A great post from Michael Jensen today about Abraham, Sarah, doubt and faith (I’m presuming it was originally a Moore College chapel sermon):
The Doubting Believer I – Abram & Sarai
An excerpt:
The story of Abram illustrates for us that faith is not heroic. It might seem strange that the New Testament presents doubting Abraham as an exemplar of faith. In Romans 4, his faith is offered as the great outflanking manoeuvre in the historic pattern of God’s justification of his people – he believed, and his faith was credited to him as righteousness. In Hebrews 11, he is listed in the roll call of the faithful forerunners of those who now believe.
But in being an example of faith, Abraham is not a hero of faith. Faith is not some virtue like courage which deserves credit by being righteousness. Biblical faith is a hearing of the word of God as the word of God. Now this word of God is always spoken to us in the midst of a life in which it is contested and disputed, and even flatly denied. It is a word about ninety-year old women having babies, or bedraggled slaves becoming great nations, or about the dead coming back to life. There is always with this word of God that we receive another way of looking at it. As word about the future, as a promise, it never comes to us as a completely fulfilled word. There is always a gap. And so we should not be shocked or dismayed when our questions start to fill that gap: how is God going to bring his word to pass? What is God’s plan in this bleak circumstance? Why are so few people responding to the gospel at the moment? What proof can I have of God’s commitment to his promises? This side of the end of all things, Christian faith will always be attended by these questions.
So why believe? In his shambolic way, against all hope, Abraham believed, though the evidence of his body ‘as good as dead’ contradicted the promise he heard. Why?
Because the character of God has its own inner logic. The word of God rings true to who God is as he reveals himself to us in the history of salvation. It is the evidence of what God actually does that compels us to believe. The truth that we receive when we belief is not deducible in the ordinary sense, or calculable, or even possible as we recognise it. It does not follow natural laws. But it is consistent with the miracle that there is something rather than nothing. Abraham was ‘fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised’.
From the Sola Panel
This is the fifth instalment of a five-part series (Read parts 1, 2, 3 and 4)
We’ve been looking at Psalm 8 and Hebrews 2, and have discovered that Jesus provides the solution to the puzzle of Psalm 8.
Where do we see Jesus? We see him in the Gospels, those records and witnesses to Jesus’ life, death on the cross and resurrection from the dead. The Gospels form the first four books of our New Testaments. And as we look at this man Jesus Christ in those Gospels, we see something very significant: we actually see (if we look at this testimony closely) that God himself became human: Jesus, the Son of God.
This is the reason that we are important to God. It’s because God actually became one of us. God, the creator and designer—the one who is far above and beyond even the 70 sextillion stars—the one whose hands hold the universe—the one for whom and by whom this same universe exists—became human. He became one of us—one of the specks of dust—one of the small, pitiful creatures. He became a baby and grew. And he did it “because of the suffering of death” (Heb 2:9b).
Just as our very existence and value in this universe is a real problem, so too is the fact that suffering and death is also a problem. The Bible doesn’t give us final and neat reasons for suffering and death—especially when it comes to individual cases. But it does tell us that suffering and death are all finally bound up with our rejection of God himself. The fact that we have abandoned our responsibility and ceased to live as God desires means that we are subject to death.
Death is not the way the world should be. It’s wrong. You will know this if you have ever experienced the death of a loved one, relative or friend, as well as thought about your own impending death. But the Bible says that death is all bound up with this terrible reality—the reality that we, as individuals and as a race, have taken our importance for granted and have used it to pretend that we are God, choosing to define our own lives. Death is, in the end, God’s judgement against our rejection of him—our abandonment of who we are, our ignoring of him and our playing God ourselves. Death now; death forever.
But what has Jesus done about death? Again, take a look at the same verse: “so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone” (Heb 2:9c). God’s Son became one of us because of God’s grace—his lavish, undeserved love for us. The reason you matter to the God who made the countless stars and supernovas is not because you’re big or good or important to the running of the universe; it’s simply because he decided to love you. And he showed his love in an incredible way: Jesus, in becoming one of us, tasted death for us. Although he was God himself, the perfect human being, he also suffered. He died. He died, in fact, an agonizing death on a Roman cross. And he did it for us, in our place.
