What is Faith?

What is Faith?

Aug 27, 2025 | Epistemology - Trust

Seems like a simple question, right? Especially because everyone, Christian or not, seems to think they know the answer. I’ll get to that and what I think it means, but the inspiration for this post comes from the 19th century Danish Christian philosopher and writer Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), often considered the father of existentialism. I’m reading one of his books, Fear and Trembling, and it’s mostly inscrutable to me. Dude thinks way too much. No wonder he’s considered one of the founders of modern existentialism, a navel-gazing philosophy that broods on the conundrum of existence while being immersed in subjective emotions and thought. In the book Kierkegaard uses the word faith a lot, but never bothers to define it, and I’m sure most readers of Kierkegaard never question what it means either.

This word and the question is important to me because in a way it was the inspiration for my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent. I read an article in 2015 by a young woman who grew up in a solid Christian home, was involved in her church’s youth ministry, went off to college and promptly abandoned Christianity, becoming, as she writes, an agnostic. This ticked me off because I believed that would never happen to my children. I taught them all their lives that we believe in Christianity because it’s the truth, and that’s the only reason. The truth of Christianity, or not, didn’t seem to occur to this newly minted agnostic, that maybe truth is the only issue that matters, not how she feels. I was going to write a blog post, but then thought, why not write a book! I wanted to figure out exactly how I worked to ground my kid’s in their faith so they would never consider leaving it, and as adults they haven’t.

As you can see from the last sentence, the word faith can have different meanings based on how it’s used. Faith in that context is a synonym for Christianity. In another context If I say, “You just have to have faith,” we’re not quite sure what it means; faith in what? If it’s to an athlete, the person is being exhorted to believe in, to trust, their talents or abilities or training or experience, whatever it is that made them a winner in the past. The person using the word has in mind what it means, and assumes others share that meaning. That gets to the heart of the issue, as we’ll see. In fact, at dictionary.com there are seven definitions of the word, one of which is why I wrote the book—belief that is not based on proof. In our secular age, most people using the word in a religious context use it this way, even some Christians. This is convenient for atheists and agnostics, like the young lady above. I can guarantee that she was under the impression she left something that required “faith,” Christianity, for something that did not, agnosticism, not realizing she was simply leaving one “faith” for another. And that, as we’ll see, is the issue.

It All Comes Down to Epistemology
This word, which few people know, is the philosophical study (ology) of knowing (epistēmē in Greek). Philosophers have debated what we can know, or not, since antiquity. That’s a long time to debate knowing! It seems like a simple concept, right? I either know or I don’t. Not so fast. Think about when your Uncle Bob the skeptic comes over for Thanksgiving and asks, “How do you know that?” to everything you say, he’s basically saying we can ’t know anything at all. That is called skepticism, the idea that knowledge or knowing is not possible. Everything is basically guesswork and speculation. It appears humble on the surface, but it contradicts itself. If I say I can’t know anything at all, how do I know that? I’m asserting I can know that I know that. It violates the first law of logic, the law of non-contradiction, something all of us should have learned in middle school, but alas haven’t. The father of logic, Aristotle, taught us that A cannot be non-A. For example, “It is raining and it is not raining” can’t be true. It contradicts itself. So, skepticism can’t be true, ergo (therefore), we can know. Even though there were skeptic philosophers in the ancient world, it’s become especially problematic in the modern world. Why is that? Descartes, of course.

If you’re familiar with my work, this won’t surprise you at all. I’m sure at this point you’re tired of my blaming Descartes for everything. The reason this 17th century French philosopher is the father of skepticism is because of his search for absolute certainty, and his assumption it could be attained. Big, huge, mistake. He began his search doubting everything he could doubt, and found the only thing he couldn’t doubt was himself; he concluded, I think therefore I am, cogito ergo sum in Latin. Thus began rationalism, the idea that our knowing is possible by reason alone, God and revelation not required. As a pious Catholic he didn’t reject revelation, but the rationalism he inspired most definitely did.

This birthed what we know as the Enlightenment, and that ruined everything. I always overstate that because it wasn’t all bad, just mostly bad, especially because it gave rise to secularism, or that it was possible to run a society without God. Scottish Philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) took rationalism to its logical conclusion by proving there can be no knowledge of anything beyond experience, what is called empiricism. Experience, Hume argued, can’t know anything outside of itself, so knowing is not possible. If you start with self, self is all you got. He found it depressing that skepticism was inevitable, and given he was not religious, revelation was not an option. Sadly, Descartes and Hume, with a dash of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud thrown in, is the depressing dead end worldview of modern man.

Hume was probably agnostic but was a functional atheist, which was controversial in his day. In fact, he was rejected as the chair of philosophy at the University of Glasgow due to his religious views. His contemporary, French philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778), was likely the one who make who made atheism culturally palatable in the West. His poem on the great Lisbon earthquake in 1755 that killed upwards of 40,000 people was the first work in Christian history to put God in the dock, on the stand as we now say. To his questions, we or God can offer no answers:

Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate
The iron laws that chain the will of God”?
Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
“God is avenged: the wage of sin is death”?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?

The growth of atheism was what turned faith into a question because as this movement of rejecting God grew throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, atheists assumed they were rejecting faith. It was only “religious” people who required faith, which came to be defined as belief without evidence. When the so-called New Atheists exploded on the scene in the first decade of this century, these twin ideas of religious people requiring faith, and faith defined as belief without evidence, became their mantra. To them it was axiomatic that since they didn’t believe in God, they didn’t need faith, but all human beings live by faith.  

There is No Such Thing as an Unbeliever
Only the most hardcore arrogant atheists will make that argument today. It’s too obvious to even mention that if someone doesn’t believe in God that itself is a belief, but since Voltaire it was assumed atheists had no need for faith. I’m sure I’ve known this all my Christian life, but when I came across a book with the title, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, I realized just how much faith is required to believe there is no God. Talk about a leap of faith! Yet, most people, Christians included, persist in identifying people as believers or unbelievers. The word believers referring to Christians is common in the New Testament, but everyone then and since knows this refers to Christians. In our secular age, the word believer, or unbeliever, is problematic because it allows secular, irreligious people to think belief or faith is something only religious people need, but they don’t. But secular people are every bit as religious as Christians; only the object of their faith is different—everyone lives by faith.

What do I mean when I say everyone lives by faith? Again it comes down to epistemology, and the nature of our knowing. Some years ago I took a trip to where I was born and raised in southern California to see family and friends, and I got into interesting conversations with two friends who are self-described agnostics. Many Christians would describe them an unbelievers. I realized something as I thought back on these conversations. My interlocutors believed they couldn’t know the religious stuff I was talking about with any certainty, so I sensed they think why bother with it at all. Their objection to Christianity is rooted in epistemology! They probably wouldn’t even know the word, but there it is, nonetheless.

