Trusting in God's Faithfulness Through Christ's Works

Life has a way of bewildering us. We may fail to achieve the goals that we have set for ourselves. We may, for instance, desire to be a doctor or a lawyer, perhaps to finish university, and there are times when these goals, for a variety of reasons, are not realized in our own lives.

At other times, we may enter into relationships that we imagine would last a lifetime, only for them to fizzle. Instead of getting out of debt, we may find ourselves in a deeper hole. But it is not only that life is bewildering and often disappointing in the more mundane areas of life. Even the spiritual life can raise and cause disappointment and doubt when the Lord does not, for instance, play by our rules.

There are those who would believe Him for healing, and the healing does not materialize. There are those who may expect promotion, for instance, and that promotion does not occur, and that leads to disappointment and it leads to doubt.

The passage that we find before us here in Matthew chapter 11, verses 1 to 19, deals with the doubt and the bewilderment of John the Baptist. This passage occurs in the larger context of chapters 11 and 12. These two chapters really are concerned with the rising tide of opposition to Jesus Christ. There is this rising animosity to Christ because, even as you have read in chapters 8 and 9, of the ten marvelous miracles that Jesus performed, people are amazed at these miracles.

In the chapter before, in chapters 5 to 7, Jesus spoke words that amazed people. But we see in chapters 11 and 12 a turning of a tide. There is this rising tide of hostility and resentment to Jesus Christ.

It is in this context that we find John the Baptist, and his doubt must be placed. But even though these two chapters are dealing with rising opposition to Jesus, there is also a thread, a line running through chapter 11 which relates to the identity of Jesus. John is disappointed in Jesus, and there is a question, a question that John must confront, a question of identity, a question really that the crowds who listen to Jesus and all of us today must face: the question of who Jesus is.

Now you may ask me how do I know that this question of Jesus's identity is essential to understanding these verses. Well, in chapter 11, there is a major movement. You know in chapter 11, verse 1, when Jesus had finished instructing his twelve disciples, he went out from there to teach and to preach in their cities.

And this expression, "when he had finished instructing," occurs five times. It appears at the end of chapter 7, it appears here, and it will appear another three times in this book, showing that there's a major shift in the argument in the book.

But in verse 2, this is the question that John asked: this is a question of identity. Now when Jesus heard in prison about the deeds of the Christ, he sent words by his disciples and said to him, "Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?"

And so the next major division in the Gospel of Matthew, beginning in verse 19, deals with this question of identity. John the Baptist, who was imprisoned in the prison of Mercarius near the Dead Sea, had heard of the mighty works of Jesus and sent his disciples to ask Jesus if he was the coming one or if they should wait for another.

Matthew's Gospel chapter 11 describes the identity of Jesus Christ in three ways. In verses 1 to 19, it establishes that Jesus is the promised Messiah. Verses 20 to 24 teach us that he is the judge of all men, and finally, verses 25 to 30 depict him as the compassionate savior.

We will focus on the first description of Jesus as the promised Messiah. These first 19 verses may be divided into three paragraphs or units. The first is the identification of Jesus as the Messiah in verses 1 to 2. The second is the commendation of John the Baptist as the greatest prophet, and the third is the rejection of John and Jesus Christ.

The scripture says that when John heard in prison about the deeds of the Christ, he sent words by his disciples and asked if Jesus was the one who was to come. John had been imprisoned for speaking out against Herod Antipas, who had gone to Rome and married his brother's wife, Herodias, while she was still married to his brother Philip.

The word "deeds" is important, as it reoccurs in verse 19. John had heard about the miracles of Jesus and asked if he was the coming one. This term is used in the Old Testament in reference to God, such as in Psalm 118: "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord."

In chapter 3 of the Gospel of John, John identifies Jesus as the coming one, the Messiah, the anointed of God, the son of David. This is in line with the Old Testament expectation that God would send a Divine Messiah, a kingly figure from the line of David, to liberate Israel from Roman oppression and establish righteousness.

John had preached that the coming one would bring Divine judgment, but he was hearing stories of Jesus performing mighty deeds without any cataclysmic judgment. Wicked men like Herod Antipas were still reigning, and the religious rulers were still corrupting religion. John began to question if Jesus was the Messiah, as he was not seeing the judgment he had expected.

