RICH DUBOSE

Perhaps the cry of humanity can be summed in Zechariah’s response to the angel of the Lord, immediately after Zechariah had been told that that he and his wife Elizabeth would have a son who would play a significant role in the Messiah’s arrival.

Zechariah and Elizabeth were very old, which made the prediction seem far-fetched. So Zechariah said, “How can I be sure this will happen?” (Luke 1:18, NLT).

When God speaks to you, do you not at times wonder, “How can I be sure this will happen?”

Abraham and Sarah wondered the same thing when God said that in her old age Sarah would bear a promised son. Not only did she question the prediction, but she laughed with the thought, “that’s ridiculous.” Merriam-Webster defines “ridiculous” as something that arouses or deserves ridicule: “extremely silly or unreasonable: Absurd, Preposterous.” That’s how Sarah felt about God’s prediction.

When the disciple Thomas was told by his fellow disciples that Jesus had risen from the dead, he essentially said, “I won’t believe this [ridiculous] thing unless I see him myself and touch his wounds. Otherwise, how can I be sure?”

This was the same question Eve faced in the Garden when the snake in the tree told her death wasn’t real and that God was lying through his teeth. This was the first dose of “alternative facts” the world had ever experienced, and unfortunately, Eve fell for it.

Because of Faith

In Hebrews, Paul’s answers the question, “How can I be sure?” with this statement:

“Faith is the assurance of what we hope for and the certainty of what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1, NLT).

Zechariah was looking for assurance when he asked the angel, “How can I be sure this will happen?” (Luke 1:18, NLT).

Sarah suffered from a lack of assurance when she laughed at God’s prediction that she would have a son way past her child-bearing years.

Thomas doubted because he wanted more evidence—more assurance that Jesus was actually alive. And what did Jesus tell him when he finally revealed himself to Thomas?

“Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29, NIV).

In other words, you are blessed because you see the hard evidence of my physical being, but there is an additional blessing for those who believe, based upon the soft evidence of the testimony of others.

If I tell you about Jesus and it changes the trajectory of your life, that means you have allowed the measure of faith that God gave you to pave the way for him to do “impossible and ridiculous things” in your life.

Zachariah, Sarah and Thomas each tried to make the wild and unpredictable (ridiculous) actions of God fit their tame domesticated versions of reality. But what they discovered was that God couldn’t be put on a leash.

“‘My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,’ says the LORD. ‘And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts’” (Isaiah 55:8-9, NLT).

If we have a hard time believing God because what he’s telling us seems unreasonable, maybe we’re using the wrong pretext to decide what to believe. In a world of “reasonable” realities that end in death, maybe we need to embrace the unreasonable, the ridiculous, and what the world calls insane.

We can be sure of what God says because he has given each of us a measure of faith that contains enough assurance to believe, even when it seems ridiculous.