Most people assume knowledge is limited to what is empirically verifiable, or empiricism. It seems obvious to them that what we can see, feel, taste, touch, and hear is more knowable than that which is not available to our five senses. Scientism, that the only valid knowledge comes through the scientific method, and skepticism, are based on such assumptions. In this context you can understand why such people would think faith is believing without evidence, that faith is a religious construct, and doesn’t apply to the atheist or agnostic. This mentality, and it is widespread, is the fruit of secularism, the notion that life at its most basic level is irreligious. People tend to assume there are basically two ways to live. Some people are religious, and others are not religious, and never shall the two meet. In fact, they are the same person! Every person is religious because every person lives by faith because every person is finite, limited in every way imaginable. Faith is required for human beings to exist. What do I mean by that?

The word finite defines everything about us. Our ability to know is limited because we are limited, and these limits of our knowledge apply to everything. That doesn’t mean we can’t know, can’t have real knowledge, justified true belief as the philosopher’s would say, but that we can only know so much. Faith is that which fills in the gaps in our knowledge. The examples are pretty much endless because we use faith continuously just to exist without going crazy. One of these happened just this morning as I write. I saw a hot air balloon not far from our house, which is faith in action. Does that person know the air pumped out by the flames will continue to keep the balloon afloat? Of course not! But he has good reason to believe it will because it has before. Faith, therefore, is trust based on adequate evidence. Trust fills in the knowledge gap, if you will. How as Christians should we think about knowledge and knowing?

The Bible and Knowing
The case for knowing is easy to make biblically. A word search at Biblegateway. com shows that know and its variations is used upwards of 1,200 or 1,300 times in the Bible. The idea that knowledge is problematic for human beings is foreign to the biblical worldview. And we can have confidence that our knowing is rooted in what is actually there, or the real.

Next we must connect our understanding of epistemology to anthropology, our understanding of man (anthropos in Greek) or human nature. For the Christian this is critical. Man, male and female, was created as Genesis 1 tells us, “very good.” God is emphatic on this point. In the account of creation God declares six times that his handiwork is “good,” and tops it off declaring it all “very good” only after he created man. But something happened that marred that goodness; we call it the Fall. It was at this point that knowing became problematic for the human race.

The Bible, however, never stops affirming the possibility of knowing and knowledge, but as Paul said, “now we see through a glass, darkly” (I Cor. 13:12, KJV). Our knowing like everything else is marred by sin. We call this total depravity, which doesn’t mean God’s image in us is totally corrupted, but that every part of our being is tainted by sin. We are at once noble and disfigured. Good and evil comingle in our being, and who is not aware of that regardless of what they believe. Sixteenth century Reformer John Calvin speaking of the Apostle Paul’s understanding of sin asserts:

that the corruption subsists not in one part only, but that none of the soul remains pure or untouched by that moral disease. For in his discussion of a corrupt nature Paul not only condemns the inordinate impulses of the appetites that are seen, but especially contends the mind is given over to blindness and the heart to depravity.

Our fallen state is cause for epistemological humility, a phrase I am extremely fond of. While our knowing is real, it is limited by our sinful nature and our finitude, but on biblical presuppositions there is no justification for skepticism. We can know things because we are created in God’s image in God’s world. Calvin further makes the point that skepticism is not warranted:

[W]e see implanted in human nature some sort of desire to search out the truth to which man would not at all aspire if he had not already savored it. Human understanding then possesses some power of perception, since it is by nature captivated by love of truth.

Seventeenth century mathematician, physicist, and Christian apologist Blaise Pascal put similar thoughts in a much more poetic way:

What kind of freak is man? What a novelty he is, how absurd he is, how chaotic and what a mass of contradictions, and yet what a prodigy! He is judge of all things, yet a feeble worm. He is repository of truth, and yet sinks into such doubt and error. He is the glory and the scum of the universe!

A biblical anthropology is consistent with what we experience of human nature. All of us, if we are honest, can see Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in even the best human being, but especially in ourselves. Even though we are fallen, however, God has made it possible that we can have significant confidence in the knowledge we possess, even though such confidence is never absolute. Thus the necessity of humility and faith to fill in our knowledge gaps.

Reason Isn’t Enough
The second poison Descartes and the Enlightenment gave us after a presumption of absolute certainty, is that reason is the only means of knowing, as if knowing could be reduced to the laws of logic. That would be like thinking human beings can experience the world with only one of their five senses. Os Guiness in his book, In Two Minds: The Dilemma of Doubt & How to Resolve It explains the helpful idea of limits:

Christianity is second to none in the place it gives to reason, but it is also second to none in keeping reason in its place. We never know the value of a thing until we know it’s limits. Put unlimited value on something and in the end you will exhaust it of all value. If we forget the limits of a thing, we fly in the face of reality and condemn ourselves to learn this simple ironic lesson: More without limits is less; less with limits is more.

Reason by itself, without revelation, is something like colorblindness. It can learn, apprehend, and know things, but it can never fully define these for what they are because only in Christ do all things hold together (Col. 1:17). This makes more sense if we think of universals and particulars, puzzles and puzzle pieces. Without God in Christ, who is the ultimate universal, no particular can be defined in its fullness, for what God created it to be, its telos, or purpose. To truly know even in our limited fashion, we need to have the ultimate puzzle picture, the biggest of big pictures that gives meaning to it all.

Much of what we “know” is not the result of some kind of logical process, a syllogism, or rigorous inductive reasoning. What we “know” can’t be proved in the final analysis. Rather what we “know” must be accepted by faith, which is warranted trust based on what we consider adequate evidence. When we get right down to it, faith, and the acceptance of its inevitability in life, is to pay homage to our finitude. But human beings are not fond of admitting their limits.

This refusal to accept our created nature makes perfect sense in light of what we read in Genesis 1‑3. We learn that our Creator is God and that we are not (shocking to some, I know). Our fall from our esteemed created state was instigated by the temptation of wanting to be like God, to usurp His place as the one who defines reality. The insistence that we ought to have absolute certainty and that we can reason our way to perfect knowledge, is an indication that we are by nature rebels who refuse to accept that we are contingent created beings. We are dependent on God, as the Apostle Paul told the Greek philosophers in Acts 17, for life, breath, and everything else. That pretty much covers it all! Therefore, go and live by faith.

 

 

To Trust in Man or the Lord, that is the Question

To Trust in Man or the Lord, that is the Question

Feb 26, 2025 | Epistemology - Trust

As a young pup Christian in college in the Jesus Revolution days, I was born-again into a Scripture memory focused campus Christian organization. I memorized a very lot of verses, chapters of epistles and even entire letters, like Philippians, and chunks of other letters. I still have a box of those cards on which those verses are printed or written. Given life is life, I fell out of the habit of memorization and only slowly started memorizing Scripture again decades later when we moved from Chicago to Tampa. Not sure why, other than I realized anew what a “living and active” (Heb. 4:12) thing God’s word is. The first passage I was compelled to memorize was in the church bulletin in one of the services we attended when we got down here, King David’s doxology on the greatness of our God, I Chronicles 29:10-13. This passage has been a constant companion through the vicissitudes of life ever since. God’s word is indeed living and active.

