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YOU LIVE BY A LAW THAT BAFFLES THIS WORLD |
I
Peter 1:8-9
By
Spencer Gear [1]
In October 1997, I drove past Bundaberg Toyota (Qld., Australia) and one the
front window was this advertising slogan: "New Camry is here: seeing is
believing." [2] This was the theme of the recent
If you go to the intersection of Maryborough and Bourbong Streets, Bundaberg,
you'll see a sign on the front of a real estate agent's business: "Seeing
is believing."
Do you have to see to believe? Or do you need to believe to see?
When I turn to the Bible, I read
I Peter 1:8-9
Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not
see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and
glorious joy, 9for you are receiving the goal of your
faith, the salvation of your souls (NIV).
So is seeing believing? It maybe so for the new Camry or when
buying real estate, but in God's economy, believing is seeing.
Let me tell you where I am going in this sermon. I Peter 1:8-9 teaches us
that:
1.
Believing what you do not see is something you do all the time. We do it
in many practical things every day.
2.
This is a very reasonable and necessary position. If you had to see
before you believed many things in life, you'd be up the creek.
3.
Believing is seeing is the law of faith. You must live by it to be a
Christian.
4.
These verses and others in the N.T. teach us that even though you can't see
Jesus physically, it's better that you can't see him. You have proof of
his existence:
a. From the Bible; and
b. The Holy Spirit lives
in you and it's His job to reveal Jesus to you.
5.
You have faith in Jesus;
6.
You love Him;
7.
And you have a joy that you can't express in words, because of
8.
The salvation you are presently receiving--not just the salvation you will
receive when you meet Jesus at death or at his second coming. You are
receiving that salvation NOW.
Let's get involved with this magnificent text.
Do you believe in anything you cannot see? Please tell me some of the
things you believe in that you can't see.
! Can you see the wind? You can
see what it does. It blows the trees. I was sitting in a
fishing boat at the mouth of Oyster Creek when dust settled down on the
river. A car travelling along a nearby road made the dust and the wind
blew it, but I could not see the wind. I only saw the dust. You
believe in something you cannot see—the wind.
! Every boy and girl, Mum and Dad,
that I see in this building today is alive. How do I know that you are
alive? You are breathing, moving, talking.
What
makes you alive? Your heart? Well, that is the physical thing that
beats to keep you alive, but what kick started your heart to get it
going? You have a principle of life within you that keeps you alive and
you can't see it. The Bible calls it your soul or your spirit. You
can't see it.
! What about your conscience that
tells you that you have done wrong. Can you see it? But it's
real. You feel guilty.
! Let's think about God. Can
you see Him? No! Because He is Spirit. How
do you know there is an almighty
God? The evidence is all around us.
- Look at the magnificent gum tree!
What a beautiful design! I find it impossible to believe in a
gum tree without knowing that God, the great designer, designed it that
way.
- How can you take one passionfruit seed,
plant it in the dirty ground with some mucky cow manure, give it some
water and a plant grows that bears fruit. Each passionfruit has
dozens of seeds inside it that are so sweet to eat. And when I eat
all of those seeds, not one of those seeds grows inside me. God, the
great designer, made it that way.
- Take a brand-new baby. Just think of
how babies are made. What an incredible way God has planned for it
to take a sperm to unite with an ovum.
- Have you stopped to think of how all the
cells of your body link with the brain, the central nervous system, the
stomach, the bowels, urinary tract, heart and lungs, what it takes for an
eye to see, a tongue to talk, feet to walk on, and arms to do lots of
things. No wonder the Psalmist in Psalm 139:13-14 could say of God:
"for you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's
womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your
works are wonderful, I know that full well."
- Some birds are able to navigate by the
stars. Even if they are hatched and raised in a building without
windows; if they are shown an artificial sky, they immediately are able to
orient themselves to the proper place and migrate to it.
- The archer fish is able to fire drops of
water with amazing force and accuracy, knocking insects out of the
air.
