The real meaning of faith (part 2)

In the last post, I started to explain the real meaning of faith using Paul’s account of Abraham’s faith in Romans 4. This post picks up where the last one left off.

In Romans 4:19, Paul tells us that Abraham “considered his own body.” The Greek verb for “consider” means this: “to direct one’s whole mind to an object, to study, examine, consider reflectively, ponder, or to apprehend something in its fullness by immersing oneself in it.” That means one thing: Abraham was not afraid to face the human facts. Yet somehow he did this “without weakening in his faith.” Faith does not run away from what is there in front of us. Faith does not deny that the problem exists. Faith does not say it is a “negative confession” to admit we are sick. That is not faith, that is deception. And it’s a deception born of fear. Faith states that, in spite of the undeniable reality of the physical evidence, the evidence of the word of God is stronger still. The word of God is the only evidence faith needs. When faith comes up against the brick wall of circumstance, it does not pretend obstacles do not exists. It does not pretend we have the ability to do anything to change the circumstance other than to cry out to the God who can change everything.

Paul understood what the nature of Abraham’s faith was. It was not a mind-over-matter arrogant declaration of the person who believes they have the power within themselves to make anything happen. No, it was the same faith which had enabled Paul himself to move ahead in obedience at the darkest hour of depression and despair. That was the time when he wrote to the Corinthians admitting that he felt the sentence of death had been passed upon him (2 Corinthians 1:8). That was the time he felt afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; hunted, but not killed; struck down, but not struck out (2 Corinthians 4:8-9). That was the time he felt he was carrying about in his body the dying of Jesus (2 Corinthians 4:10). Like Abraham, Paul knew that the key in such circumstances was to look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are unseen. Those things can only be seen with vision given by the Holy Spirit on the basis of the revelation of the Word of God (2 Corinthians 4:18).

Paul continues: “With regard to the promise of God he did not waver in unbelief, but was strengthened in faith, giving glory to God” (verse 20). The man or woman of faith, like Abraham, has an undivided heart. Whatever the state of their emotions or mind, they will trust God and obey him. But notice this: it was “with regard to the promise of God” that Abraham did not waver. The most crucial thing here is not Abraham’s faith, but the promise of God upon which that faith rested. Abraham’s faith was directed toward something entirely independent of him: the promise of God.

Genuine faith has nothing to do with mind over matter or positive thinking or speaking. Such a “faith” is human-centred. It is not the faith of the Bible. Abraham’s faith was based on and controlled entirely by the divine promise. Faith does not contain its own power, as some preachers seem to suggest. Such a “faith” would be a form of magic or even witchcraft – an attempted manipulation of God by human efforts. Instead, the promise on which faith rests is its power. Faith exists, Charles Cranfield wrote, because a person has been “overpowered, held and sustained by God’s divine promise.”

So many fall into condemnation, frustration or disillusionment because they feel their act of believing is the critical part. They discover that their “faith” does not work, because in truth it is not Biblical faith so much as human positive thinking. And what is the promise that holds us? The promise is the Bible in its fullness, as that Word is understood and applied through diligent study, prayer, discipleship, submission to godly wisdom, and expressed in a commitment to live not for oneself but to walk in the way of the cross. As we walk in obedience to the Word, its promises take hold of us.

Abraham “was strengthened in faith.” He did not strengthen himself by his own “positive thinking”, will-power or emotional self-control, all of which were entirely inadequate. He found his strength only and entirely in God. God himself will come alongside the one who is attempting to move forward against all the heavy currents of doubt, fear and despair the world and the enemy can stir up against him. Abraham made a choice to believe God, but that opened the door for God to help. Where everything is ranged against the promise, faith is “being enabled” by God to rest on the promise alone, refusing to demand any visible proof or evidence. People of faith are not strong people, they are weak people with faith in a strong God.

Faith begins the minute we believe what God says. Once we have believed what he has said about salvation, the big decision of faith is accomplished. The heavy lifting is over. It should be easy, by comparison, to believe him for anything which comes after that.

