THROUGHOUT THE AGES

Close in importance to the basic human needs for food, shelter, and companionship comes the urge to develop a reassuring structure of beliefs. This urge, since the beginning of recorded time, has provided a receptive audience for seers, scholars, scientists, and the so called experts of every persuasion. There has never been a shortage of "authorities" ready to find reasonable explanations for all observed phenomena and to provide solutions for the mysteries of the universe. And yet there are events that seem to say that our rules, beliefs, even our common sense, may sometimes let us down. Throughout ages, human beings believed that the world around them have a miraculous dimension. Angels and demons are real, prayers are efficacious, and man has a special place in the universe. Today fewer and fewer people believe in such a world. For many, existence has become something defined by politics, economics, and discoveries made in laboratories. And yet an instinct for the unknown persists, and a conviction also that not everything in our lives can be cut and dried by the status tidings, controlled in the halls of government, or defined in a test tube. For, though more has been learned about the earth and the cosmos in the past 25 years than in all the preceding years of recorded history, the more we have probed the more mysterious the world has become. In view of the strangeness persistently revealed around us, we ask if common sense does not require us to accept the uncommon. Should we not abandon our conventional notions of the laws of nature? As scientists tune in to the reverberations of cosmic creation, must we adhere to the idea that time progresses in a linear way? Must every effect be preceded by a cause? Anomalies and coincidences are related phenomena in that they are both departures from the expected time frame. That Biblical prophecies came true, that many anomalies beyond our reasoning exist, and that coincidences abound - all this is without question. The (as yet) fathomless mystery is what force is powerful enough to bring them into being. I wish I could answer anyone about certain things, I cannot. Only I can say is that I was blind and now I can see. No one lives without beliefs. We all believe something, have some view of what life means. And what we believe affects us deeply; in a real sense we are what we believe. So, belief is not something to be left to the theorists or the experts. I know very well, that in our modern secular world the word "faith" arouses a great deal of scepticism, even ridiculed and scorned. But faith is not credulity, believing any half-baked idea that comes along. Even secular life could not operate without faith. A friend of yours asks you for a loan, you lend it, secured in the knowledge that he will pay it back. That is faith. If you have faith in someone, you trust in that person's character. So, in the Bible, faith rests in the character of God Himself. He keeps His promises to men and women. He can be trusted. Even when they wander away from Him, He remains faithful. God's faithfulness comes first, both in promise and in action. Mankind's faith is a response to God's initiative. You see, my friend, to have faith is to accept what God has revealed of Himself in Jesus. Obviously, no one comes to faith in Jesus without a sense that something is missing in life. It is also obvious that this can take different forms with different people. One person may be conscious of moral failure, another may be aware of a sense of frustration and futility in life. Another may come to realize that life has no meaning unless God is brought into the picture. You see, my friends, some people shy away from Christian belief, faith-commitment because they believe it would involve closing their minds to all other truth. I know that all descriptions of God by people are provisional and partial, however, I am prepared to assert that God is personal, not a 'super-man'; containing in Himself the highest we know in the created order. It follows from this that if we are to know God, it will be more like knowing a person than knowing an electron or a mathematical theorem or even an animal. And the key to getting to know a person is trust. As the trust deepens the knowledge grows; and the deepening trust is commitment. Commitment even in the first tentative stages, a cautious opening of oneself to allow 'something' to communicate. Being 'open' my friends, does not mean being totally open-minded to all possibilities. Just as a scientific view, once adopted, excludes other views, so the Christian view is exclusive of other theologies. But this not mean that any set of Christian beliefs are exhaustive. They are open-ended to fresh insight and restatement. Being a Christian does not mean being dominated by a form of words, but being submissive to God in Jesus Christ.