The Second Pandemic: What's Your Faith's Temperature?

Y'all, there's another pandemic going on, and it's not just the coronavirus.

It is the sickness of Expecting Easy Answers. We ask God for what we think we need, or want, or declare to the heavens that we deserve... 

And He answers, but His answer isn't exactly what we thought it was going to be. And so we glare heavenward, declare that God must not be interested in our personal and vested interests, or take it a step further and allow doubts to sink into our souls and question the very existence of the One Who made us in His image.

This doubt has been a pandemic from the beginning of time, but I submit that apostasy -- a turning away from faith in God, and a turning to faith in oneself... or one's circumstances... or one's military might... or one's politics... or one's newsfeed... or one's bank account -- has greatly increased over the last short while.

I've been watching through Verse By Verse Ministry's Revelation study, given by Pastor Stephen Armstrong, who died this past January of Covid. A friend pointed out the study to me, and I've been awed by the man's deep knowledge and understanding of all Scripture and his excellent teaching of it. Because of his laying out of Scripture, he convinced me to move from a half-hearted "I don't know how it'll all turn out" interpretation of Christ's second coming to a rapture-tribulation-glorious appearing course of events...

Because of Scripture. There was no other way I would have been convinced. Anyway, I highly recommend the study, which you can find at this website (he also does many other books of the Bible in verse by verse style): 

In Revelation 3:14-21, there's a letter from our glorified Lord to a church named Laodicea. It's at the end of six other letters to six other churches, all of which denounce certain actions by those six churches, but all of which encourage them in other actions. Laodicea is the only church among these seven that holds no redeeming qualities. It's the only church that has truly become so diseased, that nothing good remains in it. It has become apostate.

Instead, Jesus, in His glorified form before John, doesn't pull punches. He says of the church in Laodicea: "I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm -- neither hot nor cold -- I am about the spit you out of my mouth. You say, 'I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.' But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from Me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness, and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see (to note: Not one of these three things can be obtained anywhere except from God Himself). Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with Me. To him who overcomes, I will give the right to sit with Me on My throne, just as I overcame and sat down with My Father on His throne. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches."

Steve Armstrong described the Greek word "spit" to be translated as "projective vomiting." Not just a little sick. A lot sick. Stomach-turningly sick. 

I got that sick once. I'll spare you the sordid details, but there was no control. We had company that night, and I remember the mortifying experience in our small house. There was no polite turning away to be sick. No delicate escape to hide what was happening. It was loud and it was miserable. There was not an ounce of redemption in that experience, nothing that made it better. And it didn't stop it until every last bit of what was inside of me was purged from me.

What was it that made Jesus so very sick? 

A lack of faith in God. A humanistic world view that shrugged off the one true God and took the point of view that I am king. "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul" (Invictus, by William Ernest Henley). A shrugged off meh attitude toward the story of creation and redemption and eternal life.

That's the pandemic. 

I was reading this morning in Luke 18 about Jesus in His earthly ministry, and how "people were also bringing babies to Jesus to have Him touch them." But when the disciples decided that Jesus was too busy or too important to mess with, you know, the least of these... they turned people away. Jesus said, to paraphrase, "Hold it! Wait just a second, y'all. Let the little children through to me. Don't stop them, because the kingdom of heaven belongs to people who have innocent faith, who are fully dependent on Me, who don't think they've got this, who haven't yet learned subterfuge, who are completely sincere, who haven't yet learned how to manipulate the way the world and the devil teaches us to manipulate circumstances. In other words, the ones who completely depend on Me."

In contrast, earlier in the chapter in verse 8, Jesus asks, semi-rhetorically: "However, when the Son of Man comes (the second time, in context), will He find faith on the earth?" And in the chapter before, Luke 17, the disciples cry out to the Lord: "Increase our faith!" So Jesus says: "If you have faith as small as a mustard seed (one of the smallest seeds), you can say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it will obey you."

When I was seven years old (I remember, because I was in Sicily at the time, and we were spending the day at a beach on the Mediterranean), I stood on the shore, looked at the skyline where I thought the Lord lived, and decided to test this. If I just have enough faith, I thought, I will walk on water, like Peter did. 

And so I took my step from the sand onto the water where it gently lapped near my toes. Held my balance for a second, and then put all my weight on the water.

I sank. And the Lord whispered to my heart: I'm not manipulated like magic. I may not have said manipulated when I was seven, but you get the point. I was testing faith for the sake of testing faith. I wasn't having faith in the One I was claiming.

The writer of Hebrews says in 11:1: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen." Paul says in Romans 8:24-25: "But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently."

The point is: It's easy to have faith when we can see our answers we've asked for staring us in the face. It's much harder to have faith -- but I would submit -- much more faith-building -- when circumstances look bleak, dire, hopeless. 

And when it comes right down to it, that's the faith I want. The faith that is hard to come by. The faith that is clawed out of dry ground. The faith that stands on a wall overlooking an enemy and prays for your servant's eyes to be opened, and when they are, the hills are full of horses and chariots of fire all around (2 Kings 6). The faith that strides down a mountainside, stops at a stream, picks up five stones, and bawls in the face of a giant: "My God, Whom I serve, will defeat you today" (1 Samuel 17). The faith that pushes aside pride upon pride upon pride and goes and dips seven times in the muddy, gross Jordan River (2 Kings 5). The faith that stood beside Jesus in the middle of a stormy sea and heard His voice say: "Peace. Be still," and the wind and the waves immediately faltered into nothingness. The faith that kept Mary at Jesus' feet listening like a woman starved for nourishment. The faith that prompted Peter to climb out of a boat and stand on water, walking toward his Savior. The faith that made Peter and John race toward an empty, empty, resounding, echoing, empty tomb. Hallelujah!

On July 26 of this year, the Holy Spirit showed me a vision of Joshua trees behind the main doors of our church. I looked up Joshua trees, and what I found encouraged me to no end. Joshua trees are succulents. They root in dry desert soil, signs of life in the harshest desert conditions. Before they can flower, they must undergo a dormant period of cold. Because they're dependent on this cold weather to flower, they're particularly vulnerable to climate change. They're slow-growing, but because they're slow-growing, they're also long-lasting. They grow 3 to 9 feet before branching out. Joshua of the Bible (for whom the Joshua tree is named) famously said: "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord" (Joshua 24:15). No ifs, ands, or buts. No half-hearted Meh's about it. Joshua was firmly planted, rooted in faith, no matter what.

Isaiah 43:19 says: "See? I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up, do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland." 

It's what God always does: Out of nothing... something. Something good.

But sometimes, it takes the desert to see it.