Then the promise of verse 21 will come up under our feet: whatever God has promised, he has power to do. This faith of Abraham – our father – is available to every one of us today.

The real meaning of faith

In Romans 4, Paul gives a powerful exposition of the faith of Abraham. Abraham is the father of faith for all of us who believe in Christ (verse 16), and so what was true of Abraham’s faith should be true also of ours.

The most basic thing that can be said about Abraham was that he believed God. Of all the things Abraham did, this was the most important and fundamental. So what is Biblical faith? Abraham’s faith was not just intellectual belief or emotional assurance. The passage Paul refers to here is from Genesis 17, where Abraham’s first response to God was a form of bitter sarcasm: he laughed at God! I doubt his emotional or mental state was any better the day he walked up Mount Moriah with Isaac at his side and a knife in his hand. The strength and power of Abraham’s faith did not depend on his emotions or his mind. It came from a much deeper place in his spirit, and gave him power to obey no matter what his emotions and his mind told him. Biblical faith operates at a much deeper and more supernatural level. Biblical faith is a conviction birthed in our spirit in an encounter between our spirit and the Holy Spirit, in which we choose in our spirit to respond to God speaking to us. This response comes in the form of our choosing to believe that God is who he says in his Word. That was Abraham’s basis of assurance.

This faith, this deep conviction of the Spirit in the truthfulness of God, is a powerful thing. It is what motivated and empowered the heroes of faith of Hebrews 11, even to the giving of their lives. It is what compelled the great Biblical figures of faith to take their lives in their hands, to disregard all human considerations and consequences, in order to do what they believed God had told them to do. It impelled Moses into the presence of Pharaoh, it sent Elijah to the top of Mount Carmel, it put Jeremiah at the bottom of a muddy well, it caused Isaiah and Ezekiel to engage in acts of personal humiliation because it was the only way of making God’s point. It sent Stephen to his stoning, Paul to his prison, John to his exile on Patmos, and Jesus to his cross. Faith is the lifeblood of the church, and where it grows weak, and men and women are more interested in self-preservation than in obeying the word of the Lord, the church will die.

Over a period of thirteen years, from Genesis 12 to Genesis 17, God spoke five times to Abraham, yet nothing happened. Just more promises! Yet God was teaching him to rely on his Word and not human circumstances, no matter how daunting or even devastating those circumstances appeared to be. Abraham’s response to such a hopeless situation was this: “Against all hope, in hope he believed” (verse 18). Abraham had been hoping for a very long time that God would fulfill his promise, yet it had not happened. That is why his believing was “against hope” – human hope, that is. Human hope will achieve only human results, and that is what the church often settles for – what we can accomplish without God. That is a sometimes comfortable, but wrong, place to be. From time to time it will take us quite a way, and we may look successful – until we hit a roadblock we cannot remove. Everyone comes to the end of their ability, but God never comes to the end of his. But Abraham chose to place his hope somewhere else – in what God had said. To achieve eternal results, our trust must be in the ability of the eternal God.

Genuine faith always brings results, and these results are expressed here: “so that he became the father of many nations, according to what had been spoken, ‘So shall your descendants be’” (verse 18). Abraham’s faith was an act of defiance in the face of everything that was around him. Every time we obey the word of God we are defying the logic and opinions of people and the force of circumstances around us. If we ever lose our capacity to do that, we have lost our power to be part of advancing the kingdom. Abraham was desperate. ‘Desperate’ literally means running out of hope. But when his human hope ran out, instead of giving up, he chose to step out in faith and trust God for a hope he did not have and could not create. When the power went out, he turned on a generator on, and discovered there was more power in the generator than there is in Niagara Falls.

It’s not bad to be desperate – think of Moses with the Egyptian army at his heels, think of Gideon with his three hundred men, think of David eyeballing Goliath, think of Jonathan and his armour bearer climbing up the cliff to confront the entire Philistine army. Think of Elijah against the four hundred prophets of Baal, think of Hezekiah with the massed armies of the greatest nation of earth outside his city walls. It’s not bad to be desperate – but it’s what you do when you’re desperate that matters. God often puts us into desperate positions because it’s only when we are up against impossible situations that we stop relying our limited resources and start to access his infinite resources instead.

