The speaker on the radio stated that faith was faith because we can’t prove
it. My logical, proof-preferring self, went, “Wow!! Is he ever
right!!” God never intended for us to be able to prove the essence of our
Christian faith. For all the digging we can sometimes do, for all the
ancient manuscripts we can scrutinize, for all the historical accounts we can
lay beside our Bibles, for all the arguments we can find cleverly devised words
for – for all of this, we still come back to the fact that what faith believes
cannot be proven. God’s Word itself does not attempt to prove the existence
of God, but then neither does God’s Word attempt to prove itself.
We must accept both by faith, and base our lives, our beliefs, our reasoning,
our purpose, and our eternity on what we cannot prove. For some of you,
that is a relief. You are as logical and proof-preferring as I am, and
you have this inner hankering to somehow touch and feel, see and fully
comprehend, and have a sense of concrete objectivity. But, you can’t.
And that is the essence of faith.
Hebrews 11 tells us, “Faith is the confident assurance that what we hope for is
going to happen. It is the evidence of things we cannot yet see.” But
we still can’t prove any of it. It goes on, “By faith we understand
that the entire universe was formed at God’s command.” We can argue and
debate, and present lofty sounding analysis and comparisons, but we still can’t
prove it. The skeletal foundation of our faith is presented in the
words, “It is impossible to please God without faith. Anyone who wants to
come to him must believe that there is a God and that he rewards those who
sincerely seek him.”
Faith causes people to attempt the impossible and the illogical and sometimes
it even runs contrary to normal human instinct. Noah built an immensely
large “boat,” because water was going to come down out of the sky, and a lot of
it, something that had never happened before. Abraham had no idea where
he was going, but God said, “go,” and Abraham went. He and his wife,
Sarah, astounded gynecological history when they listened to a promise that
said two not-quite-centenarians would have a baby. And a number of years
later, the baby born of that promise, was brought before God as a sacrifice,
and Abraham was still holding onto his faith! Jump to the end of Hebrews
11, and you find faith “rewarded” with torture, death by a sword or stones, and
the “lucky” ones just had their backs cut open with whips, were chained in
dungeons, or wandered aimlessly about, animal skins for clothes, their bellies
hungry for food.
So why hold onto all this “foolishness”??? Faith reveals to us the
God we cannot see. Faith gives us a right standing, an approval, an
acceptance, before the holiness of our God. Faith creates hope.
Faith becomes the balancing scale of what has worth and value, and what
doesn’t. Faith gives us purpose. Faith gives confidence.
Faith relieves our fears of the temporal, and literally opens our eyes to the
eternal. Faith strengthens and encourages, and causes us to move
forward. Faith shouts to us from the pages of biblical history and from
the lives today of other believers. Why? Because there is
for all of us far better things in the mind of our God, things for our benefit,
the prize to be received at the end of our earthly race.
(Related Bible reading: Hebrews 11:1-40)
