"When they saw him, they worshiped him, but some doubted." Isn’t that a peculiar text? I have probably preached on the Great Commission more than any other text in the whole Bible, but I’ve always skipped over these strange words, because I’ve never known what to make of them. Well, tonight I want to focus on them because they provide us an opportunity to reflect further on this mysterious thing called doubt. "When they saw him" refers to the eleven disciples who were left after Judas Iscariot committed suicide. According to the stories that end each of the Gospels, they had seen Jesus a number of times after he had died and risen from the dead—— in Jerusalem, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, sometimes in small groups, other times in a crowd of 500 people.
Now they have gone to this particular mountain in Galilee at Jesus’ command. He had said, "There they will see me." And sure enough, they do. They see the risen Christ in person, in his body. And they do what we would do. They worshiped him. They fell down on their knees, heads bowed in humble adoration, some perhaps even lying with their faces in the dust. They give the risen Christ the kind of homage that only God deserves. By this time, they knew that Thomas had been absolutely right when he finally met Jesus a week after he rose. John 20 tells us that Thomas had doubted the reality of Jesus resurrection when he heard the first reports of it, but when Jesus showed Thomas his nail pierced hands and feet and spear wounded side, Thomas said in John 20:28, "My Lord and my God." Now they all knew that. No wonder they worshiped him on that mountain in Galilee. That’s exactly what you’d expect. It’s what we would do if we saw Jesus in person, in his resurrected body.
But then comes something you would never expect. "When they saw him, they worshiped, but some doubted." Can you imagine that—— doubting in the very presence of Jesus, in the middle of worship? Of course you can; you’ve done it many times, and so have I. We always say, "Seeing is believing." So you would think that there would be no room for doubt in the very moment of seeing the object of our faith. But they did. How could they see and believe and worship and doubt at the same time? Maybe we need to ask, was this really doubt, or was it something else?
That’s not an academic question, or a minor one, because the confusion about doubt is the source of much spiritual difficulty. In fact, some of us are stuck in our walk with Christ because we don’t understand what doubt is and isn’t, and how it relates to belief and unbelief. We can’t make progress in our faith because we’re stuck in the foggy bottomland of doubt. So put on your thinking cap for a few moments and ponder this mysterious text in Matthew 28. You may find some light penetrating the dark mist surrounding the doubt and faith in your life.
We need to ask first of all if this was really doubt in Matthew 28. And that raises the obvious, fundamental question, what is doubt? Some people think that doubt is unbelief, but it’s not. These disciples believed in Jesus enough to fall down and worship him as God, and yet they doubted. When I did a study of doubt in the Bible, I discovered that all of the words for doubt in the New Testament have at their root the idea of being divided. To doubt is to have a divided mind, a mind that is torn between belief and unbelief, a mind that carries on an inner debate with arguments flying back and forth, a mind that hangs back, falters, wavers back and forth between belief and unbelief.
Belief is being of one mind about accepting something as true. Thomas expressed his belief in those famous words from John 20, when he called Jesus, "My Lord and my God." He was of one mind about the truth of Jesus’ identity. Unbelief is being of one mind about rejecting something as true. The crowd around the cross when Jesus died was expressing its unbelief when they said in effect, "Jesus is not Lord and God; he is a mere man, and a fake at that." They were of one mind about the falseness of Jesus’ claims about himself. They simply did not believe at all. Doubt is wavering between the two, being of two minds about Jesus. Doubt is not the same as giving up on faith and surrendering to unbelief; it is being torn between the two. Unbelief is a closed minded certainty, while doubt is an open minded uncertainty. So is that what we see in these disciples—two minds, certain one moment, uncertain the next?
Or is this something other than doubt? Well, what else could it be? A comment by G.K. Chesterton in his marvelous book, Orthodoxy, got me to thinking about this. "In that terrific tale of the Passion of the Christ," he wrote long ago, referring not to Mel Gibson’s movie, but the Biblical story, "there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things went not only through agony, but also through doubt." Chesterton was thinking of that moment in Gethsemane when Jesus prayed, "If it is possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done." Was that an expression of doubt? Did Jesus have two minds about the truth? Chesterton thought so. I do not. I think it was something that looks and feels like doubt. It was fear. Doubt is a form of fear, but not all fear is doubt. Sometimes we are simply terrified, so filled with horror at what is happening that our minds are not so much divided as racing in confusion. Could that explain these disciples, and us? We think we are filled with doubt, but we are really filled with fear.
Other times what looks and feels like doubt is simply questioning. I think of Job. If you read the story of Job carefully, you will find that contrary to popular opinion, there doesn’t seem to be any suggestion that Job doubted God. But he surely had some strong questions, even challenges for God in his immense suffering. He didn’t have two minds; rather, his mind was seeking to understand God’s will. For him, it wasn’t doubt wavering between faith and unbelief; it was faith seeking understanding. That reminds me of something Neal Plantinga wrote in his fine little book, Beyond Doubt. "The Christian believer seeks understanding very often in the interrogative mood and… faith beyond doubt is not yet beyond question." That may have been the case with these disciples, and it may explain us. Even though they could see Jesus and thus believed in him as Lord and God, they were still filled with questions about what had happened and what was going to happen. Perhaps their doubt was something else; perhaps it was really fear, a troubled mind, or questions, a searching mind.
