I would like to make a case for something that should need no case – faith.  Ultimately, faith itself is nothing – it is the object of faith that is significant (obviously I could have faith that my pen would save me – and a nice pen it is too – but God Himself is a bit more authoritative regarding my soul).  So I don’t mean in any way to say that it doesn’t matter who you put your faith in.  However, I would like to take a minute to consider faith itself and what part it plays in the life of a person.

I have often fallen into a way of thinking that goes sort of like this:  there is a clear choice in life.  You can either live by faith, or you can live by sight.  The Christian (and followers of other religions) live by faith, the typical atheistic scientist lives by sight.  And this dichotomy runs full through all things – you can know by faith (that is, taking the bible seriously), or you can know by sight (that is, trusting your senses, your experiences, the latest science).  Knowing itself is accomplished by 2 different routes, and the Christian is on one, and the majority of the academic world is on the other.  (Small wonder we have such dissonances at college!)

But this is a cheat – what I am finding is that it is not this way at all.  It turns out that living and knowing by faith is the default position, and that even those who claim to be living and knowing by sight are not able to do so.  In fact, no one lives without faith.  By that, I mean everyone lives trusting in things he cannot see or touch.

When you go to the dentist, a strange and mysterious thing happens – a person (and perhaps someone you don’t even know), in a mask and white coat, picks up a needle, or a sharp instrument, or sometimes something that sounds like a tiny buzz saw, and asks you to open your mouth.  Now, one might question a person’s sanity at what happens next.  Like lambs to the slaughter, we dutifully open our mouths.  It happens every day, at hundreds of points around the city, and no one thinks anything of it.  Nothing on the news… but if you want to see just how insane this act is, just change the circumstances.  Let’s say you are walking down a dark alley one night and out from the shadows jumps a guy with a needle in one hand and a sharp instrument in the other and he says “Open up!”  The mask and white coat that seemed so reassuring on the dentist would only make this guy creepier.   In each case we have to make a decision about obeying or politely refusing the command.  How do we make that decision?  Faith.  If you believe in the person making the request, you can obey.  If you don’t you can’t.  That’s the way of the world.  It is the same way with God – if you believe Him, you can obey Him, if you don’t, you can’t.  And suddenly, it makes sense to hear Him tell us that without faith it is impossible to please God.  Or that the righteous will live BY FAITH.

In fact, we do nearly everything by faith – we certainly believe when we do things like taking wedding vows, or trusting the promises in the scripture.  But these acts are not as strange as the world thinks when we point out that we also sign contracts, cross streets in front of busses, pet our dogs, and sit in chairs by faith.  We believe bus drivers won’t run us over, or that our dogs won’t bite us, and that a chair will hold our weight.  

You may rightly say that having faith in God and having faith in my chair are not the same thing, and you would be right, but not in the way people usually think.  The argument usually goes that faith in God is faith in something we can’t see while faith in the chair is in something we do see.  And furthermore, that we have experience with chairs, so we are trusting in our own experience and our senses.  This sounds very good until you think about it a little more deeply.  

We actually are unable to trust our senses and experience unless we have a world that is coherent – that is, if we pet a dog six days in a row without a bite, we probably don’t even think about his biting us on the seventh.  Or the scientist in the lab who yesterday put two chemicals together and observes the result assumes that if he today combines the same chemicals in the same situation, he will observe the same result.  But there is no reason to believe this.  Why would that be?  Why isn’t the universe actually random?  Why don’t dogs change their personalities on an irregular basis?  Where do these laws of nature come from if there is no design that they adhere to?  And how can there be a design if there is no designer?  

Fact is, there is not only no reason to trust the uniformity of the laws of nature, there is no reason why we should be able to trust our senses – why don’t we SEE differently from one day to the next?  Can’t our senses be fooled?  Have you noticed how in the last 10 years there have been a lot of movies about false realities?  Did you see the film The Matrix?  Or the 13^th Floor?  Or Dark City?  Or The Truman Show?  They are all about how our senses are fooled into thinking that we are experiencing reality when we are actually not.  We know that our eyes can be fooled by certain sensual experiences – when we see a pole in the water that looks broken by refraction, or see a mirage on the road due to heat and reflection, et c.

And one more element:  memory.  For things to make sense we have to REMEMBER what happened the last time we pet the dog or combined the chemicals.  If we don’t, we don’t have the benefit of predicting the outcome, and it is that prediction that makes it possible for our actions.  Have you noticed how many films there have been in the last 10 years about the loss of memory?  Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Paycheck, What Dreams May Come, even Dorrie in Finding Nemo.  Each of these films has at least one character who has lost his memory – and there is always something horrible about that experience – we know ourselves by our memories as well.  Who we love, who our family and friends are, where we live, work, how to work the cell phone…

My point in all this is that without faith, we cannot obey God, but neither can we obey our dentist.  Without faith we have to give up the Christian worldview, but we also have to give up the scientific worldview because we cannot trust our senses, our experiences, or our memories unless there is a God who designed everything, gave us senses to see things as they really are, and memories that are reliable.  In the end, it is NOT a question of living by faith or living by sight – it is only a question of what or who you are going to put your faith IN.  Saying that we are not going to live by faith is really a little like saying I am not going to breathe air – I can try water or chocolate pudding, or ammonia, but it won’t last long…the reason is, we were MADE to be faithful creatures.  

