Faith is a virtue that is difficult to grasp, even by Christians. As a borderline socially autistic individual who tends to reason things out naturally, I admit that my faith is difficult to obtain. Trust me, for someone like me, it took God Himself to intervene in my life to make me understand that there was more than just what I saw and heard. This is not something that I think most people will experience, because God handles all of us in our own way and in His own time.
Christian Faith has two parts, according to C.S. Lewis. The first part is the part that most people have trouble with: belief. Believe requires us to reject the shroud that has been pulled over our eyes by the Kind of this World and accept that there are things that we cannot reason away. That is an extraordinary rejection of personal pride in oneself and it does not come easy. Those of you who do not believe in God or anything supernatural, I certainly sympathize with you. We do live in an ordinary world where our mundane lives have little to offer us in our day to day rituals. To hear that there is something more than this does seem a bit offensive to me and I can see how it would make people defensive and angry.
Everyone believes that something is wrong with humanity. The Statist Utopian and the individualist anarchist both agree that there is something wrong with human beings. And while the causes are often debated over and governmental policies are often prescribed to “fix” things, in the end there is no shortage of wrongs done in this world. The standard by which we live is often times violated given specific factors and circumstances. It almost seems like we can’t help ourselves to behave irrationally and hurt others in the process.
Christian Faith starts with the belief that we are all sinners. To sin is to violate the Will of God for us. God’s Will extends beyond just a simple set of rules (far much simpler than the government’s, by the way) as it is about living as a creation of God rather than a creation of this world. This is a hard concept to accept. It requires that you believe in a supreme being, that He created you, that you are a sinner prone to evil, and that evil is a violation of said being’s Will. Already many agnostics and atheists have huge issues with this concept. Many Christians do as well. The primary reason is that it requires us to accept that we are wicked and evil. It takes a lot of humility for someone to admit they are wrong, let alone prone to evil and corruption. I have yet to meet a rational non-Christian admit that he or she is prone to evil.
The next part of Christian Faith is the belief that God sent His Son, His very Word incarnate into flesh, to this planet for the sole purpose of showing us what a life as God’s creation should be and to ultimately experience death by torture for the sake of our redemption. So now, not only do you have believe that you are a sinner and despicable before the eyes of God, your creator, but you have been redeemed before Him through faith in His Son, who died for us all. While some who fall into despair at the very notion of no hope for redemption will joyfully embrace this wholeheartedly, there are others who will want an explanation as to why. To be honest, I can’t answer this entirely, which is where the faith part comes into play.
Finally, and this is where things get really ridiculous in a rational, down-to-earth sense: we believe that he came back from the dead, ascended into Heaven, and will be coming back to judge the whole of mankind, whether living or dead. For the ordinary individual with no concept of things supernatural beyond what is seen in fiction, this is probably the most outrageous article of Christian Faith. To think that a man who was tortured to death by being beaten, stabbed, and hung from a cross in order to be exhausted to death would come back where all others have failed beforehand is just downright unscientific and completely irrational. The only guarantee in life is death and nobody ever really beats that. Of course, he conveniently isn’t around anymore to explain it because he ascended (whatever that means) into Heaven (where ever that happens to be). But don’t worry, he’ll be back to embrace those who believe in Him and to cast those who didn’t into Hell, where ever that happens to be. There is no rational or logical sense to any of this and yet many people embrace this as the ultimate truth of our existence.
You can see why it took someone like so long to wrap up my blog series on the Seven Virtues. Faith is a difficult concept to grasp for someone like me, despite the wisdom God has granted me and the intelligence I have gained through His Spirit and my own hard work. To believe all this, to embrace that I am a child of God through Jesus His own Son, is quite a leap into unknown and unperceivable territory. But Christian Faith is all about this and it brings us into the knowledge of the truth about humanity. I can tell you that it is much easier to predict what people are going to do or say given the knowledge that comes through faith. Not that I’m not surprised from time to time, of course. I don’t claim to have absolute knowledge through Faith as it tends to cover only the nature of my life in relation to God.
Ultimately, God desires obedience more than sacrifice. He makes this clear in the Old Testament on several occasions. As disobedience to God’s Will is the very definition of sin, this certainly is not surprising. Even worse is that we are unable to be completely obedient to God 100% of the time we are here in this life. So God orchestrated the perfect sacrifice of the only man who was 100% obedient to Him in order to allow us to share his own connection with God. No comes to the Father except through Jesus.
This is what Faith is for the Christian. It is the ultimate expression of things that have come and things that will come. It is knowing that God is Holy, that His Son has redeemed us, and that He is Lord not through some complex algorithm or some scientific study, but through Faith.
And thus, we have Faith as the Seventh and final virtue. From it, all other virtues can flow out as obedience to God through Faith in Jesus will gradually make you a better person. Take my word for it, I’ve lived it and witnessed it myself.