When “one” plus “one” equals “three!”

Photo by OSPAN ALI on Unsplash

This is our weekly post here at deposition of our faith. Thank you for joining us.

This is week 1

Scripture reading: Psalm 138:2

We must get to the point as believers where we believe in the infallibility of God’s Word to a fault.

We are to believe in the unchanging nature of God’s Word more than we believe in the unchanging nature of Gravity and Time. Let me illustrate (and I use this illustration for lack of a better one!). Imagine you were to one morning step out of your home, and immediately you got out of the door, you began to float. Suddenly, instead of coming back down as one usually does when taking leaps and steps, you kept going up! Now, this goes against what you know and expect from your position on the planet. However, whilst going through this trippy experience, your troubleshooting will never begin at questioning the “idea” of gravity itself. You will go to further lengths — questioning your sanity even — than to eventually say that “gravity is broken”. The same goes with Time. If for some weird, inexplainable reason all the clocks in your neighbourhood (including phones, personal wrist watches and such) were to stop telling the time correctly, you wouldn’t throw “time” as a concept under the bus because the devices that tell time have failed you. No. You’d much rather use some weird, Hollywood-esque physics to explain away this phenomenon, or you may even blame it on paranormal influences. You will never throw “time” under the bus.

Why would you?

If we practiced the Word, in our own perspective, and God’s word seems to have been ineffective, then we must be of the mind that we have not done it as we ought to. Faith demands us to stand on a premise that we have never and can never evaluate, but we can only practice to see manifested. The funny part of that is, when things don’t work out, we are supposed to say, “well, then I haven’t been practicing it right”, instead of immediately calling the Bible an old collection of folklore and empty promises. That is hard. It seems like an easy way out for bible-pedalling preachers and believers who just want you to keep coming so that they can take advantage of you and keep you backward (or perhaps I have gone too far!). It seems unscientific. If a method can never be faulted by evaluation or experiments, then how does one verify its validity? “God’s Word is true” is a premise that cannot even be allowed to be faulted even when the evidence suggests that it is not so.

How then do we approach the Word?

Well, I drew together a few things to consider.

1. Just because God has promised you something doesn’t mean it will come to pass in your life. In Numbers chapter 14, we see the Israelites murmur amongst themselves yet again due to the evil report of the spies sent to see the promised land. Although God actually sent Moses to Egypt to deliver the Israelites from slavery and then take them to the promised land (its literally called the “promised” land), He later said in verse 28 of the same chapter that those same Israelites will not step into that land, save for Caleb and the rest of the little children.
2. Just because it didn’t come to pass in your life doesn’t mean God has told a lie (see the Israelites).
3. Just because you know of God’s promises doesn’t mean that they have to come to pass in your life.
   …Ye have not because ye ask not- James 4:2
   Just because I know that muscle training builds the muscles doesn’t mean my muscles will be built. Except I go to a gym, the knowledge is fruitless. Just because you know how to pass an exam doesn’t mean you will pass an exam, just because you know eating healthy makes for healthy living doesn’t mean that you are going to actually follow through with it, and so on.
   However, one important thing to note here is that, even when we do the things we know we should do, we may not always do them well. So, doing what you know involves following the right practices to obtain the promised result. It is not like I haven’t ever done some exercise or gone to a gym or eaten healthy, yet, I still don’t look like those body builders! There are demands to success that sometimes we all follow and know, yet we fail over and over again. James 4:3 shows that not everyone who asks even receives because we ask amiss.
4. Just because God’s Promises came to pass in your life before doesn’t mean they will come to pass in your life again (eating once to satisfy your hunger doesn’t mean that you will never be hungry again) Galatians 4:19 records Paul saying that he travails “again” until Christ be formed in them (The Galatians). We see the disciples struggle to cast out an evil spirit in Matthew 17:16, even when Jesus had already given them power in Matthew 10:1. In Matthew 17:21, Jesus then reveals that this kind of affliction needed a different approach, regardless of the fact that they already had command over evil spirits.
5. Just because it didn’t come to pass doesn’t mean that God failed. God does not fail, his promises don’t fail. We can fail to obey, fail to understand, fail to engage. However, just like time doesn’t fail because your clock failed, and gravity doesn’t fail because you flew in a zero gravity simulator, God’s Word stands unchanged, undaunted and fool-proof.

Next week, we shall be looking at what ways we should approach the Word of God to see fulfilment of the promises in our own lives. For if prophecies cannot be fulfilled, then this is simply religious doctrine and not the power of God, and the Kingdom of God is not in words, but in power.

(1 Corinthians 4:20)

God be with ye till then!