Faith Beyond Reason

Faith Beyond Reason

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Heb. 11:1, KJV). Faith is independent of reason, not that reason is bad rather it is a faculty given to us by God. In fact, the prophet Isaiah quoting God challenges us to "Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord" (Is. 1:18). Our Christian belief is based on faith and not on either evidence or reasoning. We must take that leap of faith trusting God in every step of the way.  To reason, faith can be absurd. It can be absurd because it asks of us to do the irrational, thus in the realm of faith, human reasoning must be suspended. The realm of faith is a rupture with the natural and predictable to enter into the realm of adventure and awe. It is an adventure because it leads us away from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from the ordinary to the extraordinary. This dimension is seen in the biblical story of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac; the son of the promise. God, in essence, is asking something that seen from a human point of view is unethical. In this scene, we see, as Kierkegaard postulated, a teleological suspension of the ethical. In his call to enter the realm of faith, Abraham believed God. He did not base his decision on his ethical presuppositions governing his life.

There is a great lesson to learn from this story. If Abraham would have limited his faith to the realm of the perceivable, to his reasoning, he would not have entered into the realm of the divine, the realm where everything is possible because he had entered into the realm of God. In this realm, there is no limits nor dimensions. Our human mind is ruled by measurements, limits, dimensions, lengths and all sorts of restrictive concepts, but in the realm of God, these “laws” or “rules” are suspended to give way to the impossible, to the “absurd” and unexplainable. This reminds me of the blind man healed by Jesus (John 9). The religious Pharisees wanted an explanation, but instead, they got an unexpected lesson from a man unencumbered by religion as the Pharisees were.

Faith depends on God’s providence and the individual’s willingness to believe what seems to be impossible. Nothing is impossible since there is nothing impossible for God. There is no necessary power of the mind, there is no need to look back, everything can be changed, everything can be transformed to a reality which does not consist of any kind of measurements, rather it consists of a transcendental reality where God is the one who makes us see the possibilities open to the reality of the realm of faith. Nothing is mechanical, but an individual adventure in the realm of God’s abundant blessings.