Part Two in a super-elongated series – an assignment to myself  “to start laying out what I believe God asks of us – first individually, then corporately as churches”. Here’s where we are:
- One: Repent.
- Two: Believe
Since One was “repent”, I think I should. I have neglected blogging (this is bad for me, not for you necessarily). I am trying to be more disciplined in weekly schedules and such. The advent of a new baby on the way and some big work projects (plus summer in general) have held me up a bit. To repent is to turn from your current path, so my deeds showing my repentance will be blogging in nature…
The second thing I think God asks of use is to believe. And I think these may be in reversed order. Maybe you have to believe first, otherwise repentance is fairly hollow. You don’t have to repent if you don’t believe in moral authority. If “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,” then acknowledging God exists has to be the starting point of our approach to Him.
And that’s the real issue, isn’t it? God seems to have made a frustrating decision to base most of our interactions with Him on faith alone – not observable, provable, scientific-y stuff. “Why for?” you may ask (and I have done so many times).
Here’s what we know – the Bible lays out the case that one of God’s key desires is for us to have faith in Him. The highest concentration of knowledge on this single subject, arguably, is contained in Hebrews 11. Side note – good to think about the target audience of Hebrews – namely the “Hebrews” :-). The writer takes great pains to remind the targeted Hebraic folk of the importance and centrality of faith. One would assume the entire basis of the Jewish faith is..well…faith. And yet the writer (we don’t know for sure who wrote the thing) spends a good percentage of the book encouraging his readers not to lose faith, including this entire chapter. Curious, isn’t it? We’ll come back to that. But I digress…
“And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.”
God insists that we believe He exists in order ot draw near to Him. Faith being defined here as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” combined with Paul’s assertion that “…hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has?” leads us to this conclusion: God asks us to believe in Him, and makes no promise to prove His existence first.
This is the sticking point for most folk these days. We take the Han Solo approach –
“Kid, I’ve flown from one side of this galaxy to the other. I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff, but I’ve never seen anything to make me believe there’s one all-powerful Force controlling everything. There’s no mystical energy field controls my destiny! It’s all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.”
(Which is not as fun to quote as these.)
We all learned the scientific method: “To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning.”
And God does not fit into our box. Or our test tube. He rarely does the same thing the same way twice. Moses learned all about that – he tried to repeat a miracle with disastrous results. God refuses to be quantifiable. He refuses to do what we tell him to. We lay in bed at night and say “God if you’re real, turn my lights on right now” (come on, you know you did). Or “if you’re real, help me out with my major problem”.
T’would be a lot simpler, twouldn’t it, if God would just prove Himself by our methods? But He instead chooses his own proofs. Rocks and trees and planets and the wonders of the world around us (the “things that have been made“). A still small voice in our most desperate hours. The knowledge of right and wrong hard-wired into the fiber of our being. That lingering feeling we all wrestle with – the one that says there must be more to the universe than what I can taste and touch and see and hear and smell.
But these are not proof by our definition. And in the end God leaves us just short of being able to test, observe, and repeat. And then tells us to have wisdom and knowledge and really see Him, we must first believe. And then tells us that if we would just believe, we will receive all the proof we need.
I don’t know what it was that made me first believe. Probably the same reason I believed in Santa for a bit and the tooth fairy ever so briefly (until the cheapskate didn’t pay up) – I was a kid and someone told me it was true. The good news for me is that I got over the big hump – just believing – due to ignorance and innocence. And God delivered. Santa and the other fairy tales dried up, but God was different. I have seen miracles. I have heard God speak. I have observed the impossible (and never repeatable). And in the depths of my soul is the eternal, inescapable witness that He is, and that He rewards those who look for Him.
But I can’t prove it. Neither can you. A lot of Christians spend their lives trying. Not to say that apologetics is a bad thing. You can get very close with logical arguments, ontology, cosmology, and other -ologies. But you can’t get the whole way. God has left a gap that can only be closed by accepting that there are forces in the universe that don’t fit into my methods of proving.
And God is the ultimate example. He chooses to be so. He chooses to reveal himself to us personally, intimately, uniquely, inescapably, unequivocally, and unprove-ably (hey ma – I made up a word!). We say the proof of God is in our changed lives – and we are right, but that can be explained away. Many atheists and agnostics are fond of saying that religion is good thing because it makes people do good things. in fact, they will say they support your beliefs if they cause you to act in a socially responsible way. But they do not prove God exists.
Jesus tells a fascinating story about faith. A rich man dies. He is in torment in hell. He asks that first he, then someone else be sent to warn his brothers. Abraham tells him “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” That doesn’t compute. Most people today say “I won’t believe unless I see something miraculous.” Jesus says you’re a liar. You’d explain that away too. So would I. Unless I choose faith.
So what makes us leap from disbelief to faith? I think the answer is different for all of us. Sometimes a convincing argument, more often an experience – good or bad. The birth of a child, the death of a friend, the ups and down and ins and outs of life that make us stop and think about the weightier matters. But whatever it is, there is one thing that is clear – we have to leap. And leaping requires the humility and honesty to say “I’m not Han Solo. I haven’t seen it all. There might be more to life than I know.”
It’s utter vulnerability, really. A huge risk. It’s different than challenging God (“prove yourself if you want me to believe in you”). God chooses to miraculously prove Himself to some people some of the time (no, I don’t know whay some people get the “special” treatment). But for most of us, we have to set aside our overinflated view of our own ability to figure stuff out and decide to just believe.
And that’s where it all starts.
