“Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?”

John the Baptist Luke 7:18

I have heard this passage taught as John having a crisis of faith with an observation that even someone like John can struggle with doubt. But coming to this passage after reading through the OT, I do not see this as doubt or a lack of faith. It is a matter of expecting the Messiah to be significantly different than what Jesus is bringing, and those expectations were based on how the OT prophesied about the Messiah.

The majority of the OT passages anticipating the Messiah are all about a figure who will reward faithful Jews, punish lawless Jews, powerfully defeat Israel’s enemies, and restore Jerusalem and Israel to new heights of glory. The idea that the Messiah is to suffer is like a tiny motif amidst a grand symphony of victorious triumph. It is so diminutive that it has virtually no impact on what people expect from the Messiah. And who is going to pay attention to such an odd idea in the midst of expectations that are so much more appealing?

Focusing on the suffering servant passage in Isaiah 52 & 53, we view the Jewish religious leaders who reject Jesus as clearly evil, refusing to recognize what should have been obvious, that Jesus was the Messiah. But it was not obvious at all. Instead, it was so outside of what everyone expected that even the prophet who had the role of preparing the way for Jesus was confused. And Jesus recognizes the confusion created by OT Messianic expectations when he responds to John, “Blessed is the one who does not stumble on account of me.” (NIV)

To me, this begs the question… Why did God provide through OT prophecy a set of expectations that would cause even faithful Jews to stumble over Jesus? I can imagine that some people would object to this question because it seems to accuse God of doing something wrong, and God cannot do wrong. But I would counter that we need to go where Scripture takes us, even when it does not square with our sense of how things should be. The issue is not whether God would provide misleading expectations or not. The issue is whether the prophecies about the Messiah in the OT are in fact misleading when it comes to recognizing Jesus as the Messiah. And I submit that the OT prophecies about the Messiah generate expectations that do not match with what Jesus brings when He enters into our world as the Christ.

Maybe the takeaway from this is that we easily have the wrong expectations about what God is going to do. So it is important not to cling too strongly to those expectations, but rather hold them loosely and be ready to embrace that God is operating differently than we thought He would, or maybe more to the point, we wanted Him to.

Consider how this applies to our work. A faith that God is good, powerful and cares about our work easily leads to all kinds of expectations of work success. We can imagine outcomes that best reflect the Kingdom of God and those then become our expectations. So what happens to our faith when things turn out very differently? How do those situations cause us to stumble?

One type of stumbling would be to conclude that God must not care about our work after all. Because if He did, our expectations would be fulfilled. Just like John the Baptist questions whether Jesus is the Messiah, we would question whether the teaching that God does care about our work is true.

A simple application from this passage on John the Baptist is to accept that our expectations of what it should look like if God cares about our work can cause us to stumble. So what should we expect? As I ask that question, my mind remembers a previous blog post, A Perspective on Hope. I think that an answer to my question is found there. What do you think?

I would love to connect with you about these posts if they have stirred any thoughts or questions. Take a minute, shoot me an email at bo@leavenedlives.org, and let’s see where that takes us.