Or maybe their minds were genuinely divided. But how, and why? If they saw Jesus and believed in him enough to worship him, what is this doubt about? Well, folks who have thought about this a lot have discovered that there are at least 3 kinds of doubt. There is factual doubt, emotional doubt, and volitional doubt. People with factual doubt have two minds because they don’t have all the facts. They lack the information to give their faith a firm foundation.
We see an example of that right after Jesus arose. In Luke 24:38, 39 Jesus appeared to his disciples as they huddled behind locked doors, and they were startled and frightened. They thought he was a ghost. Jesus said to them, "Why are you troubled and why do doubts arise in your minds?" And then he gives them more information to dispel the doubt. "Look at my hands and my feet. Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see I have." They doubted because they lacked the facts, so Jesus gave them more facts. That may have been the kind of doubt the disciples had on the mountain. That kind of doubt is epidemic in this postmodern age, where many have never really learned the facts of the Christian faith, and others have forgotten them because they’re disconnected from the church of their youth. They doubt because they do not know. This doubt often turns to solid faith when the facts are clearly explained.
A more difficult kind of doubt is emotional doubt. It often masquerades as factual doubt, but it really isn’t intellectually based. It is emotionally based. It has to do with the way a person feels about the Christian faith, rather than with the truth of it. It can grow out of anxiety or depression, medical conditions such as alcoholism, lack of sleep or improper diet, or most often out of some sort of trauma, some sort of suffering.
In Luke 24:41, right after Jesus gave his disciples more facts to drive away their doubt, we read that they still did not believe "because of joy and amazement." Strange, until you think about what they had just been through. Three days before, Jesus had been torn from them and murdered before their very eyes. With that, their lives were shattered. All their hopes and dreams hung bleeding on the cross. Their faith had proven to be so much folly and they had sunk into utter despair. So now even when the fact of Jesus resurrection stands right in front of them, they can’t get beyond that emotional trauma. It was too amazing, too good to be true. What they were seeing and hearing did not square with their emotions, so they didn’t believe even when Jesus presented them with the facts. That may have been the doubt on the mountain, as they were still suffering the emotional aftereffects of Jesus death 40—some days ago. I don’t know that for sure, but I do know that this kind of doubt is also epidemic, especially among church going folks. We know the facts, but our hopes and dreams have been shattered by the suffering in our lives. So doubt lingers on and on. In my last message in this series, I’ll talk specifically about how to deal with this difficult kind of doubt.
But there is one more kind of doubt, perhaps the most difficult kind of all. It is volitional doubt, doubt that grows not of the mind or the emotions, but out of the will. This kind of doubt hears Jesus say challenging things like he said later in our text, "Go into all the world and make disciples," and says, "No." This kind of doubt is at bottom an unwillingness to believe, to grow in faith, to forsake sin, to live the Christian life, to bow to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. I remember reading a quote from one of the great French existentialist, an atheist. It was perhaps Sartre. He said, "My unbelief was based not on intellectual arguments but on the fact that I wanted to have sex whenever and with whomever I pleased."
Now, that was outright unbelief, not doubt. But this volitional doubt leans very strongly in the direction of unbelief, because at heart it is rebellious. It comes not from a confused mind or hurting emotions, but from a rebellious will. The cure for this kind of doubt is simply to surrender, and the key to surrender is gaining a new perspective on life in the Kingdom of God. This kind of doubt will not go away until the doubter begins to see that life under the Lordship of Christ is better, more satisfying, more pleasurable, more liberating than life in rebellion. Maybe that’s why some doubted on the mountain. They knew the facts about Jesus and they were filled with joy and amazement that he was alive again, but they weren’t ready yet to surrender their lives to this King who would change their lives completely. And maybe that’s why Jesus said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me," to me, to the One who loved you so much that I died to make your life rich and full.
"When they saw him, they worshiped, but some doubted." But was it doubt, or was it fear or confusion? And if it was doubt, was it factual, emotional, or volitional? I hope that all of these distinctions have been helpful to you as you think about your own faith and doubt. I know it has been a bit complicated. That’s why, at the end of all this, I come back to the words of our text, and the simplest explanation of the disciples’ doubt. They doubted because they were too far away from Jesus to be sure it was him. They fell down in worship because they thought it was the one in whom they believed. But because of the distance between themselves and him, they doubted. Then, says vs. 18, "he came to them" and their doubt was dispelled by his stirring call to live as disciples out there in the world he ruled.
Many things may create a distance between Jesus and us—intellectual questions, emotional trauma, an unwillingness to bend the knee to his Lordship. So it will take different methods to remove these obstacles, but the basic cure for doubt is always the same. We need to get closer to Jesus. There is nothing that will clear the mind, heal our emotions, and move our will better than simply getting closer to Jesus. You can do that by worshiping him—— privately in prayer and meditation on his Word and publicly with other disciples. But the Good News is that he is always coming to us, even when we sit in worship and doubt.
Stan Mast
Stan Mast has been the Minister of Preaching at the LaGrave Avenue Christian Reformed Church in downtown Grand Rapids, MI for the last 18 years. He graduated from Calvin Theological Seminary in 1971 and has served four churches in the West and Midwest regions of the United States. He also served a 3 year stint as Coordinator of Field Education at Calvin Seminary. He has earned a BA degree from Calvin College and a Bachelor of Divinity and a Master of Theology from Calvin and a Doctor of Ministry from Denver Seminary. He is happily married to Sharon, a special education teacher, and they have two sons and four grandchildren. Stan is a voracious reader and works out regularly. He also calls himself a car nut and an “avid, but average” golfer.
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