📖 Bible Characters II — Unit 6: John the Baptist — The Forerunner Who Doubted in the Dark

Of John the Baptist the Lord Jesus said that among those born of women there had not risen anyone greater. He was the forerunner of the Messiah, a preacher who moved multitudes and turned a nation toward repentance. And yet this giant of faith, shut up in a dungeon, was shaken by doubt. His story is a comfort to every believer who has ever wondered in the dark, because it shows us that Christ answers honest doubt not with a rebuke but with evidence.

Subject: John the Baptist — the forerunner who doubted in the dark.

Proposition: Even the greatest born of women can be shaken in the prison of discouragement, and Christ answers honest doubt with evidence, not rebuke.

We will follow three movements in his life.

I. The Forerunner

John's life was a miracle from the start. He was born to Zacharias the priest and his wife Elizabeth in their old age, long past the years of childbearing, his birth announced beforehand by the angel Gabriel (Luke 1). He grew up to become the wilderness preacher of repentance, a rugged figure in camel's hair crying, "Prepare the way of the LORD." Crowds streamed out to hear him and to be baptized, confessing their sins. His was a baptism of repentance, a public turning from sin to make ready for the Lord. He feared no one. When the proud religious leaders came out to him, he called them a brood of vipers and warned them not to trust in their ancestry, for "the axe is laid to the root of the trees." Yet for all his fire he never drew attention to himself. "One mightier than I is coming," he said, "whose sandal strap I am not worthy to loose; He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire." He knew he was only the herald of a greater King. Then one day his own cousin came to him at the Jordan, and John baptized Jesus, and saw the Spirit descend on Him like a dove. From that moment John pointed every eye away from himself and toward Christ:

That was the whole purpose of his life. When his own disciples grew jealous that the crowds were now going to Jesus, John gave one of the noblest answers in all of Scripture:

Here was a great man content to grow smaller so that Christ might grow greater. He knew he was only the friend of the Bridegroom, only the voice, only the one who came before. There is no truer mark of greatness than that.

II. The Doubt in Prison

But the story takes a dark turn. John had fearlessly rebuked Herod for taking his brother's wife, and for speaking that truth he was thrown into prison. There, in the damp and the silence, cut off from the open sky and the rushing river and the crowds, the great preacher grew discouraged. And as discouragement settled over him, doubt crept in. He who had baptized the Messiah, who had heard the voice from heaven and seen the descending dove, now sent his disciples to ask a question that must have cost him dearly:

It is a stunning thing that John, of all people, could come to such a question. What had shaken him? Most likely it was the gap between what he had expected of the Messiah and what he now heard. John had preached a Christ who would come with fire and judgment, whose winnowing fan was in His hand to clear the threshing floor. But the reports drifting into his cell told of a gentle Healer who preached good news to the poor and left the wicked Herod on his throne — and left John himself in chains. If Jesus was truly the Coming One, John may have wondered, why am I still here in the dark? But discouragement does that to the soul; in the prison of the dark, we forget what we knew so clearly in the light. Notice how the Lord Jesus answered him. He did not scold John, did not shame him, did not strip him of his calling. He simply pointed to the evidence:

In other words: John, you already know. You have already seen the proof; go back to it. The works of the Christ were being done in plain sight, exactly as the prophets had foretold. John's problem was not a lack of evidence; he had seen the evidence with his own eyes. His problem was that in the prison of discouragement he had forgotten it. And then, the moment John's disciples had gone, Jesus turned to the crowd and honored the very man who had just doubted Him: "Among those born of women there has not risen one greater than John the Baptist" (Matthew 11:11). The Lord did not love John any less for his dark hour.

III. The Remedy — Go Back to Christ

This is a particular kind of doubt: not the doubt of whether God exists, but the doubt of one's own standing — the question that whispers in the dark, "Am I really His at all?" I remember when my own wife asked me one day how I dealt with doubt. I began to explain the old questions I had wrestled with about whether God was even there, but she stopped me. "No," she said, "I have never doubted that God is there. I have been doubting whether I am really a Christian." That is the John the Baptist doubt, and many of God's dearest children pass through it. John was not the first giant brought low this way. Elijah, fresh from calling down fire on Mount Carmel, fled into the wilderness, sat down under a juniper tree, and asked God to let him die. And how did the Lord answer His discouraged prophet? Not with a scolding, but with sleep, and food, and a gentle voice. God deals tenderly with weary saints. He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust. Discouragement is not the same as unbelief, and the Lord does not break the bruised reed.

The cure is not to chase a feeling. Feelings rise and fall; we have good days and bad days, and a person may even be weighed down by a chemical imbalance that has nothing to do with faith at all. If our assurance rests on how we feel, it will blow away with the next cold wind. Assurance must rest on Christ and on His promises. John wrote his letter for exactly this reason:

God means for His children to know. And the Lord Himself has given the promise that holds us when every feeling fails:

When doubt creeps in, the remedy is not to look inward at our wavering hearts but to look back to what Christ has shown us and outward to what He has promised. We go back to the cross, back to the empty tomb, back to the sure Word, and we rest there. Doubt is not always sin, and it is not the end of faith. Often it is simply the soul's exhaustion crying out in the dark, and the answer is not to despair but to look again at the One who has never failed. The same Christ who sent word to John in his prison sends His Word to us in ours, and that Word is enough.

John never came out of that prison. Herod, trapped by a rash oath made at a banquet, had him beheaded to please a dancing girl and her vengeful mother (Mark 6). The greatest man born of women died in a cell for telling the truth. But he died the Lord's, and his dark hour of doubt did not undo him, because his standing never rested on his feelings in the first place; it rested on the Christ he had pointed others to all along.

So take heart, you who serve God and yet sometimes wonder in the night. Discouragement can shake even a giant of faith. But the answer is always the same: go back to Christ. Return to what He has shown you and to what He has promised, for your assurance rests on Him, and "He must increase" while every doubt grows small in His light.