My older self doesn’t seem as adept at memorization as my younger self, and I’m only memorizing verses or passages that mean something to me in the moment. The latest has to do with a theme I’ve come to realize is what the Christian life is all about, trusting in God, or not. I’ll get to the passage in a moment, but first I want to briefly explore why trust is the very essence of the Christian life. We have to go all the way back to the temptation Satan threw at Eve in the Garden (Genesis 3). The first thing Satan does, in the form of a very crafty serpent, is question what God had commanded Adam and Eve:

 “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

Well, in fact he did, Satan, so buzz off! Unfortunately, Eve didn’t do that and thought she could reason with the father of lies. When I read this passage I wonder why she was so easily seduced by the serpent. The blame must go to Adam. In Genesis 2, the Lord creates man, and Moses tells us about him:

15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

The Hebrew word for “keep” tells us why Eve’s encounter with the serpent was Adam’s fault. According to Strong’s:

The Hebrew verb “shamar” primarily means to keep, guard, or observe. It conveys the idea of careful attention and protection. . . . It implies a sense of diligence and responsibility in maintaining what is valuable or sacred.

Adam obviously did a terrible job of guarding and protecting the garden and the woman God gave him, the fall happened, and all its terrible consequences followed because the man didn’t do his job. All men are called to “shamar” their garden, whatever that is.

So, Eve’s on her own to deal with a crafty liar whose job is to get her to not only not trust in the character of God, but to rebel against his express command of not eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And not only does Satan impugn the character of God, but he also calls God himself a liar! 4 “’You will not certainly die,’ the serpent said to the woman.’” Oh yes you will. So the woman uses her own judgment about the tree, thinks it looks kind of appealing, and takes some and eats it. Adam having failed at Job 1, goes along for the ride, and sin, misery, death, and suffering are introduced into God’s perfectly good and ordered world.

In a nutshell, this is our same battle today, trust in the character of God or not, call him a liar or not, and experience the consequences one way or the other. It’s that stark, as are the consequences. Which brings me to Jeremiah 17:5-8. I will quote it in full, and then comment on the incredible contrast and what it means for our lives.

5 This is what the Lord says:

“Cursed is the one who trusts in man,
who depends on flesh for his strength
and whose heart turns away from the Lord.
6 He will be like a bush in the wastelands;
he will not see prosperity when it comes;
he will dwell in the parched places of the desert,
in a salt land where no one lives.

7 “But blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord,
whose confidence is in him.
8 He will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
and never fails to bear fruit.”

Cursed verses blessed; the choice is ours. Let’s see what that looks like in practice according to the word of God.

The Cursed and Blessed Contrast
First, let’s look at the contrasting words cursed and blessed. In Hebrew they connote divine favor or not. What they do not necessarily refer to, and this is absolutely critical, is circumstances. God’s favor, or disfavor, can’t be divined merely from circumstances, and we mistake God’s intentions if that’s what we use to judge them. Are they irrelevant? Of course not, given the obvious fact some circumstances are pleasant and others are not. Nobody wants to suffer, but suffering and terrible circumstances are not necessarily an indication of God’s disfavor, any more than pleasant circumstances, wealth and honor, are necessarily indication of God’s favor. The qualifier means they may or may not be, and wisdom understands the difference.

In fact as we see from the blessed man, unwelcome circumstances are perfectly consistent with God’s blessing, as are pleasant circumstances to the cursed man. This is counterintuitive to us because we’re human and we prefer pleasure over pain. Christianity frees us from the tyranny of circumstances because God enables us in some manner to overcome or transcend them so they do not determine us. In other words, circumstances are a superficial and often deceptive way to try to divine God’s intentions toward us. Can God use them to send messages to us one way or the other? Obviously He can because as Scripture plainly teaches, He is in control of all things, and He does that all the time. It’s called life.

The point is a simple one, if difficult to attain in practice: we are to place our ultimate trust in God alone, not anything or anyone outside of Him.

One of the great curses of the modern age, in the words of our Declaration of Independence, is “the pursuit of happiness.” The founding generation, steeped in a thoroughly Christian culture, read those words differently than we tend to today in our prosperous thoroughly secular culture. For them it was about purpose and goodness and independence, character, but for us it’s perfect circumstances. If we have pleasant circumstances we’ll be happy, if not, we’ll be miserable. If you want to be miserable, make happiness the purpose of your life. On the other hand, even if our circumstances are perfect, we’re not to put our trust in those circumstances for our fulfillment. It’s subtle, but daily prayer and thanksgiving for all the blessings God bestows upon us keeps us grounded. It gives us the proper perspective, that He not things or other people, is our ultimate reward, the ultimate joy that allows us to take joy, and enjoyment, in everything else. If we allow anything outside of Him to be our source of joy and fulfillment, we’ll be squeezing the joy and fulfillment out of them like water out of a wet rag.

Having said that, and at the risk of contradicting myself, God wants to bless us with good and pleasant things, as all parents want to bless their children with good and pleasant things. That wasn’t always easy for me to believe, or any of us really, but Jesus himself makes this perfectly clear (Matt 7):

11 If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!

This can also be clearly seen from the beginning when God commanded the man and the woman to be fruitful and multiply; barren or dead trees don’t bear fruit. Women who couldn’t bear children were considered cursed because children were seen as the ultimate blessing in life, as indeed they are. (As an aside, we should want more little blessings in our lives.) The Pentateuch, the first five books of Moses, overflow with words of blessing and prosperity for obedience to God, and curses for disobedience. God’s law is not merely a means to drive us to Christ, but a means to blessing and true personal and societal flourishing. To live in alignment with God’s good, created order is the means to blessing.

Part of the reason for God’s curses and His judgment is to drive us back to Him to find true blessing and fulfillment, no matter what the circumstances are. When the boundary lines do fall for us in pleasant places our contentment is still in Him, not the circumstances. David teaches us this in Psalm 16:

5 Lord, you alone are my portion and my cup;
you make my lot secure.
6 The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
surely I have a delightful inheritance.

That’s why Jesus tells is to seek first God’s kingdom and His righteousness, and not to worry about all the other stuff. Do that, and everything follows regardless of the circumstances.

Cursed is The One Who Trusts in Man
Cursed is a strong, but accurate, word, reflecting the judgment of God against sin, and not trusting God is sin. God is not obligated to reward bad behavior, any more than we are obligated to reward our Children’s bad behavior. Parents who do not discipline their children do them no favors. When God’s first children, Adam and Eve, rebelled God pronounced curses, first on the serpent and the woman, then on the man. Everything in life became harder than God initially created it to be, thorns and thistles. Like me, you may have asked the question: but why can’t God just overlook the rebellion, why does His judgment have to be so harsh?

Let me answer this with some other questions. In a court of law if a judge let someone off who committed murder would you like that? Be comfortable with that? Think that was the right thing for the judge to do? Of course not because we all intuitively understand justice must be done, that wrongs must be righted, which means we live in a moral universe where right and wrong, justice and injustice are a fact of the reality we inhabit. We can no more escape the moral laws of the universe than we can escape its physical laws. Break the moral law, and we suffer the consequences. Let’s look the one who trust in man.

6 He will be like a bush in the wastelands;
he will not see prosperity when it comes;
he will dwell in the parched places of the desert,
in a salt land where no one lives.

