The Knowledge of God Through Suffering
The following in an excerpt from my upcoming book “The Revelation of Jesus Christ”, a full commentary on the book of Revelation. The book should be available fall 2011.
He who leads into captivity shall go into captivity; he who kills with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints…Here is the patience of the saints; here are those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus. – Revelation 13:10;14:12 NKJV
Revelation 13:10 contains one of the more difficult statements for the saints in the entire book of Revelation, but understanding and receiving it opens us up to the knowledge of God. If we do not understand it, then we lack the knowledge of God and risk being offended and alienated from Him in times of trial and persecution. If we understand it but do not receive it, then we register an offense with God which separates us from Him. When we are offended with God, the natural result is either turning away completely or embracing a modified God, an idol of our making devoid of those elements of God that we find offensive.
The main thrust of the passage is that God actually decrees and approves of the persecution of the saints at the end of the age. Before you move on quickly to read the rest of the book, consider very carefully what was just said. The beast will be the agent of persecution against the saints at the end of the age—and make no mistake, he hates them with a perfect hatred—but God is actually the one decreeing and assenting to the persecution. The heart must then ask, how is it that God will allow His own saints to be executed? Why is it that He will give them into the hands of the most cruel man who will ever have lived? How can the God of infinite love, who desires His saints, be content to speak of the saints as those to be taken captive and those to be slain?
This question is not just for the end times, but it is fundamental to our understanding of God now. Jesus Himself promised the saints tribulation (Matthew 24:9, John 16:33). The history of the saints ever since Jesus’ ascension proves His prediction to be true and must provoke us to answer the question that clearly arises from this text.
Is God uncaring? Is God an accomplice of evil? Why does God not act? If we do not answer this question and answer it well, we will either live in superficiality, ignoring a significant question about the nature of God, or we will become offended with God and devoid of any real relationship with Him; even if we continue religious practices and appearances, deep within we will deeply distrust Him.
The issue of the persecution of the saints is a fundamental issue for the saints past, present, and future. First, we must ask why the saints are persecuted. The saints are persecuted because this age is under the delusion of rebellion, and the saints are the sole witness of light against that darkness. Jesus left the saints as His witness in this age (Acts 1:8). The earth is content to remain in darkness, but God is not content for men to perish in their darkness without a witness and thus the saints are witnesses of the light. The same world that executed Jesus to eradicate His witness is then constantly confronted by that same witness in the saints. The saints are the salt in the earth’s wound, constantly declaring the knowledge of God both in their living and in their speaking (Revelation 12:11).
The earth would prefer to forget the ruler of the heavens and succumb to the inebriation of the rebellion. The saints alone stand firm as a reminder that this present age is temporary and is headed for a comprehensive judgment at the end of the age at the hands of the Messiah. The saints spoil the party by being the constant reminder of the judgment to come. While the witness of the saints accompanied by the power of the Holy Spirit will lead many to repentance, history shows that most men would prefer to silence the voice of the saints and the reminder of the judgment to come rather than to repent and receive life. This animosity will reach its zenith at the end of the age when the planet is under the sway of the beast. Answering this question, then, is critical to understanding the events that John is describing.
The answer to this question is found at the end of the verse. This declaration is written as a call for the endurance and the faith of the saints (the saints are also called to endurance in Revelation 14:12). Endurance and faith will be the two primary qualities the saints need to match the intensity of the persecution at the end of the age. Endurance will be needed because the persecution will be so intense that the natural response of the human heart will be to give up and succumb to the pressure. The temptation to compromise will never be stronger due to the unique dynamics of that time.
We often think that overcoming is a glorious thing, but there are dynamic times in history when overcoming is simply enduring.
The second call to the saints is the call of faith, or trust, and this is really the core issue. As has been noted several times, God Himself is the architect of the events of the end of the age. He is going to put wickedness on full display so that sin might be fully revealed and Jesus might be fully glorified. The saints will be tempted to feel offense at God when they begin to endure massive persecutions that are actually part of His plan. So many are going to fall away, unable to cope with the present persecutions because of their insufficient understanding of God.