Seizing the impossible

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for" (Hebrews 11:1). It's sometimes amazing the light a Greek word sheds. One example is the word hypostasis or "substance," which is found three times in Hebrews. I've written about this before, but I'm going to take another stab at it here. In the Greek language, this word originally meant that which supports something, a deposit or sediment in the ground, or even an item of immovable property.  It came to refer in a more figurative sense to the underlying reality behind a thing.

In Hebrews 1:3, Christ is pictured as the exact representation (charakter -- used of the imprint of the likeness of the Emperor on Roman coins) of the “substance” (hupostasis) of God. Christ, in a very exact and accurate way, brought the untouchable substance of the eternal God into this flesh and blood world. The eternal reality of who and what God is in the eternal, unseen realm is made physical, earthly reality in Christ. Then in Hebrews 3:14, believers are said to share in Christ if they hold fast the beginning of their hupostasis -- meaning the substance of their faith -- to the end.

Finally, we come to Hebrews 11:1.  Here it states that faith is the "substance" of things hoped for.  There is a neat parallel here between what is said of Christ in chapter 1 and what is said of faith in chapter 11. And that shouldn't be surprising, because our faith is faith in Christ. The power of faith is in its object. Your old school experiment of a magnet drawing iron filings would be a good illustration of this. In chapter 1, Christ is said to bring the substance or reality of who God is in the eternal realm into this present material, physical and transitory world. Not only that, he does so in an entirely accurate manner (remember the charakter).

In the same way, the exercise of faith brings the things that exist in the eternal realm --  the “things hoped for” -- into flesh and blood reality in the lives of individual believers. As Christ himself brings the invisible substance of God into this physical world, so faith in Christ brings the things we hope for, the things we do not yet possess, into our possession.

This is an incredibly powerful statement about faith. Our faith in Christ reaches out for and secures what is real in the invisible world and brings it into the physical reality of this present world. The outward realities of this world, which sometimes seem to us insuperable obstacles, are in fact only passing shadows. What is real in the eternal world but has no substance in the material world gains substance through the exercise of our faith. It is this substance which enabled the heroes of faith, whose lives are recorded as chapter 11 unfolds, to conquer everything the world threw against them, and still emerge victorious, whether in life or in death.

It's time for us to be men and women of substance, who dare to seize the impossible by faith and change the world.

The day Jesus was surprised

Jesus was “astonished” at the faith of the Roman centurion who came to Him seeking healing for his sick servant (Matthew 8:10). The same word is used in Mark 6:6 to describe how Jesus was "astonished" at the unbelief of the people in his home town. These are the only times this verb occurs in the entire New Testament with reference to Jesus. Jesus was rarely surprised by anything, but those two situations caught him off guard. It astonished Jesus that, in spite of all the miracles, his townsfolk could see no further than the boy they had grown up with. It equally astonished Him that this centurion, entirely foreign to Israel and the covenant promises of God, could so easily grasp hold of who Jesus was in relation to his Father. The townsfolk of Nazareth saw only Jesus’ earthly father, the centurion saw only his heavenly Father. The townsfolk limited Jesus to what his earthly father could give him, the centurion saw that Jesus could have anything his heavenly Father gave him. In one sense, therefore, the two stories are all about how different people understood Jesus and how they received him.

The centurion, by receiving Jesus as the Son of God and giving him due honour, placed himself in the middle of God’s chain of authority. The centurion was the link in the chain between Jesus and the sick servant. The centurion, by placing himself under Jesus’ authority, tapped into that authority and became the channel by which that authority flowed to the servant. Even though the centurion himself had no direct physical role in the healing, he was the human channel by which it occurred. It was by his faith that the servant was healed (Matt. 8:13). If he had not come to Jesus, if he had not recognized Jesus’ authority, if he had not come under that authority, the power of God would not have been released to heal the servant.

