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Because I Said SoI’m obsessed with a need to know how, what, when, where, and most importantly why. My need to understand the ins and outs of everything that interests me was confirmed by several personality and temperament studies, which of course I took because I need to know how, what, when, where, and why. I need to tear things apart literally or figuratively and see what it is that makes them work. In short, I’m extremely analytical.What does this mean? It means that when I was a child, the worst thing I could possibly hear was, “Because I told you so.” I loathed that comment. Give me a reason. Make me understand why I need to do something and I’ll do it. Make me believe the reason is valid. Show me why your lead is beneficial, and I’ll follow you anywhere. “Because I told you so.” feels like a cop out to a six year old. You’re convinced that there is no good reason, that your parents are simply too selfish, ignorant, or lazy to really get it right. And then, you grow up. Boy, what a change that makes. You’re able to look back and recognize why “because I said so.” was necessary. You were six, and your parents were right. You wouldn’t have understood the reason, or you would have argued against their reason no matter what it was. All you were focused on was your childish desire and the only reasoning you would have accepted, was a reasoning that would have allowed you to gain whatever it was you were after. You either couldn’t see the bigger picture, or you willingly chose to pretend that it wasn’t there. What is faith? Faith is realizing that when God says, “Because I said so.” you’re six, and he’s right. This is extremely difficult for all of us, especially for the kids with lousy childhoods and abusive parents. It’s difficult for everyone to fully comprehend God as a loving parent, much less comprehend God at all. To some, God isn’t right, He’s simply stronger. To some, God doesn’t exist because they don’t want Him to exist. To some, God exists as whatever they feel like calling Him. And still to others, God exists as us. How can faith prevail when God can’t even be correctly identified by most? We all have a difficulty with faith in God, because we all have a tendency to react to God in the same way that I reacted to my parents. We don’t get it, so we make obedience difficult. We don’t understand, so we find it hard to follow. We decide that we will only walk by faith after we see the results, which of course isn’t really faith at all. This applies to everybody, believers and non believers alike. Those who say they are putting their faith and trust in Jesus Christ still fail to do so in many areas. A friend of mine complained to me that Christians expect him to follow God with blind faith. He sarcastically commented that it was rather convenient for them to require obedience without question. To question was proof that you had no faith. This was extremely irritating to him as he was forced to swallow whatever they said as fact. If something didn’t make sense, then tough. He had to just accept what they said as truth. Unfortunately, I don’t doubt that somebody was telling him that. Faith is misunderstood from both ends of the spectrum. God never asks us to have blind faith. Blind faith is a lazy idiot’s faith. Blind faith says I have no reason to believe, I’m simply going to believe because I can’t think of anything better to do. On top of that, God repeatedly tells us to question him. He’s not insecure. He knows He’s right. He wants you to know it too. He continually tells us to seek Him. God not only wants us to find out who He is and what makes Him tick, He desperately wants to share everything with us, and in fact He already has. He’s just waiting for us to take our part in the conversation. God demands our faith, but not our blind faith. What He wants is for us to truly understand that 1) He really is the all-powerful, all-knowing, supreme God of the universe and could squish us like a bug if He so desired, and 2) He doesn’t desire that. He actually does really love us and earnestly wants a relationship with us. He wants us to draw near to Him. He wants us to want Him. That’s what faith is: acting upon your desire for Him after you get to know Him. When my father said, “Let’s go for a ride in the car.” I got in the car. My getting into the car was not an act of blind faith. It was based upon my everyday experiences with my dad. I didn’t have to understand the inner workings of an automobile, but I did understand enough of my father to know that he was 1) a lot smarter than I was, 2) he was not a liar, and 3) he loved me enough to do what he thought was best for me. When he told me to get in the car, I got in the car, and we made it to our destination. I had faith in my father to “miraculously” make that car work. Blind faith would be the equivalent of a total stranger calling me out of nowhere and telling me to open my thirteenth floor hotel window and walk out. To follow those instructions in that situation, you’d either have to be a complete idiot, or you’d have to be the epitome of laziness, deciding that it wasn’t worth the effort to research who the person was on the other end of the line and what his basis was for giving you such absurd instructions… …which is exactly what we do on the other end of the spectrum. We misunderstand faith because we want to misunderstand faith. It’s easier. There’s relatively little effort in accepting anything you hear at face value. With only the slightest amount of effort, we can sort out everything we hear into what allows us to remain in our comfort zone and what challenges us to grow, and then simply accept everything that falls into the first category as obviously originating from God and therefore we follow it in faith. This is just as wrong as having no faith. I loved, and still do love, music from groups like Petra and Whiteheart when I was a teenager. I loved artists like Michael W Smith, Russ Taff and Steven Curtis