John calls us to have faith, or trust, in God despite the events we endure. We have to have full faith and confidence in the perfection of God. He will judge rightly at the end of the age. So many saints are offended because they expect God to administer immediate rewards as well as immediate punishments and so they have no capacity either to endure or to trust. How many fall away because they perceive their good words to go unrewarded and because they perceive evil to go unpunished? How many cannot deal with what they perceive to be the triumph of evil and tragedy? How often has it been heard amidst wars, disaster, calamity, or personal loss, “how could a good God exist and allow this?” The problem is that our hearts are quick to accuse God when our sense of right and wrong is not satisfied.
Our horizon is so narrow that we desire immediate rewards and immediate judgments rather than God’s ultimate judgments and rewards, which exist outside of the brief span of this age.
Ever since the garden of Eden, the heart of man has been deceived to the point that man believes that he can rightly judge God. We believe that we are capable of determining when God is acting justly and when He is not. While the message of the garden is that man is not sufficient to actually judge what is good and what is evil, we continue in our deception and constantly judge God Himself, weighing His actions according to our own understanding of what is permissible and good.
When faced with a persecution of the magnitude of what is coming at the end of the age, men’s hearts are going to be unable to consider that a good God would allow such violence against the saints. A root of offense will grow in many hearts, and they will ultimately fall away from the faith, completely unable to reconcile their own conviction of right and wrong with the actions of God.
The call to the saints, then, is found in the obedience of Jesus. Faced with His Father’s call, Jesus sweated great drops of blood and even asked that the cup of His Father’s wrath might be avoided. But after offering up intercession, He set His face like flint to obey the Father. He had full confidence that He could trust God.
God handed Him over to the Romans and they promptly humiliated Him beyond the humiliation that any other man has endured. They flogged Him and tortured Him. He was left marred beyond any other man and unrecognizable. They nailed Him, naked and humiliated, to an excruciatingly painful instrument of death. To top it off, He was openly ridiculed by the religious leaders. Through it all, God stood silent as the Son endured agony. The silence was so deafening that Jesus cried out, “Why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46)
Have we fully considered the Son there in agony and humiliation, so devoid of the Father’s presence that He cried out as One totally forsaken? Can any imagine what He was enduring? Now, tell me who among us can nod amen to that agony and humiliation and say that it is the wisdom and beauty of God?
Years and years of Sunday school stories have sanitized the whole incident to the point that Jesus dying on the cross is now thought to be the most logical thing possible.
Saints, to the human heart Jesus’ execution on the cross is not the most logical thing, but rather the most offensive thing possible. The very idea that it was the perfect plan of God to so humiliate and torture Himself is preposterous to human reason. It is no wonder that the Jews rejected the idea of a Messiah who had endured such humiliation. Our lack of understanding of what the Son actually endured is what makes us so quick to embrace the message of the cross. If we could actually see and feel what He endured, our hearts would wrestle much more with the reality of the cross. We would keep asking why God would do such a thing to His own Son until we came into a greater knowledge of God through the offense of the cross.
Because we have not entirely understood the cross, fully appreciating the torment and humiliation of it, we are greatly lacking in the knowledge of God. We are required to consider the man hanging from the cross. We must face the humiliation of God Himself, not just the victory on the other side of the cross, if we are to truly know God as God.
The understanding of the cross in its full human reality is not just a theological significance on our outlines; it contains the revelation of God. To go deep into the very revelation of who God is, we must go deep into the cross and we must go deep into the human reality of it, not just the victory of it. We must plumb the depths of the man whose flesh was shredded before He was nailed to the cross.
The knowledge of God as God on the cross gives the saints the perspective necessary to trust God in the midst of the persecution of the beast. Just as God authorized the agony of the cross, so too God has authorized and decreed the persecution of the saints. Just as the cross ultimately brought glory to Jesus, so too the persecution of the saints will ultimately bring glory to the saints and prepare them to be God’s companions.
The message of the cross is that God even orchestrates pain for our own benefit. We must rest in Him, knowing that He is the perfect Father and the perfect Judge. The perfect Father allows sons to endure pain in order to prepare them to mature them in the image of their Father. The perfect Judge is going to judge all the earth only when iniquity is ripe. He delays judgment to give men time to repent, because once God judges, He is going to judge completely. That is going to be the most catastrophic event in history.
Trust is the root issue. The enemy attacked us in the garden with it by questioning the Father’s motivation in limiting humanity. If the enemy could deceive man amidst perfection and open fellowship with God, how much more will the enemy tempt us as fallen men in a fallen world on the issue of pain, suffering, and evil, in the absence of God’s full presence?
