The God Who Answers Questions
This article responds to David Courchaine's sermon "Spiritual and Logical Clarity," streamed July 22, 2026, in which he presented Zacharias as a warning against being "stuck in logical clarity," that is, against asking for evidence. It is part of our series of responses to Message followers. Scripture is quoted from the King James Version.
The God Who Answers Questions
In his July sermon, David Courchaine held up Zacharias as a warning.
You remember the story. An angel tells the old priest that his wife Elizabeth will bear a son. Zacharias asks, "Whereby shall I know this? for I am an old man, and my wife well stricken in years." He is struck silent until the child is born. David reads this as a caution: do not be the man who asks for proof. Zacharias was "stuck in logical clarity," and it cost him his voice.
It is a striking lesson. The trouble is that the chapter it comes from teaches something close to the opposite. So let's look at the evidence, all of it, and not just one verse.
A small correction first
David called Zacharias a high priest, "the best of the best," a man who "knew more about the miracles of the Bible than anybody else." That is not what Luke says. Luke calls him "a certain priest named Zacharias, of the course of Abia." He was one of thousands of ordinary priests who served in rotations. Being chosen to burn incense was a once-in-a-lifetime honor decided by lot, precisely because there were so many priests. This matters only a little, but it matters, because David's whole framing leans on Zacharias being a spiritual expert who should have known better. He was a faithful ordinary man having the most extraordinary morning of his life.
Now to the heart of it.
Mary asked too
Read a few verses further in the same chapter. The same angel, Gabriel, appears to a young woman named Mary and tells her she will bear a son. And Mary answers with a question of her own: "How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?"
Mary asked. She was not struck silent. Gabriel answered her. He explained that the Holy Ghost would come upon her, and then he did something worth noticing. He gave her evidence. He told her that her cousin Elizabeth, old and long past childbearing, was already six months pregnant, and he said, "For with God nothing shall be impossible."
So here are two people, in one chapter, both visited by the same angel, both told they will have a miraculous son, and both responding with a question. One is silenced. One is answered and handed a sign to check.
If the lesson were simply "do not ask," Mary broke it. She asked, and heaven answered her kindly.
So the difference cannot be the asking. It has to be something underneath the asking.
The difference was the heart, not the question
Here is the honest distinction, and I am not going to soften it. When Gabriel silenced Zacharias, he gave a reason: "because thou believest not my words, which shall be fulfilled in their season." Zacharias's question came from unbelief. He was not asking how the promise would work. He was doubting that it would happen at all, standing in the temple, with an angel in front of him.
Mary's question was different in spirit. She did not doubt that it would happen. She asked how it would happen, and then she said, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word." She believed, and she wanted to understand.
So the line God draws is not between asking and not asking. It is between a heart that trusts and a heart that refuses to. Both can ask questions. God is not offended by the question. He reads the heart behind it.
And even then, look at what happened to Zacharias. He was not cast out. He was not stripped of his priesthood or called a false believer. His prayer was still answered. His son was still John the Baptist, the greatest prophet of his age. And when the child was born and Zacharias wrote "His name is John," his mouth was opened, and he was filled with the Holy Ghost and prophesied. The silence was a temporary, gentle correction, not a disqualification.
That is not the story of a God who punishes people for wanting to know. It is the story of a God patient enough to walk a doubting man all the way to prophecy.
And then there was his son
Now watch what happens a generation later, because it is the same family, and it is remarkable.
Zacharias's son, John the Baptist, grew up to be the forerunner. He baptized Jesus. He called Him the Lamb of God. No one on earth had better reason to be certain of who Jesus was.
And then John was thrown into Herod's prison, and he began to doubt. He sent his own disciples to ask Jesus directly: "Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?"
This is the greatest of the prophets, doubting the very Messiah he had announced. If ever there was a moment for a rebuke, for "how dare you question," this was it.
Jesus did not rebuke him. He answered with evidence: "Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see: The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up." Go tell John what you have seen.
And then, with John's doubt still hanging in the air, Jesus turned to the crowd and said, "Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist."
The doubt did not lower him. Jesus answered the question and praised the man in the same breath.
Do you see the pattern across the two generations? The father asked, and God corrected him gently and restored him. The son asked, and Jesus answered him with evidence and honored him. In neither case did the question end the relationship. In both cases, God met the doubt and stayed.
This is who God is
This is not a stray theme. It runs through the whole Bible.
When Paul preached in Berea, the people did not simply take his word for it. They "searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so." Scripture does not scold them. It calls them "more noble" for checking. Paul himself wrote, "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." The apostle John wrote, "try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
Test. Search. Prove. Try. These are not the words of a faith that fears questions. They are commands to ask them.
So when a message tells you that asking for evidence is being "stuck in logical clarity," that doubt is Satan's ground, that the honest question is the enemy's trap, hold that up against the God of Scripture. The God of Scripture answered Mary. He restored Zacharias. He sent evidence to John the Baptist in his prison cell. He called the Bereans noble for fact-checking an apostle.
The thing you are being warned away from is the very thing God invites.
The honest question
If you are inside the Message and you have questions you have been afraid to ask, questions about a prophecy, a story, a claim, I want you to hear this plainly. Your questions do not put you outside God's reach. They put you in the company of Mary, and of John the Baptist, and of the Bereans.
God is not nervous about your questions. He never has been. A message that is true has nothing to fear from them either.
So ask them. Search the Scriptures, whether these things are so.
That is not doubt. According to the Book of Acts, that is what noble people do.