The image is one devoid of life, devoid of thriving and blooming and fruit. Ironically, this cursed person could have all the most wonderful circumstances he could ever want, prosperity, but even then without God he can’t even see it. It’s like dreaming and working and longing for something for years, and then when you get it, it’s just a thing. It no more fulfills you than one meal fills you. The things of life, be they people or money or comfort or achievements or entertainment or possession or hobbies, or anything else, were never meant to be our fulfillment and joy, or ultimate purpose. All of these things are good, just not ultimate goods. Two of the great saints of Christian history put this truth in wonderfully poetic form. Blaise Pascal, 17th century Christian genius, says it this way:

There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ.

And Augustine, the 5th century Christian genius and Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, put it this way:

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

People can stuff all kinds of things in their hearts, stuff them to overflowing, and still they will never be filled, never satiated, never satisfied because they are under God’s curse.

Blessed Is the Man Who Trusts in the Lord
The metaphors Isaiah uses are perfectly descriptive of the contrast, of the blessing, the thriving, the flourishing of this one who chooses, who is determined to trust in the Lord. We all know what trust means, but let’s look at a definition to dial in on its implications for us as we navigate the difficulties and challenges of everyday life in a fallen world among fallen people in a fallen body:

Reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence. confident expectation of something; hope.

How in the world can we have such confidence in God apart from the circumstances even as we pray and long for the circumstances we think we want? Because God isn’t looking to make His people happy, to give them circumstances that are pleasant and unproblematic, but to make them like Christ. In life I call this the pain of sanctification, and very often it isn’t pleasant, thus the reference to pain. Trusting God in such environments is difficult, to say the least, which is why we have to doggedly determine to believe in the goodness of God’s character and intentions toward us. How do we do that? Especially when things are darkest, and the struggles seem unendurable? We have to know this fact of existence of our life in Christ: Everything God does in our lives is for our good and his glory. Paul tells us in Romans 8:28 it isn’t 98% of things that “work together for our good,” but all things, one hundred percent of things. Is this easy? Of course not. Why should it be? Life isn’t easy for heathens either, so why should it be for God’s people? Assuming it should be has led a lot of Christians to become the cursed one who turns in trust to man because God isn’t measuring up to their expectations, which means the circumstances in their life are not to their liking. It’s a terribly shallow and short sighted way to look at existence, but an understandable one.

By contrast, if we look at the vivid picture presented to us in the tree planted by the water, it gets its sustenance, its life giving force from a source, from living water, that is ongoing and cannot be altered by whatever is outside of the stream. Strong living trees withstand storms or heat or drought because they are always being fed the water of life. No wonder my Christian life changed back in 2012 when I determined that every single morning I would get on my knees and pray and read the Bible. I have done that and it made all the difference. The realness of God has become more real than I can describe. My perspective on everything, literally, is always God. I can’t see anything in life apart from the connection to Him. When I hear great music, a melody that grabs me, I think God! When I look at creation, the most humble little flower, I think God! When I make a living daily working through the thorns and thistles, I think God! When I see other people and make them smile, I think God! When I walk alongside those who suffer I think God! When I see a professional golfer or baseball or football player do something we mere mortals can’t fathom, I think God! I could go on like this for hours, but I trust you get the point.

What Happens When We Get to Our Red Sea Moment
Most of the trust challenges we have in our lives are not dramatic, thankfully, but the choice in every moment dramatic or not, is do we trust the Lord, or not. Those times that do get intense present us with a seemingly intractable dilemma. We are all familiar with the story of the Exodus. Moses leads the people of Israel out of Egypt to worship God, and initially the Pharaoh allows them to go with his blessing. In fact, on the way out God inclined the Egyptian people toward the Israelites, “so they plundered the Egyptians.” Everything was looking fine, smooth sailing all the way to the promised land, then it wasn’t. Pharaoh changed his mind, sends his army out after the people to bring them back, and probably slaughter quite a few in the process.

You can read the narrative in Exodus 13 and 14. The Lord leads the people to the shores of the Red Sea, and in the opposite direction comes the army of the Egyptians. Uh oh! What now? If a situation ever looked impossible this was it. The question for the people of Israel was this: would they trust in the Lord or not. Moses implores them to the former:

13 Moses answered the people, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. 14 The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.”

Be still? What are you nuts? We learn previously that the Israelites were armed for war, and it would have been easy for the warriors to take matters into their own hands, but be still? Yep, that’s the plan. And you know the rest of the story. They decided to trust Moses and thus the Lord.

Chances are, our Red Sea moments are never so dramatic, but they sometimes feel that way. I’ve written here before about building the trust muscle, as I call it. We all know what it takes to make muscles stronger, breaking them down, injuring them if you will, so they come back stronger. It’s not a pleasant process most of the time, but the results are worth it. I’ll end this with something I pray and strive for on a daily basis, and which I’ve yet to attain, from Isaiah 26:3 :

You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.

Perfect peace . . . .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Astonishing Goodness of God

The Astonishing Goodness of God

Feb 28, 2024 | Epistemology - Trust

I was struck by this phrase written by John Calvin as I’m very slowly making my way through his commentary on Isaiah. Satan is a master of deceit; he is the father of lies because lies are his native language. It doesn’t surprise us, then, that lying is how he got the freight train of misery that is life in a fallen world out of the station. The very first lie he told on earth to a human being (Gen. 3) caused the disaster we call the fall, and came in the form of a rhetorical question: “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” Even though Eve answered the question because it was so obviously untrue, it really wasn’t meant to be answered. It was an assault on God’s character, and most especially his goodness. By asking it just this way, Satan was implying God was in fact not good, that he wants to keep good things from us. He could have just as easily said, God is a big old meanie, and he doesn’t want you to be happy.

Eve replied with the truth, that it was only one tree in the middle of the garden of which God commanded they should not eat, or they would die. Then Satan brought out the shotgun of lies and let her have it with both barrels:

4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

He could have easily said, God is horrible and he hates you. He just doesn’t want you to have what he has. He’s keeping this incredible thing, this “knowing good and evil” from you, and that’s just not fair!

Down through the ages since that day, a very lot of people believe Satan. It’s only in the very next chapter when everything starts going to hell, and Cain kills his brother Abel. When God rejected Cain’s offering we’re told, “Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast.” He was probably thinking, God is a big meanie and it’s just not fair! Thus we see the beginning of the ever present temptation of sinners to believe it is God who is the liar, and that he is not good.

How many people reject Christianity because life has handed them a raw deal, and it’s just not fair? A lot. That’s why since the time of Voltaire it’s been called “the problem of evil” because supposedly it’s a problem for Christianity, and by extension, God. Evil is a problem, all right, but it’s a problem for every person whatever their faith or worldview. Throwing God under the bus doesn’t make evil any more palatable or understandable. I would argue it makes it far worse. At least if God’s there you can blame someone. Chance and matter doesn’t offer much solace that way. Evil is then just a brute fact and exists for no reason at all. Other religions have to deal with it too, but not very well. Outside of the Abrahamic religions, not one even explains why evil exists or where it comes from; it just is. And none have any kind of satisfying answer other than, just deal with it. Christianity, by contrast, has a plausible if not completely satisfying answer. At least satisfying enough to be on a continual growth track for 2,000 years because a lot of people think it is plausible enough.