How much more will he tempt us to question the goodness of the One upon the throne when we find ourselves in the midst of tribulation and find that God is actually the author of our tribulation?
This is not just an issue for those who will endure the final tribulation. In every generation, there have been saints who have endured horrific persecution at the hands of wicked men. From the beginning, saints have endured loss and heard silence from heaven in answer to their loss. Western believers are often anesthetized from the reality of life, but loss, suffering, and evil are very real for saints all over the earth now, and so the question that John raises in this verse must be answered within the heart of the believer in order to have an authentic knowledge of God and to not ultimately be offended with Him.
Saints, His wisdom is beyond ours. His love is beyond ours as well. We are incapable of truly judging right and wrong. We must embrace the love of our Father and have confidence in it even through the deepest nights. If we had just a glimpse of what He is preparing us for, our souls would be overwhelmed with the glory that God desires to put on us. He is preparing His saints that they might be His prize companion in all the universe. He is using every trial to fashion for Himself a companion who has shared His own sufferings. If we could clearly see the judgment that is coming, we would never doubt that the Judge of all the earth will do right (Genesis 18:25). The prophets trembled at the visions of the end they saw. Truly, we can be confident that judgment is coming.
So, while God is engineering great glory for the saints and preparing great judgment for the wicked, we are called to endure and have confidence in God in advance of these events. Why? Because when God reveals the fully glory of man and unleashes His judgment against the wicked there will be many, both captivated by the glory and in terror of the judgment, who will cry out to Him with hollow words of commitment and worship.
God is looking for those who love Him now. He is looking for those who can trust Him without having received the full revelation of either the glory or judgment to come.
Those who have confidence in God in this present wilderness will be in the company that trusted and loved God to the point of enduring great tribulation. In a perfect garden, a sinless man and woman were easily persuaded to doubt God’s goodness, even though they had never experienced anything but good at God’s hands. What kind of companion for Himself is God going to produce with the fallen saints who chose to love Him and trust His promises, even though His own hand allows their pain and they have only a small measure of revelation concerning the goodness of His promises?
Oh, saints, God has something magnificent in store for us. He is testing and perfecting us. This earth is the potter’s wheel of our formation. God is going to produce a glorious vessel, and we will dwell with Him forever in glory. In the meantime, at this moment and especially in the tribulation to come, the test of endurance and trust will determine whether we experience great glory or great loss, even to the point of being cut off because of our offense.
The Testimony of Suffering
“Don’t be intimidated in any way by your enemies. This will be a sign to them that they are going to be destroyed, but that you are going to be saved, even by God himself. For you have been given not only the privilege of trusting in Christ but also the privilege of suffering for him.” – Philippians 1:28–29 (NLT-SE)
Perseverance of believers in the face of suffering is one of the primary testimonies of the age to come and the truth of the gospel. Not only is it a testimony to unbelievers, it is also a great privilege. The privilege of believing, of coming into the understanding of Jesus, is one thing, but there is an additional privilege in suffering. That privilege is not just coming into an understanding of Jesus, but coming into real, physical participation with His life by living a life of a similar kind as His was. I wonder how many of us consider suffering to actually be a privilege? We do not because we do not understand the significance of suffering.
Not only is suffering a privilege, but it is at the very heart of Jesus’ exaltation and Paul is connecting the believers in Philippi to his description of Jesus’ exaltation in the first 11 verses of chapter 2. Paul’s encouragement to the church to embrace suffering is his logical conclusion to his own consideration of Jesus’ own sufferings which began in the first part of the chapter.
Because Jesus’ sufferings led to His exaltation, therefore he is encouraging the church as well to embrace her sufferings that she might follow her master, both in temporary suffering and in permanent reward from God. Paul is encouraging them to follow the divine pattern. Their reward in the age to come is dynamically connected to their suffering in this age, just as Jesus’ present exaltation as ruler over the universe was the result of His suffering.
Obeying God in blessing can be easy, and this is not to say that God does not release blessing or that all blessing is wrong. However, there is something unique about suffering. Suffering demonstrates the authenticity of love. Suffering is what disarms the powers and principalities because when a heart is unmoved by suffering then a fragrance of love arises that they are powerless against. When love arises in the midst of suffering, the powers are completely stripped of their powers over the one who is full of love in the mist of suffering.