In response to the question of whether he was the coming one, Jesus answered indirectly in verses 3 and 4. He did not directly answer the disciples of John, but instead pointed to the mighty deeds he was performing. Jesus was indeed the Messiah, the Liberator, who would perform mighty deeds and bring Divine judgment.

Yes, I am the Messiah, or the Christ. He answers directly and indirectly to those who brought the question from John. He says, "Go and tell John what you see and hear: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them."

Jesus now alludes to texts from the Old Testament passages from Isaiah 35 and Isaiah 61 that John would have known. These passages speak of healing and deliverance. Jesus says to John, in effect, "Will you know the scriptures? The blind are now able to see, the lame are walking, lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised up, and the poor are hearing the preaching or the good news of salvation."

In answering this question, Jesus identifies himself by alluding to Old Testament texts. He is the Christ, he has come, and he says to John, "Blessed is he who is not offended." The word there means to stumble.

What was John's problem? John was a true prophet of the Old Testament, and he suffered from what theologians call prophetic foreshortening. The example given of prophetic foreshortening is the example of one who looks at a mountain range at a very fast or distance. When you look at mountains at a far distance, you would think that the peaks of those mountains are very close, but only as you get closer to them do you realize that there are vast gaps, vast distances between these mountain peaks.

The Old Testament prophets were like that when they looked through their prophetic telescope down the corridors of time. They saw all of the events of history surrounding the coming of Christ almost merged together. That is, the Messiah would come, he would save his people, and he would judge all at once.

But Jesus has come as the promised Messiah, and his first job, his first role was to save. Judgment would come, but judgment was yet in the future. He has come to save.

Who is this one who comes? He is the promised Messiah whom God has promised to send to save those who were lost. Blessed is he who is not offended by me, who does not stumble because I do not perform or act in the way he imagines.

This one who comes has not come with judgment; he has not come to kill people. In fact, he himself will be killed and raised from the dead, and men and women will stumble over the cross. Paul would put it this way when he says, "But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God."

Blessed is he who does not stumble at me. Blessed is he who sees me as a crucified and risen Messiah and does not stumble over me. My friends, it requires faith to appreciate Jesus as the promised Messiah.

If I may just tinker a little with that great hymn, "All the lights of sacred story gather around his head sublime." We must recognize before we see anything else in the passage that Jesus is the Messiah, the promised Messiah that God has sent.

And it is not then those who know him ought not to stumble at him because he does not appear in the way that they imagine he would appear.

But in verses 7 to 15, if we've seen the identity of Jesus as the promised Messiah, in verses 7 to 15, Jesus commends John the Baptist. Yes, he struggles; you know we sometimes think that we cannot wrestle with faith. Jesus does not condemn John for wrestling with faith, and in fact, he commends him not for wrestling but for who he is as a man of God.

And there are a series of questions that Jesus poses simply to set up this description of John as a prophet. What did you go out, he says, in the wilderness to see? He reminds them of John's dramatic entrance on the Judean scene.

He's the one who burst on the scene, and his appearance caused no little stir. He came from the wilderness dressed in a tunic made from camel hair in the vein of Elijah the prophet of old. He was one who ate honey and wild locusts; this is the man whose behavior is ascetic in every respect.

And Jesus asked the question of him, "What did you go out in the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind?" The reed there is described as a cane grass that grows in marshy places near water. It was tall and thin and easily bent.

In Jesus's asking, "Did you go out to see somebody who is wishy-washy, who changes his opinion and changes his message based on the prevailing winds in society?" This is not the man; this is a man of resolve, this is a man of character, this is a man of integrity.

"What did you go out to see?" Verse 8. "A man dressed in soft clothing? Behold, those who wear soft clothing are in king's houses." John did not come in luxury; he was not like some pampered king dressed in luxurious clothing. He was a gritty prophet.

This is the man who came and first fired the imagination of a nation. For 400 years there was silence in Israel; there was no prophet, and John burst on the scene. This strange man dressed in strange garb, eating strange food, proclaiming the kingdom of God had arrived, "Repent and be baptized."

This is the prophet that you have gone to see; this is the prophet that you receive. Jesus says, but our Lord will go on to point out that John is more than merely a prophet, and he quotes scripture in verse 10.