So it shouldn’t surprise us that God teaches us that 

1 - we can’t please Him without faith, 

2 – that our righteousness is accomplished not by our obedience, but by our faith in His obedience,

3 – that we should walk by faith not by sight, and even that

4 – we should always remember what the Lord has done for us (Deut 6)

When Moses knows he is going to be leaving the Israelites, he gathers them around to tell them one last thing:  and that is to ALWAYS REMEMBER.  Why?  Because they were to pass the faith down to the next generation, and our memory of what God has done for us tells us who we are, why we are here, and where we are going.  All things quite necessary for us to remain sane.

One last point:  this all means that revelation and reason are not two different ways to know things:  they are two sides of the same coin.  We don’t think that there are two ways to go, like faith OR science – revelation OR reason.  Both are gifts from God given to better know Him, His plans, and how we fit into them.  We know that revelation is a gift from God, but it turns out reason is a gift too – given to be able to make sense of revelation.  And revelation comes in two types:  Special and General.

In a blog today, someone called Steve Aden had an interesting point:  "In law and culture, as in all spheres of life, the “natural order” tends always to disorder. Culture, as the term implies, must be cultivated, because bad ideas drive out good ones like weeds in an unkempt garden."


He went on to speak rightly of the need to stand against abortion, but it seemed to me as I read it that it could be equally a call to stand against the foolish thinking in many other areas of political and cultural life.  


I have never read Mr. Aden before, but I think he hit on something when he said that culture comes first, then law.  And while we may understandably feel overwhelmed when we as individuals think of making or remaking laws, making culture is a matter of daily choice for each and all of us.  Culture is simply the fabric we create when we make the thousands of little decisions every day about how we will choose to live.  Will we mow our grass or not?  Where will we invest our time and money?  Dine at home or out tonight?  What shoes will I wear?  How will I arrange our bathroom cabinet?  What will we do for a living?  Do those drapes go with that couch?  


And these questions are answered only after we have answered more fundamental ones:  what do we believe is valuable?  what true?  what good?  what beautiful?  What/who do we trust to guide us when we define these categories?  


But this leads me back to the first quote from Mr. Aken.  In all spheres of life, the natural way is toward disorder.  Things, if left alone, will fall apart, not come together.  It requires energy, time, expense, focus, discipline, for good to occur.  In short, it takes a will to work to make things good.  A culture declines as soon as it thinks that good can occur without work.  If we were ever, for example, to come to the point that most people wanted to live well without working, we would come apart at the seams as a culture.  We would go down in the history books like Rome: defeated not by outward attack, but by a lack of inward commitment to the good, true, and beautiful.  Without the will to strive for these things the natural forces take over, and we decline into barbarism.  Cultures decline due to exhaustion - we can rest on our rakes, but we can't put them away.  Things don't stay neutral, they decline, so without a vision, there is no work to accomplish that vision, and thus the people perish.  The welfare state/big government issues are not my point here - big government is the natural result of what I am saying which is that making cultural decisions like what is beautiful, and what is delicious turn out to be far more important than we have been led to believe.  Those commitments to the good, true, beautiful, by millions of people, leads to civilization with wiser laws, more honest governors, truer charity, and sounder fiscal policy.  In the long run, we must be committed to principles that make a certain course of action distasteful (even if it is legal), and so rejected because it runs against our corporate vision of the human life well lived before God.  Without these inner commitments, there is no civilization in our culture.  

Did you ever fear that God's requirements of you were too much to ask?  That death to self was just a little too far?  There really HAS to be some part of your life that you can call "your own"?  That God keeps His hands off?  What if we were looking at that the wrong way, and that everything we keep for ourselves will eventually die?  Here's CS Lewis from a little-known essay:


"For some (nobody knows which) the Christian life will include much leisure, many occupations we naturally like.  But these will be received from God's hands.  In a perfect Christian they would be as much part of his "religion" his "service" as his hardest duties, and his feasts would be as Christian as his fasts.  What cannot be admitted - what must exist only as an undefeated but daily resisted enemy - is the idea of something that is "our own," some area in which we are to be "out of school" on which God has no claim.

For He claims all, because He is love and must bless.  He cannot bless us unless He has us.  When we try to keep within us an area that is our own, we try to keep an area of death.  Therefore, in love, He claims all.  There's no bargaining with Him."

from the essay, "A Slip of the Tongue,"  CS Lewis (The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses)

Praise God that He won't allow us even the smallest part of our own lives...it is out of His love for us that He does not.