“Therefore let those who suffer according to the will of God commit their souls to Him in doing good, as to a faithful Creator” (1 Peter 4:19).
LIFE IN THIS WORLD PRESENTS US WITH SOME SERIOUS QUESTIONS. Many problems are hard to figure out, and much that happens is hard to explain. Our Father has revealed the answers to all of the questions we need to know (Deuteronomy 29:29), but He has left many other things unexplained. For now, He asks us to trust Him enough to obey His instructions and take it for granted that every question has a good answer, whether we know the answer or not.
Sometimes we make the mistake of thinking we can’t have any peace of mind if we don’t know how everything works and what’s going to happen. But God offers a different kind of security, one grounded not in our knowledge but rather in our trust. Paul’s confidence, for example, came not from having every question answered but from knowing the person of God: “I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep what I have committed to Him until that Day” (2 Timothy 1:12).
Now the kind of faith Paul had was not blind faith or mere credulity. He was a legal scholar, and it’s doubtful that he would have come to trust God as he did without being shown evidence that God could be trusted. But having acknowledged the power of the evidence, Paul was willing to live his life (and it was a difficult life) on the assumption that God would take care of him.
When we reach the point where we believe the evidence for God’s trustworthiness is compelling, then we are ready to do what Peter talked about in today’s text: commit ourselves to Him. In the confidence that our God is a “faithful” Creator, we can make the calculated decision to trust Him — especially in situations where we have some questions we don’t know the answers to.
In all of this, the future must be factored into our thinking. As a thing that is “unseen,” the future is one of the primary things that faith deals with. Faith does not ignore questions or minimize their importance, but it does exercise patience. Faith is willing to wait and see what happens. History is, after all, a story, and in a story, the conflicts don’t usually get resolved until the end.
“Faith makes the discords of the present the harmonies of the future” (Robert Collyer).
Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com