- The bombardier beetle produces two
different chemicals. When these chemicals are released and combined,
they explode in the face of an enemy. Yet the explosion never
happens too early and never harms the beetle itself. No wonder Psalm
62:11 says, "You, O Lord, are strong" (in Macarthur Jr. 1991, p.
79).
- But what about this monstrous world that
we live in?
I can see what God does all around us. Yet I cannot see God. But I
know what He is like. He is mighty powerful. In fact, the Book of
Romans 1:20 reads:
For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his
eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from
what has been made, so that [people] are without excuse.
Using the
old measurements (non-metric),
To
travel at the speed of light (ca. 186,281 miles per second) across the Milky
Way, the galaxy in which our solar system is located, would take 125,000
years. And our galaxy is but one of millions" (MacArthur 1991, pp.
80-81).
If you call yourself a Christian,
A.
YOU LIVE BY A LAW THAT BAFFLES THIS WORLD
Jesus took Peter,
James and John to the
Yet, when Jesus was arrested before His crucifixion, Peter didn't want
to have anything to do with Jesus. Peter denied he knew Jesus three times
(Matt. 26:69f).
He was there for Jesus' death and resurrection.
After the resurrection, Jesus asked Simon Peter, "Do you truly love
me?" (John 21:15f). He asked him three times.
Jesus gave Peter and "the apostles... many convincing proofs that
he was alive" (Acts 1:3).
Then they (Peter included) saw Jesus taken up into heaven before their
eyes (Acts 1:2).
It is this Peter who says to the early Christians scattered throughout
the world and experiencing terrible persecution and trials:
"Though you have not seen him" (in the past)--v. 8;
"Even though you do not see him now"--v.9.
What do you do?
- "You love him" (v. 8). Agape is the kind of love that comes from your heart because of "the preciousness of the person loved" (Wuest 1942, p. 28); and
- "You believe in him" (v.9); and
- You "are filled with an inexpressible
and glorious joy" (v. 8). The old KJV translation said it
beautifully: "Ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory."
This is
crazy thinking by the world's standard. You can't see Jesus, but you have
- "a deep unconditional agape love for him;
- you have faith in him;
- and you don't have ha-ha happiness, but a
joy in the Lord that is impossible to express.
Peter must
have had in mind what Jesus said in John 20:29: "Because you have seen me,
you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."
How can
this possibly make sense?
2.
"You love him" (v.8) even though you can't see him.
How is it possible to love somebody you can't see?
a. First, He has written us a BIG love letter, called the Bible, that tells us what he is like. In fact, Jesus said, "Anyone who has seen me, has seen the Father" (John 14:9).
I loved my
wife more and more, the more she wrote me love letters. This showed me
her deep love for me.
If you want to know what God the Father is like, take a look at Jesus as he reveals
himself in the Bible.
- In this BIG love letter to us, God tells us that Jesus had compassion on people and fed them, healed them, cast out demons that were tormenting them;
- Do you know the reputation of Jesus?
"The
Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, `Here is a glutton and a
drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and `sinners'" (Matt.
11:19). Jesus associated with the scum of the earth--the worst possible
sinners--and they were changed by him.
Jesus put it this way, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor,
but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to
repentance" (Luke 5:31).
- Of course, Jesus cared for the rich and
the religious.
He told Nicodemus,
a Pharisee and a member of the Jewish ruling council, that he needed to be born
again (John 3).
- In this BIG love letter, Jesus
tells us how to live forever. Atheist philosopher, Bertrand
Russell, said, "When you die you rot." Not so, according
to the big love letter. Death is not the end.
Where will you be one minute after you die? My last birthday gift from my
mother—three weeks before she died in 1997—was this book, One
Minute After You Die: A Preview of Your Final Destination (Lutzer 1997).
When you die physically, you continue to live--either in heaven or
hell. If it is to be heaven, this is what Jesus said in the BIG
love letter: "Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only
true God and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent" (John 17:3).