"This is he of whom it is written, 'Behold, I send my messenger before your face who will prepare your way before you.'" In other words, he's quoting again from Malachi chapter 3, verse 1, a text where it speaks of a messenger going before God.

Now Jesus takes this text that refers to God and applies it to himself. John is the one who goes ahead of him, who introduces him, who is his spokesman.

Precisely because John is the one who introduces him, Jesus can say in verse 11, "Truly I say to you, among those born of women there has arisen no one greater than John the Baptist."

This is an astonishing declaration because what Jesus says about John is jaw-dropping. He says of all human beings who have ever lived, there is none greater than John the Baptist.

Well, you say, "Well, what about Abraham, the one who is the father of a Jewish nation?" No, he's not as great as John. Well, what about Moses, the greatest prophet of Israel? He's not as great as John the Baptist. Not Elijah, not Alexander the Great, not Julius Caesar. No other human being, he says, is greater than John the Baptist.

Now, by the way, this is not now the world's evaluation of John; this is God's evaluation of John the Baptist. Why is John viewed as the greatest? Well, he's viewed as the greatest because of his proximity, his closeness to Jesus Christ.

John stands at the end of a chain of prophets throughout history. Prophets like Isaiah saw something of Jesus, but he didn't see him clearly. But John comes as the last of the great Old Testament prophets. He sees Jesus and he could say to the people around him, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world."

The reason John is the greatest, Jesus says, of all the prophets and of all who ever lived before, is because John stands closest to Jesus in biblical history and in salvation history.

And then Jesus introduces this paradox, something that seems to be a contradiction. He says, "But the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than John." Why? Because even though John is the greatest of the Old Testament prophets because he saw Jesus and witnessed to him, those of us who belong now in the New Age, John is the last of an old age.

But those of us who are members of the kingdom of God who live after the death and the resurrection of Jesus, we now have a greater understanding. We have the fullness of revelation, and because of that, we are greater than John the Baptist and even Moses himself because we are post the cross.

We stand on the other side of the grave of Jesus Christ. We know the resurrected Christ, and so the least in the kingdom of God is greater than John the Baptist.

But when you look at this passage, our Lord Jesus, by stressing the greatness of John the Baptist, says something about himself. You cannot read these verses without seeing the naked implications. If John is the greatest of the Old Testament prophets because he was closest to Jesus, then Jesus must be incomparably greater than John and all.

If John is the greatest because he's close to Christ, then the text is reminding us that Jesus Christ transcends John the Baptist and transcends all. You see, he is the promised Messiah who is greater than all. Why? Because he stands in the place of God, because he is the Messiah.

In other words, he's God in flesh.

God and man are united in one person, Jesus, and there is none to be compared to him. Jesus introduces the kingdom of heaven and explains that those who are least in the kingdom are greater than John the Baptist.

He explains that the kingdom of God has come with power and wicked men oppose it. Jesus reiterates John's lofty position in the plan of salvation, saying that all the prophets and the law prophesied until John and that he is Elijah who is to come.

Michael Welker, a German theologian, gave a lecture at Harvard Divinity School in 2001 entitled "Who is Jesus for us today?" In this lecture, Welker said that for many, Jesus is a cultural icon, associated with the cross and a manger at Christmas. However, the historic Christ, the Christ of reality, has faded in our culture.

We need to ask the question, "Who is this one with whom we are dealing? The one who stands in the place of God, the one who is the Messiah, the one who is the son of God?"

The significance of Jesus was not lost to many in earlier centuries. The traditional Christian calendar divided history into two periods: BC (before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini, in the year of Our Lord). History divides into two parts, and Christ is at the center of history, and he is the determiner of destiny.

John needed to realize that when we look at Christ, we are not merely to see his poverty of birth and poverty of life, or his unimpressive disciples. We need to see him as the one whom God has promised, who is God in flesh.

This is why Jesus commends John the Baptist as the greatest because of his witness to Jesus, a statement which points to Jesus's greatness as the Messiah, the promised Messiah.

In verses 16 to 19, Jesus introduces a parabolic statement about a group of children playing a game of hide and seek. He says that the children who are playing the game of hide and seek are like those who are in the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus was pointing out a pattern that has been seen throughout history—the habitual rejection of God's messengers. In verse 16, Jesus compares this generation to children in the marketplace. One group of children is playing uplifting music, but the other group refuses to dance.

