Are You Ready To Move Beyond What If?

What is perfect faith?

There are examples of it. Abraham, for example, stands out as a man of great faith and we are given many examples of how he lived out his faith.

The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.

Genesis 12:1

Abram did as he was told – without down payment or written guarantees of a reward. Abram was not even in the position to define his own expectations or the rewards of his unwritten contract. Furthermore, he would not see all that was promised to him in his own life. And many thousands of years later, though we can better see Abram’s reward better than Abram ever could with his own eyes, the reward continues to be fulfilled and is not yet complete.

That’s how awesome is the reward for perfect faith.

But God, we will say, has not spoken with me with a human voice. He has not put his demands into my ear. How then shall I obey His word and do as He commands? Shall I take the recommendations of others that He speaks to me, personally, through the stories of my people? Or the stories of another people?

From those stories, however, we know that the only rewards that are awesome beyond our understanding and expectation are the rewards promised by God to the faithful – those who do all of what God asks of us. The emphasis is on “all” and not what we might pick and choose to do among the many things these stories recommend to us.

Worse, however, is that these stories suggest that faith and rewards are only the upside of that relationship with God; there is a downside that is as unimaginably and awesomely terrible as the rewards are awesomely wonderful. God blesses and curses. He promises torments, disasters and death upon the unfaithful.

In other words, we are not free to do as we wish. We are free to choose, but we cannot escape the consequences of our choices and the consequences of our faithless and ignorant choices shall bear painfully and powerfully upon us, our families, our people, our nation, and, our descendants.

Ours is a renter’s dilemma because God is an inescapable landlord – He owns it all. Even should we chose to deny His existence and/or the terms of His agreements, the consequences remain and these consequences are not reserved to befall us at the end of human history. They befall us here and now regardless of whether or not we acknowledge the source of our persecutions.

But even faith is not a simple matter for us who want to be faithful. Even though we should want to be faithful, the intellectual assent must be made effective in our bodies, souls and spirit. In what we do and what we refrain from doing as prescribed by divine law.

Beyond God, all other rewards and consequences we may hope for or fear belong to our actual or imaginary negotiations with other spirits: evil, human or otherwise. None of these rewards and consequences, however, come with the assurances of history, historical narrative, God, or trustworthy reference.

If you are not self-deceived, you know your own heart and/or intelligence is unreliable to count as a trustworthy reference. Nor is the soulish word of a friend or member of your family. Such is the despair of existential nihilism (pondered by the modern philosopher) and that despair was made more profound by our own witness to the horrors of the Holocaust which demonstrated to all the world that humanity is not worthy of our faith and hope.

Regarding faith and what ifs, I believe these issues as I have stated above are the points to ponder, study, discuss, debate and understand. If my thoughts come across heavy-handed and reckless, I sincerely and whole-heartedly apologize. Perhaps, I have failed us in making haste in my response.