Believing God is Good is Necessary for a Flourishing Life
The longer I’ve been on this journey with Jesus, now north of 45 years, the more I realize my number one sin, the worst of the worst: lack of trust in Almighty God. It requires daily repentance, and is why pretty much every morning I repent for worry, anxiety, doubt, and fear. All such attitudes reflect a lack of trust in the basic goodness and power of God. Living by faith, which means trust in God’s word found in the Bible, and not sight, is incredibly hard. We’re always tempted by Satan’s lie, and it’s amazing to me how easy it is for me to do, thus the repentance. My daily aspiration and lifelong goal is found in Isaiah 26:

3 You keep him in perfect peace
whose mind is stayed on you,
because he trusts in you.

Perfect peace is the standard; an equanimity that cannot be shaken by mere circumstances. As I said, it’s incredibly hard, if not impossible. Verse 4 puts this in perfect biblical context:

4 Trust in the Lord forever,
for the Lord God is an everlasting rock.

We can trust him! And not just for now, for every minute of every day of every week and month and year, but forever! A rock is something in biblical terms that is solid, something we can count on, that doesn’t move with every passing wind or storm. In the parable of the wise and foolish builders, Jesus compares building a house on a rock with building one on sand. When the storms of life come, guess which one stands? And how do we build on rock? We put God’s words into practice. Obedience to God is the “secret” to a flourishing life, whatever that might end up looking like. But it really doesn’t matter because perfect peace is available regardless of the circumstances, as hard as that is to believe when circumstances get really hard.

You will notice this is the case as you contemplate the rest of Isaiah 26. This is a wonderful picture of a rock life, a life that cannot be moved by whims and fancies, or by the pressures and vicissitudes of life. Here is an example:

7 The path of the righteous is level;
you, the Upright One, make the way of the righteous smooth.
8 Yes, Lord, walking in the way of your laws,
we wait for you;
your name and renown
are the desire of our hearts.

To be righteous is to live rightly. It’s the kind of life that is not bumpy, not a flight with so much turbulence the captain says over the speakers to stay in your seats and make sure your seatbelts are tightly fastened. Of course all lives in a fallen world like all flights have some turbulence, but a life lived in obedience to God means we get to our destination without worrying about going down in flames.

I learned the word flourish when I was exposed to classical education in 2010, which is used a lot in that context. I found this wonderful definition:

Flourish is a verb meaning to grow or develop in a healthy or vigorous way, especially as the result of a particularly favorable environment. It refers to a thriving state or condition, such as a plant that is flourishing due to ample sunlight and water.

The only quibble I have with this is related to “a particularly favorable environment.” Because Christianity is true, and God is God, the Almighty Creator and ruler of all things that exist, we don’t need a “favorable environment” to flourish. It’s built into the covenantal cake of His promise to Abraham in Genesis 12 that all the peoples of the earth would be blessed through him, the first of numerous promises to Abraham and the Patriarchs to bless the nations. So because we live in a fallen world, God often enables us to flourish in spite of the environment, not because of it. Our trusting Him in obedience is what allows circumstances to not determine us, but to transform circumstances for our good and His glory.

Obedience Left or Right
As those who understand and embrace the gospel, we know we can’t earn God’s favor by our obedience. That kind of righteousness is given to us because of Christ, and we are accepted only because of him. Once we know we’re accepted and no longer condemned, we can realistically walk rightly, be righteous. We have to believe, me and God, we’re good; no guilt allowed. The beauty of the gospel from an Evangelical perspective is that not only are we forgiven of our sin because Christ took the punishment we deserve, but he also lived a life of perfect obedience to the Father, and in faith Jesus’ righteousness is granted to us.

That in theological terms is known as double imputation, an extremely important concept to understand. When we are saved our sin is imputed to Jesus, and His righteousness is imputed to us. Once you believe that, and fully buy into it, you can begin to “walk rightly” without falling off either side of the balance beam. As we all know walking with God in obedience to His law is a challenge, to say the least. It’s made all the more challenging because as sinners we live in constant temptation to Satanic delusion. On one side of that balance beam, we’ll call that the left side, is the delusion of self-righteousness that leads to legalism, and on the other side, the right, is guilt and despair because no matter how hard we try we’re just not very good at this obedience thing, if we’re honest with ourselves.

In my life, I was always falling off the right side of the beam, wallowing in guilt and shame. Satan really likes those on that side because he can act like his name which means accuser. He’s great at finger pointing and making you feel like you’re a miserable worthless wretch. Almost everybody who’s had any experience with Christianity knows the great hymn Amazing Grace by John Newton. The very famous first verse goes like this:

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.

Until I decided to reference that verse, I had never looked up the definition of wretch until now. It means a miserable person, one who is profoundly unhappy or in great misfortune, or a base, despicable, or vile person. That is who we are as sinners before we were saved, not after. We can now hold our heads high as children of the King, walk without shame and guilt because Jesus paid it all, and all to him I owe, in the words of the chorus of that wonderful hymn.

Falling off the right side of the beam has the benefit of building into us a right humility, that we are indeed unworthy sinners saved by God’s unmerited favor, and our only boast in life is Christ. At the end of I Corinthians Paul writes these words that have been a life raft for me:

 30 It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, sanctification and redemption. 31 Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.”

I’ve never been able to relate to the self-righteous side of the beam, but I am sure I’ve been guilty of it throughout my Christian life. If we’re ever tempted to think we’re better or superior to anyone else, that’s a sure sign we’re tilting left. Repent!

Internalizing all of this sets the stage for obedience, and the blessing by God associated with it.

Obedience and Flourishing
Because Satan is very good at his diabolical job, we Christians have a hard time believing God wants to bless us. The title of a post I wrote not too long ago indicates this, “Believe It or Not, God Wants to Bless Us.” Or, that He wants us to flourish. Life is hard, and having the habit of living by sight, we tend to think flourishing is a fluke, almost mere luck of the draw. But it is not. God promises blessing for obedience. I made some of the case for this in my post, but that deserves a book-length study. Flourishing can often include material circumstances, but God’s blessing can reach us in any circumstances, and thus true flourishing is always possible.

The morning of the day in which I write these words, I read Galatians 5 and Paul’s description of the “acts of the flesh” and the “fruit of the spirit.” The juxtaposition of two lives driven from either hell or Heaven gives a perfect description of what a flourishing life looks like or not, either heaven or hell on earth. What Paul says is inheriting “the kingdom of God” in that passage is the Jewish concept of shalom. It is that sense of peace coming from the Prince of Peace, reconciliation to our Creator God, that is the fulfillment of the live lived, however imperfectly, by the fruit of the Spirit.

