Faith: Assurance not Insurance

Recap

Last week we looked at how hope fuels and empowers our faith to believe God, as it gives us "confidence in what we hope for." This week we will talk about how two elements of faith: assurance in the unseen and how understanding God as our Creator, gives us confidence in faith. Lets review Hebrews 11:1-3:

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for. 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.

Assurance Within Creation

What kind of assurance is unseen? How is it that we can have confidence in something we cannot experience with our senses?  This is normally the challenge and misunderstanding of faith; it is also where we can get the notion that faith is blind.

In our world we want insurance instead of assurance. We want a written policy that will take care of us so that we will be covered. What we do not always like is someone telling us that everything will be okay and that we will be taken care of, but that is exactly what Hebrews 11:1-3 is saying here--that our assurance is in what is being told to us, not in the insurance policy we carry.

We have assurance in what is told to us because of the power and authority of those words. We see that, "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." Literally, faith understands that the very air we are breathing in this moment, and all of the cosmos, came about by the command of God, so that what once did not exist now exists because God spoke it into existence (Gen 1:1-2-14).

This is hard for us because we are a people dependent upon our own understanding. We want proof more than we want someone to tell us something, but what we do not realize is that we have a choice in what we put our faith in, just like Adam and Eve did.

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”...Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-6.

Did you see the transition away from belief in God's word (command) to belief in their own understanding? Adam and Eve were given clear instruction in what they could and could not eat, but through confusion of what God said, they ate from the tree there were told not to as they moved away from faith in God's word (command) and into faith in their own understanding as they "saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom."

What was common for Adam and Eve is still common for us today--to trust in our own understanding over God's word or command. With faith, we will often find that we are required to trust in God's word for us before our own understanding, and it is not until we exercise obedience do we fully understand. It is as St. Augustine of Hippo once said:

Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.

The question for us is, are we going to allow our faith in Gods word (command) to lead our assurance, or are we going to allow our own understanding lead our assurance?

So now, it is simple. We do not have faith in what we can see, but we do have faith in what we are told. Our own understanding is not always real, but God's word is always real--we can now trade in our insurance policy for the assurance of God's word. There are times when our own understanding fails, but God's word never fails--it's so sure that you are literally standing upon the ground that he spoke into existence. Choose today to walk on the assurance of his word, just as you are walking on the ground he spoke into existence.