When believers love during suffering, it demonstrates their love for God as a person rather than love for God merely as a benefactor. While God is our source, it is also critical that we understand these two kinds of love and suffering is the tool to demonstrate what kind of love we have. The test of suffering reveals that we love God for who He is and not what He does for us unless, tragically, we fail the test.
When we demonstrate that kind of love, it is a rebuke to the powers and principalities who live only for their own benefit and constantly seduce men to live in the same way. In many cases, it is the suffering of the church that breaks the drunken delusion of the age and confronts lost men with the reality of deception.
The world has no answer for a suffering church. The powers and principalities are stripped and exposed by a suffering church. A suffering church is the ultimate rebuke for this age and it is the ultimate sign of the age to come. When men begin to give their lives and lose their privileges for the sake of the age to come it is the witness that God will save them and a witness to men who live only for their own benefit and pleasure that they will be destroyed.
A persecutor can destroy the body, but he is powerless against those who willingly suffer for their master. Lost men may refuse to hear the words of the gospel, but they are incapable of ignoring the testimony of the suffering of the saints. How many have been converted not just from the words of a gospel witness, but from the demonstration of the gospel in a suffering man or woman? It is easy to reject words. It is another thing altogether to gaze at the one who willingly suffers, even unto death, for the unseen God.
When that kind of suffering takes place, the unseen God becomes visible in front of those witnessing the suffering. It is the ultimate testimony of Jesus. No more are ideas and concepts about God only ideas. Those ideas take on flesh and blood in the suffering saint before them. When lost men and women see the saint willingly giving their life for the salvation of the age to come, it confronts their empty and hollow lives that are relentlessly driven by their own desire for self preservation.
This kind of witness is demanding. It requires a church willing to lay down her life, but it is the call of Jesus. He calls us to take up our cross and follow Him and this is what that following looks like. It is willingness to suffer for the gospel. it is willingness to lose benefit in this life, even to the point of losing our own breath, in order to be a demonstration to this age that Jesus is worthy of love. Not only is He worthy of love in general, but He is worthy of this kind of love in particular.
God is looking for a people that He can trust with suffering because He wants to put the gospel on display. He wants to embarrass the powers and principalities. He wants a rebuke to lost men in this age so that their delusion might be shattered and they might have the opportunity to repent.
Let us set our hearts before Him and commit to take up this cross that His name might be made great. This is not a casual conflict, but a weighty battle. The powers are not intimidated us when we do not challenge them, but when we embrace suffering, we challenge them directly with truth. Grace is needed, but let us not back off from this, but let us embrace suffering as did our Lord.
The Faith of Abraham
Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, And to offsprings, referring to many, but referring to one, And to your offspring, who is Christ. – Galatians 3:16
Abraham only received a part of his promise in his son Isaac. In other words, Isaac was the fulfillment of a promise of descendants, but Isaac was not the promised descendent. There was another descendant that would come from Abraham. Abraham is such a towering figure of faith because, even in receiving Isaac, he had to continue to look forward to promises that his eyes never saw before death.
We are caught in a similar predicament. We receive the Holy Spirit both as a fulfillment of the promise and as a downpayment of the promise to come. We are given the very real gift of the Holy Spirit and yet the Scripture is also very clear that there is a much greater fulfillment coming. This is what causes Paul to use words such as “down payment,” “earnest money,” and “deposit” to describe our present experience of the Holy Spirit.
Just as Abraham received Isaac as a testimony that the promised Son would come forth, we must also receive the Holy Spirit as a testimony that the promised Son will return. Just as Abraham was tested on the promise that a Son would come forth that would give him an inheritance in every nation (Gen 12), we are given the Holy Spirit as a testimony that God will fulfill His promise and resurrect our entire body. Abraham had to wander Canaan as a witness looking for the kingdom the Son would establish. In the same way, believers are spread into every part of the earth, as nomads of heart, waiting for the promised Son to fulfill that inheritance.
