SUNDAY: Bible Study - 9:00 AM | Worship - 10:00 AM | PM Worship - 6:00 PM WEDNESDAY: Bible Class - 7:00 PM ~ 8110 Signal Hill Road Manassas, Virginia | Office Phone: 703.368.2622

Now faith is substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.  Hebrews 11.1

I was a bit too proud of the fact that of all the people I was related to by blood or marriage, I was the only one who didn’t need eyeglasses. Then age caught up with me, and I am on my third pair of progressive lenses. I am less able to function without my glasses than my wife, who has had hers since adolescence.  What a blessing it is we humans are so good at finding ways to compensate for out limitations.

tools Microscopes, telescopes, and mathematics allow us to see from sub-atomic particles to the edge of the membrane of our universe. Powerful machines lift, and dig, and move, and remove. We use tools to correct or repair the internal function of our eyes and ears – or use eyeglasses and hearing aids to compensate for their failings externally. We are tool makers. Tools compensate for our limitations. These limitations are many. But our ability to compensate for our limitations – our knack for making tools that transcend them is unparalleled. We are special, because we are not limited by our limitations.  God has given us minds that know how to use tools to bridge the gap between our limited abilities and our ambitious reach.

            Faith is such a tool.  The verse above says so.  It mentions two limitations we humans have, and asserts that Faith is the tool that transcends them. The first is the limitation of time.  We live in the present, and only the present.  We cannot experience what lies ahead in our future until it becomes the present. We experience time. We experience time as a line. God is not contained by time at all because He created it, He exists outside it. God has made promises. We can look at the past and see that God has always kept His promises, and thus we may project into a future we cannot see and know that the things we hope for in God are sure. We may know this substantively.  The tool we use to know this is Faith.

            The second limitation this verse mentions is perception. Although our God-given cognitive and abstract abilities are vast, they are still limited. So many questions elude us. “How can God be sovereign, and yet allow us to have free will?” for instance, or “How can God possibly love us?” or “How does the universe hold together?”   Faith is the tool we use to compensate for the inability of our finite minds to factor these kinds of questions out.

            We see an example of this tool being used in Genesis 22. God has asked Abraham, in words calculated to maximize emotional impact, to sacrifice his son:

Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and take him to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will show you. Genesis 22.2

            This demand, on the surface, seems cruel and nonsensical. But Abraham goes. And when he leaves the servants behind to climb the mountain with his son he says: “Stay here with the donkeys. The boy and I will go yonder and worship, and we will return to you.”  “We will go…we will return,” he asserts. Of course, he is right. They both go, and they both return. How did he know this would be the case? The writer of Hebrews tells us that he used the tool of faith to see beyond human experience and perceive what God could do.

By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac…He considered that God is able to even raise the dead. Hebrews 11.18-19.

            It is important for us to understand that Faith is not a compensation for a paucity of evidence – it is a tool that compensates for our limitations. Faith is the tool we use to transcend the limits of time and perception in order that we may know, substantively, that what God tells us is true.

                                                                                                                                                           

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