Strong Faith without All the Evidence

“Then went in also that other disciple, which came first to the sepulchre, and he saw, and believed. For as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead.” (Joh 20:8-9 AV)

The other disciple is John, the beloved.  What is of note here is the Holy Spirit seems to want to make the point they believed without the support of scripture.  Or, at least their knowledge of the scripture.  The Old Testament is not silent concerning the prophecy of the resurrection.  Psalm 16:10 and the seventy weeks of Daniel chapter nine are good places to start.  What John and the others had was the word of the Savior.  He promised he would rise again and even used Jonah as the Old Testament type.  So, what do we take away from all this?  Do we abandon the written word of God for an intuition, a voice, or another source of opinion?  No.  Not at all.  Peter makes it abundantly clear the written word of God is the surest manifestation of God’s will and voice.  What we can understand is this.  Faith does not necessarily need particulars.  John and the others may not have been able to point to the particulars of the Messiah’s death and resurrection as revealed in the word of God.  They were not learned men.  They were fishermen and laborers.  What they could point to was the teaching of the Savior for the past three years and an understanding of truth without the ability to perfectly understand or articulate it.  This is important for the believer to understand.

The Bible tells us to study.  And that, we should.  We are no advocating uninformed faith.  Others may call it blind faith.  Nor are we advocating the learned are to learned to see the truth of scripture because they cannot see the forest through the trees.  What we are observing is that we need not study something to death in order to accept the truth.  Sometimes, faith is based on what we do not realize we know until after we accept it.  There are many examples of this.  In particular, the very nature of God.  Because we are not God, we will never be able to perfectly understand Him.  How He works out His attributes can be seen.  And perhaps, at least to a point, understood how.  But to perfectly understand God is impossible no matter how much revelation He gives.  That doesn’t mean we stop believing.

Jesus told his disciples He would rise on the third day.  John and the others believed Jesus to be the Messiah.  So, when the Son of God told them what He was going to do, even though they didn’t know exactly what scriptures to point to at the time, they still choose to believe.  Here is the important truth in all this.  The written word of God did indeed verify the spoken word of God.  We know this because Peter and the others quoted Psalm 16:10 as proof of the resurrection and not their faith in what they choose to believe.  So, when we are faced with doubt over revealed truth, let us hold onto it until verified by further truth.  But let us also not reject truth that we know to be true just because we have questions or there are a few pieces of the puzzle still missing.  Otherwise, we become the authority upon which our beliefs rest rather then what God has said.