Jesus applies this to himself and John the Baptist. John was seen as too righteous, and Jesus was seen as not righteous enough. They were judged by the company they kept and were rejected. Jesus says that this is because they had rebelled in their hearts against God.

He closes this section by saying that wisdom is justified by her deeds—a life lived in wisdom will show fruit, and wisdom is proven by what it produces. Ask Jesus: "Am I authentic? Am I the way of wisdom?" Then you must look at what His life produces.

The text teaches them of Christ's identification as a promised Messiah, a promised Messiah who stands in the place of God. Yet, He was rejected by men.

I want to draw this to a conclusion, and I want to spend a little time, just a few minutes, and suggest that as we read a passage like this, we ought not to stumble over Christ but see Him as a promised deliverer.

We have to be blunt and honest that God will not always meet our expectations, that we will be beset by doubt and disappointment in the Christian life, as John was and as the disciples of Jesus on the Emmaus Road who said, "We had hoped that He was the one to redeem Israel."

The question then that confronts us is how do we deal with the disappointments and the doubts that we have? Well, we should not do what Descartes did, this Enlightenment philosopher who looked to himself for the answer to his doubt.

No, we must look in all our circumstances, whether we be jobless or single or sick or confronting injustice in the workplace, in whatever situation in the midst of our perplexities and doubts, we are to look to the one who alone is able to help—our Lord Jesus Christ.

And the first thing we must do in our moments of doubt is recognize who He is—that He is the promised Messiah. And because He is the promised Messiah, He reveals the faithfulness of God in keeping His promises.

God had promised to send the Messiah, our Savior, and that savior, God the Son, has come. It shows that God can be trusted to keep His word. And so in our moments of doubt, we must know that the promises of God are yea and amen.

We must know that God can never lie and can never deceive. We must know that God is true, and we must trust the God who did not spare His only Son but gave Him up for us all. How will He not also with Him graciously and freely give us all things?

Jesus, the promised Messiah, points to the fact that in all our hardship, in all our troubles, we have a faithful God who can be trusted. You can take His word to the bank.

Secondly, not only must we know the faithfulness of God as the promise-keeping God, we must pay attention to Jesus's word and works. His response to John: "Look at what is seen, look at what has been heard."

And you and I, in our moments of doubt, must go back to the word—the word which reveals God, the word which teaches us of the love of God for us, the word which tells us that God is suffering in all the details of our lives, the word that tells us that God's great purpose is ultimately to give Himself to us in the eschaton.

We must go back and stand on that word. We must look at His works, the one who called the heavens into being and sustains the host by His mighty power. We must look at the works of Jesus, who healed the sick, who opened blinded eyes, who cured those who were lepers, who raised the dead.

We must stand on what Jesus says and what Jesus has done in our lives. At the end of the Second World War and in the decade after, Oscar Coleman described Jesus as the center of history. He used the illustration of D-Day and V-Day to explain this.

D-Day was the day Allied Forces landed in Normandy in France in 1944, and it was a turning point in the war. Victory was secured in 1945 with VE Day, but D-Day was the basis of victory. Coleman's point was that D-Day had occurred in the coming of Christ in his death and resurrection.

Jesus stands at the center of history, before history, and at the end of history. He is in history and above history, and he cannot be compared to any.

We think of great people as those who have the most money, the largest followers on Instagram, or those who walk the red carpet in Hollywood. But Jesus is greater. There is none to be compared to him. He is the promised Messiah, the revelation of God in flesh.

There is none to be equated, none to supersede him, none to stand beside him. He is still greater.

We must make it our aim to know Christ, who is the sole criterion of greatness. We must believe in him, repent of sin, accept him, and enter his kingdom. Then we will be great in the sight of God.

In our moments of doubt, when we wonder if we should follow Christ, we must remember that the way of Jesus leads to forgiveness of sins, a life of righteousness and godliness, a life of joy, a life of peace, and it leads to glory.

Jesus is the way of wisdom, and that way is the way of right and good and godliness. May he so bless us for his sake. Amen.

We pray that in His incomparable greatness and wisdom, hearts and lives would be bent to submit to Christ. May we find in Him our only true resource for salvation and joy. We ask that Christ become real and precious to us, for Jesus' sake. Amen.