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That exiled band had lost their own flesh and blood, the partners of their lives. Here, Zacharias had an angel suddenly appear and speak a direct revelation from God, but he did not believe. The little finger of your future doubts shall be thicker than the loins of your present mental anguish. So doubt is a problem, even for those who are righteous in Gods sight. It is life to you. But to have mercy on those who doubt is to be there for them, comforting and building them up. We can trust such a God and such a Savior. 18. You need to learn to have mercy on them (and on yourself). But Zacharias asked the angel for a sign, and was rebuked for his doubting. In the matter of faith and doubt, the crucial thing is not our feelings and not even our faith. Its important for thosestruggling with doubt to notlet their doubt influence their lives such that they start living like unbelievers. Next? Obviously, doubt is often more complicated. Zacharias had reconciled himself to realitythey were not going to have a son. Internet Explorer is no longer supported. Atheism denies Gods existenceunbelief denies his goodness, and since goodness is essential to God, these doubts do, in reality, stab at his very being. He bows the knee, and lifts up his hands to heaven. Pestered, yes. If a forgotten prayer closet will make you weep, a frequented prayer closet will make you smile. Your servant killed both the lion and the bear, and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be as one of them. That was good reasoning. I will give you an example. Whereas, one must say it, the life of David for some few months after this exclamation, was sad, and one might wish it could be blotted out; it was sad, sad indeed. lazy busy studios The toll here is not only moral, social, and physical; it also corrupts the mind. He has built an altar to the Lord his God; the priests of Baal have built another. We can overcome the problem of doubt if we will see that God does what He says He will do. Sarah stumbled over a similar situation. Its not your faith, but the object of it, that matters most. Please make sure all fields are filled out. Besides, as I shall have to show this morning, unbelief of God is the fountain of innumerable sins. Please refresh the page and try again. Nothing is too difficult for Him. We allow God to be sovereign, but we believe that if He said He would do something, He will do it, even if it takes a different form than we had expected. How to Find, Develop, and Keep Real Community, God Is Beyond and Behind the Enormous Universe, Nietzsche vs. Dylan: Fight for the 21st-Century Soul. Darrell Bock comments, Zechariah, righteous as he is, needs to learn that God will fulfill his promises when he sovereignly chooses to act. So even if weve walked with God for years, when we are faced with a seemingly impossible situation, we need to look to our hearts, which are prone to limit the Almighty by human possibilities. it is contrary to every promise of this precious book that you should become the victim of the lion of hell. All things are possible to him who believes. The father cried out, I do believe; help my unbelief (Mark 9:22-24). But I must now, while my strength shall hold out, proceed to the second part of the discourse, namely, HOW WAS IT THAT DAVID CAME TO THINK THIS WAY ABOUT HIS GOD? My sister, you may find some portion here. You can have little faith in a sound airplane, just enough to get you on board, and thats all it takes to get you where youre going. I challenge heaven, and earth, and hell this morning to bring any proof that God is untrue. Another level of doubt is that of the person who wants to believe, but hes struggling with difficult questions and he has not yet come to see the glory and excellency of the Lord Jesus Christ as the all-sufficient Savior of sinners. Jude 22 tells us to have mercy on those who doubt. It is easy to judge, condemn, and look down on doubters as if they are second-rate Christians. So that one sin led him on to another. He sets forth his arguments against Gods existence or the Christian faith as if he is the first brilliant thinker in history to come up with such insights. So you protected yourself by saying, Lets wait and see. But in your heart, you were doubting God. This is emphasized in one other way that is a bit more obvious in the Greek text than in the English. Encourage doubters to continue to live as Christians, repenting and believing the gospel,even if they dont always feel like Christians. But you didnt want to get your hopes up, only to have them dashed again. So as we see Gods prophetic word made more sure (2 Pet. I bear my willing testimony that I have no reason to doubt my Lord, nor even the shadow of a reason: and I think that you who were in Christ many a year before I knew him can say that since you have trusted in him you have never once had any reason to suspect his faithfulness, or to imagine that he would cast you away. But we will speak of these matters in detail, though briefly. The angel specifically states Zacharias sin: because you did not believe my words (1:20). Now, there is David, and he is going up against his own people, to fight against his own king, to do mischief against Gods own chosen land. If you let a trial consume your vision, it will block the glorious power of the Almighty God. He does not answer. In short, if there is something you know youresupposed to be doing, and youre not doing it, doubt will soon spread, and your crisis of faith will be hard to overcome. Blessed afflictions are those that drive him back to where