angry because you are looking for light. If you are looking for light, He is more than happy to shine that light on you, to reveal Himself to you.

Now we see Jesus’ response to John the Baptist, in verses 21-22. “And that very hour He cured many of infirmities, afflictions, and evil spirits; and to many blind He gave sight. Jesus answered and said to them, ‘Go and tell John the things you have seen and heard: that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the gospel preached to them.”

Notice what Jesus did not do. He did not condemn John. He did not get on his case. He did not criticize him. He didn’t do that to Thomas, the doubter, and He didn’t do that to John the Baptist when he doubted. Instead, what Jesus did was He went about His business. He didn’t give John’s disciples an immediate answer. Jesus went about touching lives: giving sight to the blind, healing the hurting and ministering to those who needed the most help.

Why did Jesus do that? Because Jesus wasn’t sent to do John’s agenda; He was sent to do His Father’s agenda. Sometimes God’s agenda is not our agenda. Many times God’s timing is not our timing. But we get filled with doubt when things are not unfolding like we expect them to unfold. We think that somehow God is not meeting our expectations, so that means that God is not really there. But that’s so far from the truth. The truth is that God is there. He’s working His way, doing His thing, to fulfill His plan. We are simply called to believe that.

So Jesus went about His business. Then He turned to John’s disciples and said, “Go and tell John the things you have seen and heard: that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the Gospel preached to them.”

Just in doing that, Jesus was telling the disciples to tell John, “This is what I’m supposed to do, because this is what the Old Testament prophesied that I would do.” Isaiah had prophesied that when the Messiah came on the scene, he would give sight to the blind and give hearing to the deaf, Isaiah 35:5. Jesus was fulfilling that. He was doing exactly what He was sent to do.

But John’s problem was that his doubts kept getting stronger and stronger, because he was focusing on what Jesus was not doing. In reality, his faith could have been growing stronger and stronger if he got his eyes on what Jesus was doing.

So if your attention is on what God is not doing in your life, rather than on what He is doing in your life, then you will be filled with doubt. If you look at the world and see all the things that it appears God is not doing anything about, instead of looking at all the things that God is doing, no wonder why your doubts are strong and your faith is weak!

Doubt feeds on what you do not know. So you need to remind yourself of what you do know. And if you get your attention on what you do know, faith grows. Then your doubts begin to fade away.

We don’t know everything. God has not revealed everything to us. But we do know some things. And the things that God has revealed to us are more than sufficient to cause our faith to be solid and to grow.

There are a lot of accusations against the Christian faith saying that we have a “blind faith.” We believe in something that is completely blind. Just because we were told these things, we chose to believe them. And there are people who have blind faith. Blind faith is believing something, even though there is absolutely no evidence for it.

But that is not Biblical faith. Biblical faith is believing something because of the evidence there is for it. And if there is enough evidence so that we know these things are true, that when we encounter something that we don’t have an answer for, that what we know gives us faith that what we don’t know is still in the hands of God.

I want to give you a defense of the Christian faith, three things we know that will help us overcome any doubts that flood into our hearts. Number one, is that of prophecy. God alone knows the future. And God chose to reveal many of those things in the Old Testament, so that we would know that the pages of Scripture are from God and not simply from human beings. So the Old Testament is filled with prophetic utterances, information about future events, so that when those events unfolded, we would know it was God revealing that truth and not man simply speculating about what might happen.

And if we take the foretelling of the coming of Jesus, of the Messiah, of the Savior, in the Old Testament, we see dozens of Scripture verses detailing who the Savior would be, what He would do, where He would come from.

Every book of the Old Testament was written a minimum of 400 years before the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. So these were not books written after Jesus was born. The Old Testament books were written to give us details about Jesus, so people would know who He was when He came.

For example, in Genesis 12:3, we are told that the Messiah would be a descendant of Abraham. But Abraham would have a lot of descendants. There were millions who were descended from Abraham. So God gave us more information. Abraham initially had two sons, Ishmael and Isaac, so God said the Messiah would come through Isaac. And Isaac had two sons, Esau and Jacob. So the Lord further said that the Messiah would come through Jacob and not through Esau. Then Jacob had 12 sons. Now it’s getting more complicated. So God said the Messiah was going to come through the son, Judah. And Jesus was known as “the Lion of Judah.” And later we are told Messiah would be a descendent of David.

Each of these prophecies was God giving us ahead of time an indication of the pedigree or lineage through which Jesus, the Savior, would come on the earth. In Matthew 1, we see the lineage of Jesus listed. Matthew was writing this to the Jewish mindset to those who knew their heritage. They also knew the prophecies about the coming Messiah. So Matthew wanted them to understand that Jesus fit the description of the Messiah. You read the name of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah and David among many other names in this lineage. So this genealogy indicated that Jesus was the fulfillment of prophecy about the coming of Messiah.

In fact, if you read the entire book of Matthew, you’ll notice that a number of times, Matthew makes statements like, “as was written by the prophets” or “as was spoken by the prophet Isaiah” or “by the prophet Jeremiah.” Each time Matthew wrote that, he indicated that what was happening in the life of Jesus at that time was a fulfillment of what was written in the Old Testament about the Messiah.