What does that mean for us? “For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering” (Heb 2:10). Jesus died to bring us back to God. Because Jesus has suffered the consequences of God’s judgement, we don’t need to face God’s final judgement against us. Because Jesus died, he has made us ‘sons’, which means heirs—children of God. Those who trust Jesus—those who belong to Jesus—will have ‘salvation’, which means escape from God’s judgement—escape, in the end, from death itself.
Jesus died to bring us to glory—to finally ‘crown us with glory and honour’, as the song goes (Ps 8:5). This means everlasting life in a new creation that God will make—a place where there is no suffering or death, where there is no judgement from him, where we live rightly as God’s children and where we will know him finally and perfectly.
Jesus, who has suffered and been made perfect, has risen from the dead and is now alive. He himself is crowned with glory and honour. One day those who trust in him and know him will see him as he is.
What is your response to this? Do you know Jesus? Do you trust Jesus? Do you believe that the riddle of our existence is actually found, not in yourself, but in him?
Comments on the Sola Panel
From the Sola Panel
This is the fourth instalment of a five-part series (Read parts 1, 2 and 3.)
We’ve been looking at Psalm 8, and we’ve seen the puzzle it presents us with. On the one hand, we are nothing compared to the majestic God who created the universe. On the other hand, God tells us that we are important—that we are created for a purpose in this world.
You know that you and your actions matter, don’t you? You know that what you do or say, how you treat the world and how you treat other people actually matters, don’t you? You know that some things are right and that some things are wrong, don’t you? You know that you will face death one day, like everyone else, and that there’s something scary and horrible about that. What are you going to do about it?
One possibility is that you could just ignore the whole issue. You could just decide that it’s enough to eat, drink and enjoy life as much as you can, minimizing pain as much as possible and maybe along the way, doing great things, loving, laughing and crying, and then dying. You could buy, read and act on Dave Freeman’s book 100 Things to Do Before You Die—carve out your own meaning, define your existence.
But is that really enough? History is littered with the corpses of individuals who have died and suffered under dictators who decided they wanted to define the meaning of their own existence. Maybe you will never be an evil dictator—maybe you will never try to live in a way that hurt anyone. And yet, if you’re honest—if I’m honest, I know I have hurt people. Deeply. Despite the fact that I want to pretend that I can run my life the way I want without any consequences, I also know the guilt of my failures, the pain I’ve cause by my selfish actions and the evil in my heart. And I know that my existence, no matter how full of food and drink and life and love, is not, in the end, going to matter when I die and dissolve into the dust from which I came. I also know that this matters too, somehow.
Back to the song and the riddle of the song. God is great. His creation is enormous. In all of this, what is man? Who am I? Who are you? Why am I so important?
Fast forward hundreds of years.
The claim of the Bible is that this riddle—this puzzle—does have an answer—a profound and great answer. It’s there in the words of the New Testament—where a Christian (that is, someone who knows Jesus Christ) can read the words of the song that we ourselves have just read and not only sees the problem, but also the answer:
It has been testified somewhere,
“What is man, that you are mindful of him,
or the son of man, that you care for him?
You made him for a little while lower than the angels;
you have crowned him with glory and honor,
putting everything in subjection under his feet.”
(Heb 2:6-8a)
Here’s that song—that problem—that age-old issue of our importance: “What is man?” And then, just to make sure we’re all on the same page, our Christian author highlights the particular problem he sees: “Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him” (Heb 2:8b)
We might believe that we have a God-given purpose and responsibility to our lives in this world. But we don’t actually see it. When we look up, we still see those majestic and distant heavens. The original Hebrew song speaks of the greatness of stars—the heavenly lights. Here in this letter to the Hebrews, it’s expressed in terms of angels, heavenly superpowers. But in either case, the point is the same: God is above it all, and we don’t and can’t see with our eyes why and how God should care for us.
And then, when we look around, we don’t see human beings living responsibly, caring for God’s world or for each other, or acting rightly as agents of God’s loving rule, do we. We just see ourselves, trying to define our own existence, hurting and being hurt, loving and hating and dying.
But there is something else—somebody else—who we do see, in verse 9: “But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor” (Heb 2:9a). Whom do we actually see? What is the piece of evidence that should make us turn around and take notice? We see Jesus. This is the Bible’s claim; this is the difference and the answer.
To be continued …
Comments on the Sola Panel
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