Isaiah saying, “we wait for you,” is a fascinating phrase. None of this is going to be easy, nor should it be. Going against the grain, swimming upstream, is always hard, as it should be. Knowing this, we no longer whine and moan about how hard it is. Rather, we embrace the challenge because He who is in us doing the work enables us to live out righteousness. Our responsibility is to live in obedience as best we can. The result is that our affections, who we are and what we want will become focused on God’s glory, and will all be oriented toward pleasing God. Our inner being will be so transformed by God’s Holy Spirit that what Isaiah says in verse 8 will be true of us, present tense: His “name and renown are the desire of our hearts.” How that is done is how that sentence begins, “walking in the way of your laws.” It is obedience that allows us to wait for him, to have shalom despite not because of the circumstances. Only then will we be able to marvel with Calvin and the saints throughout the ages at God’s astonishing goodness.

 

Epistemology and Being Poor in Spirit

Epistemology and Being Poor in Spirit

Jan 24, 2024 | Epistemology - Trust

One of my favorite verses in Scripture might seem like a strange verse to have as a favorite, I Corinthians 8:2:

If anyone thinks he knows something he does not yet know as he ought to know.

It took a long time for me to appreciate and truly value my ignorance. The tendency of our younger selves is to think we know way more than we actually do. My younger self, probably in my twenties, came across the cliché, “the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.” It slowly dawned on me after two or three decades how true that cliché really is. God has blessed me with an insatiable curiosity to learn, and by this point into my seventh decade of life, I know a lot, especially compared to normal people. As I’ve grown in my knowledge over the decades, the cliché has become increasingly profound in its implications for my life, as I will try to explain.

First the word epistemology. It means the study (ology) of knowing (from Greek episteme, “knowledge”). We might think our knowing is straight forward and obvious. It is not, at all, as you quickly learn in the history of philosophy dealing with epistemology. For Christians and orthodox Jews, we’re taught in Scripture that knowing is possible and real, not in the least problematic. In fact in Scripture the word know and its variants is used between 1163 (NIV) and 1362 (ESV) times. That’s a lot of knowing! So Paul’s approach to knowledge is not calling for any kind of skepticism, that we can’t know anything. Quite the contrary. Before I get to the context; I want to share my inspiration for this post.

 

In this video Jordan Peterson and a handful of other scholars discuss the book of Exodus. These are two hour plus discussions that took place over a week early last year. Near the end and at approximately two hours and fourteen minutes, he says the following in the context of the passage about Moses and the burning bush (Exodus 3):

 From the Sermon on the Mount, being poor in spirit means being brought low enough to be humble enough to be ready to receive. It’s a reference to pride, and a call to a particular kind of humility. He decided you could be friends with what you didn’t know. If you were the former, you try to prove your point all the time. Once you realize the depths of your ignorance, and what you don’t know is inexhaustible, and my troubles are inexhaustible, I better have an inexhaustible source to call on, and I can certainly call on the inexhaustibility of my own ignorance. It reverses everything because all of a sudden what you don’t know is your greatest hope because you can open up the landscape of revelation to what you don’t know.

I love that phrase, “the inexhaustibility of my own ignorance.” It’s so Jordan Peterson, and so true! The reason is that all knowledge, every single thing that can be known is of, from, and to God, as Paul says, “For from him and through him and for him are all things.” That means it’s a bottomless ocean in which we get to swim literally forever. And as Peterson implies, all knowledge is revelation, something given to us by God, and when we know this, in our seeking knowledge and learning we’ll be like the proverbial kid in candy store. It will be fun and thrilling and exciting, and so very gratifying. And unlike candy, we can never get enough.

Getting back to Paul. When we “think we know something” we shut ourselves off from “the landscape of revelation” (i.e., all of reality), as if somehow we own or possess knowledge like it’s ours, almost as if we made it up! Which gets us to where the rubber meets the road—love. Most Christians when they think of this chapter don’t think of verse 2, but think of the phrase, “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” This is an excellent example of why taking Scripture verses, or part of verses, out of context is a good way to distort it’s meaning. It has turned too many Christians into anti-intellectuals as if knowledge in itself is bad. In chapter 8 Paul is discussing the problem of food sacrificed to idols, a big issue in the thoroughly pagan port city of Corinth. Here is how Paul introduces the context of his remarks:

Now concerning food offered to idols: we know that “all of us possess knowledge.” This “knowledge” puffs up, but love builds up. 2 If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. 3 But if anyone loves God, he is known by God.

There is no question, we can know the theological reality of the unreality of idols. They, the gods to whom the animals are sacrificed, do not exist. Our knowing that, however, doesn’t mean we are superior to those who believe they are real. That knowledge doesn’t have to “puff us up”. And our being known by God is infinitely more important than anything we can know.

Everything turns on what we do with our knowledge. We only possess it because it objectively exists outside of us. As I said, we don’t own it, it’s not ours. And since we didn’t create our brains or nervous systems or body, or anything else, how can possessing it make us think we’re any more special than anyone else? Everything we have, including our knowledge, has been given to us and is to be used in the service of others. As Jesus told us, if we really want to find our lives, and to have life that is really life, then we’ll lose our life for his sake. And that means like him, who did not come to be served but to serve, we also exist to serve others.

Who Doesn’t Want to be Right? And the Curse of Absolute Certainty
I heard this phrase not too long ago from a friend about an acquaintance of his who asked him this question. It was of course a rhetorical question, the answer as obvious as the question is silly. No, I want to be wrong. Yes, of course I want to be right, but I was deeply ambivalent about the question itself; it just didn’t sit right with me. Which brings me to a conviction about knowledge I’ve developed over the years and a certain kind of very knowledgeable person. I wouldn’t call them know-it-alls because they aren’t arrogant or unpleasant people. They don’t “look down their noses” at others. In fact quite the opposite. They want to help others and are generous with their knowledge. What was it about such people that rubbed me the wrong way? They embodied that answer to the question: they believe they are absolutely right! And they are absolutely certain about it! That, I fear, is a dangerous place to be.

The problem of absolute certainty, what I call a curse, goes back a long way in the philosophical discussion over epistemology. It’s a curse because it’s a lie, a result of sin, that finite creatures can have knowledge of an absolute sort.  A certain pious French philosopher and mathematician is responsible for this virus making its way into the bloodstream of Western culture. I refer to him a lot in my writing because this is such a critical topic in our war against secularism. His name is René Descartes (1596-1650). There was a growing skepticism in the 17th century, and he was determined to do something about it. The problem was that his answer was to insist that knowledge of an absolute sort was possible for human beings based on their reason, that man’s rational capabilities could achieve absolute certainty. He started his journey to this conclusion by doubting everything that could be doubted, and discovered the only thing he could not doubt was his existence. How did he arrive at this conclusion? His own thinking. So he made famous the phrase in Latin, Cogito Ergo Sum, or I think therefore I am, and became the father of modern philosophy. In the history of Christian Western civilization this was a disaster of biblical proportions.