Chapman. Several church goers browbeat me over how evil these artists were and how wrong I was for listening to them. What was their basis for this judgment? They personally didn’t like the musical style. They were not standing upon biblical evidence, but personal preference. Whether they realized it or not, they were equating whatever they liked as whatever God liked, and treating their antagonistic attitudes as if it were true faithful obedience. They believed they were walking by faith. (On that note, recently we discovered a web site created by a group of pastors that I won’t name here, devoted to encouraging people to hate Billy Graham. One of their proofs that he was not really a Godly man was the fact that he allows groups like DC Talk and Steven Curtis Chapman to sing to his crowds before he speaks.) For those of you who still aren’t aware of what the rapture is, it’s the time when many Christians believe that God will return to remove His people from Earth. For those of you who aren’t aware of what the tribulation is, it’s the (generally believed to be) seven year period in which essentially Satan rules the Earth and prepares for war against God. Some people believe the rapture will happen before the tribulation, some people believe the rapture will happen after the tribulation, and some people believe that the rapture will happen some time in the middle. Some people believe there is more than one rapture that will take place, and so on, and so on. I am not entering into a discussion on any of these topics at the moment, but many people I meet don’t understand what is meant by the rapture or the tribulation, so I felt it was important to briefly explain this in order to discuss my next point. Here’s another example of misplaced faith. I was discussing the rapture with a friend of mine from church. As a matter of curiosity, I asked him when he believed the rapture would occur. He said it was going to happen pre-trib, or before the tribulation arrived. I asked what he based that on. He said that the real reason he believed that, was because the alternative was too frightening. This is not faith. If the only reason you hold to a “truth” is because it seems to fit you and make you feel good, what you have is a security blanket, not faith. Calling such a belief faith is dangerous, because even if what you’re believing in is accurate, you’ve stumbled across it accidentally and your “faith” lacks any root. It will die as soon as the weather gets rough. Not only that, but it will set a precedent in your life which will cause you to cling to other “truths” in the same manner, without testing or trying them to see if they’re correct. Our biggest problem as human beings attempting to connect with God, is that we approach the question of ‘is there a God’ more philosophically than scientifically. What I mean is this: The first thing you have to keep in mind is that whatever exists, a God, a Goddess, a Pantheon of Gods, or absolutely nothing else and we are the highest form of life, (or the third highest form if you read Douglas Adams) whatever exists simply exists. It does not change regardless of what you, I or anybody else thinks, says or acts upon. If Buddha’s ideas were correct, then my saying Allah is God is pointless, and possibly even damaging to myself and others. If Jesus Christ really is the way, the truth, and the life, and there is no other way of reaching God the Father, then all of my crystals and new age philosophies won’t help me in the slightest when I stand before the judgment throne. If Heaven and Hell exist, then I’ll be in one of them whether I wanted to roam the Earth as a free spirit in the after life or not. The point is that the object of this game we call life is to discover the truth and cling to it, regardless of whether it offends your sensibilities or not. You can’t put God in a test tube and say, “Aha, I’ve scientifically proven God.” but you can approach it with the scientific mindset that you’re going to locate the truth whatever it may be, and hold to it. You can study existence like Hugh Ross did in “The Creator and the Cosmos” and find God through the evidence all around us. But what we generally do is come to a pre-determined conclusion and then while claiming that we’re searching for truth, we simply ignore those aspects of truth which don’t fall in line with what we desire to be the end result of truth. Evolution of the species, is one whale of a case in point. Evolution doesn’t stand up to a truly scientific approach, but still exists as a theory. Why? Because the only viable alternative is that there is a God, and too many people have pre-determined not to accept God’s existence into evidence. To misquote Sherlock Holmes, once you have cast out the blatantly obvious as a possibility, you must accept the ludicrously absurd as true. So what is faith? The bible says that faith is the substance of things hoped for. It’s the evidence of things unseen. SUBSTANCE. EVIDENCE. Give these words the weight which they deserve. In your search for God, not just “Is there a God?” but “What’s God like?” and “How can I know Him better?”, find the substance that God has provided as evidence and hold to it. Like a true scientist, give each piece of evidence its proper place in the whole picture. God wants you find Him. He’s left clues all over the place. Seek and you WILL find. Faith grows as His substance becomes more evident. Have you ever noticed that atheism is the most evangelical of all the world’s religions? Why is that? Because if your basis for truth is subjective, then logically the more people you can get to agree with you, the greater your “truth”. Atheists need the security blanket of masses of people who share their opinions of what truth is. A friend of mine attempted to evangelize me into the ways of humanistic atheism. I politely rejected his evangelistic efforts, explaining that I simply didn’t possess enough blind faith to believe that there was no God. I am the pen. Go to the top | |||||||