FAITH-ASSURANCE ABOUT WHAT WE DO NOT SEE
03-04-2022
Faith is confidence and assurance of the invisible and the future (Hebrews 11:1). It is certainty of things outside of our present experience. Faith reaches beyond what we can know by observation or science. However, we do not invent reality by faith. What is real, even though unseen, already exists.
We were not living when the universe was created, but our experience of the world tells us there is a Creator. “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). David looked towards the sky and wrote, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1). He never saw God’s hands, but he saw the result of his invisible power and intelligence. The Apostle Paul wrote, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made” (Romans 1:20).
Scientists have discovered and mapped over three billion double helix pairs in the human genome. This knowledge has allowed drug manufacturers to develop COVID vaccines in less than a year! Even though he knew nothing about the human genome, David would praise God for the way that he was formed, “I praise you [o God] because I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14). This, plus discoveries about the immensity of the universe, leads us to understand the infinite nature of the Creator’s intelligence.
Observing human nature, we further conclude that God is a moral being. We know right from wrong; so, if the creature knows right from wrong, his Creator must be the perfect moral standard of his creature. Powerful telescopes see galaxies millions and billions of lightyears away. Faith concludes that the One who made the universe is far greater than anything that we can see or explain.
While the sciences reveal the intricacy and the immensity of the creation, it is faith that praises the personal, loving and all-powerful God who made it. Some astrophysicists are making guesses about the existence of alternative universes that could be spawned out of an eternal mathematical singularity that they say must have existed before the explosion of the big bang. Created in God’s image, people crave to know their origin. This origin can be the God of faith, all-knowing, all-powerful, everywhere present and eternal; or it can be reduced to “an eternal mathematical singularity,” a god created in a unbelieving heart.
Those who reduce God to a mathematical formula that spawns universes have in effect removed God from us, leaving us to craft religion or a moral code modeled after our own desires. Paul would write that those who create their own gods suppress the truth by their wickedness (Romans 1:18). Removing the Creator God out of involvement in our lives and society allows us to reject the parts of God’s moral law that we don’t like, and as a result we try to impose on others that part of the law that we accept.
In the first chapters of the Bible, we see traces of the ancient world-view or cosmology. The ancients saw the world around them and experienced the forces of nature, and then gave them supernatural powers. They worshipped the sun, moon, stars, trees, animals, and the storm. Using that world-view, the Bible corrected this ignorance and disobedience. It says that God created all things by his powerful word (Genesis 1:1ff). And then God commanded Adam and Eve to tend the garden and refrain from eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:15-17).
The Bible does the same for us today. Because God is the Creator, we do not have to fear science and technology. We have nothing to fear from the Big Bang, or dinosaur bones, volcanos erupting because of movement of geologic plates or land masses. What we must not do is deify the forces of nature by making them eternal. We have no right to remove the Creator because we can explain the forces of nature through our science and technology. Our understanding should not remove God, but reduce us to humbly bow and worship our Maker. By faith we know, worship and obey this invisible, all-powerful and eternal Creator.