You may think I’m being hyperbolic, if not melodramatic, and I’m overstating the negative implications of a statement that is self-evidently true. You might reply, of course I can think so therefore I must exist, but can you really know that? Be absolutely certain of that? When you trace intellectual history from Descartes to the present day, you quickly learn it is not at all self-evidently true. In a hundred years it led to the skepticism of David Hume (1711-1776) who concluded reason alone leads us to a dead end where knowledge isn’t possible at all. He was not happy about this, in fact quite depressed, but he had to be honest. Very few people in the history of philosophy were that honest, but eventually there was another who turned out to be the greatest prophet of the horrors of the 20th century, Friedrich Nietzsche. According to Walter Kauffmann in his biography of Nietzsche, he says things in his writings that abound in prophecies of doom:

If the doctrines . . . of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal . . . are hurled into the people for another generation, if mankind realizes the unique worth of the human being has evaporated, and that no up and down remains, and if the tremendous event that we have killed God reaches the ears of man—then night will close in, an age of barbarism begins, and there will be wars such as have never happened on earth.

Next to this paragraph in the book I wrote, “The 20th Century!!!”

It is important to understand that it is not just skepticism that caused the barbarism of the 20th century, but the reason for it—the death of God. Nietzsche lamented this, but as a convinced atheist he believed God wasn’t an option for man because, well, God didn’t exist. So he believed human beings needed to create another moral foundation for civilization. Good luck with that! The moral foundation of Christianity, that “slave religion” as he called it, was gone, and the vacuum was going to be filled by something. It was the horrific paganism that Judaism and Christianity saved the world from, this time in the form of secularism. Enlightened man could no longer believe in the gods, but he could believe in himself! How’s that workin’ out for him?

The Only Source of Knowledge is God
What happened with Descartes was the idea that our knowing could start with ourselves, and then move out from there. No it can’t. The reason is that we are not God, which is shocking to learn for many sinners. What do you mean I’m not God? Of course I am. I get to call the shots in my life. I get to determine what is right and wrong for me. I determine my own meaning. The result of such thinking is that in America in 2022 a record number of people killed themselves, around 50,000. How many more tried? Add to this the dysfunction of broken marriages, dangerous and dilapidated cities, depression, and one could go on.

The solution is to start with God, and to accept we don’t know squat no matter how much we know. I remember Chuck Swindoll saying at a service when I went to his church in southern California say if you think you’re indispensable, put your hand in a bucket of water and pull it out. How quickly the water fills the space is how indispensable you are. The Westminster Shorter Catechism’s Question number 1 asks the most important question of our existence: “What is the chief end of man?” What is the purpose or telos of our existence? The answer: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” The reason there is so much misery in the world is because secular man thinks his chief end is to glorify himself and enjoy himself till he goes into the ground and rots. Well, that’s inspiring! The problem as we see all around us, there is no joy in that.

The beauty of Christianity is that God really does want us to be joyful, to enjoy life, to take pleasure in whatever we put our hands or minds to, whatever we create, whatever we experience. I’ve never liked the word happiness because I don’t know what it means. Joy, by contrast, communicates satisfaction, fulfillment, like seeing your newborn child for the first time. That is joy! Seeing indescribable beauty in nature, or hearing it in music, or marveling at your tastebuds as you experience the sweetness of an apple. Even our fleeting accomplishments can bring us joy if they are pursued in Christ, and we know they really don’t matter at the end of the day. Only He matters! That is the road to using all we have to God’s glory, including our knowledge, in love and service to others because we do it all for Him, to Him, and through Him. That is the only source of true fulfillment, now and forever.

The Theme Song of Our Lives by Jethro Tull: Nothing is Easy!

The Theme Song of Our Lives by Jethro Tull: Nothing is Easy!

Sep 21, 2023 | Epistemology - Trust

To my family the title of this post is nothing new. I’ve quoted the title of the song so many times by this point all I get is eye rolls. I used to call it the Disney eye roll when my kids were younger, but I would think Woke-Disney no longer has characters do eye rolls; that’s so 90s. It’s amazing to me that we as Christians allow the hardness of life to mess with our faith, and by “faith” I mean the Greek word for it, pistis-πίστις, or trust. God through Isaiah (26:3) says, “You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast because he trusts in you.” How often do you have “perfect peace”? Yeah, me neither. It’s also amazing to me how often we allow circumstances, or more accurately our perception of them, to determine whether we have “perfect peace” or not. Of course, this should surprise none of us because we are all of Adam’s seed, fallen creatures through and through. And it’s hard! Ian Anderson says so. Chances are he didn’t know the reason why is found in Genesis 3, when Eve believed the serpent that if she just ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, she could “be like God knowing good and evil.” Uh, no you won’t.

The message of the song, Ian Anderson being the good stiff-upper-lip Brit, is in the title of another popular song, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” And why should we not worry according to Anderson? Just “smile in a while” and you’ll get happy his way. The reason this can only work to a limited degree and not ultimately is related to one of my favorite words and concepts: telos, a Greek word from which we get our word teleology, which is the study of purposiveness or of objects regarding their aims, purposes, or intentions. I’m going to get a bit philosophical, so bear with me. I trust the payoff will be worth it.

To Aristotle there were four causes for why things come to be.

1. First is the formal cause, or the idea of the thing in the mind before it comes to fruition. Someone can’t build a chair until they have the idea of the chair in their mind.
2. Second is the material cause, or the thing out of which the chair will be made, the wood.
3. Then there is the efficient cause, or the person making the chair.
4. Finally is the formal cause, or the telos, the purpose for which the chair is made, to sit on.

Today we only think of the efficient cause as the reason something comes to exist, but for Aristotle it was a far richer concept. In Aristotle’s concept of cause, we find the answer to dealing with life being hard, and it isn’t just making a decision to not worry, smile, and be happy. It’s hard to ignore getting hit in the face with a brick—deciding it doesn’t really hurt isn’t going to help. Sometimes when it gets really hard life can feel like a pile of bricks falling on your head, or it can be just run of the mill hard like those pesky mosquitos that won’t leave you alone. We find the ultimate answer in the first question and answer in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the formal cause of human existence:

What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.

And not only the formal cause, but the three others as well. We existed in the mind of God before the world was created; He is the formal cause of our existence. He made earth so out of that He might create man; as David says, we are fearfully and wonderfully made; the material cause is the earth on which we live. The efficient cause is God making us through the vicissitudes of life, the hardness of it, the person He wants us to become. The formal cause, the telos of our existence is given in the pithy answer by the Westminster divines: to glorify God and enjoy him forever. The question is, do we really believe this, do we fully buy into it. Do we accept what Paul says, that in God “we live and move and have our being.” Do we really believe there are no accidents, that when it comes to our lives chance doesn’t exist? That God is truly in control of all things?

The ultimate cause is of course Jesus Christ. In him it doesn’t matter how hard the hard gets, we’re promised the ultimate telos (Rom. 8:28):

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

And notice: we can know this, not wonder or speculate, but have certainty that every single thing that happens in our live works for our good and God’s glory. Every. Single. Thing. Not most things, or ninety-five percent of things, but all things. And what is this purpose Paul speaks of? He continues:

29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. 30 And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.

God is the all-powerful, all knowing, all knowledgeable, all creative, all wise, all loving, all good efficient cause transforming us into the image of His Son. Talk about living a life of meaning, purpose, and hope! Talk about waking up every day excited to see what God has planned for us for the day. And as Christians we are the ultimate realists. Paul implies that all things are not good, but God works them all together for our good, even the hard stuff, especially the hard stuff. We have the encrusted barnacles of sin that are attached to our fallen natures, and it hurts to have God scrape them off. And sometimes we sing with Anderson, “Nothing is easy!” But in expecting and accepting that the hardness is necessary for the telos of our existence makes the hard things so much easier.

