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| Volume 19 Number 10 October 2017 | Page 11 |
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| Volume 19 Number 10 October 2017 | Page 11 |
Ed Benesh
“Into your hand I commit my spirit; you have redeemed me, O LORD, faithful God” (Psalm 31:5). Do these words from this Psalm sound familiar? Long after they were written by the Psalmist, Christ spoke them from the cross, after He was betrayed and abandoned by His own people and most of the folks that He called friends.
Yet, he could always depend on the Father to be there. When everyone fled, the Father alone stood by Him. Has a friend ever let you down? Maybe he or she betrayed you or simply was not there for you? Maybe he told you he would help you in some way, but failed to be there for you in the time of need. The wound of a faithless friend is often very hard to bear and not easy to put behind us. There is a distinct reason for this. When a friend does not keep his word or betrays us, it is as if he is saying, “You are just not worth it. You are not worth the time and the energy it would take to keep the promises I made to you.”
To make matters worse, most of the time, theses faithless men and women don’t even feel you are worthy of an explanation or the truth. It hurts, and it should. Now, if you have ever felt the pain of unfaithfulness, then, you can empathize with God, who, with every sin of man, understands what it is like. From the Garden of Eden until now God understands the hurt and the pain.
In other words, you have a Father in Heaven who knows how you feel. Why not take that pain to Him and let Him bring you peace and healing? When we experience the absolute faithfulness of God, then it also helps us with our own faithfulness toward Him and toward others. In this day, take your hurts and pains to a Father who will never fail you. Grow not only in your understanding of who He is, but how you can be more faithful to Him.
Joseph Ezenweze
Paul wrote, “Therefore we are always confident, knowing that whilst we are at home in body, we are absent from the Lord: For we walk by faith, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:6-8 KJV). Paul said that Christians living on earth are absent from the Lord. They have not in their human state gone to the place prepared for the saints (Matthew 25:46, Revelation 14:13).
As absent from the Lord, we in the human body walk by faith, not by sight. That means that we are to trust in Lord’s words even though we are not in direct personal contact with the Lord. This does not mean that we can doubt God’s Word.
Paul knew that Jesus is the Saviour even though he did not know Christ “after the flesh” (2 Corinthians 5:16; 2 Timothy 1:12). Jesus being in Heaven did not mean that men on earth could not know Him to be the Christ.
There was a time when faith and sight went together. Men walked by faith because of sight. In John 20:29 we find, “Jesus said unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” Thomas believed the Lord’s resurrection only after personally seeing the Lord (John 4:39-42). He believed because of sight.
Many during the Lord’s ministry came to believe on Him because of the things they saw and heard. Others saw the dead raised. Some were amazed at our Lord’s teaching and preaching. Others were impressed by the miracles performed during the days of the early church, and some of these obeyed the Gospel.
Today, God performs no miracles as He did in the days of Christ’s ministry and in the time of the early church (Ephesians 4:8-16; 1 Corinthians 13:13; Romans 8:24). Today, we cannot personally witness the miraculous. We can come to faith by the Word of God that recorded the miraculous (John 20:30-31; Romans 10:17). So, while Thomas had faith because of sight, we now have faith in the absence of sight (2 Corinthians 5:7). Yet, a day is coming when faith and sight will be together again. We read in 1 John 3:2, “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”
We will not quit believing the words of Christ when we “see him as he is.” Faith will not vanish in heavenly sight. We will have faith and sight in Heaven. Thomas had faith after sight. We now have faith without sight. In Heaven, we will have sight after our faith on earth and continuing with faith. God help us.