I have read about a cemetery in Kirbyville, East Texas,
As you are now, so once was I
As I am now, so you will be
To follow you, I'm not content
Until I know which way you went (Lutzer 1997, p. 11, but Lutzer cited it in Indiana).
In this BIG love letter, Jesus said, "I am the resurrection and the life;
he who believes in Me will live even if he dies; and whoever lives and believes
in me will never die" (John 11:25).
Erwin Lutzer, the author of One Minute After You Die, puts it this way,
and in line with what Jesus said: "One minute after you slip behind the
parted curtain, you will either be enjoying a personal welcome from Christ or
catching your first glimpse of gloom as you have never known it. Either
way, your future will be irrevocably fixed and eternally unchangeable"
(Lutzer 1997, p. 9).
Do you realise that the people you work with, joke around with, marry, reject,
are not ordinary people. They are people who will live forever and
they are what C.S. Lewis described as "immortal horrors or everlasting
splendors" (cited in Lutzer 1997, p. 9). [3]
I picked up the Bundaberg News-Mail on Friday, 15 May 1998, and read the
death notices. I learned that my Mum's first cousin, Harold Lobegeier,
had died. Harold was secretary of
How is this possible? In this BIG
love letter, we are told why Jesus was put to death by that excruciating form
of capital punishment--crucifixion.
In 1 Peter 2:24, "He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so
that we might die to sins and live for righteousness." You deserve
to die for your own sin ("the wages of sin is death"), but Jesus took
your place and died for your. He was your substitute for sin.
You ask me why I love Jesus, whom I have never seen physically?
First,
He has written us a BIG love letter, called the Bible, that tells us
what he is like.
There's a second reason you can love somebody you can't see.
b. There is not one Jesus physically on the earth, but Jesus has sent His representative to live in you personally and among the people of God, to make Jesus known to you. Christ lives in every person who believes in Jesus, by the Holy Spirit, and lives in every group of Christians (the church) by His Spirit.
It would be impossible for all people in all of history to have seen the
physical Jesus while he was on earth. So this is what Jesus has done for
us and it's far better than his being on earth physically.
John 14:15-16:
"If you love me [Jesus is speaking to the group of disciples], you
will obey what I command. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you
another Counselor to be with you forever" (NIV).
[This is
another of the same kind as Jesus and the Father, i.e. The Holy
Spirit/Counselor is God. The word for Counselor--parakletos--is
one called alongside to help, but in the sense of a legal friend, an Advocate,
a solicitor for the defence. Comforter or Counselor is not a really good
word to describe the parakletos. The NRSV's use of
"Advocate" is closer to the real meaning. He's a legal friend
who is] (Morris 1971, pp. 649, 662), John 14 says:
Now, Jesus again, from the BIG love letter, in John 15:26,
1. Jesus is sending the
Advocate, the Holy Spirit, from the Father and where will this legal friend
live? Inside every Christian and among the community of believers.
2. When did this Holy Spirit
Lawyer become available to Christians? Jesus said, "I will not leave
you as orphans." So the Holy Spirit came when Jesus went away
physically from this earth.
3. What kind of Spirit is
he? These verses say He is the Spirit of Truth. The Holy
Spirit who lives in you personally and among the church, will never ever tell
you a lie or misrepresent you. He can't. He must always tell the
truth. That's his nature.
4. The Holy Spirit solicitor
lives in you. What do these verses say about what his job is. Jesus
said in John 15:26: "He will testify about me." So the Spirit's
job, when he lives in you, is to tell you about and represent Jesus.
John 16:7-11:
"Jesus says, "But I tell you the truth: It is for your good
that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to
you. When he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin
and righteousness and judgment: in regard to sin, because men do not believe in
me; in regard to righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can
see me no longer; and in regard to judgment, because the prince of this world
now stands condemned."