Given the low place eschatology, and a solid, real eschatological hope presently has among God’s people, can we honestly say we have the faith of Abraham? Abraham had to trust that God would raise up a Seed to bring blessing to the nations from a barren womb. We are being asked to watch, wait, deny ourselves, and live soberly in anticipation of that promised Seed returning, judging the earth, and bringing restoration to creation. The resurrection of creation is no less a miracle than what Abraham carried in his heart. If we are not living constantly in an eschatological perspective, making decisions with the literal day of the Lord in view, are we living as Abraham did?
Our faith is to be just as active, rugged, and absolute as Abraham’s was. Many of us may be “coasting” feeling like we are living in the fulfillment of what Abraham ached and longed for, but the reality is that living the Christian life as God intended it will require a faith as demanding as Abraham’s. If he could speak, Abraham would be urging us to live with a heart that is just as uncomfortable with the present as his own way. He would be pleading with us to live longing for the second appearance of Messiah as strongly as he longed for the first.
Abraham’s longing caused him to wander with no real home looking for a city that God built. In other words, his heart was so set on a future city that he refused to settled in any of the contemporary cities. He would rather wander uncomfortably to maintain a longing for a future city then to settled in a city and risk losing the ache and the longing. I wonder sometimes if we give credence to the coming city, but dull the ache in our heart by being too settled in the cities of our time.
Abraham received Isaac in joy, but even this child of promise caused his heart to long for the appearance of the ultimate seed that could fulfill all the promises. Do we receive the Holy Spirit with all the joy and eagerness that Abraham embraced Isaac with and then long from the depths of our heart to see the fulfillment of the promises with the Holy Spirit points us to or are we content with what we have now?
We must acknowledge that It is to our shame that we have so little interest in the Holy Spirit. It is as shameful for us as it would have been for Abraham to not embrace the baby Isaac. However, for those that eagerly receive from the Spirit, do we allow the Spirit to do His full work of causing us to long for the appearing of the promise? Abraham was called to sacrifice his son Isaac on a hill so that he would know the ultimate promise was not Isaac, but something greater.
So too, the Holy Spirit desires that we receive all that He will give us, but He longs to point us to something more than we have in this age. He wants to cause our hearts to ache that we might receive something greater in the physical return of Jesus to the planet and the resurrection of our entire being by the Holy Spirit. Abraham did receive Isaac back, but he also crossed over into a confidence that God would fulfill all His promises no matter what happened to Abraham. The willingness to sacrifice Isaac was not just an issue of Isaac, it actually changed Abraham’s heart and joined it to God’s promise in a new way. Like Abraham, we need to have our hearts bonded to God’s promises.
Again, do not make the mistake of despising what God has given now, but do not make the critical mistake of losing sight of the ultimate promise that is coming. What is given now is given unto inspiring faith to believe that God will do all that He has promised. In other words, the Holy Spirit and eschatology are inseparably linked.
The clear evidence of this is found in Acts 2. The Holy Spirit so filled Peter with faith, enabling him to believe that God would do all that He had promised, that Peter immediately connected the gift of the Holy Spirit with Joel 2. Since that time, whenever there is an unusual outpouring of the Holy Spirit one of the primary results is a sudden urgency with regard to the return of the Lord. Believers suddenly feel the nearness of His return and it becomes an integral part of their proclamation.
What this also means is that when believers give testimony to the Holy Spirit but have little or no real interest in the return of the Lord, in the sense that it alters the way that they live, that something is lacking in their experience of the Spirit. Perhaps God is asking many of us to sacrifice our present enjoyment of the Holy Spirit, as Abraham did Isaac, that we might no longer consider what we enjoy now to be the fulfillment but that, like Abraham, we might exercise faith in looking for a greater fulfillment. The heart transformation that would come from such a sacrifice is real and substantial.
The issue is not to lay aside our experience of the Holy Spirit. God forbid we should ever do that! The issue is that our present enjoyment of the Holy Spirit must not be an end in itself, but rather we must sacrifice our present satisfaction that we might allow the Holy Spirit to transform us into pilgrims like Abraham. If He is given full control, He will do this work. So long as we are content with just a little of the Holy Spirit now, we are like Abraham refusing to sacrifice Isaac. We are like little children so enamored with our present gift, that we have no faith for a future promise that God is calling us to.
