Believing is Seeing

“I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe.” – Ephesians 1.18-19

“Even so Abraham BELIEVED GOD, AND IT WAS RECKONED TO HIM AS RIGHTEOUSNESS… So then those who are of faith are blessed with Abraham, the believer.”

- Galations 3.7,9

We have all heard the old adage, seeing is believing - for it is in the nature of man to suspect those things which cannot be apprehended through the senses. But even the most cursory look at Scripture proves that - where faith in God is concerned - seeing is not believing. A great many of Christ’s contemporaries saw Him perform miracles but they did not believe in His Name. From a biblical point of view it would perhaps be more accurate to say: seeing is knowing.

For example, an agoraphobic may stand all day in the lobby of the Empire State Building, watching people travel safely up and down; but ask him to get into the elevator himself and he will look at you with incredulity and fear in his eyes. He has seen; he knows; but he doesn’t believe. At least not enough to act. In just this way, the Israelites saw the works of God for forty years in the wilderness; they knew – and had in fact witnessed - what wonders He was capable of, yet they did not believe.

Why not? In part because, though they saw God work, they did not take time to get to know His ways - that is, His character as it was revealed in the realm of their everyday existence. Instead, "they always went astray in their hearts," thinking more about their ‘deprivations’ than God's deliverance, and privileging their grievances over God's gifts. Like the agoraphobic, though they watched God perform miracle after miracle, they did not believe; at least, not enough to risk acting on what He had revealed.

The Bible teaches that faith, or the ability to believe, is a gift of God (Eph. 2.8) - that is, it only comes through revelation by the Holy Spirit. But belief, if it is authentic, must be followed by action - i.e. obedience. "Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness." What does this mean? It means that when God revealed Himself to Abraham, Abraham believed the revelation, in spite of its seeming impossibility. "In hope against hope he believed, so that he might become a father of many nations according to that which had been spoken" (Rom. 4.19). As a result, though he was a sinful man, God honored him by granting him righteousness - that is, moral perfection in His eyes.

The very idea that someone with no past experience of God - no thousands's-year-old religious tradition or canonical body of Scripture to draw from - would have the courage, even the audacity, to believe is not only incredible, it is near to being beyond all human comprehension. Yet Abraham did.

He was seventy-five years old when God bid him go forth from his country, from his father’s house, and the land of his relatives (Gen. 12.1). But when God spoke, “Abraham went,” even though he did not know where he was going (Gen. 12.4). Ten years later, when God spoke to him again, saying, “Now look toward the heavens, and count the stars, if you are able to count them…So shall your descendants be” (Gen. 15.5), Abraham believed.

Can you imagine looking up at a great black sky glittering with countless stars, and, at the age of eighty-five, with a wife in her early seventies, actually believing that your descendants would someday rival them in number?

But (it is worth repeating) Abraham did; in fact, Scripture says, "Without becoming weak in faith he contemplated his own body now as good as dead since he was about a hundred years old, and the deadness of Sarah's womb; yet, with respect to the promise of God, he did not waver in unbelief but grew strong in faith, giving glory to God, and being fully assured that what God had promised, He was able also to perform" (Rom. 4.19-21).

"Being fully assured that what God had promised, He was able also to perform..." When was the last time I responded to God with such assurance? And how might my perception of the world be different if I did?

Though it's hard to say when - perhaps at the moment his heart first responded in faith - Abraham's belief was transfigured into a new way of seeing; what was his ordinary, humdrum existence, became extraordinary because he viewed it through the eyes of faith.

Abraham no longer saw obstacles as hindrances - things that impeded or blocked his way - but opportunities to experience God’s character made manifest. Thus, rather than shrinking back in fear and disbelief when God asked him to sacrifice his son, the son of promise, Abraham “considered that God is able to raise people even from the dead” (Heb. 11.19). He ‘saw’ through the eyes of faith that God is not limited by any natural law, that he can move above, beyond, and outside the bounds of human reasoning, and so he obeyed.

Neither did Abraham’s faith divorce him from the world; it merely changed his attitude toward it. He did not become a perpetual stargazer, denying the pains and hardships of life, because he served a God with theoretical power to overcome them. No, he engaged life’s challenges; he endured its trials; and he endeavored to accomplish the tasks put before him, but always with one eye to the horizon, “looking for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Heb. 11.10).

Like Abraham, we may not see God literally, as we see the ocean or the trees, but if we respond in faith and obedience to that which, through Christ, the Scriptures, and the Holy Spirit, He reveals to us, we will begin to see things spiritually, through the eyes of faith. As we do we will discover and affirm the truth that few find - seeing isn't believing; believing is seeing.