Things not yet seen

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for.

These are the opening lines of Chapter 11 of the Book of Hebrews. The more I study literature, the more I am amazed at the magnificence of the language of Scripture. Doesn’t this sound like an introduction to an epic catalogue? That first sentence is the premise, and what follows, then is the proof: a chronological catalogue of examples, people who lived out this definition of faith. This is a veritable Who’s Who of faith-driven people, from Abel to Noah to Abraham (who the writer dwells on for some time) and even Rahab (who we sinners like to dwell on—if she can get on this list, then I can too). In fact, pastors have renamed this chapter as “The Great Hall of Faith.”

I love this definition of faith. It is a state of being, rather than just a statement of belief. Faith is a state of sureness and certainty, a bold confidence in something. People talk about having faith in themselves or faith in a system of thought, or faith in a government, and when I hear these things, I think of a balloon swelling and filling up and floating up perpetually. But then there is always the reverse picture—losing faith in oneself, or in a system or in a government, and there is something deflating, crumpling about this. The key, people tell me, is not just to have faith, but to have faith IN something good, because then, the balloon will not pop.

We are supposed to have faith in ourselves. I have tried. I have filled up that balloon many times, pumped it full of oxygen and tied it off tightly, but in the end, it always leaks. My best intentions, my most glorious goals always turn into the worst kind of wretchedness: petty competition, vanity, gossip. And sometimes this is a slow, hissing leak, and sometimes this is a dramatic explosion, when I realize all at once that the virtue I was gloating over was really just a pile of dung, and I am left stunned, my guts blown everywhere.

We either go through life filling up our leaking balloons, or spend our lives on a quest for the Balloon Which Shall Not Leak. Some people give up all together. They know the law—that all balloons leak eventually—and so they amuse themselves ironically by watching others’ futile attempts.

So, if faith is a state of sureness, a confident selection of something, this is what is strange about the Christian faith: the balloons we are told to select are named, “What We Hope For” and “What We Do Not See.” Personally, I think that this is crazy. Loony. The visible balloons—things like family, finances, food, the things that we can touch and hold and know that they make us feel better, the things that we love and are the good things in life—these things leak. They disappoint us. They run away. They hurt us. They enslave us. But at least we can see them. If a visible balloon leaks, how much more will an invisible one?!

I suppose that in order to answer that question, one has to know more about the balloon. What is it that we hope for? What is it that we do not see? We find a clue to this answer in the very next verse, Hebrews 11:2:

By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

Ah, so this balloon we are hitched to is the belief that we are in God’s world. And there is something strange about this world—if we peel back the many layers of the visible so that we can get to the very core, the very heart, the very creative center, the foundation of reality, we find the Invisible. If all of the visible of the world was made out of the Invisible, is it any surprise that the only really perfectly created balloon, the Balloon Which Shall Not Leak, is also made out of What is Not Seen?

It occurs to me that some may say that this is a circular argument (ha, ha, no pun intended!). I completely agree. It also occurs to me that some Christians may say that this argument makes us look crazy. I also completely agree. There’s little sense in any of this. I think about Noah building a giant ship in his back yard while it hadn’t rained in ages. Hebrews 11: 7 tells us: By faith, Noah when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family. And I think about the phrase things not yet seen.