Like Jesus’ disciples, we often look for life amongst dead works. We worry about things that God has already taken care of. We are afraid of things that we should not be afraid of, and we often weep and mourn when it’s totally unnecessary. Further, we often doubt when we should believe, just like his disciples did. When Mary Magdalene told Jesus’ disciples that she had seen the Risen Lord, Mark 16:11 says, “They would not believe it.” They did not believe Mary. Then Jesus appeared to the two on the road to Emmaus, and these two went and told them also, but verse 13 says, “and they did not believe them.” They wouldn’t believe the witnesses. They must have thought they were hallucinating or lying. By the way, many non-believers today argue the same way. The disciples experienced a mass hallucination, or they plotted to tell a lie! They just can’t believe it. This is the case for many people in the world today.
But like the doubting disciples, they did believe in something! They believed in themselves. In one of my favorite movies, “Joe Versus the Volcano,” Tom Hanks asks Meg Ryan, “Do you believe in God.” Her reply fascinated Joe (played by Tom). She said, “I believe in myself.” Joe responds, “I get bored when I think about myself.” Later, he witnesses a huge, gorgeous moon rising over the ocean’s horizon. Just before he passes out from dehydration, He falls to his knees and says, “I have forgotten how big… God, thank you for my life.” In the world we live most people don’t believe. A web search reports, “According to the latest international survey data, as reported by Ariela Keysar and Juhem Navarro-Rivera in the recently published Oxford Handbook of Atheism, there are approximately 450-500 million non-believers in God worldwide.” They just can’t believe it.
If they could see it, touch it, taste it, smell it, or rationalize it, they might believe in it. All men are believers. Everyone believes in something. When people refuse to believe the witness and testimony of eyewitnesses to the resurrection, they just embrace another object upon which to place their confidence or devotion. Paul says man is inclined to reject the intuitive existence of God and turn to worship sticks and stones and beasts, etc. Unbelief in our age has become a little more sophisticated. But it’s all the same. We either believe in God or we believe in ourselves, but the truth is, we all believe in something. The comic Steve Martin once said, “It’s so hard to believe in anything anymore . . . I guess I wouldn’t believe in anything if it weren’t for my lucky Astrology Mood Watch.” No one believes in nothing. Everyone has faith. The only differences are in the object of our faith and its intensity. Luke tells us in Acts 16:31, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved.”