Faith

I’d like to encourage you to read Hebrews 11. Much as Psalm 119 is a tribute to God’s teaching and counsel (the Law), this chapter of Hebrews is a sweeping, exuberant, compelling paean to faith. It begins:

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

It is followed, verse by verse, like this:

By faith we understand…

By faith Abel offered to God…

By faith Enoch was taken away…

But without faith it is impossible to please Him…

By faith Noah…

By faith Abraham…

By faith he dwelt…

By faith Sarah…

These all died in faith…

By faith Isaac…

By faith Jacob…

By faith Joseph…

By faith Moses…

By faith he forsook Egypt…

By faith he kept the Passover…

By faith they passed through the Red Sea…

By faith the walls of Jericho fell down…

By faith the harlot Rahab did not perish…

 

And then concludes:

And what more shall I say? For the time would fail me to tell of Gideon and Barak and Samson and Jephthah, also of David and Samuel and the prophets: who through faith subdued kingdoms, worked righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, became valiant in battle, turned to fight the armies of the aliens.

Women received their dead raised to life again.

Others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection.

Still others had trial of mockings and scourgings, yes, and of chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, were tempted, were slain with the sword.

They wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented—of whom the world was not worthy.

They wandered in deserts and mountains, in dens and caves of the earth.

And all these, having obtained a good testimony through faith, did not receive the promise, God having provided something better for us, that they should not be made perfect apart from us.

Hebrews 11 is an intense and sweeping depiction of faith, and the testimony to faith’s centrality to life in God. It speaks both of the immediate results of faith, and also of delayed results—where God’s higher purposes subsumed faith until a greater result would be revealed.

Faith is key to life in God.

There is a kind of door into the eternal that is not opened by a rational progression of thought. It comes from two directions:

•          from our believing, we see, and

•          from the power being seen, we believe.

Look at how freely the experience of God appears in Scripture. It is depicted as normative, and normative of belief:

Rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good. (1 Peter 2:1-3, NIV)

If someone makes a purely rational decision to believe in Jesus and accept His offer of salvation, of course He will say, “Amen, welcome into the Kingdom.”

But few people are ever argued logically into the Kingdom, and even at the end of a compelling, logical argument, they must still take that step of faith.

Pascal said, “The heart has its reasons that reason does not know.” (From Pensees)

Thus, instead of being convinced by argument, most recognize their own frailty, their own sinfulness, and their hearts respond to the offer Jesus makes to forgive and accept them. All this requires is that we accept the gift.

In this world we Christians are looked upon as aliens. We are viewed as people with an odd belief system, a strange religion to which we cling. We are often scorned as not really fitting the culture in which we live—and the truth is, we don’t.

Don’t apologize for your faith. Don’t be ashamed of the Gospel. Be willing to take the ridicule. Be willing to be considered an intellectual lightweight, because your faith does not conform to the logic that a skeptic requires of you. Never mind the fact that the skeptic’s faith is built on less.

You should behave instead like God’s very own children, adopted into his family—calling him “Father, dear Father.” For his Holy Spirit speaks to us deep in our hearts and tells us that we are God’s children. And since we are his children, we will share his treasures—for everything God gives to his Son, Christ, is ours, too. (Romans 8:15b-17a, NLT. First Edition)

Faith and belief are very odd things in this day, but the truth is that there isn’t anyone, skeptic or believer, who doesn’t live on faith, who doesn’t live by belief. I can choose, if I want, to believe that the universe began without purpose and without a creator. I can choose to believe, if I wish, that the aggregations of atoms and molecules came together and made life happen purely by accident.

I can’t prove that, however. It is a statement of faith. And as a statement of faith, it does nothing to change how I live or how I behave, how I treat other people, or how I treat my enemies.

And so, in that sense, as much as I might want rationally and skeptically to cling to the accidental-creation theory, I find it of little value. As Kurt Gödel would point out, there are questions, problems, challenges in this system that cannot be solved within this system.

But when I look at Jesus, and I hear what Jesus said about loving God, loving our neighbors as we love ourselves, and loving even our enemies, I find there a truth, a wisdom, a presence and a power that transcends all the rest—that goes beyond it.

God breaks open the physical world in which we are confined, and drives into it an entirely new dimension of life and reality. If we taste it, we find that it is good.

C.S. Lewis said:

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. (From “Is Theology Poetry?”  1945)

If I have to choose one or the other, skepticism or faith, accident or intentional creation, deduction or presence, then though I will fail again and again in so many ways, nevertheless:

I choose to believe so that I might see.

In Christ,

Pastor George