he ought to have been all the time! All of us who believe in Jesus Christ as Savior have been there, too. Without saying a word he just left it to my own conscience, for he had convicted me of committing the very fault against which I had so earnestly declaimed. Have you ever talked to someone who said, If I just saw a miracle or had a direct word from God, I would believe? Christian! Stop praying! The fact that such a godly man doubted shows us that none are exempt from the problem. Why not say, Your servant killed the Philistine, your servant escaped from the javelin of Saul, when the mad monarch would have pinned him to the wall; your servant escaped from all the schemes of Doeg; your servant escaped when Saul pursued him in the tracks of the wild goats and in the caves of Engedi; your servant escaped out of the power of Achish, the Philistine; and, lo, this Saul, who seeks my head, shall I not escape also out of his hand? That would have been a rational conclusion, a proper way of dealing with evidence; but to say, after such love and kindness in the past, He will let me sink at last, was to draw a lying conclusion, and to bring in a verdict directly contrary to the evidence. I will love you, oh Lord my strength! Inconsistency will win us over into the ranks of his enemies, and they will be saying, What are these Hebrews doing here? and the question will be passed around from man to man, Is not this David of whom they said, Saul has killed his thousands, but David his ten thousands? What is David doing here? Brother, if Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall, I may, without wresting Scripture, say, Unbelief goes before destruction, and a doubting spirit before a fall, for so it is. The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower. 20. Doubt is not unbelief. Heaps upon heaps with the jawbone of a donkey, I have killed a thousand men. And what were the pillars of the temple to him? But he was limiting God to work through normal human means. Often might you, brethren, be exposed by the same inconsistency. God is sovereign, not the prayers of puny man. She ran in and announced that Peter was at the door. We all need to consider that the truths we espouse might be wrong, in order to embrace our faith more deeply. The trials to which he had been exposed had been varied; they had not assumed one form only, but many; yet in every case he who sent the trial had also graciously ordained a way of escape. The man walked with God and he had done so for many years. I like to think of doubt as the gap between our current faith and perfect faith. Unbelief is akin to Atheism. He also predicts a number of other features of Johns life and ministry which did, in fact, later happen. On the other hand, its easy to yield to disappointment if God has not answered as we thought He should have, and our disappointment quickly leads us into doubt. 24. Why these differences? He was thus raised to a very high position, the companion of Achish, at his right hand, the commander of the men who were to protect the king in case of danger. Oh Lord, from this great sin deliver us! Faith is not a leap in the dark; it is based on solid evidence. By doubting Gods ambassador, he was doubting God Himself. Michael received a master of theology degree in New Testament studies from Dallas Theological Seminary in 2001. If the excitement of delight has been followed by depression, that excitement itself, if you seek it again, will be the best cure, until your mind, made strong to endure these blessed excitements, shall be sweetly strengthened for the bliss of heaven, and on earth you shall be capable of enjoying the heaven which some of the saints have known before they crossed the stream of death. He should have been ecstatic with joy. They had concluded that it must not be Gods will. Oh! you have said, I could trust him although the fig tree did not blossom, and although there were no flocks in the field, and no herd in the stall. Ah! He says to Abiathar, Bring the ephod here; and he enters upon no enterprise without first asking of the Urim and Thummim what was Gods mind. It also helps us to find a quick solution. You prayed for something so long and your request was denied for so long that you concluded, It isnt going to happen. Then, maybe even after you stopped praying, suddenly there was a glimmer of hope that your prayers were about to be answered. He went once to Achish, king of Gath, and the Philistines said, This is that David of whom they said, Saul has killed his thousands and David his ten thousands; and David was greatly afraid, and feigned himself mad in their hands, and scratched on the doors of the gate, and let his spittle fall down upon his beard, (which to the Eastern was the surest sign of his being mad if he despised his beard), and they drove him away, for Achish said, Why, then, have you brought him to me? They came at last to the place where the captains of the hundreds slept, and they stepped over their slumbering bodies without arousing them. Here are sevenprinciples to consider when dealing with doubt. We dont know how long Zacharias and Elizabeth had been married, but it easily could have been 30 or 40 years. And this is a very sorrowful part of Davids life. But still you take care of your children. While David was away with King Achish, the Amalekites invaded the south, and attacked Ziklag, which was Davids town. The effort to reinterpret the Bible in a way more friendly to homosexuality wont remain isolated to this one category; sooner or later, the mental paradigm you constructedto make your sin acceptable will corrupt everything