A number of years ago, my wife and I experienced a tragedy in our lives as we witnessed the still-birth of our daughter seven months into her gestation. She had a genetic disorder called triploidy. According to healthline.com, the longest an infant with this condition has ever lived outside of the womb is ten months. Attempting to explain the range of emotions I felt that day as I watched my daughter enter the world already dead is impossible. To even look at her was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. And it has taken me years to now even be able to admit that.
Triploidy is a complete genetic fluke. What it meant was that rather than having two sets of chromosomes in her cell structure, her chromosome sets were tripled, hence the name. The severity of retardation that occurs under this kind of situation is genetically apocalyptic. Thus it is a mercy of God that children who are born with it do not live. Were they to do so, their lives would be complete and total misery.
You can then imagine my reaction when my wife told me that someone inferred to her that the reason our child was dieing was because we did not have enough faith in God. For the record, I completely forgive this person now and have no bitterness, however it really begged a question…what exactly is faith? Is, as this individual suggested, faith some exasperated internal force of will that makes God our marionette? I know that we see God’s hand move in response to the faith of men, so I can say that I understand the tension of this question. However I will say that God responding to our faith will always have His purposes in mind as the ultimate end of His response rather than our own self-gratification…period.
Trying to wrangle faith to the ground so it cries uncle and defines itself is a rather slippery task. If you have not noticed, scripture uses the word faith so much, and we know that faith is the only way to please God, yet scripture rarely seems to actually define faith in cerebral terms. I think the closest it gets to being defined is Hebrews 11:1.
It would probably take me pages and pages to explain what I am about to say, but for the sake of this being a blog I will just throw it out there that it seems to me as if there are a couple facets of faith, and God responding to our faith is really one facet, however, I think that the most important facet of faith I have come to understand is that it is a positive/obedient response to God.
Galatians 3:5-6 says, “He therefore that ministereth to you the Spirit, and worketh miracles among you, doeth he it by the works of the law or by the hearing of faith? Even as Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.”
Did you catch that? The hearing of faith? What in the world does that mean? I looked up numerous commentaries on this tonight and every one of them utterly dodged and failed to explain what the “hearing of faith,” even means. Verse six gives us a clue, in order for Abraham to believe God, what first had to happen? God had to say something…He, in His almighty sovereignty made a claim…He made a promise. What was that promise? Abraham would have a son. Abraham believed that God would do through him, what God had promised, and that son would bring forth a nation.
I forgave that individual because they knew not what they were saying, it seems that she, like many people in our society have imbibed more theology about faith from Yoda and Luke Skywalker lifting an X-wing out of a swamp than they do from the Bible. They think that faith is the force of personal will.
According to Galatians, faith is hearing God, and responding to His desires…this is the dynamic of walking in the Spirit, and growing as a Christian, this is what Paul is getting at when he asks, “Are ye so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?” NO!!! And yet so many today have been swayed and lulled into a near demonic belief system by thinking that faith is a product of fleshly force of will.
A number of years after this tragedy, God blessed my wife and I with a healthy daughter, and not just any daughter, she is mind blowing. When she was about a year and a half old she had a fever over 105 degrees, my wife took her to the doctor’s office, and while she was waiting for our family practitioner to come in, my daughter had a febrile seizure. My wife said it went on for minute after hellish minute. We spent the rest of the day in the emergency room as my daughter lay upon my chest crying hour after hour in an almost non-coherent fashion, until the fever broke and we took her home safe.
About a week or two later, since I was not there when this occurred, I asked my wife what she was thinking or feeling when the seizure was in full swing. I had waited a while to ask her, because all the while I had been personally thinking about our first daughter, and the subject has been a very tender one for my wife over the years. Her answer utterly shocked me, “I just prayed, and thanked God for the time He gave me with her.” The implication being that the thought of my daughter becoming a vegetable or worse, dieing, had crossed her mind.
If that is not true faith, then I do not know what is. My wife, out of the abundance of her heart, simply responded to the sovereignty of God with the faith of a child, utterly, totally, completely trusting Him, regardless of the outcome.
