It's 2:15am and He says, "Write the blog post" so who am I to refuse to do so? Anyway, it is a very warm night and with this hot flashes, who can sleep anyway?
This post is about Hebrews Chapter 11. Yesterday, it popped up on YouVersion and it started out to say, "Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see. Through their faith, the people in days of old earned a good reputation..."
The people the Bible refers to are the ones from the beginning whose faith was so strong that they overcame all obstacles, because God had their backs. Starting with Abel's offering to God his choice harvests, to Enoch not dying but instead raptured by God, to Noah who, against all odds and jeers of his peers built a humongous arc and saved the animals two by two (can you just imagine how much the people were laughing at this crazy old man?), to Abraham obeying God by leaving to go to the promised land and then having to "almost" kill his precious son because God asked him to. It goes on Isaac, Joseph, to Moses and the list goes on and on.
Just because the Bible has been bound to be the final cut, people of strong faith continued throughout the ages. Faith is the thread that continued all throughout the generations and kept Jesus' purpose for us alive. Even though the skeptics say that the Bible was written by humans, the miracles keep happening, God continues to use simple people to keep the testimony of Jesus alive, that He is the Savior of the world.
But I digress, perhaps from lack of sleep. It's ok, I will come back to my point. The whole point of Hebrews 11 that Faith denotes much more than believing in the Almighty God. It encompasses the very core of life. Precious lives of the faithful mimicking Jesus' offering of His own life to save ours. When you live like Jesus lived, being faithful means you are damned by the world. The world that doesn't or refuses to understand the true essence of being faithful to the Almighty God. Christians are tortured, even to this very day, beheaded. Christians gamble their own earthly lives in exchange for a perfect eternal life. This world has nothing for them. It cannot offer the true happiness of God's provision. So we endure the sneers, the jeers, the physical pain and even death because of what we look forward to. The grand prize awaits us if we stay faithful.
I love verse 39, speaking about those mentioned above and all others who have gone before us, "All these people earned a good reputation because of their faith, yet none of them received all that God had promised. For God had something better in mind for us, so that they would not reach perfection without us." They are all waiting for us, in heaven because one day, we ALL will reach perfection and happiness both body and soul in the eternal and everlasting glory of God through Jesus' sacrifice! That is so beautiful. Praise God!
Until my next rant... LOVE ONE ANOTHER!
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