The other option in our secular culture is to believe we’re cosmic accidents, products of chance with no inherent telos other than what we can conjure up in our own imagination and hope to nothing that it works. Darwin gave us the gift of meaninglessness, and as we witness all around us, it is the gift that keeps on giving. We live in the most prosperous and powerful society in the history of the world, but last year almost 50,000 people killed themselves. How many more tried? How many others just live lives of quiet desperation and loneliness going from experience to experience hoping to find “happiness” and fulfillment, thinking the God shaped vacuum at the center of their being can somehow be filled by something other than God. It can’t.

Meaning is ultimately impossible to conjure up living in between poles of meaninglessness. In the secular view of reality, we come from nothing and we are headed to nothing; oblivion is our destiny. When life gets hard it has no other purpose or meaning than it’s just hard, and nobody likes that! No wonder so many people are so miserable. For Christians, though, Paul prefaces the above verses with this blessed truth that gives all things meaning for us:

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.

If we really, truly believe this, and trust in God, we can sometimes have a semblance of peace and even if it’s not perfect, it glorifies God and is good for us. But nobody said it would be easy!

 

Habakkuk 3: Will We Trust the Lord When Everything Looks Like We Shouldn’t?

Habakkuk 3: Will We Trust the Lord When Everything Looks Like We Shouldn’t?

Jul 28, 2023 | Epistemology - Trust

If we’re honest, we don’t tend to live by faith (i.e., trust) in God, but by circumstances. If our circumstances are hunky dory, to our liking, we’re happy, if not we moan and complain. I like to think we naturally stop doing this in the process of growing in maturity, of growing up, of overcoming this penchant to act like children, but growing up isn’t easy. It is, however, necessary. For Christians this process is called sanctification, or being made holy by God. As I was going through my own sanctification process in life at some point I realized how hard it was. By nature I found I’m a moaner and whiner, and I tended to see myself as a victim easily seduced by self-pity. I came up with a phrase not too long ago some four decades into this process: the pain of sanctification.

Being molded and shaped by Almighty God into the image of his Son is not fun, nor for the faint of heart, but the fruit is sweet. If we really want God to have his way with us, it will get ugly. Our feelings will be hurt, and as Tim Keller always said, He will crush us. It is often an emotional struggle. The reason is that, as Jesus said (John 16:8), when the Holy Spirit comes, “he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment.” The Greek for convict, elegchó- ἐλέγχω is a tough one: reprove, rebuke, discipline, expose, show to be guilty. That word expose is especially scary. Who wants to be exposed? Not me! In fact when I was younger in the Lord I was afraid of asking God to have his way with me, to expose my sin. Now I plead with him to do it because of one very important word, in fact I’ve learned the most important word in the Christian faith: trust. Yes, it’s right up there with love, but trust has to come first because loving God, ourselves, and our neighbors is the fruit of trust.

As I finished the book of Habakkuk and read these final verses that word trust came to mind, and how difficult it can be to exercise it if we live by circumstances:

17 Though the fig tree does not bud
    and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
    and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
    and no cattle in the stalls,
18 yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
    I will be joyful in God my Savior.

19 The Sovereign Lord is my strength;
    he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
    he enables me to tread on the heights.

In the ancient world when almost everyone lived on farms and grew their own food nothing could be worse than this. It’s not just some empty store shelves like we experienced in the last few years that for us is a slight inconvenience, but imagine walking into every store in your city and they are all empty! Might we just panic? When everything that sustains life is gone what do we do? Freak out! Yet here is Habakkuk saying it doesn’t matter because he will choose a different response which will not be determined by the circumstances: trust.

I’ve found as I’ve grown older in the faith and in life that my greatest sin is not one of my most obvious sins, but my lack of trust in God. And because of that I’ve found that one of my favorite verses in the Bible is the most convicting, Isaiah 26:3:

You will keep him in perfect peace
   him whose mind is steadfast,
   because he trusts in you.

 If I don’t have perfect peace, I don’t trust in God. It’s as binary as you can get. I can say that sometimes in life I think I might have such peace, but I’ve found over the years I’m not really good at the whole perfection thing. So I’ve come to my default position in my daily prayers: I repent of this lack of trust every day. It’s reflected in things like fear, worry, anxiety, doubt, impatience, anger, and being easily annoyed. Oh, how easily annoyed I can be! After four plus decades as a Christians and God’s sanctifying work in my life, I think I’m a little better in putting my tendency to annoyance in abeyance, but its never easy. I have to constantly be aware that I just threw perfection out the window.

Where do all these attitudes and emotions not honoring to God come from? Living by circumstances and not by faith. The Greek word translated as faith or belief in the New Testament is pistis- πίστις: “Properly, persuasion (be persuaded, come to trust).” I really like the way Strong’s Concordance puts that because God never, ever requires “blind” faith, or faith without reason. This is very important to understand for a couple reasons. 

  1. The first is atheists pushing the lie that Christians (i.e., “religious people”) need faith because there is no evidence for what they believe. Or at best the evidence is so weak they have to take a “leap” of faith. In the words of Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, faith is believin’ what you know ain’t so. Thus people who are “not religious” supposedly don’t need “faith.” This is of course garbage because there is in fact an ocean’s worth of evidence pointing to Christianity’s veracity and that it’s worthy of our trust.
  2. The other reason is more important. The kind of faith that seeks the blessing of perfect peace in Him is, to coin a phrase, persuasive faith. In other words, God persuades us throughout our lives in relationship with Him (meaning we daily seek Him in his word, prayer, and in fellowship with His people, see 7:7) that we can trust Him, that He is trust-worthy, worthy of trust. He will never leave us out to dry even when “the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food. 

I will end this with a brief story. My sister-in-law was over for a visit recently, and we were talking God and things, and having recently read Habakkuk these verses were on my mind. So I pulled out my Bible at our dining room table and read the passage. Or should I say I tried to read the passage. When I got to, “yet I will rejoice in the Lord,” I could not get the words out, the tears wouldn’t let me. I’m not exactly sure why passages like this do that to me sometimes. Is it because I can approximate such trust at times, or that I’m so bad at it? I think it’s the latter because no matter how bad I continue to be at it, God in Christ loves me anyway, and continues to love and sanctify me so that I can approximate it a little more every day, and experience its blessings. Who doesn’t want peace of mind and heart rather than anxiety, fear, worry, and doubt? It’s a rhetorical question. 

When we realize just how unworthy we are, yet God loves us anyway because of Christ, tears are the appropriate response, but the emotions are not something we can manufacture because we think it’s the right thing to do. Relationships don’t work that way. They are dynamic, alive, unpredictable, coming when we least expect them, and hard to control. God in us, in Christ, in the person of the Holy Spirit is real, and the truth of who He is and what He’s done for us is stunning to contemplate. The more you do, the more real it becomes, and you won’t be able to help the emotions either.