The Death of Doubt in the Death of Christ

In my first year of university, I took a course titled “The World History of Crime”. The course played out just as the title suggests: we examined crime, punishment, and criminal justice across various societies throughout the annals of time, beginning with the Ancient Mesopotamians and ending with Hitler’s Nazi Germany. 

My professor, a lawyer and former resident of the Soviet Union, was a well-read man who took the time to pour over ancient law codes and punishment practices to give us a comprehensive picture of global history through the lens of criminology. Though my professor himself may not have admitted it, the reality is that ever since brother struck brother outside of the Garden in humanity’s youth, our world has been consumed with crime, bloodshed, and violence. Our history, the story of humanity, is one of crime - crime against one another, and above all, cosmic treason against a holy God. But thanks be to God that, for those of us in Christ, our story does not end in misery - ours is a story of rags to riches, from dust to glory.

While a good deal of that course is now lost from my memory, there is, however, one ancient punishment that I will not soon forget. In Ancient Rome, presumably before crucifixion became widespread, Emperors would in some cases punish convicted murderers by chaining them to the corpse of the person they had killed, binding the two in a dark dance until both were joined together in death. Virgil, the Roman Poet, describes the grotesque practice in this way:

“The living and the dead at his command were coupled face to face, and hand to hand; Till choked with stench, in loathed embraces tied, The lingering wretches pined away and died.”

I remember this particular method of execution so vividly because of the obvious bearing it has upon our understanding of the Christian life. Before God saved me, I was not an innocent man who happened to be chained to a dead sinner - I was both the dead man and the murderer. “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked” (Ephesians 2:1). Let's forever banish the notion that when Christ saves us He delivers us from sin that is merely outside of us; no, it is from sin within our very hearts, the "sins in which [we] once walked." Outside of Jesus Christ, we were both murderer and dead man bound together in one - dead men walking.

But God.

In the Lord Jesus Christ, I am no longer a dead man enslaved to sin and self, but “a new creation”, for the “old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (1 Corinthians 5:17). That great gulf between God and I has been bridged in the man Christ Jesus, God the Son, and I have now “put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator” (Colossians 3:9-10). Through the gospel of Christ, God as cosmic Emperor unchains us from death, rather than binding us eternally to it. 

And yet, why is it that I feel I am choked daily with the stench of that old man? As though we are yet still, as Virgil put it, “in loathed embraces tied”? Why is it that, like Paul, the cry of my soul so often is, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24). When such thoughts arise, we must, as Paul did, preach the truth back into our minds: “Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:25). Indeed, we must cultivate the daily habit of preaching to ourselves from the truth of Scripture, rather than listening to ourselves from the bottomless pit of our own deceitful flesh. Martin Lloyd-Jones made much of preaching to yourself with Scripture during his ministry:

“Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?”

However, we would be remiss to say that our thoughts in this case are entirely wrong. We are, as Paul makes clear throughout the book of Romans, people in whose flesh “nothing good dwells” (Romans 7:18). Make no mistake, our garments - our minds and flesh - are stained with sin. We are in Christ, yet the stench of that old man is never far-off. Paul himself wrestled with this tension daily. In Romans, he openly pens this struggle in such a way that all believers may find resonance in his words: “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15). 

Indeed, our thoughts according to the flesh are not deceitful merely because they tell us that we are wretched, for we are, but rather the mind of the flesh is deceitful because it proposes only doom and completely dismisses the finished work of Christ on our behalf. That is why we must preach to ourselves and not listen to ourselves. As believers in Christ, we are in a constant state of pilgrimage from this life into the next, “being renewed in knowledge after the image of [our] Creator”. As we get closer to our thrice-holy God, it is only natural that we begin to see, taste, and hate the indwelling presence of sin in ourselves more and more. But, no matter how much sin we see, we must always keep our hearts fixed on Christ.

And yet, sometimes that voice within us is awfully loud. Sometimes, that dead man draws close to our face and with his rotting breath whispers into our ears, “There is no salvation for you in God” (Psalm 3:2). Whether it be the flesh, devil, or both shouting at us, the reality can so often be thus: we begin to doubt, to despair, and lose sight of our Lord amid the sound and fury of our own minds. The moment we take our gaze off Jesus and move it onto ourselves, our works, or our circumstances, we begin to stumble and fall amidst the waves of this life, just as Peter did upon the raging sea itself.

As a young Christian, I wrestled with this dreaded foe we call ‘doubt’, with the very assurance of my salvation. I don’t recall how or why such doubts surfaced; one moment my newly blossoming life in Christ was making leaps and bounds and the next, I doubted. I did not doubt His ability or promise to save, mind you, but I doubted my own faith in Him, and I soon became overwhelmed with the torrents of my own sin around me and found my soul stumbling, sinking.

It is one thing to realize and even taste for yourself the depths and depravity of your own sin, but it is another to doubt the promises of God. We may say that our doubt arises out of a despair over our own sin and not over His faithfulness - as I claimed when I was in the throes and pangs of doubt - but that simply will not do. To acknowledge your sin is one matter, but to obsessively fixate on it is another. Indeed, it is nothing but a form of unchecked self-pity, a shade of pride that ‘humbly’ swaths itself not as “holier than thou” but as “more wretched than thou”. In both instances the sin is the same: a preoccupation with self over Christ. Make no mistake, to claim that our own personal sin is somehow out of the bounds of God’s grace and Christ’s redeeming work is to doubt His character and promises. Self-pity is not piety, it is pride.

When doubts arise, which they will from time to time, there is but one remedy: look unto Jesus. Indeed, the death of doubt is found only in the death of Christ. Not in our works or in the strength of our faith, but in Him. As the hymn goes,

“Upon a life I have not lived, Upon a death I did not die, Another’s life, Another’s death, I stake my whole eternity.” 

Assurance is found and secured in His finished work upon the cross whereby the Father has “forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This He set aside, nailing it to the cross” (Colossians 2:13-14). Cast your soul upon these truths, upon the reality that “a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ” (Galatians 2:16). As the great 18th-century evangelist George Whitfield so vehemently declared, “What! Get to heaven on your own strength? Why, you might as well try to climb to the moon on a rope of sand!”

Look unto Jesus in the Gospels, and then take hold of these glorious truths through faith. And what is faith? As Dr. Stephen Yuille so wonderfully and simply puts it, “Faith is the hand of the soul by which we receive Christ and become one with Him.” This faith is not of our own meritorious concoction, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not as a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). We are saved by Him and for Him, secured eternally in the unbroken chain of salvation that Paul lays out:

“And those whom He predestined He also called, and those whom He called He also justified, and those whom He justified He also glorified” (Romans 8:30). 

Did you catch that, dear believer? Our ultimate glorification in the presence of Christ in eternity is in the past-tense, “He also glorified” - in the mind of God, our glorification is as good as done. And so, rest in the finished work of the Lord Jesus; let all doubt perish in the presence of not only His death, but His resurrection. Rest in the truth of both His promises and His character, for they are one and the same. 

Cast yourself upon Him who died not only for many, but for men in particular - for you, and for me. When that dead corpse draws near, when your own thoughts spit out all manner of filth against the heart of Christ, pay no mind - these lies are but the lingering rattles of death in a flesh, Devil, and world that are passing away. Rather, rest in the words of God Himself, and preach them to your own soul: “And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).