Afterwords -- week 49
"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1)
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” (T. S. Eliot)
November 26, 2022
Dear friends,
People today have very different views about what's real and what's valuable. According to the Bible, we humans seek to escape reality (i.e., truth) for the untrue-but-seeming reality of falsehoods (Gen 3:4-5; Jn 8:44; Rev 12:10). Because we are fallen creatures, we want to be gods, able to create our own identity and our own universe (or metaverse) without God. Often Christians, along with other religious people, are accused of avoiding reality, when in fact, it is the great mass of humanity who tries to escape the reality of sin, judgment, and death, as well as dismissing (or deconstructing) the offer of forgiveness and eternal life, accomplished by Christ in (real) history.
FATHER ABRAHAM. Scripture presents the patriarch Abraham, along with his wife Sarah, as examples of faith, specifically, the kind of faith which pleases God. In Romans chapter 4 Abraham is the example of saving, or justifying, faith. In James chapter 2 he is the example of obedient, working faith. In Hebrews chapter 11 he is seen in his prevailing, persevering faith. I've been pondering these examples of Abraham and Sarah and the other heroes of faith. By faith they welcomed God's promises, obeyed and followed the Lord, and looked forward to the unseen, future city of God, "the better country" (v 16). They successfully endured trials and testing. Father Abraham is not just an example of initial faith, but of ongoing faith.
SEEING THE UNSEEN. The theme of Hebrews 11 is that the people who believe God are those who have received his promises about unseen realities, and so, will act and live differently. Their heart's compass is Godward. They take God at his word and are able to resist temptations and persecutions in order to follow the Lord in obedience. Their real identity is as children and heirs of God, but they are willing, like Jesus, to live as strangers and aliens in this world. They embrace their calling as holy exiles on earth (vv 35-39). They behold a different reality, and it's the real one. Faith is the assurance and the conviction that what God has said is true, and that what he has promised will come to pass (v 1). Faith is considering that God himself is faithful to fulfill his promises (v 11). It is a kind of "seeing the unseen" (v 3, 27).
FAITH AS RECKONING. By faith we stand upon God's word, and we trust his character, not just initially (justification), but also as we live in this world (sanctification). Faith is a kind of reckoning, or accounting (v 11-19). Students of the Greek text will note the use of λογίζομαι in verse 19, which means to "reckon, count, calculate, take into account" (cf. Rom 6:11). We, like Abraham and Sarah, count something to be true even when we have little or no direct evidence. It's like trusting the word of our accountant, or our bank statement when it tells us how much money we have. Or it's like a pilot who flies by his instruments when his sight and senses can't be trusted. Abraham and Sarah's faith was a kind of calculation, a reasoned evaluation, based upon unseen-but-real data.
MOMENT-BY-MOMENT. So, faith is a daily reckoning. As believers, we are to walk in an ongoing conviction about unseen things. Not just at the beginning of our salvation, but all throughout. We are to reckon certain things to be true, moment-by-moment, truths about the universe, about God and his promises, about his Son, about what he has accomplished, about the cross and empty tomb, about how we are to live, what the future looks like, and what is the real value of life here and now. A Christian is one who daily takes God into account, taking him at his word in every circumstance. One book that has been a great help to me, and perhaps the greatest influence on my Christian life over the past forty years, is True Spirituality, by Francis Schaeffer (Tyndale House, 1971, 2001, 2012)...
"The Christian life means living in the two halves of reality: the supernatural and the natural parts. I would suggest that it is perfectly possible for a Christian to be so infiltrated by twentieth-century thinking that he lives most of his life as though the supernatural were not there... If we are to bring forth fruit in the Christian life, or rather, if Christ is to bring forth this fruit through us by the agency of the Holy Spirit, there must be a constant act of faith, of thinking, 'Upon the basis of your promises I am looking for you to fulfill them, O my Jesus Christ; bring forth your fruit through me into this poor world.'"
Here are a few more excerpts from this classic book.
ARTICLES OF NOTE.
-- Pray for migrant workers, and Christians, who reside in Qatar.
-- AI "negotiation agents" could "manipulate political views, execute financial scams, or extract sensitive information."
-- How one Christian school addressed critical theory.
-- 1440 is a free daily news summary, edited to be as unbiased as humanly possible.
FINAL QUOTE. “Faith is reason at rest in God." (C. H. Spurgeon)
That's it for week 49!
Sandy
Image credit: photo above by Lungelo S. Mthupha on Unsplash. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from The ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.