God is looking forward, let us not look back. We must take all that has been given, not despising any of His present gifts, but we must also keep pressing forward looking for the “Day of the Lord” which will be the fulfillment of the promises regarding the Seed. God is looking to see if there are any men who consider His promise worthy actually rearranging their lives around it. He is looking for saints that believe His word, in spite of all opposition, and are looking forward to the complete fulfillment of the promise first given in the garden. Anything less is not following in our Father Abraham’s footsteps.
A Witness that Condemns the Age
By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the rightesouness that comes by faith. – Hebrews 11:7 (ESV)
Have we fully considered the faith of Noah? He believed what he heard from God in spite of what was around him. We find that he alone had confidence in the word of God and the promise of God. What is even more amazing than his belief is the fact that Noah’s obedience condemned the world. The very way that Noah lived pronounced a judgment on the age in which Noah lived. (It is important to understand that, in the context of the verse, condemning the world is more rightly described as condemning the age rather than the earth. It is a condemnation of the systems and values of this age rather than a condemnation of the creation.) The word used here has the idea of declaring the verdict but not necessarily executing it. The execution of the verdict belongs to God always, but our very lives are a part of declaring the verdict.
How then should we live? As our lives are lived under firm confidence in the Word of God, our lives are proving the truth of His promise by the way His promises shape our lives. Our unseen, mostly future, hope then becomes the very evidence that the unseen thing for which we hope exists (Hebrews 11:1). Our lives are designed to be a witness and testimony to the truth (Acts 1:8).
Have we considered that our very lives are going to be testimony against the damned? God is calling us to live in such a way that we give a witness to the truth that is so authentic that it condemns those who do not believe. Saints, do we live this way? Do you live in such a way that your life pronounced a judgment on all who turn away from the gospel? Are you such a vibrant witness to the living, risen Son of God that for men to reject your witness is to condemn themselves?
Jesus did not leave the world without a testimony. We have the testimony of the infallible Scriptures. We have the testimony of creation which Paul argues in Romans is sufficient to bring one to at least a rudimentary knowledge of God. We have the inner witness in man that we call the conscience that leads a man into truth. We have the testimony of the very Spirit of God who convicts this world of sin, righteousness, and judgment (John 16:8).
Besides these witnesses God has given, He also intends us to be the primary witness to the world. How that should cause our hearts to tremble. Who we are and how we live is to give vibrant and living testimony of Jesus. In other words, on the day of judgment when men stand before Jesus, should a man try to claim ignorance, Jesus will point to you and me and say, “They were a living flesh and blood example of Me. They were evidence that every word I spoke was true. There is no way you could have seen then and not seen Me. You are without excuse because the testimony of their lives was too compelling.”
Who is sufficient for this? Can you and I honestly say that we are witnesses to the extent that a man encountering us is as though he has encountered Jesus Himself? Does our witness have the power to condemn men? Can men who have seen us be condemned for having seen the reality of God and rejecting it? This is what the author is saying of Noah. Noah so carried what God had spoken in his heart that to reject Noah was to reject God Himself. Noah was a man of flesh and blood just like you and me, but what he carried in his life was so vibrant, so alive, that it was enough, in God’s eyes, to be a revelation of Himself to the unbelieving world.
Are our lives so much a revelation of Jesus that they would count as a verdict against the world? Are we enough of a witness to condemn the world when it rejects us? Remember the inverse is true as well. If our lives are so authentic that they can bring condemnation that means they are also authentic enough to bring men to life. It means that we are so full of the living God that there is a river of living water flowing from us (John 7:38) from which men can drink. If our lives are a real enough testimony to condemn men then they are also real enough to bring men into life.
The Power of Faith
Faith is a significant issue in the Scriptures. We are told that without faith it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:16). We are told that faith is the door to access salvation and unlock the benefits thereof. Jesus is very clear that at His return He is going to be looking for faith on the earth (Luke 18:8). Paul exhorts us to walk by faith and not by sight (II Corinthians 5:7). Throughout the Scriptures faith is very clearly presented as the thing that operates the Kingdom of God. We cannot be redeemed without it. We cannot please God without it. We cannot even access God without it.
Why is faith so important in God’s economy? Why does He put such an emphasis on it? In this age of materialism and science where we trust only what we can inspect and verify with our hands, faith seems to be a superstitious relic to a non-believer, and the believer often fails to grasp its significance and operation as well. To really understand faith, you must go back to the garden to an interchange between Eve and the serpent that literally changed human history forever. (more…)