Faith

Faith is something we all have. It is something we exercise everyday. In the morning we get up in the full anticipation that our lives are going to continue that day. We have a natural belief mechanism.

In fact everything we do is predicated on faith, if you stop and think about it. Even philosophers acknowledge that. Instinctively, we have faith in ourselves. Some have enormous faith in themselves; others much less. But every one has a measure of faith – or belief – in the life they live.

The issue comes with regard to a god figure. Some people seem to have no problem with the idea, while others just cannot believe it. Yet others find themselves somewhere in between, partly in belief, partly not.

It all comes down to how each of us sees it. Perhaps to our predisposition, perhaps to our environment [having parents who have faith in some sort of God, one type of religion or another]. That is certainly the humanist’s position -the person who sees life as merely human without any god or god type involvement in our existence.

In essence that is a materialist position. We are merely matter, physical beings in a physical world. There is nothing beyond, and our destiny is in our own hands. The world is explained purely in such terms, and questions of faith in a god figure are superstition, ignorance, deception, feeble mindedness, an excuse etc.

The Christian position is evidently that God exists, and that God came as a man Jesus Christ to teach and live and die the way which the Christian faith espouses. In Christianity God is supremely a living example of what life is and how it should be lived.

Problem is that this may be the proposition – and we can readily concede there was a Jesus figure on which the whole faith is based. But of course believing him to be God and to be what he claimed to be – God in flesh, God the Way, God the Truth and God the Life – is really stretching the bounds of our credulity.

Just because some one says they are God etc, does not make it so. And certainly this person Jesus Christ only lived for 33 years as a man on this earth – he no longer exists as such. He is not here; if he were immortal surely he would be ?

No. Nice story, nice teaching but that’s as far as it goes.

Well that is as far as our natural faith goes. Yes.

But Jesus taught – and the Bible records both in the Old Testament writings and in that of the Evangelists and the apostles of the New – that faith is needed and that natural faith just won’t do.

You see faith – the supernatural variety – is a gift from God. Unless God gives it, you won’t believe it.

Now let me just pause a moment to say  this. People with natural faith  – the faith we all have – are quite capable of creating a god figure. In fact there is a natural propensity in some to do this. But it is natural faith and natural faith begets merely natural religion of one sort or another.

There is a great deal of religion in this world – human beings attempts on the basis of their natural faith to explain the world in religious, quasi spiritual terms.

But there can be only one actual God – the All Powerful, All Present, All Knowing One who created us and therefore indeed must, by virtue of that creation, surely own us.

Faith to believe in God our Creator must come from God our Creator. In fact the Bible explains that we are ‘fallen’ creatures: the descendants of Adam who sinned against God and was cursed – expelled from Eden where Adam dwelt with God and communed quite naturally with him.

That ability to see, accept and know God was lost to us.

And only God can break the curse and give us the ability to see and understand and know again.

I can accept as true that God is indeed God, that he made the world and us in it, because I have such faith.

God given faith.

Along with countless others down the ages and indeed alive today who accept and see and know that Jesus Christ was what he claimed to be the Son of God who came to open blind eyes [physical healings to illustrate spiritual truths]; who described himself as the Light of the world; who said that he was the Way, the Truth and the Life, and that no-one can come to God the Father but through Jesus the Son.

Too hard for many to accept. Too hard for many religious to see.

Because God alone gives faith, the faith that comes from him, to see and accept him. And that faith can only come when we hear God’s word to us and accept it.

As the apostle Paul wrote to the Romans in his letter recorded for us in the New Testament of the Bible, faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.

You have to accept the Biblical account as God’s truth if you are to know the faith that comes from God.