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by Logan Ames

When you’re afraid of something in life, how do you overcome it? Do you essentially just close your eyes and wait for the circumstances to pass you by, hoping that you won’t get harmed? Do you “man up” or “woman up” and face them head on? Personally, I rarely take either of those two approaches. God has given me a very analytical mind, so it causes me to approach my fears differently than many people. While others might take the “try not to think about it” path, I gave up on that idea a long time ago. I must find a way to reason in my own head that I’ll be okay. When I was afraid of roller coasters as a child, I watched happy and healthy people with all of their limbs intact walking off The Sidewinder at Hersheypark in Hershey, Pennsylvania and reasoned that I would not be injured or killed because they were not. Even when I went skydiving as an adult in 2005, I was terrified, yet I reasoned that the odds for survival were in my favor based on seeing other people successfully complete their jumps and knowing that a very large majority of people who do it survive and love it!

In the church, so often we respond to legitimate questions or fears that people have with some form of “that’s why they call it faith." Sometimes, that might be an appropriate response. Other times, it’s an incredibly lazy one. How can followers of Christ expect to develop other potential believers by pretending as if the entire foundation of our belief system is blind faith? If we look at Scripture, there are few circumstances where God requires us to trust him with no basis or foundation whatsoever. As I mentioned in last week’s post, God routinely commanded his people in the Bible to intentionally remember what he had done for them in the past. This wasn’t because God needed some kind of pat on the back. God doesn’t need our approval, our thanks, or our encouragement. The purpose for God telling them to be intentional about remembering what he did for them and how he showed up for them over and over again when they would have otherwise been destroyed was to show them they had REASON to keep trusting him.

Faith is not the opposite of reason. Some people say that faith in an unseen God defies logic, but I guess that all depends on what your standard of reason is. As we embark on a series that will cause us to look at each and every one of the heroes of our faith mentioned in Hebrews 11, including some who are not mentioned by name, we must understand that they trusted God because their standard of reason had been altered. Before addressing any of the specific individuals, the writer of the chapter gives us what I believe is the foundational verse for the whole thing: “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible” (Hebrews 11:3). This is a verse you will see quite a bit in my posts in the coming weeks and months. The men and women of this chapter who put their lives in the hands of their Creator did so with more than a blind and unreasonable belief that he was worthy of their confidence. It was an established truth that they UNDERSTOOD.

We too can have that understanding by faith when we face impossible and trying circumstances. Let’s follow the same logic the writer, and most likely the heroes, in Hebrews 11 did. If you walk outside right now and look up at the stars, down at the flowers, around at the mountains, or out toward the beaches and oceans, you basically have two choices in deciding how you believe it all came to be as it is. You either believe that someone designed it that way, or you believe that it happened by some stroke of luck or chance. Maybe you believe that chance has been accurately described by scientific research, but if so, there is still chance involved because you’d have to decide where the very first form of matter originated. Do you realize that either of the two options I described above requires faith? Since we can’t be 100% sure either way, it’s a matter of faith. If you believe that someone designed what we see outside, then you must decide if it’s the God of the Bible or someone else. This is where faith and understanding go hand in hand. The beginning of the Bible in Genesis tells us all about what God created. Then we go outside and can physically see with our very eyes that it’s designed just as the Word says it is. Even later in Genesis 9, we see that God created the rainbow for a purpose. Today in 2017, we can still walk outside and occasionally see the rainbow as God created it.

God’s not asking you to trust him just because he says so. He’s saying, “Look around and understand that you can trust me." Continuing with the logic of the writer of Hebrews, if God could make everything that we see out of what was not visible, is there anything he can’t handle? We must understand how small our view of God is and how limited our view of his involvement in our circumstances can be at times. If our standard of reasoning through our difficult circumstances is only extended as far as we can have control over them, then we won’t be able to trust God for anything. If our best doctors in the world say there is nothing they can do for a patient with a terminal illness, then we have no reason to have hope. On the flip side, if our standard of reasoning BEGINS with the understanding that God absolutely created everything that we see out of what was not visible, then the things for which we need his intervention seem like small potatoes in comparison. That terminal illness for which there is no cure could easily be healed by God. That drug addiction which has a grip on you or your loved one is nothing compared to God’s love and strength. Those attacks by your enemies don’t stand a chance against God’s power.

In a world with increasing uncertainty, we must stand on the only thing we know IS certain: hope and trust in God. We’ve had major hurricanes, continued terror attacks all over the world, political unrest, and threats of nuclear war. These seem like overwhelming and troubling circumstances to face, and they don’t even include whatever you are facing in your personal life. Left to our own reasoning, fear will overtake us. But when we think about what we know God has already created and accomplished, we are able to reason that he can do what we need and much more. I encourage you to compare the miracles you need from him to creating the world out of what we can’t see, and let your understanding by faith be your guide to get through whatever it is. Do that this week, then join me next week as we begin to look at other men and women just like us who had to go through the same reasoning process.

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