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Jim's PERSPECTIVEJuly 08, 2014Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go forth from your country, and from your relatives, and from your father’s house, to the land which I will show you.” Genesis 12:1 By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed by going out to a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was going. Hebrews 11:8 In Romans 4, Paul states that “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” For the apostle—and for all believers–the action of Abraham is the basis of faith: to believe what one hears from God and to act on it. In Abraham’s case, he went out with his family at the behest of God without an awareness of where he was to go. We all are “invited” (more like implored or commanded) to follow the leading of God, aka “The Holy Spirit,” “The Divine Presence,” and for those of us who are Trinitarian in outlook, to follow Jesus, who is the “invisible image of God,” and who, as the Truth, the Life, the Way, promises to “lead us into all Truth.” Furthermore, all those who are counted (considered, regarded, reckoned) by God as “righteous,” will do this thing, which is to “walk by faith and not by sight,” trusting that we will be led to the places, people, and purposes that God has planned and ordained for us. But walking without seeing is not easy to do, and it is scary. It occurs to me that in the normal course of walking, in addition to the visual, we use aural and tactile means to process our routes and orientations. We listen when are walking. If one doesn’t listen while walking, something may run into one, or one may run into something. We use feelings and perceptions to guide us as well. I believe that we are not only asked—and expected—to walk by faith without seeing. We are asked and expected to walk by faith without hearing and to walk by faith without feeling, all the while believing that God is leading us. Of course this kind of experience presupposes that one rightly “heard” the voice and command of God to do thus-and-such in the first place. The description in Romans 4 (and Hebrews 11) of what Abraham did, has him hearing first and then acting on it. “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing comes by the word of God,” is how Paul states it later in the tenth chapter of Romans. Incidentally, “the Word of God” here does not mean the bible. The “rhema” or actual word of God is what is used in Romans 10. The walk of faith is often devoid of sight, hearing, and feeling. And God evidently has no qualms about asking us to do this. Actually doing it goes against the grain of everything that we are. We have eyes, ears, and hands, and we expect to be able to use them to maneuver. Yet God, who endowed us with these great facilities, says, in effect, “You are not to depend on these means to do what I want you to do.” Many persons believe that reality is verifiable primarily through sense experience. In fact, there are some—“logical positivists” is one name for them—who believe that only that which is empirically verifiable is allowed to be regarded as true. On a side note, it has always struck me as odd that even the strict empiricists have to walk in faith for so many things in this life, because for different contexts we all have to depend on others even when placing trust in them does not always make sense and is not well-founded. I think (and believe) that the failure to walk in faith as God has defined it—walking without empirically verifiable experiences—is the reason that the vast majority of persons don’t ever experience God. Ironically, what they want is an experience, but the thing they want they cannot have because they insist on having that experience in experiential (pardon the redundancy) terms that they think they understand (read: “control” here). And God seems bound and determined to undermine our need for, and dependence on, control. This is, I believe, what the writer of Hebrews is getting at when he says, “Without faith it is impossible to please God.” “Walking in the Spirit” is not easy, but we are told to do it anyway. Jesus himself pointed out that “the way is hard, and few there be that find it,” and that the way is narrow. But “walking in the Spirit,” i.e., “walking in faith” is the way—and the only way—to know the mind, the nature, the character of God in general, as well as God’s plans and purposes for you in particular. - Jim Radford |
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©2013 Jim Radford. All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication prohibited.
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