From Matthew 11:2-6 / “Are You the One?”

Commentators are divided as to what was behind John sending his disciples to Jesus.

J.C. Ryle, similar to Calvin for instance, thinks this was by no means a moment of doubt in John. John, knowing his time was short, was getting his own followers to make the necessary shift to Jesus. After all, hadn’t John been the first to proclaim who Jesus was and that, by supernatural revelation? One would think he was by not shaken in the least.

Others speculate that John, expecting Jesus’ to rise to a more common vision of Messiahship, began to doubt his identification of Jesus as the Messiah. In prison, facing death when he thought the Messiah would change everything, was near fainting.

Which ever view one takes (I tend to think as Ryle and Calvin) this much is certain – how often the answers to our deepest questions and concerns are right there before us – we simply need to truly contemplate what it is we see and hear.

Men say they need “proof” of God. Open your eyes and your ears – and you will have all the proof you need. Fail at that, and no other proof will suffice.

So Jesus sends the men back asking them to bear witness to what they themselves have seen and heard. The blind are given sight. The lame walk. Lepers are fully cured. Deaf men hear. The dead are raised up again. The Gospel of the Kingdom is being preached to even the poor. What more can you ask for proof?

Indeed, what more might you are I or anyone else need? Are not the life, words and acts of Jesus incontrovertible proof of His divinity and mission? He was a public figure. His detractors could have easily disproved His miracles if they had been false. But no one does. His contemporaries may try to assign the source of His works to demonic powers – but they could not deny they truly happened.

And so I ask you today reader – what do you say to these things? What do you make of the evidence?

Note secondly, that we must not reject the obvious truth because it does not fit with our pre-conceived notions.

Jesus may not have been the Messiah they imagined the Messiah would be – but here He was, fulfilling Scripture. Jesus appeals to Isaiah 61:1-2 in giving His answer. As He would say to the Pharisees, “If you believed Moses, you would believe me.” And, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.”

Maybe the Jesus of the Bible isn’t the Jesus we want Him to be or imagined Him to be. Many a time I’ve heard people say – upon reading something in Scripture they do not like – “I would never serve a God like that.

No less than Oprah Winfrey testified that she abandoned the God of the Bible because she read in the Old Testament that God said He was a jealous God over His people Israel. She had weighed God in her balances and found Him wanting in His being “jealous” which she thought beneath Him. That God, she would not have.

But God and His Christ must be received on their own terms. We cannot re-create Him to our likeness. We must take Him in His wrath as well as His mercy. In His sovereignty as well as in His love. His holiness as well as His grace. His demands, as well as His blessings.

We may well need to reject the God of our imaginations, but we dare not reject the God revealed in the Bible, and in the face of Jesus Christ. Do not stumble over who and what He truly is.

Father, save us from our heart’s blindness and deafness. We are so dead and dull. Open our eyes, that we may truly see and comprehend His glory. It isn’t that the Sun hasn’t risen upon us and shined in His perfection – it is that we are blind. Save us!