What's the
Holy Spirit's job in you as believers? John's gospel (esp. chapters
14-16) tell us:
( He is with Christians continually
and is in them (14:16f);
( John 14:26 says He is our teacher
and reminds us of all that Jesus has said.
( He testifies about Christ (15:26);
( What's his work in unbelievers (the
world)? To convict of sin, righteousness and judgment (16:8).
( The Spirit can only come when Jesus
goes away (16:7). This obviously means that the work of the Spirit in the
believer is totally related to the saving work of Christ on the cross (based on
Morris 1971, p. 663)
Will you
note something with me that's very special. In John's Gospel, the
functions assigned to the Spirit are given to Jesus.
Read John 14:20; 15:4-5 (Jesus is in the disciples).
John 7:14; 13:13 (Jesus is the teacher).
John 8:14 (Jesus testifies on his own behalf).
But we
have already noted that this is the ministry of the Holy Spirit. No
wonder John 14:16 calls the Holy Spirit Counsellor another Counsellor
(another of the same kind). This is all tied up in the mystery of the
Trinity. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--one God, but three Persons--and
sometimes with overlapping function.
This has all been to help us understand our text in 1 Peter 1:8-9.
! We haven't seen Jesus.
! We don't need to because we know
Jesus through the massive love letter that He has written to us--the Bible.
! We know Him through the Holy Spirit
who lives inside every believer, and among the gathering of believers.
! And as a result, we love Jesus with
an unconditional agape love.
Not only do you love him, but v. 9 says:
3.
"You believe in him."
You have faith in him. Not a leap of faith into the dark, but faith in
the one who has revealed himself carefully and accurately in the Bible and
through the Holy Spirit who lives in you.
The Bible is under a lot of attack today. This is not a book of fables
that credulous Christians believe like a magicians trick.
I want to give just one example of the accuracy of the Bible. You can
absolutely depend on the authenticity and credibility of this book.
Sir William Ramsay was regarded as one of the greatest archaeologists of all
time. He was so influenced by the theological liberals [of the German
historical and critical school] that he did not believe the Book of Acts
was written in the first century. Instead, he originally claimed, it was
written in the mid-second century after Christ. So, the Book of Acts was
not a trustworthy document of the facts of A.D. 50. How could it be when
it was written by somebody 100 years later by somebody who did not live at the
time of the incidents described in the Book of Acts?
In his archaeological research on the history of Asia Minor (
The meticulous accuracy of the historical details, and gradually his
attitude towards the Book of Acts began to change. He was forced to
conclude that `Luke is a historian of the first rank... This author
should be placed along with the very greatest of historians' (cited in McDowell
1977, p. 43).
Because of
the accuracy of the most minute detail, Ramsay finally conceded that Acts could
"not be a second-century document but was rather a
mid-first-century account" (cited in McDowell 1977, p. 43).
Take this Bible in one hand and look at the world around you and you have a
perfect picture of what's going on in this world. But it's historically
accurate because the God who gave it to us is the God of truth. Not just
truthfulness, but the God whose truth matches reality.
I work in a white hot world where I am trying to help parents whose youth are
raging out of control, with hatred that seethes. I'm working with youth
whose parents couldn't give a hoot about them, abuse them, marriages bust apart
and people are emotionally splattered in the process.
Sexual abuse, drug abuse, youth suicide, poor parenting skills, youth
rebellion. If I didn't have God's BIG love letter to us, I would be
blaming poor families, selfish and destructive youth. I'd go looking for
some medical problem, a dysfunctional family or bad background that makes these
people victims. VICTIMS! VICTIMS!
But when I turn to the BIG love letter, I read in Matt. 15:18-19,
"But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and
these make a man `unclean.' For out of the heart come evil thoughts,
murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.
These are what make a man unclean" (Matt. 15:18-19).
Christian: You are living by a law that baffles the world. Seeing is
not believing, but believing God is seeing what is happening in your
life and telling you what will happen to this world. Saddam Hussein will
not end history. Neither will the new President of Indonesia, or the
Indian bomb, or Bill Clinton, or John Howard.
