Why Faith?

What was God Thinking?

Photo by name_ gravity on Unsplash

We live life for the most part as if it makes sense.

Why, for example, did we not understand gravity, before Newton got hit on the head by an apple? Well, actually we did know stuff about it, but not enough to give it a name. The same with atoms like oxygen, which are critical to our lives in spite of the fact we can’t see them — and yet we operate with complete confidence oxygen atoms are there. We even have entire subjects in school that deal with things like gravity (physics) and oxygen (chemistry).

Theology is the discipline that studies the nature of God who happens to be, for the most part, just as invisible as gravity and oxygen. And yet, unlike physics and chemistry, many in mankind are skeptical of the existence of a specific God or gods or spiritual beings of any nature. Sure, members of our species have written about God and gods. We have mythology, including superheroes of comic books and other fictional story forms and we know where they came from — our imagination. We even know why we invented them. They helped us, especially when we were children, deal with the fact we live in an overwhelmingly dangerous world. That is the usefulness or purpose of mythology, including fairytales and nursery rhymes. They helped inform us when we were most weak and innocent just what kind of world we had found ourselves in. They helped us cope with danger by enabling us to imagine we have super powers, like flying and bending steel with our bare hands.

Let’s go a little further and see if we can now better understand the awkward years of adolescence.

Heavy metal music, rock stars with clownish painted freaky faces, and tattoos of skulls, helped express the anger and disappointment of discovering Santa Claus and the tooth fairy were not real, but gravity and oxygen with all the mathematics and chemical formulas were. The world wasn’t as fun and simple as we were lead to believe. So, of course we were angry.

Not only that, our bodies began to betray us, morphing us into creatures beginning to look more like our parents. As we continued to learn information about life closer to the ways adults understand it, we became angry for having been, it seemed to us at the time, lied to. Our parents turned out to be more flawed than we were at first lead to believe. This gave us the excuse to separate from them and follow others of our own generation, not completely realizing at the time we were repeating a pattern of rebellion other generations before us had already done in their own ways, and within the limitations of the technology of their times. We weren’t as clever and original as we initially innocently thought.

Now let’s flip the script.

Imagine you are God. You see the patterns of men, after all, by definition of what being God is, you created them.

You know you exist, but they don’t.

Let’s also stipulate, that you, as God, are good. Unlike the gods of mankind’s myths you don’t behave as they do. You created time. You are outside the time you created. This means you can see the end, the middle, and beginning of time all at once.

But here is your problem. You operate under certain laws of nature you have created and installed into your universe in such a way that enables those with the capacity to understand to be able to make decisions thus allowing them to advance in knowledge over time. Also, they can choose to obey or disobey, which opens up the opportunity for them to experience true love and true hate.

Under those conditions, how do you enable them to make good decisions?

How do you reveal yourself to them in a way that will work, regardless the generation they will have happened to be born into?

The answer is to teach them to trust you through faith first.

This means that men and women, boys and girls, will need to choose God before they can even begin to understand him, and they will only understand him as he reveals himself over times longer than any of their life spans. This means those who show up later on the timeline will have more information compared with those who came before them, but it will still be incomplete.

In other words, God has created a way for mankind, regardless of when individuals lived, or even what age they were at any time, to come to understand that God is even more real than gravity and oxygen. It is called Faith, or Believing, and Trusting at the front end in order to discover who God is. In other words, we are called to walk by faith into obedience which then is rewarded by opening up the relationship with God that then allows us to grow in our understanding. This explains why there is such a difference in behavior between those who don’t believe in God and those who have walked with him for a long time.

Faith is God’s system of avoiding showing any favoritism between the people he has created.

He invites us all wherever and whenever we are alive on this planet to come to him by faith, believing that he exists and that he is truthful and loving, even though we are currently in a dark and evil world that wants to cover all this up by making it sound like just another fairytale.

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation. By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.

Hebrews 11:1-3 (ESV)

And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.

Hebrews 11:6 (ESV)

Photo by Billy Pasco on Unsplash