Posted by
JasonC on Wednesday, July 12, 2006 10:28:25 PM
As they proceeded from the mouth of God
and traveled down the road towards their appointed places in the
future, the promises of God left a trail, traces of themselves, like
when a truck has gone through a mud puddle and then driven down the
road, leaving wet, muddy tracks along the dry pavement. We who are on
the Earth live between the two locations – between the time in eternity
past when God made and sent forth His promises, and the time in the
future (either near of far) when the promises will become manifest in
our lives, though we can’t see them now. What we have to do is pick up
the trail. Hebrews 11:1, in the New King James Version, says, “Now
faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not
seen.” Here faith is described as “substance” and “evidence.” First,
the substance: The promises of God, which are in the future somewhere,
are the “things hoped for” spoken about in Hebrews 11:1 – not “hoped
for” in the modern sense, as in “I don’t know if it will happen, but I
want it to – I hope it does,” but in the divine sense that it is a
guarantee, so that when you are “hoping for” something, you are
actually “looking for” it, expecting it to happen at any time. Now, as
I said before, when the promises traveled away from God and out into a
future time, they left a trail, similar to muddy tires on dry pavement.
Well it is easy enough to see the substance that those muddy tires
leave behind. It is also easy enough to reach down and pick up that
substance; it takes hardly any effort at all. It also takes little
effort to believe that the muddy truck is somewhere down the road.
Well, that’s how simple faith is – or at least, that’s how simple it’s
supposed to be. You believe in God (it’s very hard not to; such
disbelief would be like looking at the mud on the road and saying that
no truck has passed through), and if you read the Bible, you can see
the many wonderful promises of God, so all that’s left for you to do is
to reach down with near-effortlessness and pick up the substance, the
residue, that the promises have left behind as they journeyed from God,
because the substance left behind by the unseen things (the things
hoped for) is faith, and when you pick up the faith,
you are holding in your hands the evidence of things not seen, just as
if you were holding the muddy evidence of the unseen truck. The
substance left behind is faith, and faith is the evidence. This is what the Bible is getting at when it talks about childlike faith, and how we must come to God with only
this kind of faith – as adults, we tend to complicate things, but it’s
really as simple as seeing mud in the road and realizing that something
has passed through.