This world is not going around in cycles of capitalism, socialism, mystical New
Age karma and reincarnation. This world is heading towards God's grand
conclusion with the second coming of Jesus Christ, new heavens and a new
earth. How do we know? Believing God is seeing.
What does all this
do for the believer?
4.
You "are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy" (v.9).
You don't just have some joy. You are filled with it and it
boils over so that you find it impossible to express.
This beats the best
psychiatric institute in
This is real Christianity. Heb. 6:5 says we "have tasted the
goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age."
Why is it happening?
5. V. 9: You are "receiving the goal of your faith." What is that? "The salvation of your souls."
Not that you will receive the goal of your faith only when Jesus comes
again. You are receiving some of that goal right now. What
is it? The salvation of your souls. This is not the soul as
opposed to the body,
as though the soul is finally saved; the word ["soul"]
designates the person, the real being that is saved, and not merely a part of
it. When the soul is saved, the body, too, is saved and will in due time
join the soul (Lenski 1966, pp. 43-44).
This is
the Bible's way of saying that your whole personality is being saved.
I John 5:9 says,
"We accept man's testimony, but God's testimony is greater..."
We trust other human beings even though people can be untrustworthy. We
trust human beings every day of our lives.
- When we drive across a bridge, we trust that the bridge will hold us up. We trust the engineer who designed it, the people who built it, and the inspectors who guarantee its safety--even though we may never have met them. We have faith.
- I trust that the bus driver will take me
from Bundaberg to
- I buy a ticket to the state of origin
match, having faith that the players will show up and the match will be
held as advertised, and that the ticket will gain me admission.
We have
faith in all these other human beings who are often untrustworthy.
Believing is seeing. Robert Jastrow has extraordinary credentials as an
astronomer. He is the former director of NASA's Goddard Institute of
Space Studies in the
The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and
biblical accounts of Genesis are the same...
This
is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the
theologians. They have always believed the word of God. But we
scientists did not expect to find evidence for an abrupt beginning because we
have had, until recently, such extraordinary success in tracing the chain of
cause and effect backward in time...
At
this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain
on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his
faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has
scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as
he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians
who have been sitting there for centuries (Jastrow 1978, p. 105, cited in
Zacharias 1990, p. 133, emphasis added).
Notes
2.
I saw it on 18 October, 1997.
3. The full quote is: "There are no ordinary people. . . It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors" (Lewis, 1980, pp. 18-19, cited in Lutzer 1997, p. 9).
References
Downers Grove ,
Illinois
Jastrow, R. 1978, God and the
Astronomers, Warner Books,
Lenski, R. C. H., The
Interpretation of The Epistles of St. Peter,
Lewis, C. S. 1980 (rev. and exp.
ed.), The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses,
Lutzer, E. W. 1997, One Minute
After You Die: A Preview of Your Final Destination, Moody
Press,
Chicago.
MacArthur Jr., J. 1991, Romans
1-8 (The John MacArthur New Testament Commentary),
Moody
Press, Chicago.
McDowell, J. 1977, More Than a
Carpenter, Kingsway Publications,
Morris, L. 1971, The Gospel
According to John (The New International Commentary on the
New
Testament), Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.,
Ramsay, W. 1915, The Bearing of
Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New
Testament, Hodder and
Seniors-Site.com 1996-1997, '
http://seniors-site.com/funstuff/epitaphs.html
[9 July 2006].
Wuest, K. S. 1942, First Peter
(in the Greek New Testament--Wuest's Word Studies),Wm. B.
Eerdmans
Publishing Company,
Zacharias, R. 1990, A Shattered
Visage: The Real Face of Atheism, Wolgemuth & Hyatt,
Publishers,
Inc.,
Copyright (c) 2007, Spencer D. Gear. This document is free content. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the OpenContent License (OPL) version 1.0, or (at your option) any later version. This document last updated at: 6 May 2007.