else. Next to omnipotence is faith; indeed, not next to it in some respects, for faith can do all that omnipotence can, when God makes it strong. That can be no small offence which charges the Creator of heaven and earth with perjury; and yet, if I mistrust his oath, and will not believe his promise, sealed with the blood of his own Son, I count the oath of God to be unworthy of my trust; and so I do, in very deed, accuse the King of Heaven as false to his covenant and oath. Ah, if we doubt God, we shall soon be numbered among Gods foes. Furthermore, not only was David guilty of all this, but he was on the verge of being guilty of still a worse sinof overt acts of warfare against the Lords people; for David having become the friend of Achish, when Achish went to battle against Israel, he said to him, Know assuredly, that you shall go out with me to battle, you and your men; and David professed his willingness to go. Oh! He graduated from Dallas Theological Seminary (Th.M., 1976 in Bible exposition) and Califo More. Have I need of mad men, that you have brought this fellow to play the mad man in my presence? What should we say of a jury who, after having heard a case in which the verdict should evidently have been Not Guilty, should, nevertheless, say Guilty? Let the earth ring with the cry of indignation. It made him do a foolish thing, the same foolish thing which he had regretted once before. The doubts that we all have show us that we need a Savior because we are sinners. While they were praying, an angel miraculously delivered Peter from his prison cell. That was the case with Zacharias. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA, and the Google A man has been condemned not only unjustly, but in the very teeth of evidence which proved his innocence. and what are we? Abraham laughed and brought up the matter of his and Sarahs old age when he was promised a son, but he was not corrected for doubting, while Sarah was (Gen. 17:17). And that bridge will stand until our death or Christs return. He was languishing in prison and he began to wonder, If Jesus is truly the Messiah, why am I, His messenger, here in prison? So he sent his disciples to ask Jesus, Are You the Expected One, or do we look for someone else? Jesus replied, Go and report to John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have the gospel preached to them. Then He gently rebuked Johns doubt by adding, And blessed is he who keeps from stumbling over Me (Luke 7:22, 23). Now, this was enough to make the wise man mad, and to make the faithful man doubt. Philip did a quick calculation and concluded, Two hundred denarii worth of bread is not sufficient for them, for everyone to receive a little (John 6:5-7). When the Lord announced to Abraham that his wife would give birth to a son, Sarah, listening on the other side of the tent wall, laughed in doubt (Gen. 18:10-15). Not only this, but there is nothing Christians cannot doubt. 1:19), we should put our doubts to rest and trust in the Word of God. how has the strong man been given up to his adversary! Oh that God the Holy Spirit may preserve our faith in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, so that we may be preserved without spot until the day of his appearing! 7. He entreated Jesus, But if You can do anything, take pity on us and help us! Jesus responded, If You can! The opposite of doubt is not a leap in the dark. The source of our doubts is not a lack of evidence. But next: for the beginning of sin is like the letting out of water, and we go from bad to worse, he went over to the Lords enemies. angels fallen angel names god heaven moloch lucifer hell against according been cast earth revelation days metaphor He grasps one of them, and drags him down the hill, and the willing people follow, dragging by the hair of their heads the false priests down to the brook; and then, stripping to his sleeves he dyes himself with the gore blood of these, the haters of God and the betrayers of his people, until the brook runs red with the flowing blood of Baals priests. No, he acted on his own authority, and a man will soon find that his head is full of addled brains that can judge without appealing to God. It seems to us that David had not prayed. In that society, being childless was a matter of reproach (1:25). When we go through times of doubt, we need to make sure we arecritical of our doubts as well. Why give your doubt a courtesy you dont give your faith? But I shall say no strong words in the preface, because I think the incident in Davids history, to which I shall call your attention this morning, will be in itself enough to lead you to give your verdict with mine, that unbelief is a damnable sin, that it should be condemned by every believer, should be struggled against, should if possible be subdued, and certainly should be the object of our deep repentance and abhorrence. If the answer is no and you cannot readily identify anything as the cause, dont push the issue. He structured these early narratives with this purpose in mind. Sometimes we want all the answers. If temporary unbelief is so dreadful, what must habitual unbelief be? How can you discern whether a persons doubts are honest questions or a smokescreen for his sin? Then again, you must remember, David had passed through some vivid experiences. My Father who gave them me, is greater than all, and no man is able to pluck them out of my Fathers hand? Where would be the doctrines of grace? If your faith fails, everything else goes down with it; and you, you hoary headed professor, will be as big a fool as a very boy, if God lets you alone.