Jesus said that he had not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. The centurion’s faith was not great because he believed that Jesus could heal by long distance. The centurion’s faith was great because, as a Gentile raised completely outside the knowledge of God, he had, in a way even the disciples had not yet seen, penetrated into the secret of Jesus’ authority. He had seen that Jesus himself was the Son of God, and because he stood directly under his Father’s authority, he had power even over sickness. The centurion understood exactly where Jesus’ authority came from and how it operated. And he did all this without being raised in the Scriptures or in the knowledge of God. But he did possess one thing, and that one thing was enough: an understanding of authority which was so acute it led him to the one with authority over all.

Moving by faith to enter into God's chain of authority does not give us the ability to do anything outside of God's will. But failure to exercise faith is equally failure to recognize Jesus for who he truly is, and that failure will mean God will not use us to do what he otherwise could have done through us. God being God, he will find another way of bringing his kingdom on earth, but what a tragedy when we fail to understand who Jesus is, fail to understand the nature of his authority, fail to enter into a totally submitted relationship with him which releases that authority, and in the end fail to enter into the destiny for which God created us.

I doubt Jesus is astonished at anything from his seat beside the Father's throne, but if he is, I would rather he be astonished at my faith than at my unbelief. How about you?

"Just say the word..."

“‘Just say the word’”, the Roman centurion said to Jesus, “‘and my servant will be healed, for I am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to this one, “Go!” and he goes, and to another, “Come” and he comes, and to my slave, “Do this!” and he does it’”   (Matthew 13:9). This is the kind of man Jesus described in the first of the Beatitudes as being poor in spirit.  He knew that he had nothing to commend himself to God, and could only throw himself on God’s mercy.  He was a man of power, yet had no power in the thing that really mattered – the life of his beloved servant.  Yet he knew that there was a greater power he could access if he came to it the right way, in the acknowledgment of his total powerlessness and worthlessness.

The reward given to those poor in spirit, according to Jesus, is this: “Theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:3).  Those who know they are nothing in themselves are those to whom the power of the kingdom will be given. Centurions were the backbone of the Roman army and the Roman empire. All authority in the empire was vested in one man, Caesar. Although centurions carried no authority in their own right, they did carry the delegated authority of Caesar himself. If you disobeyed them, you disobeyed Caesar - and you received the consequences. The centurion understood by instinct and training the profound Biblical truth that a person will only exercise as much authority as they are submitted to. He saw Jesus as the carrier of a power greater than Caesar's, and he determined to plug into it.

Someone pointed out that there is a critical connection between each of the Beatitudes and the promises attached to them – and the connection is Jesus. Without Jesus, none of the promises will come. But with him, those who are poor in spirit will surely receive the kingdom of heaven.  Those who mourn will be comforted.  Those who are meek will inherit the earth.  Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled.  With a right attitude and heart, we can go to Jesus and receive the promises.

The centurion met the connecting point that day in the person of Jesus.  He plugged his empty battery into the greatest power source in the universe.  Because of Jesus, this man who was poor in spirit received the power of God’s kingdom.  The centurion believed that Jesus’ word alone was sufficient to heal his servant, and through his faith – the child-like trust of one poor in spirit – the miracle occurred: “And Jesus said to the centurion, “‘Go your way; let it be done to you as you believed.’  And the servant was healed that very hour” (verse 13).

Notice the words, “Let it be done to you as you believed” (or “according to your faith”). These words are significant. Jesus held all the power in the universe, yet he enlisted the centurion as a critical co-labourer. It was the centurion’s faith which released the power of Jesus to heal, and if the centurion had not exercised that faith, the servant would not have been made well.

In actual fact, we don't need a lot of faith to see miracles happen - faith the size of a mustard seed is enough, Jesus said (Luke 17:6). But we do need some faith. Why? Because Jesus requires something to work with for the miracle to happen. He does not need us because he is less than God, but because in his divinity he has chosen to work alongside us, his brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, in expanding the family business, the kingdom of God.

Today we need an army of centurions to carry on this work, and see God glorified on earth. You can be one of them!