So there are times in our lives when we don’t feel close to God. And we feel at times that God is not there at all, and we begin questioning His existence. But if you remind yourself of the prophetic nature of the Bible and realize there is no way any human being would know these things hundreds of years before they happened—and they actually happened—then there must be a God, who is behind it all.

The second thing we know that will help us overcome our doubts is the miracles that Jesus did. When Jesus was going about His ministry, He did many miracles. We read about some of them in our text: giving sight to the blind, healing the sick and raising the dead. This was not a performance by Jesus. It wasn’t a show to get attention. He had a purpose. It was to show the people who He is, who He claimed to be.

If you are going to claim things that only God can claim, you’d better do what only God can do. Because anybody can claim anything. You can say anything about yourself, about how awesome you are, about how elevated a person you are. But “the proof is in the pudding.” If you’re going to make great claims, you’d better have great actions to back them up.

So if Jesus is going to claim to be the Son of God, He better be able to do things that only the Son of God can do. That’s what the miracles were for. It wasn’t for a show; it was evidence that He had the authority to say the things that He was saying.

In fact, in John’s Gospel, John never calls them “miracles”; he always calls them “signs.” Why does he call them “signs”? Because what John was doing was pointing to who Jesus was. The “signs” pointed to who Jesus was. The miracles indicate that Jesus was who He said He claimed to be.

In the very first sermon that Peter ever gave, in Acts 2:22, he said “Jesus of Nazareth, a Man attested by God to you by miracles, wonders, and signs which God did through Him in your midst, as you yourselves also know….” Peter was giving this sermon to those who actually lived during the life and ministry of Jesus. Many of them saw the miracles that Jesus did. Peter here said that Jesus was “attested by God to you by miracles.” In other words, God was putting His stamp of approval on Jesus by the miracles that Jesus did.

So we have the prophecies and the miracles. Number three, we know that Jesus was resurrected from the grave. Jesus had claimed that He would rise from the dead. But if He never rose from the dead, there would be no reason for us to believe in Him at all. Later, the Apostle Paul would say that very thing, in 1 Corinthians 15:14, 17 and 19. “If Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty….And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!...We are of all men the most pitiable.”

But Jesus said He would rise. In fact, He said that’s how He would authenticate His words. There was a time in Jesus’ ministry, in John 2, when the religious leaders came to Him and basically asked, “Why should we listen to You? Why should we believe any of the stuff You’re saying?” Verse 19, “Jesus answered and said to them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’” In that moment, those who heard Him thought Jesus was talking about the Temple in Jerusalem. They thought that was a ridiculous statement. They said, “First, we’re not going to destroy this Temple. And even if we did, there is no way You’re going to rebuild it in three days!”

But Jesus was not talking about that Temple; He was talking about the temple of His body, that He would raise up His body in three days after His death. Jesus knew it would not be long before they would hang His body upon a cross, destroying the temple of His body. Three days later, He would come out of that tomb.

Essentially Jesus was saying, “Why should you believe Me? Why should you listen to what I’m saying? You shouldn’t, unless I raise Myself from the dead like I told you I would. There are no reasons why you should believe Me, unless I authenticate my claim by coming back to life.”

So the Bible prophesies about Jesus, His miracles and His Resurrection exist so that our faith is not a blind faith; it is an intelligent faith, based upon facts, history, actual events that God foretold hundreds of years before they actually happened.

I can almost guarantee you that there will be times in your life when you will not feel close to God. You will feel like your prayers just bounce off the ceiling. You will go through a period of time when you feel like He isn’t near. And those are the times in our lives when doubts will begin to rise up.

Those are the times, when we don’t have answers for certain questions in our minds, that we need to turn back to what we do know. When there are things you don’t know, turn back to the things you do know.

And what you do know is this: God made His Word true and believable by the prophecies that tell us in advance what would take place, and they did take place. God made Jesus’ claims true in that He had miraculous power to do what nobody else could do; He was raised from the dead, authenticating all the things He said and all the works He did. This is our firm foundation in believing that Jesus is the Son of God and the Savior of the world.

Now let’s look at verse 23 of our text. Jesus said, “And blessed is he who is not offended because of Me.” He basically says, “Blessed is he who is not tripped up, does not stumble, because of Me.” What does He mean by that?

There would be things that Jesus would do that wouldn’t make sense to us: His timing and His agenda, because we all have certain expectations that will go unmet since it wasn’t God’s plan. It was something we conjured up in our minds, something that we thought He ought to do. We think things like, The world is evil. God ought to fix it. Innocent lives suffer; God should intervene. And when He doesn’t intervene, we begin to question.

But know this: God will be faithful and He will intervene. He will fix it all. It just hasn’t happened yet. In the meantime, we rest our hope and our faith on what He has already revealed to us. His Word is true. His Son is the Savior of the world, and “whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life,” John 3:16.

Are you looking for light? Or are you content with darkness? If you’re looking for light, God will show it to you. But if you’re content with your darkness, God will leave you in that darkness, unless by His sovereign will, He chooses to open your heart and eyes to His abundant grace.